SD card File magnament suggestions

[Fernando Castro]

Hi all, seems that my needs are currently transcending beyond the visilogic capabilities and I need to get creative.
I have a recipe based program wich right now is using an SD card to read and load UDT files so, however, it seems that we will be using more recipes in the future and we need that those recipes will be easy to read and understand by the operators so given the current limitation is 8 characters that may be a little more challenging than we tough,
also, the recipe deployment to all our machines will be challenging since some recipes will be having many versions due to the nature of the process and the R&D going on.
so, I was thinking of maybe using some kind of "encryption" algorithm to create an 8 characters name for the file based on the description.
the problem will be that I need to be able to list how many files I have on the SD, then get the name of each card to process that and list the equivalent human-readable on the screen
that way the user will only see a list of human-understandable names and there is less potential of them making the wrong selection.

But as I was able to see there isn't any option to get the names of files on an sd card, seems that filename is always an input for the sd card function blocks

 

Any ideas?

[Joe Tauser]

Vision PLCs are not good computers.  They were never meant to have a lot of file managing power.

We don't know the rest of the story on your situation as far as networking and the number of PLCs involved, so I'll take a swing in the dark.  Run an Ethernet cable to each PLC.  Set each up as a Modbus TCP slave. 

Get a UniStream PLC product and use it to send information to all your Vision minions.  You have a lot more file power with UniStream.  Or, get a full-blown SCADA package running on a PC and do the same thing - send the "data-of-the-day" out via Modbus TCP.

If I'm missing the boat completely here give us a better description of what communications options you have.  Running around opening panels up and swapping SD cards is not really good practice.

Joe T.   

[Fernando Castro]

2 hours ago, Joe Tauser said:

Vision PLCs are not good computers.  They were never meant to have a lot of file managing power.

We don't know the rest of the story on your situation as far as networking and the number of PLCs involved, so I'll take a swing in the dark.  Run an Ethernet cable to each PLC.  Set each up as a Modbus TCP slave. 

Get a UniStream PLC product and use it to send information to all your Vision minions.  You have a lot more file power with UniStream.  Or, get a full-blown SCADA package running on a PC and do the same thing - send the "data-of-the-day" out via Modbus TCP.

If I'm missing the boat completely here give us a better description of what communications options you have.  Running around opening panels up and swapping SD cards is not really good practice.

Joe T.   

I kind of have that part already sorted out, all m PLCs aree on a networked and collect dataover MODBUSTCP.

I was thinking about it and I feel like it should be a way to make some kind of FTP server function that could  get a udt file from a remote machine and store it directly from the remote machine to a data table in the PLC memory,  is this possible?

I could sync the list of names over modbus, and depending the name selected update the data table from the remote device....

pretty much the same as read write table function from visilogic while online mode

 

 

 

[Fernando Castro]

If anyone is interested in following up, the day has finally arrived. I have been asked to implement a way to manage filenames with more than 8 characters.

I have already figured out how to do it, but I still need to actually do it.

Heads up It also solves the problem of not being able to use the SD card file explorer ladder function through the remote operator.