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Shawn walks through adding a Mettler Toledo IND360 on Ethernet/IP to Studio 5000 for use with Compact and ControlLogix, and Imports and Tests the IND360 Faceplates for FactoryTalk View in Episode 31 of The Automation Show, Season 2. For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video. Watch The Automation Show from The Automation Blog: Note: You can unlock hundreds of “member only” episodes for just $5/mo here. Listen to The Automation Show on the Tech Talk podcast: The Automation Show, Season 2 Episode 31 Show Notes: Links for more information about Mettler Toledo’s IND360: IND360 Distributed Control eBook IND360 Industrial Weighing Solution IND360 Ease of Integration White Paper IND360 Downloads (EDS File)*** IND360 AOI and Faceplates*** *** Links mentioned in episode Programming Note: Due to scheduling conflicts, episode 31 is releasing prior to episode 30 😉 Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Automation Show. Sean Tierney here from Insights and Automation. And today on the show we’re going to integrate the Indy three hundred sixty from Mettler Toledo into studio five thousand with Compact Logix five thousand three eighty, as well as into Factorytalk View Studio. And I think you guys are going to really enjoy this. This is a pretty cool integration here, and they did a great job, I think, with, uh, providing all the files that we need to make this happen. Now, that said, I do want to thank Mettler Toledo, who sponsored this episode, so we would make it completely ad free. So thank you to them. And with that said, let’s go over to the computer here and get started and let me press the right button here. Okay. So here we are on the computer. You can see I’ve got SES links open. You can see I have well getting ready for another in-person hands on class. Um, we’re going to be doing a special here. So if you guys want to buy block of times for in-person training next year, let me know. The special price is only good through the end of twenty twenty five. So even though you don’t have to take the training until twenty twenty six. But in any case, um, what we’re going to see here is this is the PLC I’m going to use this is my Or pack. This is my uh, L368 fifty three eighty, I think I got thirty seven in it. And then up here you can see the IND three sixty shows up on the network. But it’s got the big yellow question mark. Right. And you guys all know what that is. If you’ve been watching me for a while we need to load the file now. I already have a Logix uh, studio five thousand project open, and this is the one I used for the 3D, uh, digital twin that I’ll be given to my students. Actually play with that quite a bit this weekend, trying to refine it, get it ready for students. But in any case, that’s great for those students who can’t come in to do hands on training. We’re going to give them a virtual trainer at no charge. So in any case, we’re just going to repurpose this for use with the Mettler Toledo. No. And let’s go ahead and find out a little bit more about the version here. I think it’s thirty seven. Yeah. Thirty seven. There you can see the, uh, catalog number. And so let me go ahead and close that. Now the first thing I want to do here is bring that file in. You guys know I have a shortcut on my desktop to both the editors installation wizard and the device installation wizard. Pretty much the same thing, but, you know, it’s under here on the tools as well. So the device description installation tool will open that up here. And I will include in the description the links to where I got the files I’m using today. So you don’t have to search that and worry about where to get them. You’ll find both links there. There’s one for the editors file, and then there’s another for the add on instruction we’re going to be using. And the faceplates for Factorytalk view. So pretty cool stuff. Let me just walk through the wizard here. Uh we’re going to register a single file. Let’s go browse I think I put it into my documents on this virtual machine. Okay. So empty. And there’s my editor’s file. Okay. And next. Okay. Pretty quick. Brought it right in. There it is. And we’re all done. Beautiful. So now the next thing I forgot to do is I’ve got to add that to my studio five thousand project. I just happen to know I’m plugged into A2. So I’m going to right click and do new module. After a moment it comes up and I’m going to just search on Indd three hundred sixty. Yeah. And there it is. Okay. So because we added the editors file, now it shows up here in the available items to add to our Ethernet. So let’s go ahead and create that. Okay. You can see the configuration. Of course every time we add something to Ethernet IP right. We got to have or add it to the uh to the I o tree. Right I o configuration. We got to have a name for it. So I’m going to call this empty underscore I three sixty underscore zero one. Now the important thing to note here is whatever I name the physical device I cannot give the instance the same name. So we’ll just give our AI. When we get to that point. We’ll just call it indie three sixty without the underscore in the front. Now I’m not going to give it a description, the IP address. I’m going to use the default IP address one nine two dot one six eight dot zero dot two. We talked about that in the last episode that we did on the indie three sixty, and we’re going to go ahead and click on okay. And with that done I’m just going to go ahead and click on okay. And now you can see it down here under A2. All right. So that’s all the I o I wanted to add. Now that’s great I have a unit there I can talk to. But usually you want to get an add on instruction right. That’s going to get all the information and put it together in a nice easy to look at format. Plus it’ll format it for the faceplate we use in Talk View Studio. So let’s go ahead and see about importing that in. Again I’m going to give you the links to the files I’m using today okay. So in any case I’m just going to open up my main routine. And instead of bringing in the AI, I’m going to bring in a run with the AI on it. Um, kind of kills two birds with one stone. So let’s go ahead and import a rung, and I’m going to go back to those files I downloaded and under here. As you can see I drilled down I get to this and you can see you get the AI or rung. So I’m going to bring the rung in. You got to put it on a rung anyway. So eliminates one step right now at this point it’s going to come up and say hey we need some more information here. So on the tags right. It says the instance name. Well what do I want to give this instance. So let me go ahead and select that out of there. And then I’ll come up here and do a find replace. And I’ll say let’s replace instance with what do we say we’re going to do in D three hundred sixty. Underscore zero one making sure we’re not using the same name. We gave the object the actual I o itself. And we’ll do replace all okay. So now we have a real instance names. All right I’m not going to play around with the description. You can play with that if you want. But now I have to actually tell it. Well what’s the module. So let’s go down here and we will see. We have the IND empty IND three hundred sixty inputs okay. So let me select those and we’ll do the outputs as well. There we go. All right. So that’s all good. Now let’s come down here to other components and saying module name okay. What’s the module. Where is it. There she is right there okay. Now if you look over here I have no more flags. Right. All the flags are gone. So I’m in pretty good shape. So I’m going to click on okay. And we should see it. Bring it right in here. It’s going to add all kinds of data types and custom data types, add on instructions, and all kinds of stuff that go with what you would expect with an add on instruction. You see them over there on the left, all that get added in. But what we’re really concerned with is this add on instruction block. You can see right here. Right. And I want to show you something about that right now I think mine went as a program tag. Let’s see. Yeah it went in the program tags. That’s okay. So in any case look at all of this that you get you get all these command bits right. You get all of these uh set you get status. Status is really the stuff I’m looking at here just to make sure it’s updating. So, you know, is the current. Wait, I have a demo on the scale, so I have a demo case on the scale. I didn’t want to bring in all the lentils and make a mess. So I just have a demo case on the scale around thirteen kilograms. And so, um, all of this is done for you all in the names, right? You would think a name of a function block, you know, these kind of follow those same names. So in any case, it just makes everything very, very easy. Now there’s no description over here because I didn’t change the description. All right. So I probably should have put change the description too. But in any case. So I got instance description. Of course those are all coming down from the parent. So if I change this to let’s say empty underscore I three sixty underscore zero one, then all of them change. Right. Because you can see they’re grayed out. So they’re getting they’re inheriting the the beginning of the description from above. Okay. So let’s see what we’re going to do here next. So we get that in we get the main I think we’re ready to download. Let’s let’s try it. Let’s go ahead and go to communications to active. And just waiting for it to come up. Let’s go find our PLC here. Boom I know I say still say PLC sometimes guys, but I know it’s Rockwell. It’s officially a pack,

Shawn discusses how many so called “experts” don’t use the correct terminology when referring to Rockwell and Siemens Modules in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. Link mentioned in video: – Shawn’s Online Courses – Shawn’s In-Person Courses Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey everybody. It’s Sean Tierney here from Insights and Automation. And I’m trying something completely new. I hope it’s working. I hope you can hear me. I’m actually in a different room here. What I’m calling studio C, which as I’m updating all my PLC courses, I need to I needed another spot to be able to, um, film videos. And so I’m kind of looking off to the side because I need to get another monitor in here. But in any case, I hope you’re doing well. I don’t know if you guys are seeing my audio. I don’t know if you’re hearing my audio or seeing my video. I don’t know what the quality is, but hey, you get to try things out. I’m actually trying Restream instead of StreamYard because there’s some audio delays with the StreamYard that, uh, if you’re not using the webcams, audio or whatever. So in any case, I just figured I’d just, uh, show you, uh, you know, test this out. And I wanted to talk to you about discrete versus digital. I o so I’ve seen some people who call themselves experts. Of course, you guys know I train for a living. I teach, uh, you know, Allen-bradley, Siemens PLC, HMI and SCADA and, uh, you know, there’s a lot of competition out there, a lot of people saying they’re experts and a lot of them actually share incorrect information. And one of the not so, not so horrible information is shares when they’re calling Rockwell’s IO discrete IO. And of course, if you want to use the word discrete, fine. Right. I always use the word digital. And I’ll show you why I use that word. And I know even in Rockwell, there was controversy years ago, I remember seeing a, uh, a letter come out from Rockwell. I don’t know if it was rescinded or not, saying we’re going to go from one to the other or whatever, but in any case, it kind of came to mind. Uh, I was reminded of this. Let me go to my my screen here, but I recently, uh, partnered with Schneider Electric, uh, great company to cover their modicon edge. Io wants a new a whole bunch of io they came out with, and I think it’s really cool. I filmed, I think, a forty five or fifty minute, uh, episode on it. They’re reviewing it now Ensure there’s no additional graphics they want to add or anything I technically got wrong. That’s one of the things we do with our sponsors, is they can go through and say, did you cut this? Add this. You know, just just we want to make sure it’s technically correct. They don’t they don’t get the storyboard, a script, the the episode. But in any case, it was a lot of fun doing that episode. It’s again, it’s not ready to go out yet, but soon. Uh, in any case, um, I noticed I kept saying digital I o and their modules specifically say on them discrete I o. And so, um, I just noticed that the restream is putting their logo right over my face. Isn’t that nice? So let me take care. See, this is what we call about testing things. You get to test things out. And I have a very easy fix for that. No, that’s not what I wanted to do. Thank you. All right, we’ll put that over there. Okay. That solves that problem. So in any case, um, you know, and I so I’m recording the video. I keep saying digital I o and then I’m opening the boxes and they see discrete and I’m like, oh that’s, that’s very interesting. It’s a different um, they use a different name for that. And I’m like, you know, I’m curious, you know, I’m saying digital I o because it’s a Rockwell thing, right? I’m like, I’m curious, what does Siemens call their I oh, now they call their I o modules. Signal modules. Right. Which is a slight difference. So I brought up the online uh tool here with Siemens. I said let’s see. And it’s digital modules digital and analog modules. Right. So you have digital and digital digital in out. Right. I’m like okay. So Siemens is using the word uh digital instead of discrete like Rockwell. And uh, but but Schneider is using discrete and not that it’s a big deal. Again, I’m doing this part as a, you know, tongue in cheek picking on some of my competition or uses the wrong terminology with the wrong brands, but also just to test out. And we already found some some mistakes already, but with the Restream. But in any case, before buying Restream, I want to test it out to make sure it does what I want it to do. So in any case. So I’m like, okay, Sean, are you are you sure Rockwell uses the word digital, right? And I remember this letter coming out twenty years ago saying, you know, digital, discrete, blah, blah, blah. I don’t remember the detail. So I said, let’s go up and look at the latest control logics IO module, um, selection guide and or control logic selection guide. And you can see right here very clearly they call them digital input and output modules. Let’s see if we go down we see some more of these. Okay. So the IB sixteen being one of the most popular ones. So I checked around and compact logics was the same. And I’m like well let’s go back in time. Let’s check. Uh slick five hundred. Yep. Digital I o and analog io. And I’m like, how about the flex back from the early nineties or mid nineties I should say. Yep. They use flex IO digital and analog okay. And I’m like, all right. Great. So these other people who claim to be experts aren’t using the right terminology with what they’re supposed to be an expert with. That tells you something, right? That tells you something. But I’m like, can I find any instance where Rockwell uses the word discrete? Right. So I came over to the selection guide for the Micrologix digital I o. Okay. Not discrete good. So I said, you know what? I’m just going to search the knowledge base. Um, actually the literature library on ABC.com, I’m going to say let’s look for anything that has the word discrete in it, because I know I’ve seen this word before with Rockwell, and I did find a few. There’s only twenty results out of the entire, I don’t even know, hundreds of thousands of literature out there that had discrete. And so I wanted to pick out a few that relate to plc I o cards that use the word discrete. And so here we have some of the old block I o. I actually got some will be adding that in the PLC course I’m filming. I will be doing that on remote I o but the old block I o you can see this manual. And what was the year on this? Let me just go to the. Sometimes you have to go to the back nineteen ninety four. And they’re calling it the block I o discrete I o blocks okay. So that’s an example right. And then there was another one here. Right. For I o Ponyo installation instructions. They use the word discrete as well. I thought that was interesting. What year is that from? Uh, well, it was updated in twenty. It’s twenty twenty five. So. So, you know, apparently they’re okay with using interchanging the terms here and there. And then I found this old compact io um, release note that called them discrete IO module. So my question to you is what do you call them. Now I know there’s there’s like twenty. And these all are some of these have to do with um machines with sensors, light arrays and all that kind of stuff. There’s very few, probably under ten documents you can find on Rockwell’s. Um, I’m just checking to make sure the video is coming out on Rockwell’s, uh, literature library. That will refer to IO module as discrete versus digital. And I already showed you at the beginning here, you know, all the current literature and all the old literature really had a preference for digital IO and that that kind of just reinforced when I was doing that. Modern, um, video. I was like, I keep saying digital, but the modules say discrete. Where did this where did this digital come from? It’s the vast majority of Rockwell’s documentation. Call it digital IO not discrete, but I’m curious, what do you use? Do you say digital IO or discrete IO? And do you agree with me that if you’re working with Rockwell or Siemens, as we saw on their website, that you should be using the term digital? But when you’re working with Schneider, at least the edge io nts, you should be using the term discrete. And I know it doesn’t matter one bit, but, you know, hey, if I’m going to test out the studio and the mic and the video camera, it might as well might as well have something to chat about, right? This is automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition, and I thought this might be a fun little topic to talk about again. Does it really matter? No. But, um, you know, one of the things I try to do is pay attention to the different, um, vendors terminology because I don’t like getting it wrong myself. Right. And so in any case, I just thought that would be something fun to talk about. Now, I don’t know if because I’m trying out Restream. I don’t know if I’ll be able to see any chat to see if anybody’s chatted. So let me see if I can do that. Uh. I would need that. Okay, great. So I don’t see anything in the chat, and, um. Which is fine. As a matter of fact, uh, Restream seems to be a long way behind me. So if you’re. You may just be watching this now, it looks like Restream is, like, five, ten minutes behind me, which is really weird. I don’t know why they would be so far behind, but. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. In any ca

