Every PLC and HMI tutorial on plctr.com: project setup, ladder and structured text, communication, troubleshooting and commissioning, written from the plant floor.
OPC UA Security Policies and User Authentication: What to Enable, and What It Costs One RSA-2048 private-key operation measured 3.363 ms on the laptop this was written on, and one pass of AES-256 over a kilobyte of notification measured about 2.1 microseconds. That ratio, roughly sixteen hundred to one, is the whole of the OPC … Read more
Kinetix 5700 DC Bus Sharing: What the Bus Supply Carries and Where the Limit Is A 2198-P208 supports 13,000 µF of total system capacitance and puts out 46 kW continuously. Those are two separate ceilings, they get reached by two different kinds of machine, and on most rails the one that stops you first is … Read more
Removing an Axis From a Running Kinetix 5700 System Without Faulting the Rest A 2198-D032-ERS4 is two axes behind one Ethernet connection on one set of bus bars, and inhibiting either half takes the other half with it. Getting the module off the rail is a different order of problem: control power and mains off, … Read more
Adding an Axis to a Kinetix 5700 System: the Module, the Axis, and the Four Places to Set It The eighth axis on the line is a 2198-D032-ERS4 in the last 55 mm of the rail, and getting it into the project is four dialogs and about twenty minutes. What takes the rest of the … Read more
OPC UA Certificates: Trust, Rejection, and Why the First Handshake Fails BadSecurityChecksFailed, status 0x80130000, is the answer an OPC UA server gives when it has decided not to talk to you and is not permitted to say why. Part 6 of the specification is explicit about it: the Reason string in an abort message “shall … Read more
The Kinetix 5700 Power Rail: What Each Module Is, and the Order They Go In A 2198-D032-ERS4 is 55 mm wide, a 2198-S160-ERS4 is 100 mm, and the DC-bus link that joins one module to the next is a moulded part in a fixed length that arrives in the box with the module. There is … Read more
Safety Feedback on a Kinetix 5700: What SFX and the Safe Speed Functions Need From the Encoder A VPL-B0631T-W gives 512 cycles per motor revolution and a VPC-Bxxxx-Q gives 4096. Put the wrong one of those two numbers into the Motion Safety instance and the drive catches you: the DSL diagnostics compare the configured resolution … Read more
The 1756-OBV8S Safety Output Card: What a Pulse Test Does to a Contactor Point 3 of a 1756-OBV8S flashes red while its output is off, and the contactor it drives is behaving perfectly. That is no-load detection, and it is telling you the truth: something between OUT3-P and the coil has come apart. The detection … Read more
The 1756-IB16S Safety Input Card: Dual Channel, Test Pulses and What OSSD Means Channels 0 and 8 look like the obvious pair for a dual-channel gate switch on a 1756-IB16S. They are directly opposite each other on the terminal block and the wiring is tidy. They are also the one pair the module will not … Read more
OPC DA to OPC UA: What Changed, and the Tunneller You No Longer Need KB5004442 stopped being optional on 14 March 2023, and with it went the last registry value that could keep an OPC DA link alive between two Windows machines. RequireIntegrityActivationAuthenticationLevel is still sitting under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Ole\AppCompat on every machine somebody set it on, … Read more
Hardwired or Networked Safe Torque Off on a Kinetix 5700: What Each One Needs The drive is in the GuardLogix I/O tree, the safety connection shows as running, SO.SafeTorqueOff is high, and the axis still refuses to enable. Read the STO fault type over an explicit message and it comes back 104: hardwired input in … Read more
Safe Torque Off on a Kinetix 5700: Wiring the STO Connector, and What It Does Not Do One contact of the gate switch opens a few hundred milliseconds before the other, and a second later a 2198-D032-ERS4 posts GuardStopInputFault. The axis will not come back with a normal fault reset. Both safety inputs have to … Read more