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October 21, 2025Episode 23116 min

IND360 on Ethernet/IP: Using with Logix and View (S2E31)

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, but, uh, It’s just who I am. Same plc a lot longer than Pike. I think it’s funny too, because you’ve got partners of Rockwell who have connectors to their products, and they call them the Rockwell PLC connector. It’s not a PLC, it’s a PAC. But anyways, doesn’t matter to me. Call it what you want. So we’re downloading now to the controller and if everything was done correctly, we should be able to go in there and see the current weight. Right. I don’t have everything hooked up. We can’t spray lentils all over the place. But in any case, you should be able to see that we are connected. We should have green IO up and we should be able to see the current weight at least. And all right, so I got green io. That means everything’s working right. I’m online. I got green io. Everything’s happy here. Okay, let’s go and see if we can find the current weight here. Because I think it’s about thirteen kilograms. We got all these statuses coming in. Okay. Gross weight minus twenty three. That’s a little lower than I thought it would be. Okay, here’s the net weight. Thirteen. Now, I have something in here that weighs a little bit more. All right, so let me go ahead and put it on top of the scale here. Yep. We got up to fourteen point two five. So I’m feeling really confident that everything’s working. I got green lights no errors in my tree. I got the current weight coming in. I thought that was super easy right? And so as long as you have the links to those files, it’s easy. Now what’s also easy is getting it to work with the factorytalk view. Okay. Now, the first thing, of course, this is a what I did is I decided to open up the objects five screen demo. Just figured we’d use that. And the first thing I’m going to do, I already have effective talk links open. I figured we would create a shortcut here, and I’m just going to call it, uh, five thousand three hundred eighty. Okay. And so that’s my unit. And that is the one here at one seventy four. So I’m going to go ahead and apply that shortcut here. You guys I’ve been doing these videos on creating shortcuts for over a decade now, almost two decades now. So I’m sure you guys are familiar with that. I’m going to not that I’m going to download to a panel view. Plus, I do have panel view pluses on the shelf here. But just to just to be thorough, I’m going to copy from design the runtime okay. And then I’m going to click on okay to save everything. And so now my shortcuts done from my project. This object five screen demo doesn’t didn’t have any connections to a PLC. So the next thing I want to do is I want to bring in the face plates okay. And you typically will start with the images. Okay. Now I notice when I was doing the images okay I’m going to go back to my documents okay. Indd three sixty Mettler Toledo files, general files, device library and Factorytalk images. Not on the mask. It’s on the factorytalk images. And one of the things I noticed when I brought these in, they came in really slow. So I’m not going to. I already did it just to save us time. Okay, so all those images have been added, but you typically want to do that first because the objects, the global objects have you use those images. So the next thing we’ll do is we’ll go to global objects and let’s add those in. And if you’ve never added any type of faceplates or plant packs or anything like that, this is a standard procedure you go through. So the next thing is I bring in the global objects. Let me do me. I’m just doing me for simplicity. Um, let’s see here. I’ll bring both those in. I did not choose the update my SC license on my technical tech connect, because I don’t plan on updating my SC costs in the next few months, but I do want to update my piano view plus costs in twenty twenty six, so I forgot to get that on the support. Okay, so I brought in those global objects there. You can see them right there. Okay. Now let’s bring in the display Add component into application. And there’s the display. Okay. That’s great. Now, this display is it expects you to pass something to it. When I play test it, I don’t have anything pass to it. So it’s going to say hey what do you want to put in parameter number one. And I believe if I remember to documents in this there’s instructions in there’s actually a nice PDF with instructions in there. Um let me go ahead and do show server names, which I love to do. I wish that was on by default. Okay. And then there’s my pack and then it wants what it wants. Is that tag for the Indy three hundred sixty. So that’s it right there okay. So I’ll click on okay and say let’s test play it with that as parameter number. The first parameter okay. Give it a second. And boom okay. Customer defined under load okay. That’s great. Well I don’t have that big hefty uh thing on it. But as you can see here, um, we can come through here and we can look at things. I’m going to go ahead and just put a little extra weight on the scale, and we can see it changing. Oh, now it’s ready. So I must be at least as heavy as that big piece of equipment, the feeder that we were using in the last episode. Okay. And, um, we have already we don’t have the error anymore. You can see all of this information here. Okay. And this is just great. You get this for free. It’s all done for you, right? There’s our error. Let me see if I, uh, take some weight off of it. Yeah, we get another error because it’s expecting to have that big, um, feeder on top of it. Right. Okay. And so this is all done for you. You don’t have to do anything. And I just think that’s amazing. Um, if you’re using mettler-toledo, the NDI three hundred sixty, and you’re going to use Factorytalk view now, I believe they also have files across view. Um, very, very similar. I thought I saw something in there for panel view Five thousand. I didn’t see anything for optics, but I could be wrong on that. But in any case, I’m just varying my weight on here as, um. As. So we can see the chat goes up and down, but you see how easy that was? I mean, really, we just have to tell it you’re looking for. And again, this is all in the manual. You’re looking for the actual instance we want to, to connect this to. And you could you could actually have different buttons for different instances. Let’s say you had ten insta360’s out there. Or you could have ten different buttons to choose which one. Or you could use a select a list, whatever you want to do, right. But in any case, I just wanted to show you this because I thought it was just. The integration is so sweet, so quick. The really the only thing you need are those files and I’m going to link to them. Right. Some of them are on my website, some are on Rockwell’s website, which I thought was interesting. But in any case, you know, they’re in a compass partner. So, um, and I do want to thank let’s go back to the main screen here. I do want to thank, um, Mettler Toledo for sponsoring this so I could show you this with zero ads and let me know. Did you like that? I thought it went together really quick. It’s not one of those videos where I was spending a day banging my head against the wall. No, it was very easy. As long as you have the right files, boom, boom, boom. It’s all set up and working. And again, I appreciate Mettler-toledo for letting me borrow their demo and for sponsoring these two episodes so that I could bring them to you ad free, and I could afford to actually spend the time with the product and learn it and use it. So with that, we’ll be shipping this back out. You may actually see this exact demo at Automation Fair if you’re going. I actually have a different vendor who has hired me to come and do interviews at their trade show, so I won’t be at automation fair, at least not Tuesday and Wednesday right now, because I’ll be somewhere else. But in any case, you got to you got to follow the money, right? If you want to keep the lights on with that, I want to thank you all. I want to thank you, members. I want to thank all you viewers and listeners, and I just want to wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends. Peace. If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/ 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 TierneyTechnology 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. (234 views)

October 20, 2025Episode 102010 min

Discrete vs. Digital: Automation Tech Talk for 10/20/25

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 case, uh, I just a couple of things that I’m working on right now in case this video is working. Um, the first thing is, um, we are working on a second video on the indie three hundred sixty. That’s what I’ll be doing right after this. And then, um, with that, we have another video coming up on Prtg that was sponsored, and they’ve had some people come and go and had some time problems scheduling it. But I do want to show how to use that TRG with um, uh, factorytalk view, which I thought would be cool. And then we got a lot of new. I got a lot of new demos to make. Um, we covered most of the demo one, Siemens, one I have, I have a bunch of other third party products and some Rockwell products. I’m going to make those demo boards up for in-person training. If you know anybody who needs in-person training, tell them to reach out to me. I’m going to be actually sending fliers out, uh, with a special if people want to buy a block in time for twenty twenty six to come to in-person training. And, um, so it’ll be a, it’ll be a discount, but that’ll be it. That discount won’t carry into twenty twenty six. So with that, I think that’s everything. Hope to have more of these. Again. We’ll have some more demos in the studio probably maybe in here depending on how this is working out. But in any case, um, look for more videos coming out this week, maybe some even some more lunchtime videos. And I want to wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time my friends. Peace. If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/ 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. (153 views)