Shawn details the MD-34A Windows 10 Industrial Tablet Desk Dock from Siemens in Episode 45 of The Automation Minute, Season 5. Listen to The Automation Minute on The Automation Blog: The Automation Minute, Season 5 Episode 45 Show Notes: The links mentioned in the video are listed below: MD-34A Product Website Previous episode on the MD-34A  Shawn’s Siemens S7 Course Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host):  Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Shawn Tierney here from Insights. And today, we’re gonna take a look at the desk dock for the MD dash 34 a Windows 10 tablet from Siemens. You remember I took a look at this I five tablet a while back, and at the time, I asked if they could send me the desk dock or docking station so that I could leave it here on the stage and actually use it because it’s a gray I five Windows PC that happens to also be a tablet and a barcode reader and an RFID reader and all these other things too. In any case, it did come in, several weeks later, and I filmed an episode. I don’t know what happened to it, but it never got published. So, I wanted to in appreciation for them sending this over and sponsoring this episode so it’s ad free, I did wanna cover. So in any case, let me first, though, take this guy out and, shut her down because her fan is running. I got it doing all kinds of cool stuff. Now I was really surprised. I turned it on and it still had all battery. Even though I hadn’t used it in months, it still had a full battery. So I really appreciated that. That’s cool. A lot of times at home, my tablet, you know, even if it’s off, it still will, drain batteries. So I didn’t like that at all. So look at that guy turned off. Now I’m not gonna do an unboxing because the, the box was just a simple cardboard box that came in there wrapped in plastic and very secure, but there wasn’t a lot to show with that, so I didn’t go and dig up that archival footage. But what I do wanna do here now is go to overhead mode, and then let me go ahead and unplug the ethernet cable and the power cable. This This is the same power cable that came with the tablet. Right? So you don’t have to go and buy that again. And let’s take a look at what comes with this, what they call their, desktop or what I would call a docking station. And I think we can even zoom in a little bit more on it. Here, let’s try. Okay. The first thing I wanted to show you is that it has these two metal pegs that make it very easy to align the actual tablet when you go to pull it in. I’m gonna go ahead and bring the tablet back out here, and we can see those two little holes there. And so that makes it extremely easy to align it up and put it in there nice and secure. Right? And so I really like that. And so that’s the first thing here, and you can see all the connections down there at the bottom. Alright. And then if we take a look at the back here, this is where we see this is where I have the power going in. And here we can see two, sorry, two USB two point o’s, not three point o’s. Alright. There is a three point o and a USB c in the unit itself. And then we have another RJ 45. This is a ten one hundred. So this is great if you’re just leaving it on your desk and, when you plug in, you wanna get off Wi Fi. Again, there’s an r j 45 in the unit itself as well, for Ethernet. Then we have the, VGA out. Like I said on the unit, it has an HDMI and a USB c, But, VGA now a lot of you may be saying, well, VGA, what am I gonna do with that? I have a lot of VGA output devices here in the studio that actually are very easy to convert it to either DVI or HDMI or, you know, display port, you know. So, 99%. I have actually haven’t found a monitor or a television that didn’t, accept converting VGA to high definition and it looks great. Then we have our serial port, which is awesome too because if you had some legacy serial device you had to connect to the computer, you know, you could do that right here. Right? So, a lot of times, you may have that if you’re replacing legacy equipment. So those are the major ports here. Now on this side here, we do get two more USB two point o’s and these are great for I I just plugged in the dongle for my wireless mouse and keyboard, but, that’s great having that on the side as well. And then on this side, there’s really nothing. You can see the front. Again, this is sturdy. It’s it doesn’t feel like it’s going to float away. Like, it has some weight to it. So when you set it down and it has rubber feet too. Let’s take a look at those. And, you know, I can zoom in too. So So I I feel very comfortable about leaving it here on the workbench and that it’s not gonna slide off. And, you know, it has enough, heaviness to it. I know some of the the inexpensive stuff you buy these days, you put it on your desk, every time you move a wire, it sloshes around. Right? But, in any case, you can see it’s the MDDash34 A Dash D D. So you can see that there. And, I gotta say, I haven’t had a docking station for a really long time. But with a tablet like this, I think it’s extremely useful because, you know, the whole point of having the tablet is that you’re going out and, you know, you need to be mobile. Maybe you’re checking on instruments or maybe you wanna just check on maybe you have an HMI or WinCC running on this. You wanna check on your, you know, and they do have a hand strap that you can get for this. Maybe you need to use the barcode reader. They also have a dock for the forklift if you’re gonna use it with a forklift. But this allows you to get out there and do what you need to do mobile. A lot a lot easier to use than a laptop. Right? Trying to juggle a laptop. But in any case and it’s aeronautic too. I know what my laptop, my, and I did a review on it, the MSI. It has some, some of its mounting feet depending on how you hold it. I’m not very comfortable. I’ll do that. I’ll do an update on that in the future, but in any case, but, you know, you get back to your desk. You don’t wanna use this little screen. And then I know if you’re like me, you want a full size keyboard and a mouse. Right? So if I’m gonna be doing any type of serious, work on my computer, I need a full none of these small ones. I need the full number pad. I need the full up, down, curses, everything. Right? All function keys if I’m gonna be efficient. And so you can do that with this. Right? So I actually plugged this keyboard and mouse in there, and it was what is you know, it was exactly as, expected. One thing I didn’t do is to see how many monitors I could put up to it. I just didn’t wanna take everything apart and see if I could hook up, like, three different monitors to it. But in any case, I do think it supports, multi monitors. And according to, the the manual for this set talking about extending the display versus mirroring. So in any case, you know, something to check out. You might wanna talk to your Siemens rep if you want more information about it. You know, if you’re thinking about, getting this and using the dock in your workspace. But with that, that’s really all I had unboxing of this desktop. I’m gonna set it up over here, and I hope to use it from now on every day when I’m doing my videos and doing our automation, Tech Talk lunchtime additions, which will be coming back. Haven’t forgotten about those, but I do have a backlog of videos I’m trying to get through by the end of the fiscal year. So in any case, and this is one of them. I mean, like I said, I filmed it. I don’t know what happened to it. Didn’t get released, so I wanted to make sure I got that out. And I got some other great stuff coming for you as well as we just had an episode of the History of Automation podcast that I’m doing on weekends with people talking about old automation products. So if you’re interested in that kinda old stuff, you know, pre February, like, you know, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, PLC five, some old monocons, and whatnot. We were talking about old TI five zero fives in a recent episode. Check that out. If you go to the automationblog.com/automationmuseum, also, automationmuseum.org should take you there as well. But for some reason, it’s not redirecting today, so I got a tech support link in again, this is common stuff that should never have a problem, but I gotta take support link into them to get that redirect fixed. But in any case, I did wanna bring this to you. I do also wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. Vendors: Would you like your product featured on the Podcast, Show or Blog? If you would, please contact me at: https://theautomationblog.com/contact Until next time, Peace ✌️  If you enjoyed this content, please give it a Like, and consider Sharing a link to it as that is the best way for us to grow our audience, which in turn allows us to produce more content 🙂 Shawn M Tierney Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator Support our work and gain access to hundreds members only articles and videos by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You’ll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com. (129 views)

Shawn walk’s through adding IO-Link devices to an IO-Link Master connected to a Rockwell Logix PAC using Studio 5000 in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:  Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. Link mentioned in video: – IFM AL1322 Webpage (includes AOI downloads) – Shawn’s Online Courses – Shawn’s In-Person Courses Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey everybody. Happy lunchtime. I hope everything is going great for you today. It is Friday, and I am pretty excited about that. Planning on spending a lot of time building more of these demos, this weekend. I got all the stuff finally came in. So and then I’ll be sharing it with you over the next couple of weeks. Next week, I may have, more recorded content than live content. I’ll still try to release it at lunchtime, but, just some of the things I gotta do requires me to have, you know, to go through and do edits and whatnot. So in any case, though but I should be around almost all of next week, lunchtime, whether it’s recorded or live, I’ll be here. But in any case, I just hope you all are having a great Friday. And today, we’re gonna do part two, and we’re gonna actually set up the two devices, the two IO Link devices. I thought this would be fun. Now if you guys are having any troubles hearing me or seeing me, please put it in the chat. Everything on my side looks like it’s working. So, I’m just gonna go ahead and get started. Now I did play around with, some settings early this morning to see if I could get this to work. There we go. Okay. I I’m not a a huge fan of how they design everything, but, at least this is better than what we’re doing the other day. In any case, we’re back in Studio 5000. And for anybody who didn’t catch yesterday’s show, what we did was we added these two. Let me see if I can switch over to those. We added nope. That’s not what I wanted to do, and that has to do with the selection. You always have to select this. So let’s try it again. There we go. So we added these two devices to our ControlLogix, And we have one IO Link device here and one IO Link device here, but we already have the masters added to logic. So let’s go back here, and, yeah, I’ll click over here. And now we’re inside logic, so you can see them right here down here. Make sure you guys are seeing what I’m seeing. And, now what we need to do is get the data in from the devices. We already have it coming in as, you know, just control the tags, but this is this is not, you know, what you would want. I mean, it’s it’s the twenty first century for crying out loud. Right? We want our data, you know, to be more, massage than that. And, thankfully, the vendor, IFM, has some AOIs, and they’re in that same folder, that same download, the Allen Bradley download. They put all the AOIs in here, which I think is great. At first, I went to the actual pages for the different products, and there were no AOIs there. And I’m like, I think they’re actually in the, the starter package for Allen Bradley. So I went into there. Again, we downloaded this yesterday. I talked about where to get this yesterday. There’s the add on instructions, IFM devices. And the first device I have well, the device plugged into number, the first, IO MetLink master is, this was the RVP. So we’re looking for RXP. Okay. And so what we wanna do is bring in this. We have an eight port, so we need one that goes all the way up to eight ports. And so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna copy this path here. I’m gonna come over to our assets folder here, add on instructions. I’m gonna, input and add on instruction. I’m gonna give it the path open. We have eight port devices here, so I’m gonna use eight port, and that’ll bring it in. I’m gonna accept all the defaults when it comes in. Bada bing, bada bang, bada bada boom. Excellent. Excellent. And now I know the other one I have is a temperature sensor, TN something. So let’s see here. TN. K. A port, because that’s what I have in the field, eight ports. And bringing that out of instruction as well, except the defaults. And on just a mere moments, they both come in now. You know, you probably know you can go to this add on, you know, toolbar here and bring them in that way. Although, did you know you can bring them in like this too? Right? Which is pretty cool because sometimes it’s easier to see it here because this text is really small. Okay. So in any case, we have them in. Now let’s see if we can zoom in here now. We have to create tags for these. Okay. So I’ll just do a new tag, and I’m just gonna call this these are the AL1322. I’ll call this a. Actually, this is actually for the device. So let me call this the RVP 510. I’ll just call it a in case we have another one in the future, and then, I’ll create it. K. And I’ll do the same thing here. I might as well do that right now, and this is for our t n I think it’s a 2511 a. K. Boom. So I got the backing tags for each of the add on instructions. Now I have to give it the PLC input. This one, you you know, it’s pretty obvious. Of course, we have I named thirteen twenty two a and b. Those are the two devices, the masters out there, but you have to grab the data. K? You have to grab the data. I tried grabbing this when I was testing it early this morning. It’s like, oh, I don’t like that. I want the data. K. So we’ll do that. That’s a, and then this guy is connected up to b. K. So we’ll go over to input data. K. Port number. Now if we I don’t know if this thing will let me do this. Let’s try it like this. Okay. Good. So let’s see this guy. K. This is the RVP he’s in. And this encoder, we’ve we’ve showed it in the show before. We’ve we’ve had it on connected at, Allen Bradley and Siemens PLCs, but, we can see it’s, plugged into port one. K. This is the power port Ethernet in and out, and then this is an IoT port. And, again, we we’ve covered that in previous episodes. And then for the temperature sensor, I have it in Port 2. K. So let’s see if we can get string yard to go back to this view here. Alright. Great. And now, so this guy is gonna be Port 1 because that’s the RVP, and this is gonna be Port 2. This is, no nobody’s complaining that they can’t hear me, so that’s good. The vendor ID. So, let’s see. I do have the website up here, and let’s start with the temperature sensor. So this is IFM. So the vendor ID is always going to be 310, and this particular device ID is 582. So this is a temperature sensor. So let me go back here, and it will go 310. And what is it? 582582. And in the gradient listed in that if we search on gradient, we will see it’s point zero one. You guys see that? Yeah. Yeah, that’s on the screen. Okay. So let’s go back over to the VMware point zero one. Beautiful. Okay. Now we gotta do this guy. Point number one. Vendor ID, we know it’s gonna be 310 because it is still IFM. And then device ID. I have no idea what it is. So let’s go back to the IOD datasheet, and I think it’s at the very top. Just scroll up. Yep. It wasn’t. Here we go. Device ID, 496. 