Using Honeywell Series A Cards with Controllogix

[Motorjunkie]

Hey all,

I have a peculiar situation at work where we have a surplus of old Honeywell series A (C200-style) I/O and network cards new in box from an old project that never went in years back. This being the case, we'd like to put them to good use in some of our Controllogix racks, or at least have them to use as a backup with supply chains being as tight as they are nowadays.

Does anyone know if re-flashing these cards to work with Controllogix is a possibility? I seem to remember reading that was doable somewhere, but ControlFLASH and ControlFLASH Plus aren't playing along. I was thinking possibly I would just need the .edf files for these cards? Trying to upload the .edf files through RSLinx doesn't work though. It just seems tantalizingly close, and I know we've used some DHRIO cards to work on our Honeywell racks before. Please advise.

Thanks

 

[Ken Roach]

Welcome to the PLCTalk forum community! You've chosen a tricky debut question.

The discrete and analog I/O modules that have a direct Rockwell equivalent should work with a ControlLogix controller if you disable Electronic Keying.

The network modules might be more difficult. They identify as Honeywell part numbers at the Vendor number (literally Class 1, Instance 1, Attribute 1) and ControlFlash won't load firmware into them that's meant for Rockwell devices.

There might be Honeywell tool (the Knowledgebase makes an old reference to something called NTools) to load an arbitrary firmware file into a module. Do you have any of the old Plantscape utilities and documentation ?

If anything, modern firmware installation tools tend to be built to not allow arbitrary firmware to be loaded onto a device, for cybersecurity reasons.

 

[Motorjunkie]

Thanks for the welcome! It's been a great resource for me already, you guys are doing awesome work here!

It looks like while we don't have any of our Plantscape utilities left, Experion still comes packaged with NTools. Will try to flash some cards tomorrow, I'll keep the thread updated.