Typed 2592000000 into the preset of a TON and Studio won't take it. Tried it as a constant in a MOV to the .PRE instead, which it accepted without complaining, and the timer now finishes somewhere around day 25 and the reminder comes up five days early every time.

Checked the tag and .PRE is holding a negative number, so I've clearly wrapped something. What do people actually use for an interval this long, and is there a reason the MOV let me do it?

That PC is on IT's rebuild list for next month and the engineer who wrote it left in March. I copied the whole folder onto a share and ran it from there as a test, and the macro fails on the first write because the path is hard coded to his D drive, so I don't think this is a lift and shift job.

I've got a month. Where would you actually put this, given nobody here is getting budget for a historian?

I've opened four panels so far and they are not the same as each other. One looks like the CompactLogix we had at TAFE, one is a Siemens thing with a green stripe, and two are older grey racks with no screen on the front at all.

I tried opening the Siemens one with Studio 5000 because that is the only software on my laptop, no luck, which I now realise was never going to work.

How do you work out what a rack is and which software opens it, when all you have is what is printed on the front?

The count lands 4 to 6 percent high against the pallet tally, every shift, and it is always high, never low. I was pretty sure it was the prox double triggering so I put a new one of the same make on, and got the same numbers within about ten parts. The old one bench tests fine sat on my desk as well, which is the annoying part.

Somebody here mentioned one-shots to me when I was asking about something else entirely. Is that what I'm missing here, or is a CTU on a fast scan always going to run over like this?

Where I've got stuck is who owns the state. I tried building the downtime table in the SCADA from the run bit and a timestamp, because that was the quickest thing to stand up, and it counts a 4 second jam and a 40 minute changeover as the same event. It also loses everything when the server reboots.

Does the state logic belong in the controller, or am I making work for myself that the historian is meant to do?

Power the rig down overnight and back up in the morning, the counter is still sitting on 148 where I left it, so that part does what I expected. But every time I download a change to the block, even a change that has nothing to do with the counter at all, it comes back as 0 and both M bits are false again.

I've checked afterwards and the Retain boxes are still ticked. Does retentive not mean what I think it means, or is my rig missing a battery somewhere?

Sorry if this is basic. I tried setting elapsed to 1 in OB100 so it can't be zero, and that hides it, but then the whole first minute reads wrong and it felt like I was cheating rather than fixing.

What does the DIV actually do when the divisor is 0? Does the 1500 go to STOP over it, or does it carry on with something it invented?

Finance want a shift report per station now and every attempt I make at pulling them ends up missing a station or picking up the wrong one, because there is no pattern to key off. I tried aliasing the lot into one program to tidy the front of it, which helped the panel and did nothing at all for the report.

I'm stuck between doing it properly and just renaming the forty and hoping. Before I rip it apart, is a UDT with an array of six the right shape here, or is that overkill for six stations and a counter each?

The topic in RSLinx still says good, no error in any cell, the values are just the ones from first thing in the morning. I closed Excel and opened it again and everything jumped to current, then a couple of hours later it was stuck at the new numbers instead.

I've already swapped the topic for a fresh one on the same path and got exactly the same behaviour, so I'm not sure whether that's the link letting go quietly or the sheet not asking anymore.

I had a poke around and found a spare PC in the MCC room nobody uses. Tried pointing Excel at the panel with a data connection thing I read about on another forum and got nowhere, I don't think it's meant to do that at all.

Pretty stuck on where to even start. Is a small logger the usual answer here, or does the PLC write the file itself?