Possible to grab physical I/O modules from PLC-5 upload?

slick_william

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Apr 2020
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Oregon
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Good afternoon good people of the PLCtalk.net forum,

We are doing some work for a customer where we will be converting their existing PLC-5/40 PLC's to shiny new ControlLogixes, and we will be using the 1771- conversion kits with the swing arms so that we can use the existing PLC-5 modules with the conversion kit to the ControlLogixes, instead of having to re-land all the wires.

That being said, this would require us to know exactly which modules are installed in the existing PLC-5's (and remote IO racks), but of course the cards are installed into slots right next to one another, while the model number of the I/O cards will be on the side of the card, where we cannot get to it without removing the card.

Is there a way to take a program upload from a PLC-5 and grab the existing IO configuration, where it would include the part numbers (such as 1771-IFE) and things like that? Or is there another trick to doing something like this?

Thanks,

Will
 
The I/O Configuration in a PLC-5 is purely documentation. There is no checking to see if it matches what the physical modules are in the real-world.

Since it is just documentation, it is not loaded into a PLC-5, so unfortunately you cannot pull it from the controller or any other software tool that I am aware of. Even if you have the original offline file, it might not have this information since it wasn't required.

Drawings, if they are available would be necessary to find the part numbers without pulling the modules out. You might be able to figure out the parts by looking at the indicators and module label colors.

OG
 
There's no substitute for careful physical verification of the installed hardware, ideally including checking them against wiring diagrams.

The PLC-5 program itself doesn't have any way to identify a part number of an analog module. There's no way for a PLC-5 or 1771-ASB to detect the actual hardware installed in a chassis.

If you have a well-documented backup of the PLC-5 program, the offline software (6200, AI-5, or RSLogix 5) may have the analog module configuration screens for each module, which are used to set up and interpret the contents of the Configuration, Input, and Output block transfers. But doing a raw upload of the PLC-5 program doesn't include that information. Like rung and address comments, those are stored offline only.

You can determine the type of modules fairly well by examining the size of the BTR and BTW instructions and comparing those to the user manuals, and long-time 1771 users generally recognize the most common 1771-IFE and -OFEx modules. But a chassis full of high-resolution "N-series" analog modules would be hard or impossible to figure out without pulling them out of the chassis.
 
Long-term 1771 users like myself would try and document PLC5 I/O using the I/O configuration tool in the Logix5 software, so that at least we have an online documented record of the I/O modules. Particularly useful for the analog modules in terms of scaling and configuration.
Even some of the PLCs here on the site where I work, this did not exist, and I have been building up the database.
As Ken says, photos of the racks ran be useful to determine many of the I/O modules for us long-stagers, as they can be identified from the front in many cases.
 

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