Every PLC and HMI tutorial on plctr.com: project setup, ladder and structured text, communication, troubleshooting and commissioning, written from the plant floor.
A one button start and a one button stop written as separate rungs both end in OTE Motor, and the second one wins every scan, which is why the panel lamp flickers at scan rate and the contactor never pulls in. Two things fix it: an ONS or OSR so the press lasts one scan, … Read more
A 1734-AENT on a remote I/O rack stores its chassis size in non-volatile memory, and the user manual says in as many words that the chassis size setting is not communicated to the adapter during a connection request from the controller. Download a project with the new rack in it and the adapter you just … Read more
On an S7-1200 or an S7-1500 there are four places a function block can keep state that is not in its instance DB, and every one of them makes a second FB instance of FB_Valve share memory with the first. The report is always one of three: valve 2 opens when valve 1 is commanded, … Read more
A spare CPU firmware mismatch looks like this: a new 1756-L83E ships at firmware revision 1.xxx, and a project saved from Logix Designer v33 will not download to it until the controller is at some 33.xxx. Those two facts sit on the same page of the ControlLogix 5580 user manual, and between them they are … Read more
An optimized block on an S7-1500, or on an S7-1200 at V4.x, is created with a 100 byte memory reserve, which is room for 25 Reals of new Statics before a download in RUN has to reinitialise the instance DB. Whether an S7-1500 interface change makes the load preview put “reinitialize” against the block is … Read more
A UDT holding a STRING, eight REALs, four DINTs and four BOOLs is 140 bytes, and the Data Type Editor in Studio 5000 prints that number under Data Type Size before you have written a rung. Fifty of them in a PLC recipe UDT array is 7000 bytes and one base tag, and that last … Read more
A GET on a CPU 1511 that reads from a CPU 1214C and comes back with ERROR = 1 and STATUS = 8 has almost always been refused by the 1214C, and the 1214C has no code in it to blame. Two settings on the partner decide whether PUT and GET ever return data, and … Read more
Siemens gives you a Retain checkbox and a published memory budget. Rockwell gives you neither. Here is what each one really keeps, and how to check it.
A 1769-IQ16 takes 8 ms to see an input. Here is the counter module that will not, the quadrature arithmetic, and where the pulses actually get lost.
Read process gain, dead time and time constant off one bump test, then enter them in the units PIDE actually wants instead of the ones the PID wants.
Pick between TON, TOF and RTO, find out what retentive actually covers on each platform, and stop losing an afternoon to a timer that never times out.
Store a ControlLogix project to a 1784-SD2 card, pick the Load Image setting you need, and what an upload or a card restore will not give back at 3am.