Hey gang, I've used "consumer" compact flash cards rather than purchasing the "industrial" compact flash cards on AB Logix processors before, and they work fine. But I'm noticing that as life goes on I cannot find the smaller size cards at places like Wal-Mart or office supply stores.

I also know that some of my older "consumer electronics" equipment (an old camera and an old voice recorder - yea, I'm a Luddite) pukes if I stick a 1GB card in it, much less the now common 2gb card. Has anyone used the 1 or 2 GB CF cards on AB controllers or Panelviews? Where does it break? Or do they seemed to do OK with the newer ones, too? I just cruised the electronics section for a job I'm working on this weekend, and 1GB was the smallest thing I could find in three stores.


Thanks,
Michael

--
Michael R. Batchelor
www.ind-info.com

Industrial Informatics, Inc.
3281 Associate Dr.
N. Charleston, SC 29418

843-329-0342 x111 Voice
843-412-2692 Cell
843-329-0343 FAX

 

Best bet might be to cruise to Pricewatch.com or Egghead or some of the big 'puter places and see it they've got NOS in the size you need. Make a one time buy of what you think you'll need, the smaller sizes are really cheap now, but they will go away as the consumer market runs entirely on volume. I've had the same issues with small hdds needed for some old DOS and Plan 9 applications. It's getting to be a crisis. The old apps are working fine and the replacements are garbage, typically on Windows which is nowhere near robust
enough for jobs that may go a week. These "upgraded" systems are my biggest problem lately.

Regards

cww

 

It's too late, actually. I'm out of the plant, and the customer just gave up on the desire. Basically it was a last minute idea that they asked for Saturday night.

We ordinarily won't use anything except AB cards in an AB processor. Not because I'm so hyped on making AB rich, but because if I have to guarantee it, I'm not putting my name behind the Wal-Mart in house brand. I did get an email from a guy who claims he's used 2GB SanDisk cards successfully, but they weren't available at Wal-Mart Sunday.

Honestly, if the SanDIsk hardware works, the Wal-Mart hardware probably also works. (it might even be made in the same plant.) But I'm not willing to risk $1500 in travel expenses and liability for two days of downtime using a $20 card.

MB

 

In reply to Curt Wuollet: I assume the problem with the hard drives isn't something simple like just making a small enough partition, or you would already have tried that. On older x86 PC hardware though, the PC BIOS was usually limited to reading only the first 1024 cylinders of a hard drive. This is a separate issue from how much disk a particular version of DOS FAT can address. Newer computers use a different addressing scheme which gets around this problem (although you are still limited by the DOS FAT size).

I had a similar problem with not being able to find a small enough hard drive for an old STD bus system, and we were able to just partition it to use the first part of the disk. The rest of the disk was unusable, but that was of no significance to us. Your partition editor needs to let you work in cylinders/heads/sectors though, rather than just doing everything automatically. You might have to put the drive into a newer computer to partition it, and then transfer it back to the old one for formatting and software installation.

I haven't used Plan 9, but problem may be similar for it. Linux fdisk will set a Plan 9 partition type code if whatever partition editor Plan 9 usually uses isn't suitable.

Note that for cylinders and heads, the number of cylinders/heads which the hard drive claims it has may not match the number which are actually in it. The hard drive electronics takes care of this though, and you just have to deal with the logical number (and not the physical numbers).

With regards to the CF cards, it might be worth while trying to read a working AB CF card with a PC to see if it is readable. I understand that AB uses a FAT16 file system (I haven't verified this) that can only write into the root directory (no subdirectory support). If it is a FAT file system, you should be able to read it. If it is something else, a partition editor might be able to identify it. If the PLC doesn't like the larger cards, and if the CF card is set up as a conventional file system, it might be possible to partition it to something the PLC will accept (see the above on hard drives).

 

I suppose you're right. It does feel better spending $1500 in travel and assuming liability for a $200, $20 card. :^). For some reason they never get mad at AB.

Regards

cww

 

I've even seen a couple that use an unknown OS or RTOS, only safe way is to read or write an image from/to the raw device and see if it works. Sometimes the read or write just runs off the end of the device. I'd like to see someone Ghost those. dd with a count will often work for those, but you still wonder what you've got.

Regards

cww