Ausman

I was working upstairs when my wife shouted up to me. "Do you ever get a sharp, stabbing pain, like someone's got a voodoo doll of you and they're pushing needles into it?" I was a bit confused by the question, but I answered honestly. "No, never." "How about now?" she asked....... 🪡

Scroll further down in System Bits to SB40 and you'll find lots of entries for keys which might suit, depending on your plc model.

Duh! I must have been too pre-occupied yesterday. I work with them often, but I actually didn't see the relationship, and the really strange thing is that I don't actually recall being taught that symbol at all. But I know the concept well. So either the 10 gazillion other things going on in the brain shifted it out of BEPROM, or I didn't know it at all to begin with. Odd. cheers, Aus

If you add any sort of timer to the mix, don't forget to have your logic allow for failed read/writes. Especially if you have your comms doing multiple attempts. All your sequencing must follow on from the "modbus busy" controls operating as Flex and Isak are suggesting. If you don't do this, think about what can happen. Something might take longer than usual if there's a failure, and if your timer fires off before the current operation is finished all it's attempts, all the logic and triggering steps get out of sync. Such a scenario can completely disrupt comms if the failure is permanent. Specific system response controls must trigger your program in a controlled way. The other way to go is to simply ignore the busy signals etc and allow far more time b/n what will essentially be a consistent time length flipflop regularly switching between your 2 actions. The flipflop's time innately covers any sort of failure by being longer than the total that could potentially occur. This works ok if you don't need updating as fast as possible, but you still have to have monitoring of the various status messages to pick up on consistent failures. There are myriad ways of doing any of this, all relating to programmer's personal preferences. Isak says he can bang things in immediately, but I allow a few scans between action finishing and doing the next one, as I get what I think are buffer issues occurring if I don't. My issues might also relate to how much info is being transferred. I often do fairly large blocks of registers, with specific locations within the block interpreted by the plc. If you're just working with one register, things are a lot quicker. Especially on RTU. cheers, Aus

Ok Flex, I've pondered this for a while and there's obviously something I'm missing. Maths nomenclature I don't know of? Me being stoopid? cheers, Aus

Kratmel, it looks like you have a new friend in WSC! Re your corrosion issue, I recall a community heated indoor swimming pool I worked on for many years. On initial involvement I found many failed sensors in the main space. Components and junctions eaten off the board by the "corrosive" atmosphere. The solution was far better air and pool water quality control I implemented, along with very liberal sprays of PCB lacquer on every board in use. I was very wary of using thick coats of the lacquer in case it upset the circuitry, but it never did and the corrosion issue stopped. Anything with screw terminals I tried to flood under the terminal blocks so that the lacquer did capillary action everywhere, and the junctions themselves were tweaked every 6 months. The actual sensing bits for things like co2 and humidity seemed to be made well to survive ok...it was just the rest of the board that was vulnerable. True enough, so use the screws method!! It's a bit slower, but better. Seriously, gaffer is useful stuff. Although it was primarily aimed at the film/theatre market, which is supposedly how the name gaffer came about, don't forget one use it was immediately picked up for was to hold damaged race car's broken bits roughly in place to let them back on the track! Crash!--------Pits----------Does it move far more than it's meant to?----------Apply Gaffer tape---------Push it to see how much it still moves--------Apply more tape if needed------Check again-------Smack driver and return car to track. Now...if I could only tape to the steering wheel the hands of all those drivers who incessantly handle their mobile phone whilst on the road. @WSC I'd take notes of install dates etc. There might be some other factor here not noticed that might cause the failure again in the shorter time. I also again take note of your mentioning UPS. Have you checked that everything connected to the controller is powered from the UPS? Nothing can perhaps be making nasty voltage differences? cheers, Aus

Fernando, you might want to read through all the digression in this topic. Particularly JohnRs comment which might be useful given your "large" scenario. cheers, Aus https://forum.unitronics.com/topic/5793-v200-18-e3xb-not-reading-temperatures-correctly/#comment-22838

Well, I apologise to all. 🙇‍♂️ I use it often, but maybe I'm lucky to still be using simpler controllers that allow it. And I repeat my ask about searching everywhere for .vlp. And I also wonder on the screen failure anyway. If it has only stopped on first power up after a long period powered off, which you say happens in your site, maybe an internal fiddle of all connections might fix it completely. cheers, Aus

Later Edit. My comments here are not correct for a 570. I respectfully advise that this is NOT correct. I routinely get into info mode on remote 130s. I do not use 570s, but I can't see why it would be any different. Scrnshot of me in remotely. Works with both Remote Access and remote access under Visilogic. cheers, Aus

It has also just occurred to me to ensure that you definitely don't have records. Have you (or your IT dept) checked across every computer and laptop you have to see if there are any *.vlp files in existence?

