UniStream USB Issue?

[DerekGodown]

Good morning everyone,

I was given a task yesterday which involves monitoring water pressure in an industrial complex. I'm doing this on a Unistream 5" PLC. Specifically a US-B5-RA28.

This is my first project in Unilogic, in the past I have only used Visilogic for PLCs. However, my issue isn't one with coding.... yet. I spent about an hour yesterday familiarizing myself with the software and experimenting with basic ladder logic functions. 

Unfortunately, when the time came to download the program into my fancy shmancy new PLC to test my practice runs, I ran into some errors when using the USB cable. First, a driver of mine was not up to date; obviously an error on my part. So I updated the necessary drivers and came back. This time I was greeted with a promising screen that said "Identifying New Hardware. This may take a few minutes, please wait..." So I did, for about 20 minutes until the end of my workday. Chalked it up to a "figure it out tomorrow" issue and clocked out.  When I came in today I verified that all my drivers were up to date, and still battle the same screen. I brought this up to my coworker who is years ahead of me in experience and knowledge and he said that he had gotten the same issue with the USB cable countless times on different combinations of computers, PLCs, and USB cables in Unilogic. He also said that he has never had an issue connecting via Ethernet, which is the route I plan to take here. 

Just wondering if anybody has gotten a similar issue, and if this is something that's been reported before. Maybe there is a configuration setting I'm not aware of before I can overwrite the sample program that comes in the PLC? Maybe there is a particular order the PLC prefers so that it can be better recognized by the system? Maybe I'm about 8 cups of coffee behind before I get that "Ah-Ha!" moment? (And no, I don't mean getting sucked into a parallel universe where everything is a moving sketch and 'Take On Me' plays on loop for eternity.)

Any input would be welcome! 

Thanks and stay strong, it's almost Friday,

Derek

[Saragani]

You should not get any "Drive Update" message of any kind, and I'm not sure how you've updated your driver.

During the UniLogic installation, it installs the driver that will be used. For more information, I need to see a screen capture of your Device Manager (highlight the device that you think it's the UniStream PLC).

If you don't see it under "Network Adapters" as: "Unitronics Unistream USB Ethernet/RNDIS Gadget, then the driver is probably not installed correctly, or not installed at all.

 

If the PLC do appear in the device manager as explained above, then the problem might be a firewall blocking the Ethernet communication, uPnP services turned off, and few more issues.

 

[DerekGodown]

The thing about the driver update is that Unilogic has been on this computer for a while, and used in other projects, just not recently. The message I got prompted me to check my Windows Updates and upon doing so I found a few that were still pending. After updating those the message went away and brought me to the painfully long identifying process. I probably should have screenshotted the driver message or paid more attention to the details but it wasn't until a little while after I thought "Huh, I wonder if this has happened to anyone outside of our office."

I connected via Ethernet and have had no issues since, and have had fun learning the new software. The USB issue happened to myself and my co-worker on multiple different setups, but as you said it could very well be an internal firewall issue or something else of the nature that we overlooked on our network. Thank you very much for the feedback, I will definitely refer back to your response if I ever find myself having to connect via USB and troubleshoot for a connection. 

Have a good day!

[Ausman]

I have had drivers that have been inadvertently blocked by my A/V upset the installation process of other programs, to the point of halting the progress at that point.  The driver install program doesn't know how to proceed if the driver install isn't allowed, and sits there indefinitely.  Given that this has happened regularly to someone else on the same system, perhaps your site's A/V is the issue.

In the past I used to have this occasionally happen with drivers for "illegal" 232 converters, until I twigged to the myriad of imitations out there upsetting things and took more care to only use genuine products.   Discussion about this exists on the forum.  Do a search for Prolific and then look at USB references.

Lastly, are you on Win 10?  It defaults to updating drivers itself, which has caused me untold grief on other systems until I turn it off.  I have to check this periodically because it "magically" turns itself back on!  I can't get it to stick...Microsoft (thinks it) knows best.

cheers,

Aus

[DerekGodown]

13 hours ago, Ausman said:

to the point of halting the progress at that point.

Did you get an alert of some sort at this halt or a hypnotizing/promising loading wheel? Just for future reference if I have to identify the issue again. 

I'll definitely hunt down that conversation if its been had before.

No, thank every god from every culture that I'm NOT on Windows 10, we run on 7 luckily but spent more than enough time in the past tinkering around 10 and there is almost nothing enjoyable about it. I remember how annoying its insistence on setting its own parameters were as well as much much more. Power to you if you use it on a daily basis for your work. Microsoft either thinks it knows best or hired a bunch of sadists in their program and design team recently.

Thanks for your input, always nice to hear back from you guys.

[Ausman]

8 hours ago, DerekGodown said:

Did you get an alert of some sort at this halt or a hypnotizing/promising loading wheel?

Sorry Derek, can't remember for sure, but I'd say the loading wheel.  I think I could do other things at the time, it wasn't a full lockup.  I seem to remember that it got as far as breaking existing driver links, though, I had to do a restore.  The instances ages ago were the start of my thoughts that are pretty much summarised here:

 

I hate W10 and don't use it personally except on some laptops that are used externally a lot.  A client site has it and I have written about headaches I have there with Msoft breaking things by installing drivers they think are best.  Sadly I can see the day when it will be the only option, as we need more and more "security" that "only the latest OS can deliver".  Never mind that it is vastly more big brother, and we actually pay them to use it!  Until that time I have various W7 installs in use, happily purring away.  I even have some laptops with XP, for all the field work to older plc systems and sensor interfaces etc.  No external net connections on these, though.

cheers,

Aus

[DerekGodown]

Sounds like your issue was similar to mine, then. I only had a wheel and could cancel the process whenever. I'm not entirely fluent enough to go through and identify what might be the exact issue  but from what you've shared at least I know a few ways to tinker with it if Ethernet is no longer an option during this project. 

As for W10 I can't think of anyone that I know personally that doesn't have a bone to pick with the developers. I was enrolled in a small 2-year Networking/Programming course in 2015. We had plenty of computers available to us, but only half had the 10 client on there, the rest used Windows 7. As time went on I began to notice the preference in OS' because the W10 computers were always free and the 7s always had a waiting line to use them. Our instructor would even come to class ready with a Windows 10 joke more times than not. My laptop runs on 7 and I have a dusty Optiplex in the basement still running XP as well, which is still my favorite. Unfortunately I think you may be right, if Windows takes a page out of Apple's book they may start punishing those who don't want to upgrade to the newest shiniest OS(if they arent already doing so and I'm not aware). I just hope that by that time they smooth things out as far as their security and driver insistence and maybe come back to a simpler overall design. Until that day, however, I'll be working happily on my old but gold computers.