September 17, 2025Episode 5467 min

MD-34A-DD Win10 IPC Tablet Dock (M5E45)

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 TierneyTechnology 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. (126 views)

September 12, 2025Episode 91214 min

Adding IO-Link Devices to Logix: Automation Tech Talk for 09/12/25

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 saw that when I did that too. K. Interesting. Interesting typo. Yeah. So we have two different masses here. So we’re you know, it was right for us to get zeros here because there was nothing nothing attached to port two. So the feedback was zeros. And so that’s good. So if I woulda had another thing, I guess, I coulda done is I could actually have moved the, temperature controller over to the other master, and it should’ve worked. Okay. So right now it says, 23. That’s Celsius. Of course, it’s probably well, we could just take a look here. 75 degrees in here and climbing, sadly. Let’s see here. Oh, yeah. We’re going up. Not going up as fast as I was it went up earlier. Interesting. Got up to 77. Now it’s falling because I let go of it. And, yeah, that was actually pretty easy to do. Just come out here and show you the devices one more time. So you could see this is what I was doing to turn the encoder, and, I was just holding on to this to get the temperature to go up. Let me get that on there. Yeah. But, yeah, that was pretty easy to do. And so with that, I think that’ll wrap up wrap up today’s automation tech talk about IO Link. Did you guys catch the IO Link show from yesterday? It came out a little later. It just been so crazy, but I did get that out, and I thought that was an excellent I actually sponsored it, so the video would be, ad free. I sponsored it myself. So I talk a little bit about, the automation school and whatnot. But in any case, just wanna, just remind you, Monday, we should have the episode of the automation museum. It will not come out on LinkedIn. LinkedIn does not, want people to, have long format videos. So So they only they limit you to, like, a ten minute upload, and they don’t want your live streaming from long videos like that from, from a file. So, Monday, if you’re on LinkedIn, watch it on LinkedIn. That won’t be, the automation museum. You’ll have to go to automation blog, or you’ll have to go to YouTube to see that. And then on, Tuesday through Friday, my hope is to have, some recorded content because I’m doing sponsored videos, more IO Link videos, more distributed IO. We’ll be doing Rockwell. We’ll be doing Siemens, and, all kinds of different, stuff. So, hopefully, you guys will enjoy those and learn something too because the whole purpose of this is to, you know, just share knowledge with you guys and hopefully make your you more efficient at your jobs and, you know, give you a reference you could share with somebody else in case they have the same questions. You don’t have to go through the whole thing all over again. But with that, I wanna thank I haven’t even eat lunch yet. I gotta go eat lunch. But I wanna thank you all for tuning in today. I wanna wish you all a very happy Friday. If you didn’t catch yesterday’s podcast on IO Link, please check it out. Michael did a great job. And, get some METTLEDO content coming up soon as well as, a bunch of podcasts were scheduled for podcasts out through Thanksgiving. So, we got some great content, and we’ve met with some great vendors. So I look forward to sharing that with you as well. And with that, I’m just gonna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/ 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. (329 views)