496. K. And then I’m gonna leave that all blank. Alright. So if we’ve done this correctly, this should massage that data and give us, you know, a counter, like, how many pulses per rev. I think this is defaulted to ten twenty four. And then the temperature and for whatever reason, this is even though the unit’s set for Fahrenheit, this block is showing that it’s Celsius. I did not have a time to figure out why that was. I did look through the block to see if there’s any way I could toggle it in the block itself. There wasn’t. And so, let’s go ahead and download this bad boy and see if we get it to work. Come on, puppy. Yeah. So all these limitations of StreamYard StreamYard is great for doing, interviews. Right? But, when it comes to doing things like this, I’m really struggling. I may have to go back to, restream. Yep. Put the controller back into run mode. I’ve been using StreamYard for the for the interviews we’re doing the automation museum, which will come out Monday, but, the first episode anyways. We’re recording episode four this Sunday. But, in any case so you can see it right here, and everything looks like it’s working. So let’s take a look here. I am going to turn you just have to trust me because I can’t do a split screen with this software. I’m gonna turn the encoder slowly, and we can see the counter turning up. Right? And that is now represented by a tag, not just some random data tag, but it’s actually did these go as a program tags? K. Yeah. That’s, the add on instruction. That’s not what I wanted. Nope. They’re controller tags. So here’s the RVP five ten. And we can see the count right there. See all the information about this. Let’s leave it in this view. See if you guys can see that. K. And then the beautiful thing is, yeah, it’s in the data table. Right? In the controller tags. Caught me there. Went a little legacy on you. You can see it here right on the block too, which is really nice. Right? So it just takes that data, massages it, and, makes it look nice. And then on the temperature You know what? Something happened. How come my vendor ID didn’t get put in there? Because I I thought I pressed center. Sometimes when you do it yeah. Look at it. Did I get that number wrong? That’s weird. You guys thought it was easy to live stream. 310582. I’m just joking. 310582. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Port 2. You see this? I didn’t choose the right one. Typo. You guys probably s

Shawn walk’s through connecting an IFM AL1322 IO-Link Master to a Rockwell Logix PAC using Studio 5000 in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:  Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. Link mentioned in video: – IFM AL1322 Webpage – Shawn’s Online Courses – Shawn’s In-Person Courses Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host):  Happy afternoon, everybody. Shawn Tierney here from Insights and Automation. Today is Thursday. What is today? September 11, I believe. I hope you all are having a great day. And, you know, I didn’t even know if I was gonna be able to do this, give it everything that’s been going on. Plus, I just got off the phone, actually off of out of a meeting with a larger vendor talking about their brand new IO, which I’ll be covering in a few weeks. Pretty awesome stuff. Can’t wait to share it with you guys. But in any case, if you were here yesterday, I actually ended up deleting the livestream after the livestream because I ran into an issue that something didn’t work. And I believe I resolved that. So I’m gonna try it again today. And what am I talking about? What are we gonna cover? Well and, again, if you can’t hear me or if there’s a problem with the visuals, let me know in the chat because there’s no nobody in the control room. It’s all just me. But in any case, we’re gonna be integrating these two. I have, a long time ago, the folks over at, IFM sent me in some products. They didn’t sponsor any coverage on it, and I’ve really struggled covering it. So I did cover these modules with a, with a, a PLC they sent me, and I did, cover these devices with Allen Bradley and Siemens products as dumb devices, not as IO Link devices. But I thought, you know, the automation, automation tech talk lunchtime edition, I think, would be a great time to cover some of these unsponsored products that have been piling up, and I try not to accept anymore because I’m out of room. But in any case, it’s it’s, I thought this would be a good time to test them out. And today, based on what happened yesterday, today, I’m going to try to get both of these set up on our CompactLogix. Now try to go back here to full screen. What happened yesterday was Logix kept crashing, and I believe it’s because of, Connect Components Workbench when I upgraded it and installed something that was incompatible with the version of Logix I had. So we’ll find out. But in any case, let’s go over to the computer here, and I have to do this kind of a different way because if I do it through the camera system, I do have a I do have an, request into the company, this whose software this is, and it’s not showing me the view I wanted. That’s the view I wanted. But I’m like, guys, you gotta help me make my you know, zoom in on this camera, but in any case, I won’t, bother you with that. What we are looking at here, though, is what’s the first step in getting these things to work? And the first step is where’s the web page I had up? K. We gotta go to the product’s web page, and on the product’s web page, we wanna grab a couple of downloads. Okay. If we’re gonna integrate these, IO link blocks on EthernetIP to our CompactLogix, we’re gonna wanna get the download. So this is the web page. After the fact, this is an AL thirteen twenty two. After the fact, I’ll go and put all links. And, again, I ran right over here from the meeting I just had, so I didn’t have a chance to put those links in. But any case, we wanna go to downloads. And the two downloads I needed, and I apologize if you caught yesterday’s show. I’m gonna repeat myself a little bit, but I got the Allen Bradley collection here. Right? And I also got the, NetSetter software. K. So this allows me to configure the device’s IP address. Okay. Now I don’t know if both of these are set up or not. So let me minimize that, and let’s go over to, the net set of software, which I just opened. Right? Unzipped it, and you get this error here. I didn’t show this yesterday. You gotta have a PCAP library. Now PCAP, if you’re not familiar with that, packet packet captures. Right? Capturing packets as they go down your Ethernet. Okay? So we need to have, some software that does that. So let me close that, and they they recommended two different ones. I just went and got WinPCAP. It seemed like, seems like good software. And, no. I don’t wanna start it all the time, and finish. Now let’s go back to the NetSetter, IFM NetSetter here, and let me know if I’m leaving anything out. I’m kinda did this yesterday, so I wanna make sure I’m being clear on what I’m doing here. And what we’re looking for let me go back to the overhead, and nope. That’s not what I wanted. Let’s do this. K. So these are the a l. Let’s see if I can get an even closer here, and I don’t have the overhead lights on. I feel like I’m missing a light, but in any case, let this one be easier. So you can see that this is the Ethan IP version of the a l thirteen twenty two. So I also have PROFINET versions of this, and maybe I’ll do those next week. We’ll see how things go. But I wanted to show you guys that, and let me back that out. Alright. Excellent. So let’s go back over to it it hides that view. Okay. And now we can see the net setter. Alright. So let’s go ahead and run a scan here and see if the IFM nets, and it says, the installed PCAP library has been restricted to limited to admin rights. I’m also got this security. I’m gonna get rid of that. There we go. And it says, hey. The PCAP library you guys see in this has been, restricted to to admin rights. And saying I won’t find anything pro profi profinet if it’s restricted to that. So let me go ahead and see if it’s running. Let’s see here. PCAP, when PCAP? K. Let’s run this as an administrator. K. It’s saying it’s already installed. So windows, why didn’t you find it? You always get you had to love that. Let’s go down to the w’s. There she is. Now see, I don’t see, I don’t see an executable to allow that. So we’re just gonna press on here. I don’t wanna get stuck with any of those issues. Let’s go ahead and do a scan. And I know it saw my 7069 l 30 e r, and it’s not finding these because I just wired them up. Again, I just run-in here, and so I did not put power back on. Looks like no smokes coming out. I shouldn’t joke about that. We had a fire alarm today, which also kinda threw a cold curveball in. But, in any case, Yeah. Now they’re coming up. K. Let’s see here. It does seem like it’s cutting off part of my screen. Why is it why would it do that? Stream. Yeah. What’s wrong with you? Maybe it’s just the browser I’m in. Alright. So you can see it found them. And you know what? I wanna make one of these one thirty 1, and, the other one’s already 132. So I’ll make one one thirty one, right to device, and 132. So that’s how you configure these out of the box. That’s how you would set them up. And so now let’s go ahead and, close this up and go to RSLogix. Now to save time, I, just created a blank, l 30 e r program. Okay? And this is where we were having problems before. I would right click and do new module and I crashed, but one of the things I had to do to make sure this would work before we went live is I wanted to go into the downloads and register the EDS files. K? So inside the starter package for Rockwell, there are EDS files. Right? And so what I did is I copied this path, and then I ran the EDS hardware, installation tool, or there’s another one called the device, depending on the version of software you have. There’s another one called the device hardware installation tool. Let’s see if we can find that here. Yes. See, this one has the EDS one. Sometimes you’ll see the device hardware installation tool. They they do the same thing. They just change the name to device because it can support IO Link as well. So let me go ahead. IO Link uses an IODD. Oh, speaking of IO Link, let me switch over here. They did not get the IO Link did not get the IO Link episode out last night. I’m hoping to get it out tonight. So, stay tuned if you follow the automation podcast and you look at those kind of technical presentations. We should have the IO link out tonight. So let me go back to this view. Okay? And we’re going to bring in those EDSs. Now I’ve already done this because I, after what happened yesterday, I want to make sure everything was working, but if you’ve never done this before, I just wanted to walk through it with you. Okay. And now in Logix, and I may have to close and reopen Logix. I’m hoping I don’t have to. It’s acting a little funny. It’s like refreshing. K. I’m gonna right click on Ethernet here. I assume it’s already refreshed, and I’m gonna add it in. You can see I already did it once. Oops. Yeah. It’s it’s definitely host. K. New module. K. AL1322. It’s been added as an EDS, so there it is. Create and this is where it was crashing yesterday. And what I did with and you see it then it crashed this time. Thank you. AO1322. We’ll call it A and b A, and it was 1921681Dot131. K. And I even checked the version. Hopefully, the version’s right. K. And then the next one will be I accidentally hit, add again. AL1322B. I’ll give that an address of one ninety two one sixty eight. Come on. Sometimes in VM, if your mouse goes off the screen, it stops working. +1 32. Okay. Close. Alright. So they’re both in there. And, again, just to kinda stress the point here, when I was doing that and it was crashing yesterday, you know

Shawn walk’s through converting an RSLogix / MicroLogix program to a CCW / Micro800 project in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:  Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. NOTE: There is no show planned for this Friday (9/5). Links mentioned in video: – Migration Guide – Conversion Tool Released – Conversion Tool Updated – Conversion Tool Download – Conversion Tool How To Article – Conversion Tool How To Video – Shawn’s Online Courses – Shawn’s In-Person Courses Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome to Automation Tech Talk lunchtime edition. Shawn Tierney here from Insights. And today, we’re gonna take a look at something different. We’re gonna take a look at migrating a Micrologix program to a Micro 800 program, and we’re going to do this because, I had somebody ask a question about connecting to a Micro 800 from a SCADA package. And, you know, when I did my VSC course, I did I think every Allen Bradley PLC except for the Micro 800. So I thought, you know, this would be a good time to convert my my VUSC application that I use to simulate the data for that for that course. And, anybody in my VUSC course can download that, in Micrologic, PLC five, ControlLogics, CompactLogics, multiple versions. You know, you know, I recently converted it to Siemens because I wanted to add those advanced graphical lessons to my unified comfort panel and unified, a basic panel course. So I need to convert it to Siemens, and then somebody asked me to test their SCADA package with Codesys. And as you know, I had a couple of vendors step up and send me Codesys PLCs. So I converted well, not all of it. There’s five molding lines. I wanted to do something different than a bottling line or, you know, a a widget maker. And so, I only did one molding line into the into the code Sys because, you know, I I I we all we’ve talked about that before. But in any case, needs a little love and tender love and care to the code sys, IDE does. But in any case, yes. I figured, hey. Let’s use this to convert my existing program, which I which I wrote from scratch to the micro 800, and let’s see how it goes. Now I did this this morning around 04:30. I went through it once, and it seemed to work okay. So I figured, we would do this during lunchtime. And so if you guys have any questions on this or anything, let me know. Oh, a couple of housekeeping things. There will be no episode of the show tomorrow. I’m kinda backed up trying to get through a couple of videos that I’m, sponsored videos with vendors. And, also, I have to, just get all the stuff to do with the the automation school, but I do I did record this morning an update for any students at the automation school. So that I’m gonna schedule that to go out this afternoon because I said September 4 in it. Now looking backwards, I probably should have said September 5. But in any case, that’ll come out this afternoon, and I kinda update a lot of the new lessons over at the automation school. So, especially customers and PLC courses, PAC courses over there, you wanna check that out. I did have a great conversation with a gentleman who was who knew what a Symax 300 was, so we’ll try to get him on the automation museum podcast, which is I’m calling the history of automation. I have we’ve recorded three already. History of Triconics, history of Wonderware, history of, Rocco PLCs. And these are all from people’s perspectives. This is, like, the definitive history, but, you know, it was been a lot of fun hanging out with these people who work with this old stuff, and, I really have enjoyed it. Sunday, my goal is to edit those three and, and, start scheduling them to release. They’ll they’ll come out on the on the regular channels I have now because we haven’t even funded the Automation Museum yet. So if you have a an extra dollar or 2 this month, please consider going to automationmuseum.org and making a donation. I wanna thank everybody who has already donated. Last time I checked, it’s been a few weeks, but, we were, like, 7% of our goals. So, I mean, we’re we’re you know, there’s no rush on this. The old stuff’s not going anywhere. So, and I have a lot of people asking if they can send stuff in. I’m asking them to hold on to it into their in their attics for right now, because I just I don’t and when when when they when when you get taxed as a business, they wanna tax everything that’s in in your business. Right? And so it’s hard to explain to them that this is stuff that’s for a future museum. So to avoid getting taxed on stuff that I don’t use for my business, I’m asking people to hold on to it. Now if you absolutely have to get rid of it, I do have room in my attic at home, and, I’ll stick it up there for the meantime. But in any case, you can imagine I hate their that stuff all the way up and then bring it back down later. So in any case, with that said, I do appreciate everybody who sent stuff in. And now I’m gonna try something new. I wasn’t happy with the the the way StreamYard, which