If there is an answer to this question outside the walls of GE I hope I can find it here.

I have a fairly extensive control system, 13,000 I/O points, for a Special Bar Quality Steel Mill. It is controlled, primarily by 7 GE UC2000's. The UC itself is great but my problem is that the original Level 2, Process Data Collection and Analysis) system is all but useless to me. The data is collected intermittently, if at all, and
no standard SPC tools are available without transferring tons of data by hand. We decided to try to extract the information ourselves and build our own tools but so far haven't been able to communicate directly with the UC (PLC/DCS). I haven't been able to pry a driver loose from GE and no one else seems to have anything that will talk to it. It has the capability of communicating with a Cimplicity system (as long as the appropriate add-ons and drivers are installed) but the delays in that configuration make real-time analysis impossible.

The included protocols on the UC2000 are: Ethernet Global Data, Ethernet Modbus I/O,
Ethernet SRTP as well as GE's Genius (Serial) bus and DLAN+ (ARCnet). I've tried several drivers for these with no luck. If anyone has tried this before or has any ideas for what to try next I could use the help.

Paul Butchart
Qualitech Steel SBQ, LLC
[email protected]

 

You might try Lookout, www.ni.com/lookout. They have a free evaluation CD with GE drivers and with Modbus TCP. The software executes fast and is really easy to use.

Todd Johnson
Interspace Electronics

 

It sounds like you have tried GEMIS tools for the Cimplicity system and have found some delays. The biggest issue with real time data is the UC2000 is the communications hub for the OC2000 and the drives. So the ethernet update is last on the priority coming out of the box.

What specific data are you trying to get at in the drives and on the system. If you are using a VME rack to hold the UC2000 the possibility is to use a Genius Horner card to send signals out the backplane and tie into some standard driver in most systems. This would take some UC programming but should be straight forward move blocks etc..

The UC is powerful but doesn't let in too many outside drivers because it is a drive controller. Drive controllers need to maintain consistent update times for all processes.