justinmeyer77 Posted November 30, 2012 Report Posted November 30, 2012 Is there a method to create a .vlp or some portion there of programmatically - like what I would do with Allen Bradley's .L5X? That is to say, can I create a text file that represents ladder logic and import it into Visilogic? I'm preparing to convert a rather large, but fundamentally simple, application from Omron to Unitronics. Thanks.
justinmeyer77 Posted December 3, 2012 Author Report Posted December 3, 2012 That's what I thought. Thanks. Nope
sammysoil Posted April 19, 2014 Report Posted April 19, 2014 I have been wondering basically the same thing. I'm working on a program with a LOT of ladder, which has many different "components" running simultaneously. In order to have multiple components of the same type (i.e. same code) run simultaneously, I cannot simply call the same subroutine multiple times (not without setting up some kind of complicated interrupt system), so I must take a rather complex subroutine and copy/paste it to have the number of this type of component that I need. For example if I have code to run a timer and I need 12 timers, I have to copy/paste that code 12 times and change the memory locations addressed in each subroutine into a unique space to avoid overlap/interference. Obviously this is extremely tedious and error prone. Now, this is just fundamentally the way a PLC works and I have no complaints about that, but it sure would be nice to at least know the format of the .vlx files so that I could write simple scripts to generate subroutines and import them into Visilogic.
MVP 2023 Joe Tauser Posted April 21, 2014 MVP 2023 Report Posted April 21, 2014 The Creators are not going to give up the .vlx file format. The problem of multiple copies of nearly identical code is addressed in the new UniStream product with user-defined function blocks. If it makes you feel any better, I've done the copy-and-hope-you-get-all-the-replacements-right dance more than once and you just have to plow through it. If you haven't looked into the Search and Replace feature of Visilogic you need to. It can work on the subroutine level and does make things easier. Joe T. 2
sammysoil Posted April 21, 2014 Report Posted April 21, 2014 Thank you Joe, that is understandable. I haven't worked with UniStream yet, only the Vision series, and did not know that they had incorporated that feature, that's good to know
Gabriel Franco Posted April 21, 2014 Report Posted April 21, 2014 As the PLC doesn´t run ladder simultaneously, you may use a single subroutine to execute common task passing variables to it as needed and then returning results from it. I´ve used indirect addressing to do so. As Joe mentioned, there is such useful tool to search/replace. In previous visilogic versions, it did not replace operands inside some FB, but guess it´s fixed on current version.
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