is a software I use to livestream. I wasn’t happy with the way they were doing the graphics. So I’m trying to put a little bit different today. And so I’m gonna switch over, and try it this way. I hope this is better resolution for you. I don’t have as much control when I use StreamYard natively. Like, I can’t crop myself out instead of having the whole studio here, but I’m hoping the graphics are better for you. So here’s an example. And I wrote this program. I wanted it to be something that my VUEs students could understand. I don’t wanna make, like, some new algorithm that was, like, gonna win a Nobel Peace a Nobel Prize or anything like that. But in any case, I don’t know if it would be a peace prize, but some other prize. But in any case so it’s a very simple program. Basically, I have a bunch of JSRs in the main routine. So many people are used to that. I figured I would just go with that. And, because, this had to run on a Michelogix 1,000, I put all the simulation in one ladder program. Now this is the 1,400 version. I didn’t change it. I just you know, I did it all in the 1,000, tried to cram everything in there. Actually, could not fit everything into the 1,000, but I came close. So in any case, that’s why you’ll see the, the the lead numbering here of the of the files. And, I did separate the molding machines here because, you know, you only have 15. You know, I think it’s, fifteen and sixteen is your debug. So, that’s why I did it that way. So if you’re asking, hey, Shawn, why’d you do it that way? That’s why I did it that way. So this is a program we’re gonna convert to Micrologix. And to do this, I’m gonna first do a file save as, and I’m gonna save it as a SLC, a library file. Okay? Even though it’s even though it’s a 1,400, we’re saving as an SLC. It doesn’t mean slick 500. It means library file. At at one point, it probably meant slick 500 library container or something, but in any case now I have found that if you have the free software. Right? So if you have the RS Logix micro starter light, I found that that option is not in there. So you may wanna reach out to your local Rockwell rep, and usually, they have a real nice guy named the PLC specialist. That’s a job I did for twenty five years, and they’ll do that for you. Look at it just takes some you know, it’s so, I mean, we’re talking seconds. Right? So in any case, usually, that’s something I would do for my old customers, you know, over morning coffee. So in any case, I’m gonna save this. I have a folder, my VSC basics folder. I downloaded all the files just a few minutes ago, and, I’m going to go ahead and export with comments, and I’m just gonna leave all the defaults there, and voila, it’s all been exported. Okay? So now we’re ready to switch over to CCW. And in CCW, this utility used to be able to be downloaded separately. A matter of fact, I put all the links because I have covered this quite a bit. I put all the links in the description so you can see all the different links to all the articles and videos I’ve done on this in the past. But now in the mic in connect components workbench, I’m gonna go to tools, micro MicroLogix to micro 800 converter. Okay? And so and if you guys can’t hear me or you can’t see me, let me know in the chat. But any case, that brings up this little guy here. This is version five point o five. I’m in CCW version 22. It just happened to be what was installed. Okay? So in any case, let’s go ahead and choose the MicroLogix file. I put it into my I think it’s in documents, VSC basics. Boom. I have this checkbox checked because the files match. K. Those the the files have the same name. I’m gonna go to well, I happen to have here the I think I have the L24QBB. Yeah. That’s what it looks like. Yeah. So that’s what I’m gonna use there just because that’s what I have on the workbench. And we’re gonna do, okay. And I wanna thank everybody for tuning in. Guys, if you have suggestions on what you would like to see for future episodes, please contact me, throw them in the chat. Also, if you wanna come on the show and share a trick that you learned, I’d love to have you on the show. This is, my new lunchtime thing that I do to learn. You know, why browse the web and, you know, read the bad news? But I can share tips with the with you folks. And this is something I was doing anyway, so I had to do it for my I wanted to add those lessons to my VSC course. So figured, why not d

Shawn discusses Module Discovery and Reading IO Config in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. NOTE: There is no show planned for this Friday (9/5). Links mentioned in video: – Online Courses: https://theautomationschool.com – In-Person Courses: https://theautomationschool.com/live Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Happy Wednesday. Right? I was gonna say Tuesday. It’s not Tuesday. It’s Wednesday. I hope you’re all doing good. I hope, my mic and video is coming out okay. Let me know in the chat if it’s not. But in any case, I do want to, wish you all a great lunchtime here. And it is Wednesday, and, this is Automation Tech Talk lunchtime edition. And, feel free to chat in the, both on YouTube and on LinkedIn. And, of course, you’ll always find the audio, the video, and the transcript up on the automationblog.com later in the day. Typically, right after the show’s done, I try to get that all up there before going back to work. So in any case, today, I was gonna do one thing, and I decided to do something else. So, we’re actually gonna take a look at discovering IO, automatically discovering IO so you don’t have to crank in all those different part numbers. And, we’re gonna do it today for Rockwell. And I did have some things that, I’ve been telling myself, Shawn, you gotta kinda remember to mention some things to everybody, when you’re doing the show. So let me just pull my notes up here and bring them over to the screen right below here so I can read them. So, first of all, the idea for today’s, discussion about discovering IO, adding IO, reading IO was, based on some lessons. I’m I actually had to I found some bugs in them, so I had to rerender them. So I’ll be updating them, and, several of the courses over at the Automation School are getting updates, including my CompactLogics and ControlLogics. They’re getting the most updates today. But in any case, I also wanted to mention that I already have two industry veterans who I’m talking to about coming on the Automation Museum’s History of Automation podcast. And so I mentioned this because we already have three shows in the, in the can. We talked to experts about the history of Triconics, the history of InTouch or Wonderware, and the history of Rockwell PLCs. But, again, these are things where we want to have multiple guests on about each each product and, to share their own experiences with them. And, you know, everybody remembers things differently. Like, some people remember some features, other people remember other features, and so on. So, we have two new people who I’m talking to to get them to come on the show. And I wanna invite you, whether you’re a vendor, user, integrated OEM, if you have done something with automation before the year February, I’m just using that as a kind of a benchmark. Right? So, you know, we’re talking legacy stuff. We’re not talking, you know, fifty three seventies and fifty three eighties or a ‘7 you know, fifteen hundreds or December, or m two sixty twos if you’re a Snyder guy. But, we’re talking we’re talking, you know, older stuff, legacy stuff. The automation museum is not gonna be a museum of what just came out this this year. It’s gonna be a museum of all that old stuff. And I wanna thank everybody who sent me stuff in. I will be doing more automation museum videos on the stuff you guys send in. I got a PCMK card. I got a net alert or or net net alert, I think, device too that I wanna show off. So, in any case, thank you everybody and, for that. So what else do I have to cover here before we get started? There is no podcast today. The next podcast it takes, like, a day to produce every podcast. So, I’m taking this week off because I just got so much other else going on. The the next podcast will be next Wednesday, of course, we release on Wednesdays, and that’ll be on IO Link. And that’s gonna kick off a bunch of IO Link coverage. So, I’ve been working after hours and weekends getting all the IO Link hardware I have together built into demos that we can not only use as labs here in the office, but also to do videos on. So, we got Siemens, we got Rockwell, we got IFM, Even had a a good friend of the show send in some stuff, so we’ll be looking at the stuff he sent in too, which just depends if I can get it working at 05:00 in the morning. We’re not drinking my coffee, but, hopefully, I can. And, also, I’m looking at some really cool three d simulation software I wanna use in the school, but it can also be used as a digital twin, and it’s affordable. It’s not like the 10,000, $50,000 packages you see out there. Right? So, I’m actually been working on that, working with the vendor on that after hours as well. And a lot of things going on. We are getting ready. I just got off the phone with the vendor, actually off a meeting with the vendor. We got a exciting new, episode coming up on, OPC. And then we have another episode coming up on Ethernet push buttons. This one actually was re requested. We actually have the equipment here, but we’re waiting for the vendor to schedule that. I’m also guys, you probably remember the, military trade shows demo I have in there. I’m just gonna work through a couple of bugs, and that should be that video should be coming out. And, I actually have a major vendor approached me and said, Shawn, come and interview our folks at our trade show. And so we’re finalizing the details on that. So that’ll be in several weeks from now, but I did wanna share that with you guys. So in any case, hey. Before I forget too, and I wanna say greetings to Nicholas. Before I forget, anybody, any of you guys out there, if you’ve learned something you wanna share with the rest of the community, please just send me a message. I know we had people sign up, and then they couldn’t make a customer’s call, the boss calls. I totally get that. Totally get that. But if you are using I saw one person said he was he had created a video showing people how to use safety in a Siemens drive, and he got a lot of really, good feedback from it. I mean, those are the type of things. You know, a lot of you probably don’t even know what that video is. Right? So we wanna get people like that on the show to talk about, you know, what they’ve done and and sharing, useful tips. And I think it’ll be easier, on the audience if they’re not always hearing from me all the time because I’ve been doing this for full time now for over ten years, going on eleven years. And, so you guys you know, I got thousands of videos in Ako, so you guys know all about me. But in any case, let’s go ahead and go over to the computer. And, again, feel free to, chime in on the chat. Let’s see if I have everything set up here correctly. I think I’m in the top right. So, of course, this is a live thing right over my face, but that’s okay. I don’t think you guys see that. So in any case, what are we gonna look at? We did not wanna see my desktop. We wanted to see VMware. Okay. And I’m actually in, and if you guys didn’t notice here on the, workbench, I have an old Suck 500 full of stuff, just full of IO. And I try to pick up so many different types of IO modules for my course, which I’m filming now in the slick 500. So I wanted to pick up a a a real, you know, assortment of of IO cards. You know? And I could go in there and I could say, you know, let me type in each and every model. But one of the great things we got with the slick 500 that we didn’t have with the PLC five, now correct me if you think I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s any redial thing on the PLC five. Maybe I’m just having a senior moment, but I don’t think it existed. But in the slick 500, it did. And this also worked for the compact for the, Micrologics as well. And so what you could do here in this old platform from the nineties, early nineties, late eighties, is you could go across RSLogix 500 didn’t come out until, like, 9596. Right? I was actually I beta tested it. It was really cool. When it first came out, it was like Winlogix five on steroids. Right? So in any case, what I’m gonna do here is I got I got Studio 5000 open in the background. Let me hide that a little bit. I’m gonna go to IO configuration, and I’m gonna do something called a read IO config. K. This is, again, a feature from the nineties, early nineties. Right? And what’s what’s this work? Right? Now I do have to have the path to the PLC correct or I can’t read IO config, but I’m just I’m not online, but I’m giving it the path to where the PLC exists. Read IO config and look at that. It started off with a four slot chassis, and it was like oops. Let me minimize that. Get that back. And it was like, nope. He has a 13 slot, I guess. And look at it. I have an IB, ITB, IB, IB, IV, IV, IV 32, OBOV, NI 4, NI 4, NI four, I, NI four, I, NI four, INO4I, blah blah blah. But look at it. I read it all in. I didn’t have to type that all in. Now how often are you gonna have all the equipment on your desk before you actually create your program? Well, maybe not that often. But this was a feature I loved about the Slic 500 and the MicroLogix. And, you know, so when Rocco came out with ControlLogix and CompactLogix and it did not have this it this feature, everybody’s kinda like, bummer. That kinda stinks. Right? And so but they added it. They added it inversion starting back in version 20.011. Yes. I looked it up. And, what they did, though, is they only added it for, originally, seventeen fifty six modules. And s

Shawn details how Studio 5000 Logix Designer’s look and feel changed from version 30 to version 31 in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:  Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Coming after the show Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. NOTE: There is no show planned for this Friday (9/5). Links mentioned in video: – Online Courses: https://theautomationschool.com – In-Person Courses: https://theautomationschool.com/live Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Happy Tuesday, everybody, and happy, September. It is September now, the second, and, please let me know if the video or audio is not working, but everything’s looking great. I can actually get the, streaming out over here on the right. And, I was hoping to have a guest come on the show today. We were all set up. There was actually one that was, rescheduled, and, no guests. Now it could be a problem with StreamYard because I have seen the delay when somebody tries to join as a guest and when they actually show up in my in my web browser. I’ve, like, refreshed a 100 times, so I don’t know what else to do. But in any case, I still have something that I was just working on for my students that I figured we could talk about since the guest is not connected. So and I was really looking forward to having a Julio on to talk about his company because it just sounded really interesting. But in any case, I don’t see anything in the chat. So let me go ahead and switch over to this view. Now I’ve had many people, actually, I shouldn’t say many people. I had one person I was talking to about two weeks ago, and they said, you know, Shawn, I was taking one of your courses, and I didn’t recognize I didn’t recognize Studio five thousand. I’m like, what do you mean? He’s like, it looked totally different. And I’m like, well, that’s not good. And so I’m going back, and I’m like, I think I know what happened. So some people work with only new products. Right? So they’re only using the latest and the greatest version of the software, and I’m like, wow. You know, that that that’s not me. I’ve been using RS logic since beta. Right? And so I’m like, wow. So some people make it that, you know, look and feel shock when they, when they, use the latest version and then go back a few versions. So I thought, you know, I did an update a lesson. I just rendered it for my students, and I figured we hey. Since we had a new show, again, he could still connect if he wanted to, but I figured, hey. Let’s cover that. We’ll call this, Studio 5,000 Logix Designer version 30 versus versus 31. And so what I wanna show you here is I actually have version 10. Now to save time, I typically will will often not install one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Right? And so and some of those versions don’t exist. Right? So in any case, so this is what, Studio 5,000 Logix designer, a k a RS Logix 5,000, if you didn’t know. This is what it looks like, brand new program. This is what it looked like the version 10. 