Every PLC and HMI tutorial on plctr.com: project setup, ladder and structured text, communication, troubleshooting and commissioning, written from the plant floor.
On a 1.5 m zone pitch at 0.28 m/s, a 600 mm carton is invisible to both photo-eyes for 3.2 seconds of its journey between them. An upstream zone whose release permissive is nothing more than “the next eye is clear” will use that window to send a second carton, and the two of them … Read more
Time it with a stopwatch before you type anything into the preset: the longest carton you run, crossing the photo-eye, on the slowest zone. A 1219 mm carton at 0.28 m/s sits on that eye for 4.35 seconds, which is why the 2000 ms that came across with the copied project trips every time the … Read more
Monitor a block on an S7-1500, build a watch table, and work out why a value sits there: modify against force, optimised blocks, and what STOP does.
Start search comes back empty on an S7-1200. Work through the PG/PC interface, the subnet, the flash-LED check and a CPU that loads but stays in STOP.
Get a CPU 1214C into an empty TIA Portal project: read the order number off the front, pick the firmware the bench CPU can take, and set the device name.
16#0204 appears twice in the same Rockwell reference manual with two different meanings, and which of the MSG instruction error codes tables you are reading decides where you spend the next hour. In the extended error codes for error 0001 it is Unconnected message timeout. In the module fault codes it is Connection Request Error: … Read more
Produced and consumed tags stop at 500 bytes, and at 480 once the data crosses a network, because the transfer spends 20 of them on overhead. Try to produce an INT array and Logix Designer refuses: DINT, UDINT, LINT, ULINT, REAL and LREAL are the atomic types that go across on their own, and anything … Read more
PNP sensor wiring is decided on the input card’s spec sheet, and almost nobody reads that row. Under Voltage category, a 1756-IB16 says 12/24V DC sink and a 1756-IV16 says 12/24V DC source — same form factor, same 16 points, same 5V off-state threshold, and only one of them will ever see a PNP sensor … Read more
A 1756-IF8 analog input in integer mode lands on roughly -20,030 counts at 4 mA and 30,920 at 20 mA, which are not numbers anybody memorises. If the value in front of you is 3277, the card in the rack is a 1769-IF4 or 1769-IF8 running the Scaled-for-PID data format, and none of the 1756 … Read more
F059 Safety Open means both PowerFlex 525 safety inputs are unpowered. Read S1, S2 and S+, tell F059 from F111, and know when the jumper must come out.
Assembly instances, sizes, Comm Format and RPI for a device with no catalogue profile and no EDS file, plus the connection error codes that follow.
200 tags at one row a second is 17.28 million rows a day, and at the 47 bytes a row that SQLite measured on this machine for a typed, indexed table, that is 814 MB a day and a 32 GB card full in 32 days. The same 200 tags logged on change, with a … Read more