Factorylink to an AB ControlLogix 5500 processor??

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Thread Starter

Roger Kredit

One of our Factorylink customers would like to move from an AB PLC5 environment to an AB Control Logix 5500 environment. We have developed several large applications for them in Factorylink 6.6 using the NetDtl task and RSlinx for PLC communications. I am looking for some input from people that have created large Factorylink applications that use the Factorylink OPC client to communicate to the RSLinx OPC server for the PLC communications to a AB Control Logix 5500 processor. I have gotten the communication working in both 6.6 & 7.0 ... but still have some concerns about the migration path.

Some of my questions include:
1) Stability of the Factorylink OPC task either on the Factorylink 6.6 or 7.0 platform?
2) Throughput of the OPC task?
3) Any short comings or snafus in the OPC environment to look out for?
4) Are there any configuration gotchas in the Factorylink OPC Environment?


Thanks
 
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Rick McMullan

The FactoryLink OPC Client has been tested with the RSLinx OPC Server task with very reliable results. The throughput would be approximately 8500 reads a sec. This was measured and tested on the FL6.5 version of the OPC Client with RSLinx version 1.70.62. I am fairly confident that with the updated features and the testing that I have done that you should see even better reslults with the current version.

The only shortcoming that I can think of is when you use the native data type from the ControlLogix processor. The AB__RAPD driver only supports that processor using the PLC-5 address scheme. I know of other customers who have succesfully communicated to that processor using the native data type and OPC. I don't know of any specific problems they had.

If you are going to use the OPC Explorer task in FactoryLink to set up your OPC Client tables in FactoryLink and you are using an Exported CSV file from the processor you will have to make sure that you define each FactoryLink tag to match the data type in the PLC as RSLinx does not pass that information to FactoryLink.

If you need further information you may contact me.
Rick McMullan
Driver Support Specialist
USDATA
http://www.usdata.commailto:[email protected]
972-497-0249
FAX: 972-669-1428
 
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