I'd be carefully keeping track of failure times on this sort of thing. There might be something fundamentally wrong in all the installs that the CPU is not liking. Like VFD interference, big spikes etc. cheers, Aus

If you can do this and it is running ok, in online mode you can see the "screen" by selecting the icon shown here: This will then let you select info mode and possibly work from there. The popup that occurs when online has a mind of it's own and will appear somewhere on your monitor! You may find once you can see the screen that the password is used for digging into protected display areas. Bear in mind everything said by everyone else. Re the password as possible program access, if Visilogic is not telling you it is password protected, then in theory there is no password permission involved. There aren't many steps involved to successfully retrieve the program IF you can. Read the help on PC interaction. Also, all this will work without any program written at all in Visilogic to start with. But you have to have the hardware set to match what you physically have by using View/Hardware config. You've got a fair bit of a learning curve in Visilogic to go through. You may find you've got release date of firmware or Visilogic issues as well. But baby steps first. cheers, Aus

There are myriad references on the forum to links dropping and solutions, but the very first question to answer is: Do you have SB168 set with a power-up value of 1? I'm guessing you do, given you say you send a reset, but it's the first thing to check. cheers, Aus

In old fashioned speak this is called Help, and you'll find it clearly showing when you open Visilogic . You'll find an abundance of relevant things you need to know in there. "Visilogic" I hear you ask? Wander around https://www.unitronicsplc.com/ to get a feel for things and also find Visilogic 9.8.65 as a good starting point. Please note that the program in the PLC may not allow upload. 🙂

Please look here and scroll down for the latest list as an xlsx: https://forum.unitronics.com/topic/5839-new-visilogic-version-to-what-os-list/ Are the comms to the drivers being done with 485 or 232? The settings in the PLC to communicate with the drives is likely upsetting things, but it should still be possible using the default port and plugging in to no. 1. Another possibility (that can only be done after you've got into the 120) is that your 120 can do UniCAN which might be a simple way to allow this if you got a 130 with no I/O and just a Canbus adapter, and linked the 120 and 130 together. You could then get into the 120 via the linked 130. Or alternatively completely change up to a 130 that can be fitted with an extra com module and also an ethernet one, which would do the same job but with the added benefit of getting in all the time via ethernet, all in one unit. Changing the code to a 130 is not that hard. In fact there is a facility in Visilogic to help do this. cheers, Aus

Adam and Eve were the first ones to ignore the Apple terms and conditions. 🍏 A ball emerged from the distance and began to get bigger and bigger. I couldn't figure it out....but then it hit me. ⚾ 🙃

Gabriel and Kratmel, does Unistream stuff also do the register number offset of 1 that Vision does? Perhaps this is the issue? And Stage, trial your comms using a PC first, then once proven transfer the known good parameters to the PLC's commands.

Someone else finish up for Neil, please. I have no time today.

In the Help Index find RTC Real Time Clock and then open Clock: Year, Direct/Indirect and then scroll down and open Clock: Indirect Function Example by clicking on How do I use the Indirect Clock function. Also cruise around all the subjects in this area if something is not clear. Help has lots of info on all subjects, but sometimes you need to dig deep. Search is particularly useful for pinning something down. cheers, Aus

I got sent this a while back from a friend who inhabits Facebook.....I don't. You may have to log in to see it, not sure. Edit. Also found it on youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrwQ-guwvfs If still going for facebook, search for "If High Street Shopping was like Online Shopping" and choose this one which will be somewhere in the list. It will make you giggle and shake your head at how true and silly it can be sometimes. cheers, Aus

I was just about to write Kratmel's Point 1. To me it looks like your row 13 is occasionally not being written to correctly, if at all, resulting in a previous reading still being there. Have you compared previous tables to see if there is a match? Are you fully clearing the data table before each new write? If not, do some programming to make this happen, and then see what happens. If row 13 then occasionally appears as empty, that is a good pointer to the issue. cheers, Aus

Brian, I don't use Verify, but I think the absence of the ladder icon is related to the PLC's ability. Some models of Vision can do more than others. I only use 130s and the ladder icon doesn't show. But in theory everything that IS compared should show you something is different. My methods for trying to keep track of programs is to name it in whatever MI or DW or etc that is convenient for the name to be there in full. This can be annoying when you only change a little bit, but it is the sure fire way I use. Or should say, try to use all the time! I still get caught out sometimes by not changing the ID. Flex and others put these details on screen, but as I only use 130s this can be difficult at times. I've often done minor changes to a program without sending it to the plc in use because I can't disrupt operations. When I can send it, by mistake I often go in to check operations thinking I've already sent it! Now...why isn't that working? It's because you are stoopid, Aus. That ID you change tells you so, you dumbcluck, if you look at them closely. It is annoying when I forget to do so, yet have changed something very minor. I try to use a related Excel sheet to keep track of every change, but this also gets missed sometimes. All those little bits of extra time needed to record every change somewhere are worth it! cheers, Aus

Google translate: I am new and would like to create a manual pid schema but only find the automatic one. who can help me with an example of a manual . This is for temperature control with analog input. PLC in unilogic software