September 11, 2025Episode 91122 min

IFM AL1322 IO-Link Master to Logix: Automation Tech Talk for 09/11/25

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, I thought maybe Studio didn’t like me bringing the EDS files while it was open. But I was like, you know, I tried it on another computer, didn’t have that problem. So I went home, spent a couple hours last night on it, actually, trying to update the old VMware image on here with a new version. Some people said it was had to do with FactuTalk, a services platform, so I downgraded that. I downgraded our Sling. So I was trying to see what did I install that broke my Studio 5,000 VM. And it was same Windows version, same version of Studio 5,000 on other computers I had at home, and everything was working. So, what I did on this VM is I went back to before I installed the CCW update. I updated CCW, and I don’t use it a lot, but I updated it because I wanted to show the MicroLogic’s to micro 800 conversion. We did that in a previous episode, and so that is what was triggering. Now I haven’t nailed it down to what component CCW installed. Again, I went from 13 to 22, and I already had studio 5,034 installed. I didn’t nail it down to what component was in there that caused the problem, but I’m kinda thinking with that kind of problem, I may just spin up my own VM. I used to do this, and I kinda, like, was having so much luck. I was putting everything on the same VM, but I may spin up, separate VMs in the future for CCW if installing 22 on a system that has version third 34 on it, Studio 34, if installing CCW version 22 on that, it’s gonna hose it and break it. And, then, yeah, that’s not that’s something I can do. And and spring up new VMs is so easy to do that. A little time consuming, but, again, I already lost two hours last night, plus didn’t get the, episode out yesterday. So, you know, it’s kinda like you’re looking forward. You’re kinda like, well, let’s, let’s, you know, take the least the road of least resistance. But in any case, so I have these two installed. Let’s go ahead and download them. So we’re gonna go download. Yep. Can’t download because I’ve never connected to it before. So let’s do a network who here. Who active? I have you oh, no. I didn’t want the f one. Why am I that’s from the L30, l 23, l 30. Most of these are off. I don’t leave stuff on when they’re when I’m not using them. I think yeah. $1.73. That’s what I want. Download. Again, I chose 34 because the last in person class I had here was in 34. Saying, do you really want to download? Yes. I do. And this is just gonna take a moment. So, you know, the proof and the putting here is, you know, will the IO come up as valid or will it come up as errored? You know? Do we get a green IO light or not? Okay. So we’re not getting the green IO light, and I’m proud because of the versions I chose. Right? So let’s see if that’s the pro the problem. So I’ll go to properties here, and let’s go to module info. These are one OFives. Right? It says, owned, no. Configured, unconnected. Yeah. It’s, you know, it’s 105. I chose 106. Right? Very interesting. You know what? My first guess would be that it’s a, mismatch here. So it’s a status failed faulted. Status faulted. Now I could try to reset the module here to see if that fixed it. Again, I did use it previously with a code SYS PLC, but I don’t think I don’t think that’s gonna fix it. But, hey, I’m here. Might as well try it. I think we’re gonna have to go offline and change the version to match. I’m not getting the, version mismatch error, but this is not a Rockwell product either. So let’s see. Nope. Still not happy. So what could it be? Let’s let’s go ahead and go offline real quick. We will, change the versions to match even though we’re not getting a mismatch. Let’s see here. Oh, this is one thing. Yep. This is one thing I skipped over that I didn’t skip over yesterday. So the I’m gonna leave the minor rev at one zero six, but I’m gonna change this to match what’s in the book. And the book says you wanna do int. And not dent, but you want to do int and let’s go take a look at that here. Okay. So we’ll go to PLC setup. We’ll go to this manual and I was just going so quickly. I just browsed right over it. Let’s see. Oh, no internal. They don’t want that. Okay. We added the EDS files. Yeah. This is what I overlooked. Yep. K. So it needs to be int. Okay. It wants exclusive owner. It wants int and then 223151. Alright. Well, let’s take a look at that. Exclusive owner, 223151. So really was int. That’s I forgot that you make that change. I did make it yesterday, but, well, last time I did this, I don’t even know if I get that far yesterday. Let’s see. Properties. A lot of times I’ll practice for lunchtime. I’ll do this, like over coffee in the morning, you know, four or 05:00 in the morning before work just to practice and make sure everything’s working. Alright. Now let’s download and try it again. Really confident that’s the problem because we didn’t get a firmware mat mismatch or version mismatch. And because that was a minor rev, not a major rev, I’m, really feeling like That was the issue. So let’s give it a second here. Oh, yeah. No. It stopped updating why whenever I clicked on it. So, yeah, it is. It is saying electronic key mismatch right here now. So let’s try one more thing. We’ll match them up. Typically, the minor revs don’t don’t matter, but this will be the last thing we’ll try. Matter fact, when I was doing the, lessons for the, IO modules, the new CompactLogix and ControlLogix IO modules for my courses, I was like, yeah. I’ve never seen a minor rev cause a problem, but this is a third party product, so that could be a problem. Just gonna double check, make sure it’s +1 05. +1 05. Okay. Download. Okay. Let’s see if this is what we were looking for. We’ll we’ll know soon. I had another idea too on how I can make that camera bigger, so I may try that tomorrow. I do plan to continue this tomorrow or part two of this tomorrow. I didn’t have a chance to you know, with that meeting I had this morning, I didn’t have a chance to go through all that. I am excited to show you that new IO, though. That that was it. So we had to change it from, dent or cent to int, and we had to make the IO match perfectly. And now the next thing I would do is I would you know, we could look at the controller tags, but the the better thing probably would be to add their add on instructions. So, you know, if I look at the data coming in from number one, you know, I have just this this data here. Now number one, I believe, is the well, let’s see. No. I think number one is the let’s see which one it is. Can we see any data changing? Lots of data in there. And this is why you wanna use the add on instruction because who wants to well, there it is. You can see I’m turning the you can see I’m turning the right. So these two. K. I’m turning the encoder, encoder, and you can see it’s updating. But you know why? You can see it’s it’s spread across two words, two dents, and so the add on instruction is gonna give me that in a nice tag. Right? Now if we look at the other one, so I wouldn’t I wouldn’t I would use their add on instruction to mass massage the data. I wouldn’t use the raw data, but you could if you wanted to. Let’s look at the other one. The other one is temperature. Again, what port is what? I mean, who we used to have to document this all ourselves, you know, back in the day, remote IO and whatnot. Wonder if that nine eighty is the temperature. Oh, yeah. So as I hold on to it, you can see the temperature’s going up and up. K. So what we’ll do tomorrow let me go back to full screen here. Gonna find a better way to make make all these buttons work. The reason I’m not using, OBS for everything while I’m sharing the screen natively inside of StreamYard is because I looked at the resolution, and StreamYard does not when it gets the camera feed from OBS, it doesn’t it’s not the quality of, of the screen you would want, ten eighty p. So that’s why I did it that way, but it makes the camera view a little op, awkward. But in any case, so we got them working. We got both these IFMs. It was pretty easy. Right? Once I figured out what was wrong with my Studio 5,000, I just backed up to a snapshot. This is why I never use do do anything without VMware or virtualization because you’re gonna be able to back up to a snapshot. Install all that software again. Not even not even that’s a nonstarter. But we got both of these on the network. We saw their values coming in. So what I’ll do tomorrow at lunch, assuming everything goes well, we’re gonna bring get the go get the add on instructions for the encoder and for the temperature sensor. We’re gonna download those. We’ll add on the Studio 5,000, and then we’ll take a look at how it massages the data to give us some really good data. I know a lot of you guys have used IFM out there. You’ve given a great reviews to me. You guys have told me you love using their products. They have great products. Not every product, but most of their products have been, well received. So I figured we’ll, do that tomorrow. And we will have the IO link, We will have the IO link, episode of the podcast come out today. I think what I’ll do is I’ll go grab some lunch, and then I’ll record the bumpers for that, finish editing that, and publish that, this afternoon. So, you know, I’ve I kinda felt better than going yesterday. I usually do on Wednesdays, but then again, with everything that happened yesterday, it’s probably for the better that I get delayed today. So with that, I wanna end the show by wishing you all good health and happiness and safety. And until next time, my friends, peace. If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/ 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. (276 views)

