Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Maren Purves <[email protected]> · Fri, 5 Nov 2010 21:53:27 -1000 (HST)

Ron,
I was hoping that the people here at the JAC who deal with
the Allen Bradleys more than me would respond but I didn't
see anything of that kind.
We have Allen Bradlays both at UKIRT and at JCMT.
The UKIRT Allen Bradley is definitely using the abdf1
driver, but for all I know the serial line is still
plugged into the 'second' serial line on an hknitro60.
One of our electronics guys and I once made an attempt
to connecgt it via a terminal server because we had 1/2
hour left in the summit day but we don't even really know
whether we had the right pin-out on the cable. I know
I haven't dealt with it since. I also now that we had
and may still have problems with the AB panelview in cold
temperatures (below freezing, and I got some information
on that from Karen White and somebody else at ORNL at the
Brookhaven EPICS meeting, saying basically "you're
operating it out of specs").
Not sure this helps any, but I at least wanted to
put it out there.
Aloha,
Maren
On Fri, 5 Nov 2010, Chestnut, Ronald P. wrote:
We have a number of old Allen Bradley PLC implementations here at SLAC. One of these uses a Data
Communication Card (DCM) in VME is connected to the SLC5 SLC500s. One path we are considering is using
an RSLogix PLC (which has good EPICS support) as the master PLC, and slaving the SLC5 PLC to that. It
turns out that there exists a package to translate the ladder logic from SLC500 to RSLogix.

Another group here is asking the following:

?We have some old SLC 5/04 PLCs from Allen Bradley that we wanted to make EPICS compatible. I found a
third party SLC module that talks Ether/IP:
http://www.prosoft-technology.com/prosoft/products/for_rockwell_automation/platform/slc/mvi46_dfnt

Will this module work to provide the EPICS support? ?

Another piece of information is from Ernest Williams: He warned us against the direct SLC-50x EPICS
driver support, since it uses its own protocol (DFI?) and has a poor reputation and poor support.

So the questions to the community are

How are you reviving old PLC support? What has or has not worked? What do you recommend?

Ron Chestnut

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System