10 is the first version that supported multi, multiple installs or what they call side by side installations where you can install ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen and so on. Before that, you can only install one, kinda like everything else that’s come before it. Like, you can only have and and you guys correct me if I’m wrong, but, typically, you can only have one copy of Microsoft Word installed or one copy of, you know, most any application, Excel or Premiere Pro or whatever you’re using. You can’t have two installed at the same time. It’s kinda annoying, but because Logix is has to be lockstep. In other words, you have version, let’s say, a version 16 in your controller. You have to have version 16 to program that controller, unless you wanna upgrade the firmware, which why would you wanna do that? It’s long. It’s complicated. No reason to. Right? And so I like this idea of side by side installations, And, people used to complain a lot when it first came out that it could take 500 megabytes to install a new version because it’s a lot more now. But but with hard drives so big, like a terabyte, two terabytes, three terabytes, you know, what’s the big deal? Right? So in any case, rather have the feature because you only have to install the versions you’re working on. Right? If you have sixteen, twenty, and, you know, 34, those are the only three versions you need to install. So in any case, here we are. To me, this looks like RS Logix 5,000. Let’s compare it to version 20. Okay. Well, this is this version 20 is for my course. Okay. If you could see this, they look pretty similar. Okay. Except I got extra routines here, but look at look at the look and feel pretty much the same version 10. Right? You see there’s extra stuff in there. Some things have been renamed. Okay. If you look at the toolbars, very similar. I know on the above one, I went, I went and did this, so I didn’t show you that. You can see the path. I don’t know why it’s up there now. It used to be down here. But yeah. So version 10 and version 20 were looking very, very similar. Right? And so now let me go ahead and migrate this to version 30. And, I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on all this. Okay. Version 30. Of course, it can’t be an l one if it’s a version. Notice that’s one thing this the old versions. Right? So let me change because you used to be able to do the version in the controller as two separate steps. Right? Okay. So see, this will only go up to 63 because it’s version 10. So let’s let’s see what happens. Let’s just try. We’re just experimenting live on the ear here because we had a, a guest not show up. So let’s see let’s see what happens. And it could crash. That’s okay. It’s just the lunchtime edition of automation tech talk. If you guys have questions or thoughts or ideas, things you wanna share, please, post them in the comments. Unfortunately, today, because I’m in the classroom working on new lessons for my students, I do have to go and get back to the METTLEDO, the episodes I’m filming. I ran into a little glitch with that, so I gotta do some research. But, in any case also, I was playing with some IO link early this morning over coffee. So it’s gonna go from l 71 from an l one to an l 71. Sure. That’s great. I get an l 73. You can’t see it’s off the screen here, but I have an L73 my L73 s back here. I was just, had the camera. I had to pull it over because I had the camera up to it to, you know, the to show the I wanted to show the analog testing the analog and digital out. So in the trainer, as opposed to in the in the, you know, what it would look like in the, classroom. So we get a warning here. Let me switch back. I I know I often forget to do that. There’s no control room. It’s just me. I’m doing it all. But in any case, so we’ll convert that. So we we just established here so far that version 10 or version 20, they pretty much look almost identical. Right? So that’s good. That’s good. So if you’re using 10 or 20, you’re feeling pretty good. Again, minor minor differences here and there. But let’s go ahead. I wanna make sure I open the same one. Okay. Now let’s take a look at version 30. Okay? Still looking pretty much the same again. These these are two different programs and not the same programs. One big thing you’ll notice here I know this throws some people. I don’t know why. Program tags were renamed parameter and local tags, and it’s much better because now you can use what used to be program tags in other locations in your code, you know, which is great because you can make them parameters, like, in our parameters. Right? And local tags, of course, would be very much similar to what program tags were. And it’s all good. You know, version I mean, looks similar. Right? This is 30. This is version 30. Okay. Let’s look at the toolbars. Right? Everything you know, slight coloring differences, I think. Yeah. Right? So thirty, twenty, and 10, they all look really practically identical. So now let’s compare 30 to 31. Boom. Oh, well, this is actually 34, but this you you won’t see a difference between thirty one and thirty four. And this is where Rocco did a graphical, refresh with 31. And now look at all these icons. They’re all, like, kinda new looking and fancy versus the old icons. Again, two different programs. One thing that is different, kind of a major difference is this assets folder. So if you’re in 31 and up, you’re gonna have an assets folder, which that stuff you should just be all here in the main tree. Right? So, yeah, it looks a lot newer. Right? You can see instead of gray, it’s kind of this dark blue. K. You see that? Get rid of the arrow windows. I should just close them. But the toolbar is a lot different as well if you look at the toolbar. K. So one thing that gets me is I’ve been going here for well, since the product came out in the late nineties for controller properties. Now it’s over here, and it’s smaller. I’m getting older. It’s out of the sea yet. So in any case, I I, that’s one thing I don’t like that they did. But, hey. You know, they may have a good reason for it. Also, these drop downs here are now over here. Look at that. Interesting, Except for, you know, all these lights now move to the left. K. The biggest one gets me is control properties, and the other one is verify project or verify controller. Verify used to be pretty easy to see. Now it kinda looks like controller properties. It’s like, well, not a

Today Shawn has Brandon Cooper on the #AutomationTechTalk livestream to talk about what he’s learning in his travels. Note: There is no show planned for Friday or Monday. Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:  Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Coming after the show Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. Links mentioned in video: – Online Courses: https://theautomationschool.com – In-Person Courses: https://theautomationschool.com/live Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Automation Tech Talk lunchtime edition. You may hear some background noise because today, I have a special guest on. It’s Brandon Cooper, who you probably all know has written a bunch of articles over at the automation blog. And I’ve actually had Brandon on the automation podcast back on episode one zero six. That was in 2022. Brandon, thank you for, agreeing to share your lunch with us. Brandon Cooper (Guest): Hey. Glad to do it. Glad to do it. Thanks for Shawn Tierney (Host): having me. You’re well. Thank you. And I was telling, Brandon in the preshow, he’s actually sitting in his backyard in Louisiana, and it just sounds awesome. He’s got birds chirping, and it sounds so great. It’s like, man, that’s so relaxing. But in any case, let me see. Brandon, you are Brandon Cooper (Guest): eighties this week, so it’s almost fall in Louisiana. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. Eighties. We got into the seventies. I had to put the heat on this morning because it was in the sixties, which is which is kinda odd for late August. How about you guys? Is this normal for late August? Or Brandon Cooper (Guest): not really. We usually don’t hit get into the eighties until, sometime in September, but we get we got a a lower temp week this week, so it’s it’s nice. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. I’m I’m not complaining at all. So you are a senior process control engineer, and, I know you from your what you do with POCs, but you also work on a lot of DCS systems or what would classically be called the DCS. And like I said, he Brandon was on, in episode one zero six. He’s written several articles on Rockwell and Siemens. His latest one was on, simulating e threes, I think, for migration purposes. And he also wrote two articles recently on the things I’ve learned because, change. And I don’t want you to give away the actual companies you worked for, but describe your old old role and the new role you’ve been doing now to give the audience some perspective on that’s kinda how you change roles. Brandon Cooper (Guest): So I guess for twenty two years, starting at 19 years old, I joined on as basically a process control type technician and then moved up to to a process control engineer and then a senior engineer later, you know, working in in specific specific facilities, you know, doing the day to day program and then graphics and troubleshooting and working with operations at a facility, which is also, you know, being on call twenty four seven for for all those twenty two years. So, it was it was great. I learned a lot and, helped me get to the next step, I guess. So, three years ago, I had the opportunity to take a job, where we travel around and and do things in different sites. And there’s, like a like a, capital project type, role. And that’s been really good. I’ve, I’ve enjoyed it, learned a lot more, and just a a a different role. Kids are kinda grown now, so they didn’t need me at home as much anymore. So just a lot of things fell into place about the same time and, decided to do something a little different. So Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. I could definitely see the appeal to that. So Brandon works. We’re not gonna give him the company names. Brandon works for re a major Fortune 500 company. And those companies, they have big manufacturing facilities throughout the world, and they usually have their own people, their own techs and electricians on-site. But Brandon gets to come in and do the big projects, and, that sounds it sounds like the fun stuff, but it could also be, like, mission critical stuff. And so you’re traveling a lot. You’re not reporting to the same place every day. You’re reporting do you often like, every month, are you somewhere new? Brandon Cooper (Guest): I tend to get on projects. You know, I might handle three or four projects at a time, different sites and probably different phases of those projects. So one might be scoping out, you know, phase one and and, getting together what we might be, putting together a scope and and deliverables and that sort of thing. And then the other project might be an execution next month. So, and and that might be from Florida to to Oregon. So traveling a lot for certain periods and, you know, different phase like I said, different project phases require different attention. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I wanna ask you about so from a PLC background, I’ve never used Emerson’s delta v, but I believe you’ve used it quite a bit, right, at different places? Brandon Cooper (Guest): Yeah. I’ve I’ve used Emerson some over the years. I’ve, not used their PLCs a whole lot. They’re they’re, Delta v, DCS system. I have I have, used some. Shawn Tierney (Host): So you were telling me recently, and I know you’re not a representative for Emerson. We’ve had Emerson on the show. We constantly invite Emerson to come back on the show to talk about these products. But just as somebody in the field there, you’ve heard about something new coming out, and it’s called the Delta v I q. Again, this is all just, you know, customer impressions, but can you share your impressions of what you’re hearing through the grapevine about this new product that’s coming? Brandon Cooper (Guest): Yeah. So, Emerson, is kinda I believe they’re doing a really good job cutting edge, trying to, jump on the ether you know, Ethernet bandwagon of, I call it bandwagon. It’s, you know, Ethernet protocols all the way through the system. So that’s, you know, virtualization for for servers and op systems as well as their controllers. Their new IQ controller that I believe is coming out in version 16 that’s supposed to be released later this year. The IQ can be is a is a totally virtual controller that has, you know, double the capacity of their previous, PK controller, 3,000 BSTs, I believe. Shawn Tierney (Host): Wow. Brandon Cooper (Guest): I think you can have 13 IQ controllers on a on a virtual system, so that’s, like, 30,000 DST points. Shawn Tierney (Host): Wow. Brandon Cooper (Guest): Quite quite impressive technology there. You know, that’s using charms I owe, on their network. And then, you know, they’re also playing in the instrumentation world with the, Ethernet APL. So, you know, theoretically, in a few years, there’s still there’s still a lot of things out there that are coming and and all that, but you could have a totally virtual system, you know, totally Ethernet system from instrumentation all the way to your controllers to your your servers and workstations and everything. So I I think that’s, I I think that’s on its way. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. I think on the Rockwell side, we saw Ethernet was going to really be the thing. Right? Right. And I I think that was we saw this become and I recently talked about the generations of control logics and or compact logics, I should say. And with the 53, 35 e. Right? So the l 35 e and the l 32 e, you know, those products also came out with an l 32 c and an l 35 c. And, you know, the there was a l 31 serial, which I never knew anybody who was happy with that because of the speed. It’s slow. Right? Because, the communications is slow. But in any case, when those products launched, right, I think it was I’d have to go back to the automation plot, but I think we’re talking, like, two thousand four, two thousand five. What really became obvious is that the 35 e and the 33 e outsold the the c’s by a ton. Right? It’s like the age of Ethernet is here, and ETH and IO is here because nobody’s buying the, control net version. And so, you know, when the fifty three seventies came out, they were a 100% Ethernet. And so I think we can go back twenty years and say, Ethernet has won with SteelBus, and, of course, there’s different protocols we have. Ethernet. We have a trophy net. We just had a prophylnet expert on talking about prophylnet. We’ve had multiple prophylnet experts on talking it. And, you know, there’s other you know, you still have Modbus TCP, which I know I just talked to Schneider. Even their latest product supports, Ethan IP and Modbus TCP. Right? Right. So, you know, there’s that legacy as well, which is great because, you know, I I don’t like it when a vendor stops supporting the older stuff. Right? It’s nice to have that. I don’t know how I don’t you know, this is a brand new product from Schneider. So I you know, it’s it’s a matter of fact, I got a box of them right here because the packing slip I’m I’m working on doing a, show and tell on a brand new next gen IO. And, I mean, this stuff is truly next gen. It’s just not a a a a, you know, paintbrush, you know, to make it look new. But in any case, with Ethernet having one, there’s still topology challenges with our standard Ethernet. Right? And I think that’s where mingle pair Ethernet and Ethernet APL can really take us to the next level. And then, you know, aside from that, we also have the virtualization in where we see that. And, you know, I mean, in your in your business, not to not to talk about company specifics, where do you think, you know, virtualized POCs would work and where they wouldn’t work? Right? I mean, I I