September 4, 2025Episode 90421 min

MicroLogix to Micro800: Automation Tech Talk for 09/04/25

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 do this with the, with the audience as well? And so one of the things you’re gonna notice now there is a really good go back to full screen here. Did it go back to full screen? You know what? I think that’s the other thing is too. With this, you have to select the browser. So one of the things that you’ll find the links in the description is that Rockwell has a phenomenal phenomenally phenomenally well documented guide to doing this. So I’d super appreciate as I was reading through it, and it’s they’ve done a great job. They updated it over time, and it really does a great job explaining what the differences are. So if you do take on a project to do this, whether it’s internal or for somebody else, get that guide. Read it the cover to cover. It is excellent. And, I just really appreciate when a vendor puts that much effort into it. You know, I I I talked about other vendors where I was looking up trying to look up just how a single instruction worked, and it was so frustrating. But when you’re working with people like Rockwell and Siemens and other big companies, they just have great documentation, and it’s it’s hard not to have that. Right? You want that good documentation. But, they have great documentation on this process, and you can see it came in, but we got a lot of errors. Now I wanna look at these errors, and I don’t know why go to the stop page. How do I see my errors, people? Why is it hiding behind? I’m just gonna open up the main program, see if we can get the error list to be on top. There we go. Okay. Great. So and I know a lot of you may be listening while you’re driving, so I’ll try to go through these. So first of all, no status file. Right? There’s no status file in the, like, gray 100. Now there is a first pass bit. So we’ve talked about this a lot lately, and so we don’t have to worry about that. It’s it’s in there. Like, they used to say what was it? Prego? It’s in there. So in any case, we don’t have to worry about that. But there is no, like, status file. So one of the things I would use in the Micrologix and, really, all the PLCs is that free running clock, to to flash different lights on and off. And so, because I encapsulated in this program the program out of my PLC basics course. It’s a subroutine. And so, typically, we don’t use it because we’re and but I wanted to put it in there. So if somebody wanted to go in and, and and create a screen and view for their for the PAC basics or POC basics, they’d have it. But in any case, it also talks about arithmetic status bits are not supported in the 800 as well. You can, like, have a math overflow or something like that. So you’re gonna be cognizant of that. And then this is revised usage of the timer accumulate value. Now it talks about this thing called an RA ton, MicroLogic’s, user defined function block. And so I wanna get into this. Let’s take a break here, and let’s look at what happened here. So first thing is we have a main program. There is not really a subroutine with the micro 800. It’s you just have all these programs. Think of think of, ControlLogix and just having a bunch of routines that all run at the same time or a bunch of programs that each have one routine in them. Okay? And that’s all they have in them. So yeah. So there’s not a exact this to that, but in ControlLogix, let’s say you had you could only create programs, and every program has a single routine, and every program would always run. That’s what you have with the POUs, program organizational units inside of, inside of, the CCW and the micro 800. And, you know, I think if you had let’s say you had, Siemens and you had a bunch of OBs, and they were all scheduled to run continuous. So OB1, then OB2, then OB3, and then OB4. I know you can’t some of those numbers you can’t use, but you guys get the point. Right? So that’s what a POU is. All the POUs run. All the POUs run. I think, you can change your order by reordering them, but they all run, and each POU is really a language. So you can have a POU that’s a think of a POU. It’s like a program and a routine together. Anyways, with all that said, you can see the main POU. This is my jump to subroutines, except instead of jumping the subroutines, it’s jumping to user defined functions. So this is very similar to, like, a function block in Siemens. Right? And I I guess you would call it in logic, say, they, you know, you kinda look at it as a as a a subroutine, right, as a routine that you have to jump to, a routine other than the main, but it’s not in that group. It’s in this other list. Okay? And so you can see that looks that looks like my original code except for one big difference. Okay? Is that some of the timers like, I don’t have my tons, didn’t come over as tons. And when I was doing, factor IO, when I was doing the quest for, you know, Micrologix, Micro 800, and ControlLogix, it was like, hey. Some of these instructions operate differently. Coners, timers, slight little differences. Well, I addressed that by just changing the way I wrote the program for a factor I o. But here, if you’re if you have an existing plant, you don’t wanna have to figure that out. So what Rockwell does here is they give you all they create all these user defined function blocks. They have a countdown function block. They have a copy, a counter function block. Right? This one’s a structured text. So, very simple. They just do that that line of text. Right? Just checking over there, make sure you guys can see this. So here’s one that’s called the count up CTU. Now there is a CTU inside of the, micro 800. I wouldn’t have wrote all this code to to to make it work, but they wanted to operate identically to the way it was in the Micrologix. And so here you go. And so you can see all the code. It took several lines of code, eight lines of code to replace to make the CTU in the mic in the microHunter act like the like the one in the, MicroLogix. In any case but some of these, like the LEM instruction, this is like you can just look at this and say, okay. Yeah. They they did exactly what we’re looking for. But when it comes to, like, the one shot, it’s kinda like, nothing. It’s like, yeah. Maybe you should not use the ONS. Maybe you should use the OSR. And there was another one too it didn’t do. Oh, sequencer. The sequencer is just like, yeah. We don’t have one, so make your own code up. So in any case, there’s two of those in there. Out of all these instructions it created for me to to to mirror what was in the micro 800. What was to mirror, actually, what was in the Micrologix inside of the micro 800. You know, it created all those, those new instructions for me. So let’s go back to the error list because there’s a couple of very other interesting things you guys would probably wanna know about. First of all, the only symbols that can convert it to aliases, sadly, are for the inputs and outputs. So all my inputs in slot zero went to the input, the underscore I, underscore I o, embedded I o, and same thing with the outputs. But those are the only ones who got the symbols brought over. I had symbols on timers, presets, and counters, and I had a lot of symbols in there. None of those came in. It’s very sad. And, we can see here the warning about the time of the accumulate value. So, you know, some of the changes there, the status files, these are the two flashing bits I would have to replace, which is not a problem. I get all the bits I can use in the program. You see a lot of information about the timing timer accumulate value, how how it operates differently. Here’s the two, the ONS and the SQL that didn’t work. And then, the every place that did find the s one fifteen bit, it did convert it over to the first scan bit. That’s good. Right? That was really good. There was also, in the one I did this morning, there was also some truncating of my descriptors. Okay? So with the descriptors, you know, they’re limited to 255 characters. And so I don’t know why this one was different. Maybe I already truncated it, but, with the, with the descriptors, if you had a lot of descriptions, comments and and whatnot, they would get truncated. And not a big deal, but, you know, you gotta be aware of that. The good thing is they totally document, you know, in the that file. We were looking at that conversion file. In there, they tell you everything that doesn’t convert over. So I know at home this morning, I know that, all of the all of the, comments and descriptions that get truncated, it’s totally documented. That’s a CSV file that gets saved to your hard drive. And so you know everything you have to go and fix. But, I just thought it was very interesting how to address the slight nuances between the counters and the timers and whatnot that they create all these at, like, what you would think of as an add on instruction in Studio 5,000. They create them as, user defined function blocks inside of CCW. And, apparently, if it’s not on that list, if there’s an error not an error in that list, then you’re gonna expect the same type of operation, but you’ll also see that they warn you that you do have to test it. You cannot assume that everything translated perfectly. Right? And some things you gotta know is, like, what is the, what is the speed of the controller? You’re gonna assume that the micro eight hundred’s faster. Does that cause any issues? You also have to understand about, like, what’s the response time of the IO. Right? So in 90% of the applications, that may not be a big deal. But in some applications, you know, you may start seeing multiple counts where you only saw one, you know, multiple posts where you only saw one. You may have current limitations on the new inputs and outputs versus the old ones. So a lot of things you had to do to do one of those conversions. I think the first thing you would typically do is, you know, get the and they actually have this in IAB. It’ll convert from one to the other, and that manual I mentioned has even the wiring diagrams from one to the other. Just they just did a phenomenal job. So that’s what I’m working on here. I wanted to share that with you. It’s actually pretty user friendly, but, again, don’t discount the amount of time you’re gonna have to do to test the converted code. Same goes when we talked about converting PLC five or six five hundred to ControlLogix, CompactLogix, or soft PLC. You always have to test out the code because, these people make these importers and exporters. They don’t they don’t know everything. Right? They’re not perfect. I will say this, though. Doing what we just did was so much easier than manually retyping everything into Siemens and the Codesys. So, yes. Would I do this and then go and debug it? Yeah. I’d much rather do that than have to manually reenter all the code. That was a real drag. I’m glad it’s done, but it was a real drag. So tools like this, yes, definitely. I know some people like, no. I’m gonna do it. Everything bit by bit. I’m like, well, go for it. Have fun. But, I would rather use something like this. And so any case, it looks like, we’re running over twenty minutes. So I wanna thank everybody who joined us today. Again, if there’s something you would like to see on a future lunchtime show, let me know. I usually when I’m drinking my coffee first thing in the morning, I’ll go over things and try things potentially to do at lunchtime and, be happy to share anything I can with you guys. I do wanna show now that I I I still have to refine this and get it working. Once I do, I will be adding those lessons to, both my migrate hunter course on how to do this and my VSC course on how to connect to it. And I probably end up connected to it two different ways through LinX Classic and LinX Enterprise. But, I’m I still I didn’t get that far this morning. But in any case, there will be a what’s new in school this afternoon. There will be no episode of the lunchtime show tomorrow. Don’t know if there’ll be one Monday, so that’s we’ll play that one by year. Just depends on how much work I have left over tonight that I don’t get through this weekend. But with that, I just wanna thank you all again for tuning in. I wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/ 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. (200 views)

