Programming in advance?

[Epy]

In my opinion, the most important thing is to have an accurate sequence of operations before you start writing code.
Without that information, you will certainly be changing a lot of code on site.
Just my two cents.

This is another reason why I'm for waiting til everything is in place. Things change too often, no reason to write the program months ahead of time when there's about an 80% chance it'll change drastically by the time commissioning comes around. But again, I only have smaller programs to write, so I can afford to do that.

Edit: also, I work for an OEM so by "everything is in place" I mean the unit is assembled in the back of our shop, not in place in field. Definitely have the program done before it leaves the shop.

 

[jstolaruk]

Customers expect me to be debugging motion when the machine is piped, wired, and power on. So yes, the bulk of the programming is done in advance. Yes, there will be small changes from design to build, you learn to expect it and roll with it.

 

[Briankr32]

The project is not very large, there are 5 sections of conveyor and 2 machines that only need run signals. There is another machine that has a total of 3 pneumatic cylinders. I've developed some pseudocode and named the aliases for the I/O, and I've identified 28 inputs and 26 outputs.

I'd love to use an emulator, does anybody know the cost for the emulator for RSLogix5000?

 

[just the cowboy]

By an extra PLC

The project is not very large, there are 5 sections of conveyor and 2 machines that only need run signals. There is another machine that has a total of 3 pneumatic cylinders. I've developed some pseudocode and named the aliases for the I/O, and I've identified 28 inputs and 26 outputs.

I'd love to use an emulator, does anybody know the cost for the emulator for RSLogix5000?

If your company can spend the money for the software they can buy you a PLC also to use for debugging, that way you can simulate any of your I/O using storage words to move or force. When I did my own thing I had a PLC 2 a PLC 5 and a slick, sometimes you had to run just a small section of code due to memory size 5/15 vs 5/80