Welcome to EtherNet/IP Driver for Communication to Allen Bradley ControlLogix PLCs

[dazach]

LV executables install other dlls that are required, do know why this one would be excluded.

[BlueCheese]

My hunch is that your other driver DLLs get installed as part of the "Additional Installers" settings in the installer. This driver does not yet have the full support to appear in that list to be installed as an installer dependency. For other drivers this would be a bigger problem because they have many more DLLs and installer pieces (not to mention other dependencies) that must be installed to work right, hence their need to actually include an additional installer rather than just installing a DLL inside of the LabVIEW installer.

Eric

[RichardJennings]

Hello,

I have a couple of projects with immediate use for these VIs, however I'm having difficulty understanding correct usage. I am currently reading and writing to a MicroLogix 1500 using an Automation Direct OPC server via DF1. There has been no problem with communications but I would like to remove the extra piece of software. I have downloaded the drivers and am able to read data using EthernetIP SLC500 Read Float and Read INT, but am not able to read and write to Booleans. Using the VI "EthernetIP Tag Read BOOL.vi" returns the following error when I try to read the tag B3:0/4

Error -251723772 occurred at EthernetIP Tag Read BOOL.vi;
Details: The tag name is not correctly formatted

Possible reason(s):

Ethernet/IP Industrial Protocol: (Hex 0xF0FF0004) The tag name is not correctly formatted

Can you help me with the correct format?

Thanks,

Richard

[BlueCheese]

Hi Richard,

The Tag Read/Write VIs are for Data Table Read/Writes which I believe only the ControlLogix and similiar support (the ones programmed with RSLogix5000). For the MicroLogix you'll want to use the SLC500 Read/Write VIs on the same palette. Currently though they only support accessing integer and float register files, not binary, so you'd have to alias some of your data over to the integer register file via some simple ladder logic or other fashion.

Let me know if you run into any other issues,

Eric 

[RichardJennings]

That severely limits the usefullness of these VIs. Modifying the PLC is not an option.

[BlueCheese]

Richard,

I prototyped adding support for the Bit register file as well. I'll try to see if it can be pushed into an updated version shortly.

Eric

[JF3M]

Hello Eric,

Is it possible to include string arrays in a future version also (for ControlLogix)?  I noticed all arrays seemed to be supported except string arrays.  I tested a way to make this work using the RAW format, but it is kind of a pain and hard to document.

[BlueCheese]

Hi JF3M,

You are correct that string arrays are currently not supported. This was because strings are not native types but rather structures and the array handling is slightly different. We could certainly look into it in the future. In the meantime, could you simply either:

a) Iterate through the array indicies and read/write each string in the array individually

b) Call Read/Write in parallel on all the array indicies you want to read

It seems like either of these solutions should work and (b) is only slightly less optimal than if we did it in a single operation.

Eric 

[mjo]

And just to step the challenge up a notch, hows about including access to the PanelView/ Panelview Plus HMI's  as well (that would be a neat feat).

Cheers

Martin 

[AJJ]

I'm in the stages of designing a CompactRIO system that needs to exchange data back and forth with a ControlLogix PLC and I found this thread.  I have a couple questions about this driver:

1. When I talked to NI support they indicated that the only way to get a CompactRIO CPU to communicate over Ethernet would be using OPC, but based on what I've ready here that doesn't seem to be how this product works -- is that correct?  Does this use OPC behind the scenes?
2. My system would need to be able to read one block (~500 integers) on the PLC and write back to a second block (~500 integers) -- no problem doing this with your driver, correct?
3. Any ideas how fast I would be able to read/write these blocks?  I was hoping to get about 500 ms updates -- we've done this with communications between a Windows PC and the PLC (using our own C/C++ driver, nothing to do with Labview), but I haven't worked with CompactRIO or Labview before.

Thanks,

AJ