September 3, 2025Episode 90315 min

Module Discovery and Reading IO Config: Automation Tech Talk for 09/03/25

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 so that left all the CompactLogix people just kinda hanging out there with no way to find their modules. And so what would happen is so here’s an on the left hand side, I got a, an l 33 e r that both these PLCs are in the other room, in the training room. And if I right click on the bus, the seventeen sixty nine bus, and do discover IO modules, yeah, it can. It’s not as good as the SLIC 500. So sad. No. And we know that it knows. Right? How do we know that it knows? Because in Arislynx, we can go out there, and we can see everything that’s in that chassis. Of course, I can’t see it here because I have an EDS issue. K? So if I could upload the EDS file, but I have a problem here. But typically, if you didn’t have the problem I have now, you would be able to expand expand the backplane and see all the IO modules out there. And, yeah, see, this is when things happen when you just, like, come on to lunch and you’re like, yeah. Let’s just do a show and, you know, we could try to should we try to register the EDS file? Should we try to do this live? I think it’s, it’s somewhere here. Right? I know it’s in where’s the EDS? Well, probably easy to go here. Alright. So let’s close that one now. Let’s do tools. EDS I don’t even know if I have it on this hard drive, do I? No. Well, we’ll take a little side trip here. Let’s see if the EDS tool launches. Here it is. Okay. Let’s see. Register. Let’s register a, folder directory. Look in subfolder. Sure. Where would it be? Where would I have put it? Alright. I don’t even know if I have them. Nah. Alright. So forget that. But in any case, if everything was working, we would be able to see all the modules on the backplane. Just like on the l 16 I have plugged in, right, you would be able to see any point IO modules I have on that. Right? And that is just the way it works. And a little secret here is I believe that the backplane on both PointIO and on seven sixty nine seventeen sixty nine is actually based on DeviceNet. So we always get all the information. We could see all the modules, and that’s a great thing. But, apparently, they couldn’t figure out how to get it into the software. I mean, I’m assuming it wasn’t a commercial decision not to add it into the software. I’m sure it was a technical decision, but with the l 30, the 53. Right? So much newer than the sec five hundreds. They just couldn’t get that that Discover modules to work. So very sad. So maybe maybe they could get it to work, but they couldn’t get it to add it online. I don’t know. But here’s the good news. If you have gone to the, to the newer, right, to the fifty three eighties, if I right click on backplane and do discover modules, yes. Okay. It’s like, are you not gonna work? What’s going on? But any case, yes, we’re as good as the slick 500 from 1990. Woo hoo. But, and this works for 1756 as well. Originally, it was just for 1756, and I think the PowerFlex drives. I went to grab the latest release notes, and every time I say give me release notes from version 21 to ’30 seven, it just crashes my browser. So in any case, I didn’t have again, this is automation tech talk lunchtime edition, so I get my entire lunch to prepare for this. So, I didn’t couldn’t go any farther than that, but pretty confident, that it’s, seventeen fifty six, fifty sixty nine, and of PowerFlex drives. I could not confirm whether or not Flex 5,000 supports it or any of the servos support it. And if anybody wants to shoot me out, I did I did search the knowledge base. So, you know, if anybody, thinks I missed something, let me know. But I think there’s not a very wide, support on that. But, now I can go ahead and create typically, you just create them all. You know? And because this is not full screen, it does give you a warning about adding modules online. And let me pull this over here so you can see it added it right there. And so this is I actually I did a new lessons on this for both ControlLogix and CompactLogix as part of another lesson where I’m adding IO and testing IO and all that good stuff. But in any case, I wanted to do everything in the version 31 plus because I know, we had some, students who I think I mentioned this yesterday, who’ve never used version 30. You know? They’re they’re they’re lucky. They’ve been sheltered, only used 31 plus. So, you know, when they don’t see this blue background, they would get a little, little disconcerted. But in any case so that’s what I wanted to talk about today at lunchtime, and I wanna thank you guys for tuning in. I’m just looking at the list of stuff I covered at the beginning of the show. I don’t think I have anything else left. Again, being the lunchtime show, there’s not a whole lot of prep that can go into this. But in any case, we do have another, message in the chat that I wanna say. Person’s asking about the BRX, the BRX system, and he has two servo drives. I don’t have any movies on the any videos on the BRX. I’ve only done an unboxing on it. I have tried to get the AutomationDirect folks on many, many times. I think they’re a great company. Again, I know Siemens and Rocco guys and scenario guys are probably rolling their eyes, but, you know, they’re they’re you know, just like just because you like Honda or BMW or, you know, Chevy doesn’t mean you should pooh pooh Dodge or or any any other, you know, or Acura or somebody at some other, you know, Nissan or some other company. So there you know, these companies have been around for a long time, so they they gotta be doing something right. In any case so, yeah, sorry. I won’t be able to help you with your BRX. I don’t have a quest on the any of the automation direct stuff. Not that I don’t want to. It’s just timing and market. Right? So when you’re self employed, you gotta do everything you can to keep the lights on. And with that, I gotta get back to work. So I wanna wish you all I hope you enjoyed today’s show. I wanna thank you for joining in with me. Please reach out to me if you wanna come on and share your expertise with the audience, and, just wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/ 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. (85 views)

September 2, 2025Episode 90213 min

Studio 5000 Logix Designer v30 vs v31: Automation Tech Talk for 09/02/25

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 as not as I don’t think as clear to see as the guy was. But, yeah, if you look at, you know, you get the path toolbar. Used to be up here. Now it’s down in here. Right? And a lot of things are smaller. But overall, you know, I I was a little struggling for them to say when they said, hey. This looks totally different. I’m like, does it really? I mean, it looks refreshed, like a Windows 10 to 11 type thing, But I was like, oh, I don’t I don’t know. Yeah. The main program, main routine. You know? Well, everything has the same names. So in any case, That is, those were my thoughts. What do you guys think? Does it does it, you know, if you’ve only programmed in this, do you think going back to this would be like, wow, different software? Or we’d be like, no. That just looks like an older version. But, in any case, I wanted to kinda walk through that with you because I’ve had some people, at least definitely one person who said a student of mine said, hey. We only use the new stuff. He didn’t say this, but it turned out that he they only used the new stuff, 31 and up. And he’s like, hey. I’m like, well, you know, they’re I’m trying to teach people who are using one through 37. And so one through 30 all look the same and then 31 and up. So but that’s what I was just doing now. I was adding more lessons to the courses to kinda show both of them. And so if you’re in my compact, the ControlLogist course, you’ll see those new lessons show up, soon, if not today, tomorrow. But, also adding new lessons, some new analog lessons, testing them with the trainers here in the office versus the, the trainer I use in the course just to kinda give you, like, a this versus that look. And, you know, of course doing it with the new software as well since, version 31 did not exist when I filmed the course. Right? So in any case, that’s it. That’s all I had, because it was kinda like a last minute replacement. And, talk about what’s coming out this week. No podcast this week. We will be doing I do plan to be back here tomorrow and Thursday, to do lunchtime. No. I won’t be doing a lunchtime show on Friday. We have, we’re working on new videos on the METTLATOLEDO, I n d three sixty. I, excited to, excited to work with people like, Software Toolbox and Schneider on some other videos. And, I get some, videos coming out on IO Link that I’ve been working on. Next week’s podcast will be IO Link. Again, with the experts on it, the actual company that’s in charge of marketing it, and, and certified in products and all that. So, will be that’ll come out next week, and I wanna have some IO content ready for that. So I, spent the weekend building some IO Link demos, and so look forward to, look forward to showing you that. And, with that, I since there’s nothing in the chat, and that gentleman never popped up in my interface here, I’m just gonna call a lunchtime show a little early, thirteen minutes, but I do wanna wish you all good health and happiness. If you have any questions about anything I’m doing on, YouTube, on the blog, or at the school, just reach out to me. There’s content with contact links everywhere. And, of course, you can contact me on LinkedIn as well. And, I do wanna throw a shout out to anybody who wants to come on the show, or if you’re a vendor or you’re end user, OEM integrator, you wanna come on and and just see us something you learned, please reach out to me. And with that, I wanna wish you all, again, good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/ 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. (148 views)

