Cartoner, 1756-L73 on V32, PanelView Plus 7 with FactoryTalk View ME. 50 products, each one 22 setpoints, flap fold times, glue delays, speeds, plus a name.
Right now thats 50 times 22 separate tags, Rec01_GlueDelay and so on, and the changeover display is a mess of indirect addressing. Product 51 lands next month.
I had a go with RecipePlus in ME and it works fine as an editor, but then the running values only exist in the panel, and when the panel got swapped last year we lost a week getting them all back.
Do people keep recipes in the PLC as an array of a UDT, or leave them in the HMI and back the panel up properly? I'd rather do it once. With 51 landing next month, any thoughts on which way you'd go if you had to live with it afterwards?
Who edits them, operators on the panel or an engineer at a laptop? And has anyone at your site ever added a setpoint to every product after the machine shipped, be honest.
Operators on the panel, supervisor login. And yes, we added 3 setpoints two years ago and it took a day per recipe.
On the WinCC side we ended up the same way, more or less. I think every site gets there eventually. The recipe view on the panel is only an editor, the data block in the PLC is what runs. One of the older lines had a DB per recipe, 50 DBs, and nobody could find anything. One array of a UDT and an index is what we moved everything to.
Array of a UDT in the controller. UDT Recipe with your 22 members plus a STRING for the name, Recipes[50], and Recipe_Active of the same UDT that the machine actually reads. Load: check the index, then COP Recipes[idx] Recipe_Active 1. Edit: the panel works on Recipe_Edit, same UDT, and a save button does COP Recipe_Edit Recipes[idx] 1. The panel displays show Recipe_Edit's members directly, no indirect addressing anywhere.
Product 51 is Recipes[60] from day one. Setpoint 23 is one member on the end of the UDT and one field on the display, not 50 edits. RecipePlus can stay as an export for backup if you like it, but the array in the L73 is what survives a panel swap. There's a writeup covering the recipe side of batch: https://plctr.com/utilizing-plc-for-batch-process-control/
Done over two nights. UDT Recipe, Recipes[60], Recipe_Active and Recipe_Edit, COP on load and save, index checked first. Indirect addressing gone off the changeover display. What made the mess in the first place was loose tags with the running copy living in the panel rather than in the L73. Load can still be pressed mid-batch and I'm not sure yet where that interlock belongs. Thanks ollyb and kiran_s.
Interlock in the PLC. Ours is a running bit on the load rung.