Trouble with Firmware kits V21 Studio mini

[etcetera]

Hi everyone, been a while.

I have Studion 5000 mini. Loaded it with V24 and have been using it for a while. I'm trying to connect to an older machine we built, it's a 1769-L24ER-QBFC1B running v21.011. I ran the Studio setup again and selected all the firmware kits available, including v21. It will not upload from the PLC and I can only select v24 when creating a new project. At this time upgrading the firmware on the PLC is not preferred. I tried a few times with reboots, etc. No luck.

Am I missing something? I was thinking my edition of Studio might not be up to the task.

Windows 7 Pro, if it matters.

Thanks!

Eric

 

[jkerekes]

You need version 21 which was the last version of Logix 5000. They both can be installed with your current Studio version. Now there are two distinct version 20s out there, 21.01 and 21.03. They updated the security in the latter version.

 

[etcetera]

Thanks. I thought the firmware kit would allow me to work with different plc firmware versions.

Gotta figure out if I can get that on physical media. It'll take me days to download it.

Eric

 

[ASF]

You need version 21 which was the last version of Logix 5000. They both can be installed with your current Studio version. Now there are two distinct version 20s out there, 20.01 and 20.03. They updated the security in the latter version.

Just to tidy this up a little bit...

You need version 21 which was the first version of Logix Designer (part of the Studio 5000 package). (v20 was the last version of RSLogix 5000 as a standalone product)

Now there are three distinct version 20s out there, 20.01 and 20.03 and 20.04. They updated the security in v20.03 which means you can't use 20.01 to open a 20.03 program, and once a 20.01 program is opened with 20.03 it's "upgraded" and can no longer be used with 20.01. (RA realised how big of a screwup this was eventually and released v20.04 which plays nice with both; if you needed v20 (which you don't) you'd definitely want to get v20.04.

Also, they pulled the same trick with v21.01 and v21.03. But to "fix" that one, they just abandoned v21 altogether (and v22, for that matter) and pushed out v23, which is basically v21 without the minor revision issue.

So, long story short, you'll need to either find out whether your PLC is running 21.01 or 21.03 and get the software accordingly, or just get 21.03 and make everyone else who works on this PLC use it too.

Or (and this would be my preferred option), give v21 the boot like RA did, and go straight to v23. Some of my clients have banned v21 onsite entirely for reasons around this issue! Of course, that means flashing the firmware, which means a total shutdown, and also means you'll need v21 of Logix Designer initially anyway so that you can open, upload and convert the project to v23. It's certainly not the easiest way, but definitely the best. In my (annoyingly not very) humble opinion.

 

[jkerekes]

I need to correct myself. I had version 20 on the brain. Version 21 is the first version of Logix designer. Anyway you will still need to download that version.

 

[etcetera]

I was able to get in with v21. Still looking for the correct minor revision.

The download was ready for me in the morning, went a bit faster than I thought.

We will be upgrading the firmware, but it's in production so...