Shawn discusses generations of Rockwell IP20 distributed / remote I/O in today’s Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. Links mentioned in video: – Courses: https://theautomationschool.com Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome to Automation Tech Talk. I’m Shawn Tierney from Insights, and I’m about seven minutes late today. I just got off a, really excellent call with a major automation supplier, actually, automation manufacturer, who, was introducing me to his next generation IO. And, so I didn’t have a lot of time to prep, and I’m like, what am I gonna cover today? And I’m like, let’s talk about distributed IO. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about. I love to hear in the chat where you what you guys are using for distributed IO if you’re using distributed IO. Now OEMs typically don’t need distributed IO. I mean, don’t get me wrong. They will, oh, and I should also say if you guys can’t hear me or you can’t see me or something’s wrong, let me know. But in any case, typically, an OEM with a small machine, they don’t need the distributed IO. Now they will run a lot of times Ethernet through their different devices like VFDs and HMIs, but, they don’t need distributed IO. However, a facility with a large machine or a large system, it makes no sense to run all the wires back from all the sensors and switches and buttons all the way back to the main panel, and that’s where distributed IO really does extremely well. And, you know, PLCs and PACs more and more can handle even more and more higher quantities of distributed IO. But before we get into that, I thought we would talk a little bit about the history of distributed IO or remote IO as Rockwell coined the phrase or patented the phrase back in the day, back in the late seventies. In any case, in the first distributor IO I saw out there, saw a lot of it out there, was seventeen seventy one. And seventeen seventy one IO was, big and bulky. This is an eight point module. I just grabbed what I had available, you know you know, with two minutes to go before the show started. Let’s see if I set up the overhead cam correctly. So I do not have the terminal block on here, but this is an 8.1771, IO module that was donated to, somebody who then donated it to me. And, thank you to both of companies for the donation. And I have a ton of this stuff, and, it’s really super inexpensive online. But the, you know, the problem is the programming software is so expensive. So, you know, a lot of people could use this, reuse this stuff for hobbies or whatnot. But, in any case, this would fit in a big, jack. You guys have seen the racks here before, the big seventy seventy one chassis, and we don’t call them racks. We call them chassis. And, you know, it worked. Remote IO definitely worked. The the digital was so easy to set up. The analog, a lot of people had a hard time getting their mind around block transfers. I always felt that I could explain it to people easily, and that’s why I’m doing a PLC five course with seventeen seventy one IO. I don’t have that on here on the stage because it’s just so big. I actually have it over there on the floor. But in any case, you know, of this you see this a lot. I remember going to one power plant and walking through and and, because they wanted to migrate all this seventeen seventy one IO and just taking pictures and pictures and pictures of MCC is full of distributed IO racks with remote IO and seventeen seventy one IO. And as I was going through there in the seventy eighth rack of IO, I’m like, this is not affordable. This stuff, first of all, it’s bulletproof. Why replace it? Second of all, I mean, I don’t want my electric bill going up just so they could say, we have new stuff in the enclosure. So in any case, a lot of times no. I don’t know. I will I won’t go I’m not gonna go down that that route. But in any case, so 1771 was the first distributed IO I ever I ever, came across. And then, of course, there’s there’s all the stuff, and I’m just covering Rockwell today. This vendor who I met with who has next purely I mean, really, next generation, distributor IO, I’ll be doing a video on. I have a box of this brand new stuff they sent me. They sponsored some coverage on it so I can make the video and keep the lights on at the same time, so I’m excited about that. But in any case, the next one I ran into was block IO. So this is some of the original block IO, remote IO. Again, a lot of times these IOs were available on multiple different networks, like device that control net, remote IO. But in any case, let me see if I can go back, over to the overhead cam and maybe even zoom in a little bit here. Again, I’m doing this all ad hoc. Here’s some original block IO. Check a look at that. And, man, this brings back memories, but these are actually fairly easy to use. And, you know, being all in just one little package, you know, pretty awesome. Pretty pretty awesome, distributed IO. And so that was block IO. So now we move forward. We really had, something called flex IO. Now all my flex IO I’m using this as a stand in. This is really just a, a, drone that adapter for the flex IO. But, in any case, this would be the control that had all my Flex IO, my Ethernet Flex IO, it’s all at home. I’m building up new demo boards for the automation school. But in any case, Flex IO was very popular because it was, of course, modular unlike the, block IO and not and small unlike the seventeen seventy one IO. And you could do up to eight of IO modules on a single, adapter or network head, network, interface module. And, yeah, pretty cool. The modules, again, I have it all at home. So but the modules are separate from the terminal blocks, so the module would come off. The terminal block would stay. A lot of people like that. And, very, very popular. You could also one of the one of the few things of Rockwells that you could mount, vertically as well as horizontally. I see a lot of people mounting, new stuff vertically, like, CompactLogic stuff for you can’t do that. So you gotta check the book out. You don’t wanna get, in trouble with your customer. Now FlexiO, it had some issues definitely on, device stat. Okay? There were some things where it kinda did a boot up the first time and read in the modules, and if you don’t have them all plugged in, you had to reset it and went through that whole thing in the nineties. But, in any case, very reliable. I like it on all platforms. And, the only one thing it had that was really, like, the, when it first came out. Right? So, like, when it first came out, everybody was bending these little pins. Let’s see if we can do the overhead camera again. I don’t know if I can get them that close. These little pins that connect the, the units together, everybody would bend them when they try to put the units together. And you may say, Shawn, how would they do that? Well, if your DIN rail wasn’t perfectly flat, right, was twisted a little bit, then your modules weren’t lined up perfectly, and the pins would get bent. Now you can unbend them if you’re careful. If you break them, throw it away. You know, you got, I don’t know, $500, a thousand bucks worth of junk. But in any case, that was one of the things that, I didn’t like about this platform. You just gotta be very careful assembling them. Make sure they’re all very flat and lined up before you slide the slider over. Really, that was the only thing I really didn’t like about them. But, again, in the chat, please, please put your and I got a comment in here from Emmanuel. Hey, Emmanuel. Good to see you again. It wasn’t inexpensive when it was yeah. True true that. True that. So that is a flexile. And and something that came out that really, and I’m not covering the on machine aisle. Again, all my on machine is at home. I I do have one PC out, but it looks like, not worth showing. So, that would be the machine mount IO that’s like IP 67 or IP 69. Another unit that came out was Point IO. Point IO is extremely popular, and let’s see if we can zoom in on this guy. And I really like this now. There are some caveats with this too. Don’t don’t try to flash your, module’s firmware. Not that anybody does that. Right? Most people would never flash their modules firmware unless you found that the chain the, whole blast state isn’t working, and then you’re panicking because your exhaust vents aren’t exhausting poisonous gas. You’re like, I need a last state to work. And then you go to, blast of firmware. I think they actually don’t let you do it anymore because you could brick it if you are browsing the backplane that this sits on with IrisLinks. The flash would actually break the unit. And so, I know I can’t stand in the middle here. I keep going back and forth, but in any case, you guys don’t need to see me. Right? Yeah. That’s better. So in any case, very popular platform, never flash the firmware on the IO module so you could break it if you’re browsing the same rack with RS links, but I don’t have the terminal block on here. The other thing that, with point I o that was kind of a bummer, you can see there’s eight terminals here by default. So you had no place for your commons or your, your, your voltage plus. Right? Your DC minus and plus. No. And a lot of IO cards, you had a place to land those. Right? So if you had two wire, three wire sensors, you had a lot more terminal blocks, than you would with those, you know, classic. Like, you know, a lot of people would get the Flexi with th

Shawn discusses the Fifth (and current) Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you'd like to join the show sometime, don't hesitate to use the contact us link. Links mentioned in video: - Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-1/ - Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-2/ - Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-3/ - Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-4/ - Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/ Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Hope you are all doing well today. Please let me know if you can hear me and see me okay. Everything's looking good on my side, though, so I hope you're off to a great day. I was I had a, actually, a special guest scheduled to come on today. But at the last minute, then a customer called, and, he had to go out and do a sales call or a service call. And, yeah. So these things happen. I mean, I would like I was telling them, customers come first, and, lunchtime tech talks come second. That's always the case. But in any case, we hope to get him back on. I didn't put all his information in the show because I know, you know, these these kind of folks, you guys out there are very busy, and, you can't make every show. So I also wanna say hi to Rob in the chat. We have the chat coming in from both, YouTube and, LinkedIn. But when I reply, like, hey, Rob, it only went to YouTube. So in any case, okay. Rob confirms. Thank you, Rob. You're like my producer today. In any case, let's go ahead and get in today's show. The first thing I wanna do, though, is let me click here. And I am offering this is a a special for, well, we're almost in fall now. Right? So I'm offering a special. I'm gonna offer any viewer of the show, and you can give this to somebody you know because I know a lot of you are already experts. A lot of people watch this show are already automation experts, so you would not need this. But you can gift this to one person. It is a, a 20% discount on any of my courses that are $99 or more, and, that is, that goes for the bundles as well. And I do this I always do this for returning customers. So let's say a student takes a PLC course, that he wants to take an HMI course, I always offer a 20% discount to on their next course. And, of course, they can always upgrade to the bundle for the difference in price. But I thought, you know, I wanna do something. You know? This show is only a couple weeks old, so I wanted to do something, special for you guys who found the show here early. This not only goes for those who are watching live, but also for those who are watching after the fact. All you have to do and you can see here the automationschool.com. I got the email you can use. I got the voice mail. I got the you can actually submit a form to send me an email if that's easier, and you can even book a time. Now this also applies to, group enrollments. So a lot of people don't know this, but I work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and we enroll, you know, five, ten, 20 people at a time. There's an additional discount off of the sale prices when they do that. And so we'll also have that 20% off just to get started for anybody who has a group. Now a group is three or more. Some people like to say a group is two. Two is a peer. So, like, we we we did clearly have a group of three or more more students. But in any case, we work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies in, actually, for for going on a decade now. So in any case, you'll see somewhere here I have all the logos of all the different companies. Actually, I think it's on the course pages. That said, I wanted to show you guys something else too. In, the automationblog.com, you guys now move this to a new server. You know, we're having a little, you know, moving pains. You know, some things are working great. Some things are are, still, still working on. Every once in a while, I have to talk to them about some speed issues. But in any case, of course, this is your free resource for over 2,000 articles of videos. And I wanted to show you, though, what this show will look like when it's done. So here's the, show from yesterday. So we have the video. You can watch here. Right? Then you have the audio. Right? And this is the automation tech talk audio, so I rebranded the automation news headlines. And then I've been you know, it takes an hour or two to get the transcripts, but these are actually pretty good transcripts. Much better than what you get from YouTube, because you have a little time stamps and everything. And so this is more conversational. So I've been trying to do this for the automation podcast and, this show, and it's so far, it's going well. Cost this does cost extra, but, in any case, if we could get you guys, you know, if you ever missed the live show and you wanna catch the replay, you could do it on YouTube. You can do it on LinkedIn, but you also get that full, nice, easy to read transcript. And I know some people would rather read, especially first thing in the morning than than watch. So in any case so with that, let's get over to what we're gonna talk about today. This is the backup plan I had here. Let's go to present mode. And so what I'm showing here, we're gonna talk about the fifth generation of CompactLogix. And what I'm showing here are free pro PowerPoint slides from Rockwell. I spent a whole weekend going because I had this rush order come in. A vendor wanted me to go teach their, their, customer how to program their PLCs. Right? And I was like ecstatic to do that, but I I had to spend the whole weekend, taking all kinds of slides and putting them together. I wanted to give this the customer something that they could keep, something that wasn't something that was free to the public. Right? So in this case, Rockwell gives these slides away for free, and, they're all copyrighted by Rockwell. But in any case, you can call your Rocktell, Rockwell distributor and ask for a copy of these. Again, if they have any good people left, they'll they'll have this archive like I did. I have, I don't know, twenty five years archived before I started my own business. But in any case, I was just sending somebody, so we do the Automation Museum podcast over the weekends. Haven't released any episodes yet, but I've been sending the guests when they come on. They're like, you know, I wish I had something on this old product that that old I've even helped companies. They're like, oh, I can't find this old manual. I'm like, yeah. I got it. So in any case, I I did I did, post this for those of you in my compact basics course, CompactLogix course over at the automation school. I did put the this up there in appendix a so you can grab a copy of this. But if you're not in my courses, just ask your Rockwell rep. If they're worth their salt, they'll have all these presentations free from Rockwell. But I thought we had used this. I thought it would be good because all my you can see behind me let me go back full screen here. You see behind me my, all my, you know, high end or, actually, every one of my CompactLogix except for the one, two, and three generations I showed you earlier in the series, they're all wired in the trainers here at the automation school. And, again, we're we're good to do four, five, six, seven people. If you wanna send them in, we can actually do up to eight people if you wanna send them in to learn Logix or s seven. We can also do the HMIs. But, you know, you wanna definitely in the falls, the Berkshires is a great place to visit. And, we have within three miles all the major hotels. Just go to automationschool.com forward slash live. You'll see all that. Plus, we get the Norman Rockwell Museum. We have Jim Jiminy Peak. We have, Mount Greylock. But in any case, let's get back to what we're talking about here. And, let's see. Wrong one. I wanna be up there. Okay. Great. Where The Berkshires is about an hour east of Albany, New York. It's officially in Massachusetts, and I'm in the center of The Berkshires in Downtown Pittsfield. So, actually, this building used to be an old paper mill. So in any case and it houses a, a newspaper now, but I don't know if they print here or not. In any case, thank you for asking where I was located. And, the automationschool.com forward slash live, I got links to all the attractions, links to all the nearby hotels, Hampton Inn, Holiday Inn, you know, all the big ones you can think of we have within three miles of the site. And, you know, one of the things I do that, you know, of, and, you know, that, you know, big corporation can't is, you know, if you wanna learn Siemens and Rockwell the same day, I can do that. Right? The other thing is, if you wanted to start at, like, twelve noon because you wanna drive in, like, I've had people drive in from Pennsylvania. You know, if you wanna drive in from some place that's four or five hours away, we can start at twelve, 01:00 and then finish the next morning, right, or do two or three days in a row. We also not only have the physical trainers, we also have factory IO. I'm a factory IO reseller. So if you blow through all those, we've got even more. And trust me, you won't finish all the factory IO in a day. That's for sure. So in any case, back to generation number five of, CompactLogix. And this is a '50 three eighty. Now, again, I wanna I think it was Dean yesterday who said that the fifty three seventies, the l twos and l threes, were just recently marked as active mature. And at the time, I was like, why would they do that? ...