August 28, 2025Episode 82824 min

Brandon Cooper makes guest appearance on Automation Tech Talk for August 28, 2025

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 can definitely see some applications where they wouldn’t be a good fit. Brandon Cooper (Guest): Yeah. Certainly, right off the top of my head, you know, safety systems, high speed, critical, guarding, anything like that, I I would certainly say you won’t see that anytime anytime soon or if ever. But I think overall, process control systems, I don’t see any reason that, you know, in the next five to ten years, you won’t see that largely implemented because the speed and the capability and everything you’re doing in a in a virtual system, you’re relying on it already for all your servers and op stations and things like that. The controller living in that same same system, is probably in a better environment than it was in the field. So while it might be slow to adopt, it’s certainly a viable solution, in the near in the very near future, I believe. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You bring up a good point too because with a lot of process control systems, you can’t operate the system without your SCADA or HMI or, user interface. Right? There’s not a lot of discrete standalone parts that are totally separate. So if your main console and all your screens go down, you know, you can’t operate it. And so in a lot of those cases, the PLC or DCS, the the main brain is installed in the control room. And so if you’re installing the brains in the control room anyways, can it be virtualized on some hardened redundant hardware versus, like, we do with SCADA today, versus being a brick. And I think the advantage, though, of having a hardware PLC is you can swap it out. The PLC dies, you swap it out. Where if you go with a virtual PLC, now you’re relying on the computer IT people to keep that robust and and, and up and running. I I think there’s probably quite a few, stand alone, and I don’t know if you have any examples, but I’m sure there’s a lot of stand alone applications in your your facilities and others you’ve worked in where you don’t you don’t wanna you know, you if you lose a connection to the main control room, you don’t wanna stop. You don’t wanna stop production, whether it be palletizing, material handling, you know, shrink wrapping. I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot of things that are stand alone. Like, if the whole front office went away, this machine still has to run. Am I do you think I’m right about that? Brandon Cooper (Guest): Yeah. Absolutely. You’ve always gotta have those, critical systems that are that are isolated and have to be you know, whether they can talk to the rest of the world or not, they they have to run. So there will always be places that you would you would stay away from, going totally virtual, I believe. But, I believe the overall system, I don’t I don’t see it as a problem to go in that direction. Shawn Tierney (Host): How about Ethan at APL? What are you seeing on that side? What do you think the promise is there from the process perspective? Brandon Cooper (Guest): So I guess what they’re calling gen one, it has been out several years. I believe interest Houser is leading that quite a bit. And, along with a lot of other companies, Emerson, a lot of other companies are are are playing in that world, and it’s developing. I think there’s some instrumentation out there, but I don’t know that there’s enough instrumentation released compatible to to say you know, do a whole facility at the moment. Now I have read about some facilities, I believe, in South America that have gone in that direction and, you know, are are making it work, but I don’t know that it’s all the way there. I I believe, I like I say, I can’t speak for Emerson or anybody else, but I I I know that they’re looking at some, some gen two, opportunities where, you know, getting away from the the gen one, which was like switches with, APLs, Ethernet switches that had, you know, 20 devices plugged into it. You know, they’re looking at more of a one to one Ethernet APL, charm or or connection that, would provide a little more robustness than than having a single single point of failure for 20 plus devices. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I I wanna throw out an invite too to whether it’s Emerson or Hintra Sousa. We’ve had them both on the show, the automation podcast. Love to put an invite out there for them to give us an update on Ethan and APL. We’ve, followed it quite closely, especially when I was doing the news, just all the different people who jumped on it, all the big players. I mean, pretty much everybody’s jumped on to it now, but we’d love to get those vendors on to tell us what they’re doing in that area and, you know, and give us more information about that. Is there anything, Brandon, that you came across that was like an, oh, moment? Like, whether it was programming a POC or a DCS system, you know, think back over the last month or two. Any tips you can share with the audience that maybe, you know, you found a version, didn’t do something, or there was a feature in this that did something extra. Any any knowledge or or even if it has to do with your life of traveling, any tips you have for Mhmm. The audience from going from, like, being landlocked to being this world traveler? Brandon Cooper (Guest): That’s a wide open question. So you mentioned protocols a minute ago and and my bus, TCP and and Ethernet IP and all those things. Whether it’s Delta v, whether it’s Honeywell, whether it’s Rockwell. You know? What I’m finding is that every time I go to scope something, there’s 10 different ways that I can topology wise that I can make this work. And trying to come up with standards and, repeat ways of doing things that are you know? There might be three ways that are all good options, but trying to figure out the best way, whether that’s, like I say, every vendor’s got the got the capabilities to talk both. Say, say, let’s just pick on Honeywell for a minute and their EIM module, their c 300 to EIM module. You know, it’ll talk Modbus TCP or Ethernet IP depending on you gotta flash it one way or the other, and you can’t do both at the same time. But, you you know, looking at those devices and trying to figure out the best way to to handle, you know, a third party integration or a smart MCC, another p you know, another PLC, you know, whatever the case, you there’s just so many options and so many protocols, PRP, DLR. Yep. You you name it. There there’s lots of options for everything you do, and, just trying to come up with those standards says, helps to not have to to to reinvent that wheel the next time. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I know Rockwell, and I think all vendors do this, but I’m more familiar with the Rockwell examples where they have these, they’re they almost look like graph paper, but they’re example configurations. And I used to, love to use those to show people, you know, this is what you would do in this situation. So if you had a serval application, here’s the products that are recommended. If you have, you know, lots of VFDs, here’s the networks recommended. Here’s the topology recommended. And I think I think it’s a good one vendors do that because, like you said, they all have so many options. Right? And and, you know, guidance. You know, you need to give guidance. Like, Siemens has they have basic modules. They have standard modules. They have five functionality modules. Right? And it’s like, alright. So do I is it just price? I mean, why am I choosing one or the other? Right? And so having that type of guidance from the vendors is always extremely helpful. I think, you know, for me, if I had to choose between Ethernet IP and Modbus CCP, I’d pick Ethernet IP because, you know, it’s a generational difference in, development. Right? So you got Modbus, Modbus TCP when it came out versus Ethernet IP, PROFINET, and the other the other big guys up there on the the field buses. But then you could limit yourself something because, a lot of old products don’t talk, Ethan and IP. And, you know, a lot of vendors, they like the openness of Modbus TCP. So, you know, they can just implement it without too much hassle. You know? Don’t have to join a group. Don’t have to get a spec and so on. So, yeah, that’s a good point. Hey. I may be traveling out to out across the country here in a couple months for a sponsored engagement. And I wanted to ask you, any advice for somebody who hasn’t been traveling a lot, since you’re traveling an awful lot? What would be, like, your top couple of things? And I I do have one of the ones you recommended. I do have TSA PreCheck, which I am a big fan of. This is something my wife talked me into getting, and I love the shorter lines. I love leaving my shoes on. I love all of that. But, other thoughts other thoughts that you have on, on just making making the traveling and since you’re traveling so much, what would you recommend? Brandon Cooper (Guest): So, yeah, what I talked about several things as far in the articles, but, I would say in the article number two, probably, taking care of yourself is a big thing for, trying to eat eat healthy, exercise a little bit, things like that when you’re on the road. When you do it week after week after week, the choices you make will either benefit your life or take their toll. And, I guess I’ve learned some of those things the hard way. And then and then also, you know, just on the on the upside of traveling a lot, hey. Collect your points and, you know, get those you know, it’s your choice. I’m not advocating for Hilton or Holiday Inn or or Marriott, any of them. But you pick your, you pick your, where you like to stay and and collect those points and then, use them later on your personal vacation. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. That’s a good point. It’s it makes sense to choose one company to get all your points with because I know a lot of people have taken personal vacations for free because they get so many points for work. So that’s, that’s really good advice. Before we before we close out the show, I did wanna let everybody know there’s no show tomorrow, and there’s no show Monday because Monday in The United States is a holiday. So we’ll be back on Tuesday. I got another guest on who’s gonna talk about a totally different subject, so I’m I’m hoping, you guys will enjoy that episode as well. Of course, I hope you enjoyed our time we spent with, Brandon, and I’m really wish I was in his backyard right now with all the birds and and and and, it just seems like such a of a quiet, peaceful place. But with that, Brandon, we’re coming to the end of the show. Was there anything else, you wanted to share with the audience, before we close out the show? Brandon Cooper (Guest): Not that I can think of, but, hey, I’ve been listening to your your your lunchtime show here lately, and, enjoy it. And I appreciate you doing it because it’s a it’s a good way to get tips while you’re eating your lunch. So appreciate it, Shawn. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, I thank you, Brandon. And I I would like to ask everybody if there’s something you wanna know or see. We did have somebody say, how do I connect the factory talk view to a micro 800? So I’ll be trying to do that next week. I think before I do that, I’m gonna roll in how to convert. I think you and I both wrote articles on this, but I’m gonna roll in how to convert a Micrologix product project to a micro 800 because in my factory talk to you course, I I do everything but micro 800 just because of time. It was just so so time consuming creating a course that just for time, I left it out. But I’m figuring, hey. I might as well add it now because I’m adding I’m always adding lessons to my courses. So, in any case, if we wanna if we wanna see the courses I have available, the automationschool.com. With that, Brandon, thank you so much, not only for coming on the lunchtime show today, but for all the articles you’ve shared with the audience over at the automation blog. And, again, if you have any tips or ideas, we’d love to have you submit them or even come back on the show and share with the audience. Brandon Cooper (Guest): Sounds good. Thank you, Shawn. Shawn Tierney (Host): Alright. And I’m gonna say goodbye to everybody on the live stream. Hope you guys have a great day. Again, I’m not on tomorrow or Monday, so have a great weekend. And until next time, I should probably go full screen. That’s full screen of Brandon. That’s not full screen of me. Let me try that again. Until next time, my friends. Peace. If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/ 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. (57 views)

