Recipe Issue

[Jon]

Let me start by saying I do not know much about ladder logic programming. I was thrown into this like baptism by fire.

Soo... I have a simple ladder logic program for a set of rollers, like a winder, that changes tensions based on input values.

I am attempting to modify to accommodate a "recipe" page. I have the whole HMI screens setup based off of another machine in the plant. Problem is, it is all in German (the program is set to English but the notes/labels are German) so I cannot simply look over the program and figure it out from their program.

There are multiple boxes where a value of some sort can be set via keypad. On the other machine, there is a "Save Recipe" button which saves all settings to a specified recipe name (output to a list of recipes where you an choose one). There is also an "Apply Recipe" in the list.

The Question:

What would be the most simply way to do this? Do I need to specify a group of MI variables like 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, etc.. (based on how many variables there happens to be) and copy and paste like 50 times (for total of 50 possible recipes)? So when I hit save recipe, it looks for next available set of variables to define or will it automatically find a group of variables the correct size and start defining itself?

And finally... am I getting myself in over my head with trying to figure this out? Am I better off hiring trained programmers to finish this?

Ladder logic doesn't seem too difficult as I am able to modify what it there and understand what it does but I don't know what the program is capable of so I don't know what I can/cannot add.

Thanks if you read through the whole post and did not chuckle at the simplicity of the problem

[Stein Yair]

The best way to achieve the functionality you want to to use a data table.

data tables are easy to implement. There are instructions and explanations on data tables in the help file.