Shawn discusses the Fourth Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you'd like to join the show sometime, don't hesitate to use the contact us link. Links mentioned in video: - Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-4/ - Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/ Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): So I wanna welcome everybody. Happy Monday. I wanna welcome you all too. Sorry if we get some echo. I'm actually here in the, really the, the foyer, the the kind of the you know, where you walk into my offices. And today, we're gonna talk about the CompactLogic's fourth generation. I do wanna wish you all a very happy Monday morning. And what you see here is the METTLA Toledo trade show demo from well, I I expect it'll be an automation fair this year and other fairs as well. I wanna say hi to, I think it's Jim's the the because of the setup, the screen is very far away. So but hello to everybody who's watching. So in any case, this is what I'm working on next couple days. I gotta get this all up and running and do a video on how to set it up and use it, and I just thought it would be really fun. It's a rate control application. So, the the scale feeds into the I n d three sixty, and then no matter how much is left in there, it keeps maintains a steady rate out. So it should be pretty cool, but I'm looking forward to getting that set up later today. And I was here, so I figured, well, let's just do today's automation, tech talk lunchtime edition from the foyer. Again, I apologize for any echoes you're here. Last minute mic setup change. So I'm wearing the lavalier mic, not the the headset that I was hoping to use. But in any case, let me know if you guys can hear me okay. If everything looks good on my side, make sure you could see me okay. What we're gonna do today is the generation for oh, I know what I wanted to say. Tomorrow and I believe it's tomorrow and Friday, we have special guests coming on to talk to us about their companies and, what they've learned, recently in automation. So this way, you guys don't have to always just wait to hear from me. And what I've learned, you can hear from other people, and I invite all our audience to also, thank you, Jims, to also, you know, come and join up in, a ten day a ten day lunchtime, automation tech talk with me. Because, you know, I I'll tell you what. I learn every time I go somewhere or visit somebody or talk to someone, I learn something new, and, I love learning new stuff too. So I wanna invite you all to come on the show. Now with that said, let's see if everything's all still set up correctly. And to do to switch to make the switch because I'm here in the lobby, I'm gonna have to do it like this. Okay. Great. It looks like it's working. Okay. Let's see here. Alright. Alright. Excellent. So we're talking about the CompactLogic's fourth generation, which is also known as, the fifty three seventy line. So we talked about on the first gen, we talked about the fifty three twenty and thirty, then we talked about the fifty three thirty one, 32, and 35. We talked about the fifty three forty three and forty five, and so now we're on the fifty three seventy. And I gotta tell you, this, I thought, was a great product launch. I gotta remember, I'm using my my webcam now, so, don't put my hands in front of my face. But in any case, yes. So I, you know, I thought it was such a great product watch because if I remember correctly, they all came out at the same time, the l one, l two, and l three. They all have the same features. Now this presentation I'm using is a free presentation from Rockwell. You should feel free to call Rockwell and ask them for a copy, and, they should give it to you. But in any case, I did take this compilation that I've been putting together for some training. I did make it available in my CompactLogix course. So if you're in my CompactLogix course, go to appendix a. It's the first item up there that you download this compilation. Again, all the slides are free. What I did is I spent over a day going through them and taking out all the good slides and try to put put them into one one collection. But, again, every all the source material is free from Rockwell. So with that said, let me see if I can find my mouse here, and let's jump into this. So like I said, there were three of these released. Three in this one series, we had the l one, l two, and l three. And these address a ton of the complaints from the previous I mean, the improvements are just awesome. First of all, there's some commonality with all of these that, that, you know, they all have, you know, internal capacitors. No more batteries. They all have a USB port. No more serial port. They all come with an SD card. No more having to buy a 100 doll explain it to the boss why you have to buy a 100 or $200 Rockwell Compact Flash card. Right? And so I think those things alone are awesome. Plus they all had a built in two port switch. Now you can't not with these guys. You can't use that that that's just one IP address. It's a switch. It's not two independent ports, but still very cool. The l two and l three, as you can see here on the screen, supported, the seventeen sixty nine I l, and the l one supported point I l. And the l one was much less expensive, and, you know, it just addressed all the issues we had with the l 23, but in any case, that we talked about earlier in the week. So the l one specifically, you can see it here. We have one in the training room. I'm not I didn't I decided to do the presentation and not and not rip everything apart in the training room because that's just a lot of work. I figure we could you know, in fifteen, twenty minutes with the presentation, we'll cover everything we need to know. But in any case, it's supported up to two axes of motion. So caveat there. You know, this is not gonna be, you need a an m version, like an l 18 m, right, or e r m to do a motion. Right? But, it was things that you could do to point IO because that that's so much less expensive. You can only have, I believe, six six modules four or six modules. I have to look that up. I think it's in here. But in any case, you know, you could get point out with eight point inputs and eight point outputs. So, really good. I covered all this, you know, status indicators. The it didn't have a key, Although, who cared? Right? Nobody cared. You had the toggle switch on the front, and, you know, the amount of distributed IO you could do on the Ethernet was limited. But still, if you just need, you know, perfect for a new OEM, you need a maybe an HMI and a couple of VFDs, a great, great little controller. And, I was a big fan of it. I wish they would still do the starter pack with that because that was a great deal too. Then we had the l two. This is and I'm using these I'm specifically using these nomenclatures because this is what we use, to talk about them. You know, the l 23 is the l 23. When I say l one, l two, l three, we're talking specifically about the fifty three seventies. And, again, I I don't know why they did the slide this way, but I would actually have have named this one the fifty three seventy one that is actually on the module itself on the side. And I would have called this fifty three seventy two. Again, that's exact that's on the module. But But I maybe they just wanted to show, hey. This is all one family, so they just call them all 53 seventies on the individual slides. But long story short, this is just like the l 23, but a lot smaller, has removable compact flash. There's no serial only version. They have Ethernet. And, this one's motor up to four axis if you had the m version. You know, you could get the built in high speed counter if you wanted. So in any case, a huge upgrade from the l 23, and then we had the l three. So this replaces your l 35. And and, really, in most cases, we replace your your l four because we're not using Sarcos anymore. We're doing sip motion, and, you can get this this comes in several different sizes. So if you need lots of, servos, you need lots of modules, this guy would do it for you. Now there is a version of this that they that has no stored energy. So, you know, we have this capacitor backup that's in the model in the unit, so we don't need to have a battery. But, what if you need to have no energy in the thing when it's turned off? Right? Like, let's say in our mind or you're in a explosive environment that when you turn this off all power has to drain, there could be no stored energy. And so they do because it's not removable like the l seven. They do have a version of this that will not have that capacitor in there, in which case, you're gonna have to reload from the SD card. Right? So, in any case, you can see here just such a jump up from the l 35 e. Again, the ports are on the bottom. Here's a picture I took of my units. So on the left, you have the l two, and on the right, you have the l three. So you can see the ports there on the bottom of the units. Okay. Now this starts going in the Compact I Logic I o again. You guys probably already know all about this, but I left this in here for the students who are maybe brand new to this and wanna learn more about this. I did just so the students know, I do have one of these units in the school. I'm getting ready to do some labs on it for you guys. So maybe we'll even do some, some tests. We also have point IO on a on a actually, I should say IO Link on point IO as well. That will be have some coming up labs. So in any case, if you guys are not in my compact course,...

Shawn discusses the Third Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you'd like to join the show sometime, don't hesitate to use the contact us link. Links mentioned in video: - Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-3/ - Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/ Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome to Automation Tech Talk, lunchtime edition. I hope you're having a great day. And, I ate my lunch early, so I'm here ready to go. And I just wanna welcome everybody who's joining. I can see people joining up, and, please feel free to leave comments as you go. And, somebody asked yesterday why I wasn't covering a particular product. I've never heard of that product. So I wanna invite that person to come on the show and tell us all about the product. And I wanna thank everybody who's actually reached out to me about coming on the show. We had some very interesting guests that are gonna come on and talk about what they're learning and what they're doing. That's all about what this lunchtime show is about, you know, just sharing what we learned. And because I have the kind of disarray in here, I'm going over the generations of CompactLogix. And today, we're gonna look at generation number three. Now you can always watch this if you're not available during lunch. I know some people can't get to the computer at lunchtime. That's okay. You can always watch the replay. I'm also releasing this as an audio podcast. I've renamed the old automation news roundup news headlines podcast automation tech talk, and, it's also being put on the blog. And if you're one of those morning readers and you can't watch a video, I'm also putting trying to put every, transcript up there now. It costs me extra to do that, but I'm trying to get those up there. It costs extra to get it, but it's a really good transcript. It's not just like the the captions you get on YouTube. So, not that it's a 100% correct. It's all AI generated. But in any case, it's nice for those people who wanna read about, what, the video instead of watching the video. Right? In any case, with that said, I hope you are all doing well. I'm just checking my mic, checking my video. Everything looks looks to be working on this side. Again, if you're seeing not seeing something working, let me know in the chat. Otherwise, I'll just talk the whole time and not know that you can't hear me. So in any case, the first thing I wanna do, though, is let's see if I rearrange this correctly. Yeah. So I wanted to show you where I wanna try to broadcast from tomorrow. So tomorrow, I'm gonna try to use what I'm gonna call Studio C. So I get this studio set up for, you know, recording my lessons, And so there's not a lot of room on the workbench, and there's a lot of other products I wanna cover besides what's on the workbench here. So that's why I'm, trying to get this set up. I don't know if you can see. Probably can't. I got a Monoclon PLC on there. And so that will be Studio C for shop for, closet. It's kinda like the you know, when you were a kid, you might had a if you went to a small school, you might had a a cafeteria. This is kinda like the closet slash storage closet slash three d printing area slash studio and, slash tool room, etcetera, etcetera. So in any case, with that said, also, if you have any questions on what I cover today, if you're enrolled in my course over at the automationschool.com, I did put a link in the description. Please feel free to ask them. I know I probably won't cover this, this new guy as much in the new course as I did in the original course, but don't worry about that. If you have the original course, you get the new course. And if you end up buying the new course, you'll get the original cost. So there's a big you know, over the years, a lot changes, and it doesn't seem to make sense to go back. But, of course, I can always add lessons. So I had somebody ask me the other day if I could add a lesson, I added it. So, that's what being a full time instructor, that's makes it easy for me to do. So in any case, let's go ahead and go to the overhead cam here, and this is where I'll need to put the old glasses on. And we can see the, third generation of CompactLogix. This is the l four, commonly known as the l four x. This particular one I picked up, on the secondhand market was a, l 43. I, did check with some distributors to see if they wanted the pot with their demo cases. They did not. So I I'm sure they are collecting dust dust in there in there or sitting at some customer site in collecting dust. But in any case, this actually came in two different flavors. There was an l 43 and an l 45. And a lot of people don't know this, but this is actually like an l six in a, in a, CompactLogix form factor. So and you don't know. A lot of people never use these, but they were very powerful, bringing that, control CompactLogix ControlLogix down to the CompactLogix. So, some of the things here, let's just look at the, look at the unit first physically. This is the only CompactLogix that had a left hand bust or left side bust, and we'll talk about that all more in a minute. But the right side, we still used our regular old 1769. Okay? And then in the front, for whatever reason, they put a cover over the CompactFlash slot. Okay? But this is a good cover. It like, it's not like the l 71. The first l 71 I got or l seven I got, I broke the latch because I was pushing down so hard. My finger just kept going and broke the, and broke the little tab. So I actually took it off my l seven I have here for the training room because, I don't want anybody to break it. But in any case, this one's good. This is not like that. This is very, very good, easy to open and close. Don't know why they put it in there. Maybe they had to meet some kind of spec, and it was sticking out farther than what it does on the, the ones we looked at yesterday. But in any case, and just like the l three x that we looked at yesterday, gen two, these units had a, serial port. The key, they changed the key. Not a fan of this. So the new key they had on these guys, and I I don't have one out. Probably should've got one out, but it's like a hollow key. It's a plastic hollow key. And so you may if anybody knows me, knows I keep a PLC five and a and a six five hundred ControlLogix, key on CompactLogix key on my keychain. And the reason is because, you know, I've driven someplace for three or four hours just to get there to see the PLCs in a hot run. And I'm like, do you guys have any PLC keys here? And they were like, no. They're like, well, you just wasted four hours. Now eight hours because I gotta drive back home of my life because you don't have a key. I mean, that's like saying, you know anyways, help us with a computer, and you don't have a computer. Right? It's, like, ridiculous. Anyhow, so that would that memory was buried pretty deep there. In any case, these keys, I had one on my key chain for a while, but it broke. It's just it was a cheap plastic, and it was hollow, and it broke. And so was not a fan of the key. Again, if you just leave the key in there, it's not a problem. But in any case, I I again, I don't know why they changed to that key, but I would have preferred if they would have stayed with the same key. I know tolerances would have been a little tight, but maybe they could have moved it over. I don't know. But in any case, that key doesn't return in any other product that I know of. So that's good. And I wanna say hi to the folks who are saying hi in the chat. Hi, guys. Alright. So what else do we wanna talk about this? This did have a default comms button. Now we talked about how with the, first generation, that default comms button, right, it just erased, what was there, replaced it with the defaults, and we actually tested it. Right? And so that doesn't change here, but what does change, because this does not have a battery. Woo hoo. This doesn't have a battery. That you can use that default comms button to reset the memory. Right? So if you hold it down while you're powering up, you reset the memory. Yeah. So that's cool because, like, with the other, controllers, we just took the battery out and waited, and, we lose, sometimes you do as this, as capacity you would short. But in any case, with this guy, since there's no battery, thank goodness. And that was a big problem with the l six. Now this is based on the l six. Right? But the l six, you know, they that battery they were using in the l six was designed for the l one, right, which didn't have a lot of memory compared to the l six. When you get to the l six and, you know, the memory is four or five, ten, 20 times bigger, a 100 times bigger, the battery wasn't lasting very long, maybe a couple of weeks. And that's not enough if you ship it a machine overseas. Right? So, you know, of course, people would not put the contact flash card in, and then then they would have a problem. They'd have a machine with no with no program. So in any case, with the l four, what they did they decided to do was, do something very similar to the Micrologix 1,000. If you remember the Micrologix 1,000 that came out in '94, it didn't have a battery because it had a built in EEPROM slash flash memory on the circuit board, what we call nonvolatile memory. And when you power it off, a capacitor just held the memory long enough so it could transfer over to nonvolatile. Never had to worry about an EEPROM. Never had to worry about, a battery. And so that's what they did with this unit,...