August 27, 2025Episode 82723 min

Distributed I/O: Automation Tech Talk for August 27, 2025

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 the the t b threes with the three rows of terminal blocks or terminals, and, yeah, that was great. You had a you could land everything right on there. No interposing terminal blocks if you didn’t want them. Some people would still do it, which I thought was kinda like defeating the purpose of it, but, hey. You gotta do what you gotta do. Right? But in any case, really, really big fan of. Again again, we’re talking all legacy I, distributed. Io here. And then I do have to throw out a shout out to, the fact that you can always use, like, slick 500 io, like the ’17 71 io, not when it first came out. Out. You could not use this as distributed IO. But as years went by, Rockwell made adapters for the ’17 46 chassis, and so you could use your Slick 500 IO as distributed IO. Also, although not very popular, well, the 1760 IO was very popular for the micro 1,500 and for CompactLogix. We just finished doing a series on CompactLogix. But, yeah, putting using this as distributed IO, not as popular. Right? Very rare. We actually do have an Ethernet adapter at much cost. We picked one up, used, and we will be showing that off, to our students. Maybe I’ll even do a lunch and learn on it or a lunch lunchtime episode of the automation tech talk show. But in any case, you can put this on distributed IO as well as seventeen fifty six. A matter of fact, when, ControlLogistix first came out, almost all the IO it used both locally, was seventeen fifty six IO. The cool thing with this was that you could just use your EMT card or your ENET card. Well, only certain versions of the ENET card could be used, as an IO scanner, and it was very limited. So let’s say let’s just leave the ENET out of there. So the EMBT, you could use that as your scanner and as your adapter card in Rockwell’s parlance. And that was, that’s pretty cool, but very expensive. Kinda like using $17.71 for the extruded IO. Kinda expensive. And so, we also had, other types of, IO come out. So this is, what they call butter stick IO. This is compact LDX. I think you can still use the device that version of this for, the micro 800. That’s an upcoming lesson for that course. Let’s see if we can put these under the, under the camera here. Let’s see. Oh, yeah. That’s already zoomed in pretty good. So these, I like, the next generation of the, Block IO. And I’ll tell you what, they call this butter stick. I can really like this form factor. Easy to wire, small, just a fan favorite. Right? And, Yeah. So this came in a bunch of different versions, but most people remember it for the device that, capabilities and, the LDX as well. Right? So this was I you know, I never used much of this, but right now, last time I checked, it was the only, one distributed IO you could use with the with the OG, micro eight hundreds. So now you got some eversions out there, so they can do some other things on Ethernet IP. But, my understanding is it’s it’s really cool the, the way that device that module works on the mic great 100. So that’s why I picked those up so I can actually show it to my students. And maybe we’ll do a lunch, a lunchtime episode on that. So let’s see. How am I doing? Oh, Oh, and then, of course, and this is something else we’re gonna be showing too in our CompactLogix course, is the fifty sixty nine IO, which is really high end, high capacity IO is what you’re talking about was yesterday. So the IO is fast, high capacity, feature rich. It’s really more like the 56 IO in many ways. But in any case, you can actually put this on Ethernet. So you can do a compact CompactLogix, fifty three eighty with all the same 69 IO, fifty sixty nine IO locally and remote, which is really cool. Not low cost, but really cool. And now I wanna go over to the computer because there’s some other options which I don’t have. You know, I I partner with vendors to cover their new products, and, you know, some vendors, are like to do include the hardware in that, and so some don’t. But I do still wanna cover these, and this isn’t gonna be the prettiest share I’ve done. But let me just go ahead and see if I can share my screen here. So this is what they call a flex 5,000, and this is kind of the replacement for the, the, the flex aisle. Right? And, flex 5,000 is the adapter. I couldn’t you know, it’s funny. I could not find a selection guide for this guy or a brochure for this guy. I thought it was really weird. But in any case, let me see if I can zoom out a little bit. Come on, picture. Okay. That’s better. So this is I’m just saw it right on Rockwell’s website. And so I don’t have this, but it looks really cool. The design, it looks like they really fixed the connector. I don’t have a picture of that, but, really, the same design. Thank you for putting all vendors. Thank you for putting QR codes on here. Really, really appreciate that. I know that saves them from having to put a manual in the box that we get thrown away. People just don’t keep paper manuals anymore. I mean, I have a bunch I wanna donate to the Automation Museum, but, but in any case, this week, we’re recording an episode on, the history of Wonderware, which I’m so excited to do because they were always like the big competitor when I was out there with RSView, and, I actually built some systems, some demos, I should say, with InTouch, and I just thought it was pretty cool. I still like RSV better, but because I was beta tested for it, but, still, InTouch is pretty cool stuff. Anyways, I got a question come in. What’s your most preferred digital IO to use? That’s a great question. Let’s hold hold on to that question. I would like to know what you guys prefer. So everybody who’s watching, I can see the count right there. What are your preferred, distributed IO options if you use it, if you’re not an OEM? But in any case so Flex 5,000, I haven’t used it, but it looks like they’ve fixed a lot of the problems with the original Flex IO, which again was still very, very popular. Look at the three terminals there. Three rows of terminals. I just think that’s great, you know, wiring your three wire devices right into it. But when I was talking to somebody about next generation IO, this vendor who sent me all the hardware that I’m gonna cover, they mentioned how, there was another product out from Rockwell. Now I hadn’t I don’t you know, guys know. I have nose to the grindstone. I don’t get to do the news show anymore. It just wasn’t profitable. It was actually, it was a big drain on the company’s finances, time wise, anyways. But, they told me about this new product from Rockwell. I’d never heard of it before. It’s called PointMax IO, and I’m like, okay. I thought they would have called it point 5,000, like flex flex 5,000, point 5,000. And, so I’m like, that’s interesting. PointMax. So I figured, well, let’s take a look at this. So good. ANTR. I’m glad they kept that. Looks like we have safety in there, guys. Ain’t that cool? You can see the indicators on the IO. Very I I like the I like the look. I gotta say that. I like the look, and I like that it’s not painted black like, the the many of the other products that went from, the light gray to black like we talked about, I think, yesterday. I, I like the push in, terminals. I like how they’re labeled. I think you guys could see the labeling there. Whoops. Okay. And, I I don’t see test points, which is definitely it keeps it out of that next gen, option. But, I mean, I see these tiny little holes, but you’re not gonna get a probe in there unless you’re have, like, a I don’t know. But in any case, you know, the black really well, I’m a big fan of the, you know, the light gray. The black really and you’ll see it on the ControlLogix too. The black background really makes the LEDs really, light up. So I like that. But I like how they kept the light gray on everything else. And, yeah, very cool there. You see the again, a QR code. