NI OPC Server for Allen Bradley PLC

[mew211]

Hello,

I am trying to grab some data from an Allen Bradley SLC500 PLC over a Data Highway (DH+) network and pull it into LabView 2017 for datalogging.  Our PC (Windows 7) has a 1784-PKTX card to interface with the DH+ network.

I have NI OPC server 2016 installed, and it seems like it supports communication with the 1784-PKTX card.  I have successfully used Allen Bradley's RSLinx software to confirm that the PC can see the PLC on the network.  I got to this point by installing Allen Bradley's drivers for the 1784-PKTX card.  The problem is when I go through the card configuration with NI OPC server, with the same settings as I use in RSLinx, it doesn't want to see the 1784-PKTX card.  I get the following error:

Failed to locate PKTXChannel1 of card PKTX0

I have tried several different channel settings, station address numbers, etc. without any luck.  Is there a specific driver I need to be using for the card aside that is different from the Allen Bradley supplied driver?  Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Matt

[elcalverado]

Hi Matt,

I found a KB on Kepware's website that addresses this problem. Since the way NI OPC Servers works is similar to KepserverEX, the solutions listed in this article should apply to your problem as well:

Received Error Message Failed to locate PKTXChannel 1 of card PKTX0

One of the steps specifically mentions that you should not have RSLinx installed. Let us know if any of these work!

-Jordan

[mew211]

Jordan

Thanks for the reply.  It may take me a few weeks to get to this but I will surely let you know if anything works.

Matt

[mew211]

Jordan,

I tried this on another PC that never had RSLinx installed, and still no luck.  I'm getting the same error message.  One thing I have realized though is the drivers for the 1784-PKTX card are drivers I downloaded from Allen-Bradley.  When I try to install the DH+ drivers that came with NI OPC Server 2016 (the ones that look similar to the Kepware drivers in the link you sent), Windows won't install them.  I see in the Kepware documentation that the DH+ driver isn't compatible with 64 bit machines, so this might be an issue (I'm running Windows 10 on a 64 bit machine).  Also, when I right click on the NI supplied driver and try to force it to install, I get an error that the digital signature of the driver can't be verified.

Am I creating problems by trying to use the driver that came with the Allen-Bradley software?  At the moment, this is the only driver I can get to install.  In other words, do I have to use the driver that comes with NI OPC server to make this work properly?

Thanks,

Matt

[Sil.VI]

Hi Matt, 

It is a great point your comment for the 64-bit compatibility, do you have access to a computer with the system requirements for the software to run on ideal conditions?

[mew211]

Unfortunately I don't have access to a 32-bit machine.  Also, I'm trying to "future proof" this LabView application, as we're required to keep our PCs up to date.

Does anyone know if I need to use the drivers supplied with NI OPC server to make OPC server properly communicate with the 1784 PKTX card, or can I use the Allen-Bradley supplied card drivers (that seem to be 64 bit compatible) and make this work somehow?

Thanks

Matt

[elcalverado]

Matt,

How does the card currently show up in device manager? The DH+ channel help specifically mentions using the KSE_PKTX2000 driver that is found at C:\Program Files (x86)\National Instruments\Shared\NI OPC Servers\V5\Drivers\Allen-Bradley DH+\KSE_PKTX.inf. It seems like you will need to use this driver, although if there are bitness compatibility problems, that may be an issue.

Where did you see that this driver is only supported in 32-bit systems? Also, do you have Windows 10 secureboot enabled? This will sometimes prevent older drivers from being able to be installed. You could try turning this off or googling for other ways to disable driver signature enforcement.

[mew211]

Thanks everyone that helped on this.  I wanted to update with what I found to be a workable solution.  First, after a lot help from NI tech support, we determined with certainty that the PKTX card driver that comes with NI OPC server will only work on 32 bit machines.  I was told that installing a 32 bit version of Windows 10 would work, however we didn't want to go this route.

Instead we purchased a seat of Allen Bradley's RSLinx OEM to use as an OPC server.  Note that RSLinx Lite that is the freebie version does NOT support OPC server capabilities even though the menu options are there for it.  We bought the OEM version which enables OPC communications with multiple devices.

Now with communication established to the PLC through RSLinx OEM, and an OPC server set up there as well, it was very easy using the OPC example in LabView 2018 to pull data in from the PLC.