Shawn discusses the Second Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you'd like to join the show sometime, don't hesitate to use the contact us link. Links mentioned in video: - Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-2/ - Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/ Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Automation Tech Talk lunchtime edition. I had a little, issue earlier, so I watched the replay. Everything looked great. So, again, I wanna thank you for hanging out with me at lunchtime. I also wanna thank those folks who've reached out to me about actually being a guest on the lunchtime show. I really appreciate that. And, you know, it's it's nice to actually hear what other people are doing. Right? And, we got some pretty cool guests lined up. I I also have some vendors who, maybe they're not ready to sponsor an episode of the podcast, but they just want to, tell us the cool things they're doing. And so, inviting them on as well. Just trying to share everything I've learned and share help people share what they've learned over the years, during lunchtime, right, when we all get to take a break from all the serious stuff trying to make money to pay the bills and all that. So in any case, with that said, I had and and I'm assuming I guess I'll just delete the original five minute livestream, because, things didn't seem like they were working. So I got a couple things I was talking about in that livestream. Number one is that that big box in the middle of the training room, that is, some hardware for the add on lessons I'm gonna be adding. I have a lot of different hardware here from all kinds of different vendors, and I will be adding those as bonus, lessons add on lessons to the courses. So if you're in in any of my level one or two do I still have the automation school up? So if you're in, my level one or two courses, level one and two courses, I should say that correctly, over at the automationschool.com, you will get those, add on lessons at no charge. And, plus, there's some other courses you're gonna be getting at no charge as well as I kinda mix things up, and and I think I covered that over at the automation school and the updates for each of the courses. Also, I ran across somebody on Reddit who was looking they're like, you know, what do I need to get started? I'm like, hey. Lesson one zero two in all my courses is free and all my PLC courses, and it tells you everything you need to know to get started programming PLCs, software options, hardware options, demo options. So if you know anybody looking to get started and they don't know where to start, like, how much does Rockwell software cost, and is it free, and can I get a free demo, and, you know, how about for Siemens, and what starter packs are available? I cover that all, and I make that lesson free. Because quite honestly, I don't want anybody signing up for a course and then be like, you know, I didn't wanna do a simulated PLC. I wanna do a real PLC, and I can't afford it. So I want everybody to know upfront what the costs are. For a lot of people, it's not an issue. They get a bunch of PLCs in the software at work, so and they're gonna do it at at during their lunchtime. But in any case, I did wanna share that with you. And, now I wanna talk about the second generation of, CompactLogix. Let's see here. Yes. CompactLogix. This is where I gotta put the old glasses on. And, let's see if I can go here. Okay. Great. And so let's see if I can zoom in. I don't wanna zoom in on both cameras, just the overhead one. And so you might be asking, Shawn, why do you have all this hardware in the test stand? That's because I am filming the new twenty twenty five courses. So, I got a lot of wiring to do, but but, you know, there's no getting around that. So we talked about generation one. Let me see if I can slide this a little bit. Maybe four. So not sure. Don't push it off the table. That would be bad. Okay. So if we look at these three controllers let's see here. Maybe I can move them this way a little bit. Okay. This is what we call the second generation of CompactLogist controllers. I don't know that Rock will ever call it that, but it's kinda makes sense because you can see these are all very similar. Right? And they all came out around the same time after the, I don't and I I just can't look at the camera with everything appearing backwards to me and make them straight. But in any case, these were the three options. Now this first guy, you know, I had some OEMs buy these, and they were very unhappy because just the speed of the serial ports. Yeah. It was great. You had two serial ports. One that could be connected to, you know, an HMI, and the other one one could be for programming. But it was just really slow. So, yeah, you can muddle through some online edits, but uploads uploads and downloads, you know, for the impatient northeasterner like me, it was kinda tough. It was like, yeah. You know? We used to call those, coffee downloads. You'd go grab a cup of coffee while it downloaded and hope nobody pulled the, and then you had to flash the firmware, of course, you had to flash everyone. So flashing the firmware via serial is a very dangerous prospect because if anybody breaks the connection, you could end up with a brick, an unusable, PAC. Although these days, that I think Rockwell has figured out ways to resolve that. I think one of the ways they do that, and don't quote me on this, but talking to product people over the years is they put, like, a basic firmware on the unit. So if the firmware is corrupt, it'll just load, like, one dot x, which is just like a stub. It doesn't can't really program it in one put one dot x. But in any case, so this is the l 31. And let's see if I can get a little closer here. You guys can see that. And this is I don't know if you can see it on there. Let me take a look at it myself. It should say somewhere on here 5331, but it doesn't. I'm sure it says it somewhere. Let's see. Let me find ah, there it is. Okay. I found it. And again so you can see it on the label right there. If you can't see it, no worries. But, in any case, 50, 50 331. There was also a 53, 32, and 35. I think I have both, both of these are 30 fives. Right? So the difference between I would have to fix this backwards thing. It's killing me. The difference between the '32 and the 30 fives are just memory, how much IO they can support, but there were also of the thirty two and thirty five, there were also control net versions and Ethernet versions. Now they kept the because US they didn't have a USB port in their PLCs at this time. They kept the serial port, and and serial ports are great for, you know, serial ports are great for third party products, barcode readers, ASCII. You could do d h 45 with them and all that good stuff. Right? But in any case, you know, it would be better to have USB. Right? And the new the new gen threes had US gen four had USBs. But in any case, what else do we have here? So a lot of people get confused with the control net. So the control net's unique because it has the control net ports coming out the bottom. Now the l 35, c, but it's actually a c r because it had two control net ports. The l 32 c only had one control net port, so you couldn't do redundant media with that guy. But in any case, control net really confused a lot of people. It was very easy to use, but the software cost quite a bit of money. Right? And so RS networks for ControlNet was expensive, and I think that's what eventually led to its downfall, plus Ethernet just became you know, Ethernet's built in every laptop. You didn't need an expensive ControlNet card. Right? So in any case, I think control net, was very fast. If you're running Ethernet at 10 meg or control net at five meg or even Ethernet at a 100 meg and control net at five meg, control net was so efficient that you could really do this get as much data through. However, ControlNet was scheduled. Right? So that you were scheduling the data to show up every so often. Kinda like how your RPI is off in the backplane when you put IO modules in the backplane. And, I always liked it. I always thought it was easy. A lot of people would try to make their own cables and, you know, the, coax cables, and, they wouldn't do a good job. I went to some places where they're like, this piece of lousy piece of junk keeps falling off the network when you open up. And first of all, they have this the coax, r g six coax, and it's going into, like, a a one one or two inch, one and a half inch piece of pan to it. Right? And it's, like, making a right turn. Right? And it doesn't doesn't bend radius to these things. Right? And so it's going and a lot of times it would be right at the connector. I'm like, oh, I want I wonder why your why your network's in a minute. Here, let me try it. You shake it and it'd be like, oh, on, off. It's like, really, you gotta have some common sense people. And so a lot of times, engineers don't see inside the, panel that, they just order a panel and expect it to come in work. And so, you know, sad but funny now after the fact, but a lot of people would get upset because, you know, they would self crimp their connectors with not using, you know, the expensive tools, a $100 tool, a $150 tool. They go buy a $5 tool and expect that the work and last forever. And it's you just kinda wonder, you know, what kind of stresses they have in their life. They actually think that because, you know, if you're doing professional work,...

Shawn discusses the First Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you'd like to join the show sometime, don't hesitate to use the contact us link. Links mentioned in video: - Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-1/ - Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/ Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey everybody. Hope you can hear me. I'm trying something a little bit different here. Welcome to automation tech talk lunchtime edition, and, I hope you guys can hear me. I hope, you can see me because I've changed everything around. But, because I have all the equipment here for my new twenty twenty five courses on the workbench, and I don't have any of the other studio set up for what I want to cover today, I decided to cover generation one of the CompactLogic. So I'm just gonna look over here. It seems like audio is working. Okay? It seems like the video is okay. So in any case, feel free to say hi in the chat if you're watching. But, lots going on here. I just had, three vendors send in, samples for me to look at. Actually, one is a trade show demo from Automation Fair, so I'm looking forward to, covering that. The other is a brand new line of IO. Very exciting. And then the third are some Ethernet push buttons. So I hope to have more about that. Plus, I have, more boxes of stuff donated to the automation museum. So, just so much to cover in the coming weeks and days. And, but in any case, one thing I do every day too is work on my courses, not only, answer questions, but also work on my courses. And I'm getting ready to update them all for 2025. And I just wanted to say if you are already enrolled in any of my Compact Logics, whether it's level one, level one, two, you get the new cost for free, so don't worry about that. So in any case, today, I wanna talk about, though, is the first generation of CompactLogix because a lot of people have never even seen them, not even know they exist, but have never seen them. And, just some real interesting stuff here. And, let me first show you with the, overhead cam here. Let's see if I can do this. Do I still have audio? Yep. Okay. So, in any case, you can see here, this is the l 30, and I'm actually connected through a serial port. I'm using a USB, a USPS rev three from Rockwell that I bought years and years ago. And, let me see if I can zoom in on that. You can see I don't have everything wired up for the new courses yet. So, be spending some nights and weekends doing that. But you can see there, I have one of just my, sample program in there. This is the one I use. If you're in my VUE course, you'll be very familiar with this program. But in any case, with all the molding simulators, code in there and whatnot. So but I also wanna get on here. I'm just gonna stick it off top of the Polysplike, the l 20. And in the description of today's show, I have an article I wrote years ago that kinda detailed some of these things, but the l 20 was the very first CompactLogix to come out. Now I had sourced its release to late twenty I'm sorry, late two thousand or twenty zero zero in any case. But, but, you know, whether it came out early two thousand one or late, February, you know, that was almost directly after, like, a year after the ControlLogix l one, the 5550, controller. So pretty quick. And, this, unit came in either a single serial port or dual serial port. Now the, the, l 30 I have written down here is, came out the following year, okay, about a year later. And so if we look at that, I mean, it may have been six months later, but, I have one coming down at, one coming out in February, one coming out in 02/2001. And these were known. I'm trying to get close so you can see the label there. This one was known as the 5320. See it up there? And this one was and I know it's hard to see because it's at a different level there, but maybe it'll zoom in better if I take it off. 5330. And so we talk a lot about fifty three seventies and fifty three eighties. Right? But this is where that whole nomenclature, began way back when. And, yeah, so 25 years old, 24 years old. And, there were some interesting things about that. Now first of all, this guy had no removable memory, no SD card, none of that stuff. It did have a battery in here. Oh, that's noisy. See the battery in there? And I believe this is the same battery we were using in the slick one hundreds. I'm sorry. Slick five hundreds, the seventy forty seven b a, but I think it was had a seventeen sixteen maybe a 17, 69 b a one. But I'm not gonna take it out just to see it. I always leave them unplugged because they would just go dead. So screechy. You can see there some of the pinouts on the side of the unit. And, you know, the one cool thing about them is is kinda like the the original ControlLogix. This particular unit had built in a EEPROM. In other words, there was a flash or EEPROM equivalent soldered to the board, and so you could actually store your program internally. So if the battery died or if you get a lightning strike and a power surge, sometimes that'll make these guys forget what their program is, then you would have, you still have your program there. Now a lot of times, people would make changes to their program, and they would forget. They would forget to, to update the, the internal memory. So but, hey. That's gonna happen with every PLC that has flash or, you know, removal of memory or, you know, built in memory. Now the problem with that was that, you know, OEMs typically like the lower, less expensive version of the controller, like, for instance, CompactLogix versus ControlLogix. And without removable memory, how do you how do you set them an update? That was one of the big problems with the l 23, but that's the next generation. We're not gonna get into that. But still, it was a great it does take a long time to download the serial at nineteen two, which is kinda what everybody defaults to. A serial at '21, I'll tell you what. It I was really annoyed because I had to download it to reset some things, and I had to download it again to change some things and so on and so forth. So, it was like, I actually brought the air conditioner in here because it was getting so hot with the lights on. I'm like, how long are these downloads gonna take? But in any case, in the days of Ethernet, serial just is so hard to go back to, but, it works. And, in any case, so these guys were very interesting. Now the l 20, besides only having a single serial port, it has no isolated ports. Right? So if you want to take the communications out of that serial port, maybe you wanna do d h 45, you definitely have to go through an AIC plus to May to give you an isolated port because NEC says you can't have a network that runs to your POC that's not isolated. Okay? So if this port's not isolated, then you need an isolator, and the AC plus is the ice isolated link coupler, I think, or something like that. Anyways, so, that was one of the limits of the l 20. The speed uploading and downloading to it was a limit, and they picked up something from the from the, Micrologist guys, this port reset. Right? And we'll we'll take a look at that in a minute. But, this channel zero default button, it wasn't a toggle. It was a reset. A reset channel zero settings, it didn't toggle them. Like, in the Micrologix, it toggles between default and what you had to set at. So if you had to set at d h 45 or a modbus, you press the button, it toggles back to d f one full duplex. You press it again, it goes back. Well, not on this guy. It kinda, like, erases it. And we're gonna test that out, but that's what that's what the manual says, and that's been my experience. But in any case, so no removal merit memory, only serial, I e very slow. And then this guy only could do the l 20 can only do eight modules where the l 30 could do 16. L 20 can only do one extra bank, so two banks total. The l 30 could do three banks. So if you had a very narrow enclosure, and and these are not rated. I I I tell these just to people. I know a lot of proud panel builders are showing their panels on, on, LinkedIn, and, a lot of times when I see them put a product, vertically instead of horizontally, there's not many Rockwell products you can put vertically. So always check the manual, but I always, like, secretly send them an instant message saying, hey. You may wanna take that that picture down because you have it mounted incorrectly. So in any case and and most of these products, something like a like VFDs and other products, you get derate them when you mount them vertically. Most of the rockwove's POCs, you can't just can't mount them vertically. They're just not designed for that because you don't get the convection airflow. Now, I mean, you could do whatever you want. It's a free country. Right? Free world. But if you want a warranty, don't tell them you'd mount it incorrectly. Right? So in any case, so that is the l 20 and the l 30. And, I wanna take a look at the, l 30 specifically, when it comes to, defaulting that serial port. Okay? So what I did is, I I uploaded the program. I changed this party. It was DH45. I changed it to DF1FullDuplex nineteen two. BCC is the default for this line. I know a lot of the products Raquel makes is CRC. And then I changed this guy to DH45. Let's go over to the computer and check that out because I'm doing everything live, so I'm hoping you guys are seeing everything okay and you can hear me fine. In any case, alright. So here, you could see I'm in the program, and let's go to control the properties....