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I don’t see and, again, I this looks like there’s a little cover here. Maybe it’s under this cover, but I’m not seeing the dial for the IP address. So that’s one of my favorite products about when Rockwell has distributed IO where you can actually dial in the IP address. I like that. But in any case, I think this is interesting. I’m hearing and, again, I did not do any research on this, but I’m hearing that this kinda misses the next gen mark, because it doesn’t have an OPC server built in, and it doesn’t have that security, built in between the modules and the, and the adapter, which kinda keeps it out of that next gen realm. But still, if you’re a fan of the the current point I o, this is saying that it’s going to be available quarter three twenty twenty five, so you probably see it at automation fair. They have the system specs, system installation, selection configuration tools. So, I mean, it looks like a decent product. It’s just, you know, I haven’t read up much about it. Again, I I always extend I just sent the list out to Rockwell a couple weeks ago of all these great things. I’d love them to come on the show and talk about. I know they’re very busy. They got a lot going on. But, in any case I don’t know. I thought this was cool, so I thought we’d talk about it. You know, I I I wonder if it has the same thing with the fifty sixty nine IO. It’s like they changed the IO addressing so that, you know, it’s the bits on part of an array anymore. The bits are all standalone bullions. The actual inputs and outputs are standalone bullions. I would imagine they probably did that for some reason, which I never found described anywhere for them doing that, but that does make converting programs a a pain because the the the software doesn’t know what to do with it. But in any case, very interesting stuff. I would, again, love to get Raquel on to talk about this more. You know, we’ve had him on ten, eleven, 12 times. So I’d love to get him on to talk about this and so many other things. But in any case, I wanted to share that with you. I just became aware of it, but, this is probably there. I’m gonna guess it’s the new value line because it’s missing some of those neck next gen features. So, and who knows? We’d like we talked about, yesterday. Who knows what the future is? We only know when they tell us. Right? So let me go back full screen here, and let’s see what came in on the, comments here. Well, point.io, a lot of people are big fans of point.io. You get the exact number of IO you want. It’s affordable. You know, if you’re not doing high density IO, you know, like, I and I’ve shown like, I think I showed it in the presentation yesterday. You know, I’ve been at sites where they had racks that were almost maxed out 60 some odd modules. But in any case, the points per slot, though, is low. And if you have an eight point module, then, you definitely have to have to, you know, use the terminal block to do your, you know, if you have a two wire sensor or three wire sensor. You only get one point on the o IO modules, so that is kind of a downside. You know, as far as other vendors, I think all the vendors do a good job with this. Again, we’ll show you the next gen stuff that I’m gonna be covering here in the coming weeks. But I was putting together, and I will be showing you guys this, some of the e t 200 e t 200 SP IO distributed from Siemens. And I really liked it, especially wiring it. The push in terminals were great, and, it was just so simple to use. Commissioning it, I I still haven’t found the book that tells you how to commission it. I had to kinda do it the old fashioned way and kinda figure it out myself. But, in any case, if anybody knows, if you use an e t two hundred s p I o, and you didn’t find the book to commission it, when I say commission it, give it its IP address. Right? So, you know, with the Rocco, you just dial it in. If you don’t dial it in, if you need a different IP address, you boot p it. Right? So, that’s all documented very well. And then the wiring diagrams. Now I know a lot of these IO devices have the wiring guide right on the front of it, but, you know, it’s always nice, and and I think this is one thing. If you’re a Rockwell user, you probably agree with me that they have their installation instructions. Most of their installation instructions have great wiring diagrams, and so I was struggling with that last night. Of course, it was late, so it could have been that too. But, in any case, I don’t have anybody else posting what their favorite IO is. So Capone IO wins in the chat, and I, I’m at twenty two minutes. So, again, sorry I was a little bit late. You know, meeting with vendors like that has to take precedence because that’s that’s a potential income to keep the lights on. Also, don’t forget, if you have anybody I know most of you here are don’t need training because you’re experts. Right? But if you have people working for you who need training, that is a big part of my business, the automationschool.com. You know, I just tried to add a chat box to it today, and then as I started this live stream, I could see somebody trying to chat with me. It’s like, oops. But in any case, the automationschool.com, I got courses on ControlLogix, CompactLogix, MicroLogix, Micro 800, and soon, click 500 PLC five and, of course, Siemens. That’s gonna expand it. I have HMI courses and SCADA courses. I think I I would have to say it’s probably the best Fact Talk View course online because a lot of people don’t, won’t spend the money to buy a license Effect Talk View course. I did because because being an RS View beta user, Fact Talk View is the next generation of that, of course. So in any case and I got some exciting stuff coming over there. So if you wanna get a, 20% off coupon for an online course from anybody you know, anybody who works for you, you know, wants to get into this crazy business, just get in contact with me. All I need is the email address of the person the coupon’s for, and, they’ll get 20% off. I’m doing this just for viewers of the automation, Tech Talk, show. And then, of course, we can do custom training here. You wanna either get up to speed on Siemens. Maybe you’re an Allen Bradley user, and you’re like, yeah. I wanna learn Siemens. Or maybe it’s vice versa. You’re a Siemens user. You’re like, yeah. I wanna learn Allen Bradley, or, anything like that. Just get in contact with me. All the contact links over there at theautomationschool.com. And with that, I agree. Rockwell has great documentation. I do agree with that. And with that, I’m gonna go eat my lunch. So I wanna wish you all good health and happiness. Have a great day, and until next time, my friends. Peace. If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/ 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. (119 views)