Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Jeff Hill" <[email protected]> · Mon, 18 Mar 2002 09:15:45 -0700

Hello Pedro,

I'm unable to make any guesses at what might be wrong based on this
information, but here are some things that you can try.

O This driver has detailed diagnostics available via "dbior". As the
level argument to "dbior" is increased you will receive quite a bit of
information about the internal workings of the driver.

O You might change the input to periodic scan to see if a proper input
value is communicated.

O What version of the driver are you using? If you received the driver
from KECK then there is a good chance that it is old version. I don't
know of any issues with KECK's version, but a newer version is also
available with a simplified approach for building the list of block
transfer requests. The AB PLC5 protocol enhancements and PLC5 addressing
formats are also supported. This version was used operationally for
several years communicating with the LEDA project's high power RF
system, and is also use at other sites. As I recall, the only
outstanding issues with this version are related to some esoteric IO
addressing modes used by John Sinclair when he was directly accessing
the PLC's IO page. I have attempted to integrate John's changes.
However, John mentioned that my new version does not work as well as
his, but that he does not have time to pursue the issue further. 

Jeff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Pedro
> Gigoux
> Sent: Friday, March 15, 2002 3:19 PM
> To: EPICS Tech-Talk
> Subject: drvAbDf1
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I have a program that's using the Allen-Bradley driver written by Jeff
> Hill. Just recently two more words were added to the memory map at the
> PLC side and I had to modify the program to read these two words using
> analog input records, but for some reason the program refuses to
update
> the record values at the EPICS side.
> 
> I set DTYP to "AB DF1 serial" and SCAN to "I/O Intr".
> drvAbDf1BlockReadDataSize and
> drvAbDf1BlockWriteDataSize are both set to 128 bytes which should be
> enough to hold the new words. I also checked the database with dbhcr
and
> the records I added are in the list of the ones using the Allen
Bradley
> output, for instance:
> 
> INST     @/tyCo/1 41 39       AB DF1 serial       ec:fault:word39:word
> 
> I also did a comparison of the output of dbpr (level 2) of a record
that
> works and the ones that don't. All the fields are identical except for
> UDF and SEVR that are set to "1" and "INVALID", respectively.
> 
> I added debug code in drvAbDf1.c and found that words are registered
> without errors at the driver level and also found that wordList
contains
> all words I've added. One thing I found though is that not all the
time
> the write words are initialized without errors, but this behaviour is
> present even without the new words.
> 
> Any help will be appreciated,
> 
> Thank you,
> Pedro.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System