serial communication - weighing machine

First what is your problem?, you don´t have the software, don´t have the cable, or what? I assume you know what protocol is, and if you have any experience in C, you would make a simple program to communicate with the port. please detail your problem... Carlos
 
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Frank Grygier Specter Instruments

> I have got a digital weighing machine, it is connected to the com2 port. I want someone to help me in reading the data from it. > Look at a product called Omni Server. It allows you to develop serial protocols very quickly. the data is available to DDE aware applications. Frank Grygier
 
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Chiron Consulting

i have an application where i read digital weigher weight and fault data from a serial port. what do you need? what does the data stream look like? what do you need to do with the data when you get it? Greg Goodman Chiron Consulting [email protected]
 
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Joe Jansen/ENGR/HQ/KEMET/US

I am sure many others will tell you this as well: You need to provide a *LOT* more info if you are going to get any assistance. ie: What brand of scale? Is the communication protocol published? Or do they make you buy their special software? What do you want to use to talk to it? VB? Excel? Some strange HMI software? I am probably not the one to answer your questions, but nobody will be able to help without providing some idea of what you are using. --Joe Jansen
 
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Burda, Jason M.

I asked this question several months ago and did not get a response, so here is your *LOT* of information, maybe someone can help. I have a mettler-toledo scale using a Jaguar control unit that talks through the serial port to a PC running a WinWedge DDE driver to dump the info to an SQL database. Problem is that the driver does not always work well. I would like to take the weight into a PLC or to my cimplicity database directly. JMB
 
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Jeffrey W. Eggenberger

You should probably be consulting the manufacturer, if the company is no longer in existence, then the best you can do is make an attempt to "kludge" a program together. As far as the error codes, who knows? Jeffrey W. Eggenberger Electrician: Industrial, Commercial, and Residential
 
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Gilles Allard

I did a few projects where a Jaguar was connected to a PLC. We used Profibus-DP (the profibus interface is optional on the Jaguar); it was a "plug-and-play" exercise. If you want to get that data into cimplicity, I assume you are using a GE plc. Check their Profibus interface. Gilles
 
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Joe Jansen/ENGR/HQ/KEMET/US

According to their website, the Jaguar unit does have a non-proprietary protocol that can be used to communicate serially. If you can get a hold of a copy of this protocol (they have links to their app engineers, who are usually pretty good at giving this info out), you can write something up to talk to it. I recently completed a training class on the Omron CS1 PLC processor. The CS1 (and the older C200) processors support what is called a protocol Macro. This lets you pre-define several different strings that you can fire off through the serial port to trigger data events, and get the results back for parsing in the PLC. Others that I work with here have used it and swear by the ease of setup that this provides (NOTE: That is a BIG hint if anyone from Allen Bradley is listening!). If you are not in a position to use one of the Omron units, it is possible (but not nearly as easy) to use serial comms in ladder with an AB. If you get a hold of the comm spec and cannot get the ladder working, let me know and I will try to put something together and post it on the PLC Archive (www.plcarchive.com). If you get it going, feel free to post something there yourself! ;-} Hope that this helps! --Joe Jansen
 
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Ioserver has an ASCII Driver that allows users to extract data from serial port or TCP/IP and present these data to OPC or DDE Clients. Our users have used it to extract data from a variety of scales, weighting machines and ASCII devices. To dump the data into SQL you would have to write VBA code in Excel or VB. Cimplicity have an OPC Client interface so there should be no problem getting the data into Cimplicity. You could use our OPC Gateway to transfer the information from the scale to the PLC via the SNPX serial protocol or GE Ethernet protocol. You have not mentioned what PLC or PLC protocol you are using. Regards Philip Wong [email protected] http://www.ioserver.com/ > I have a mettler-toledo scale using a Jaguar control unit that talks through the serial port to a PC running a WinWedge DDE driver to dump the info to an SQL database. Problem is that the driver does not always work well. I would like to take the weight into a PLC or to my cimplicity database directly. > > JMB
 
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> I have a mettler-toledo scale using a Jaguar control unit that talks through > the serial port to a PC running a WinWedge DDE driver to dump the info to an > SQL database. Problem is that the driver does not always work well. I > would like to take the weight into a PLC or to my cimplicity database > directly. You are currently talking via a serial port; nothing in the online Jaguar description I found implies which protocol you are using, and your post says only that you're using WinWedge, which I understand to be a configurable parser for serial bytestreams. In what way is it not working well? Is the serial datastream unreliable, or is the WinWedge bad software, or are you having trouble pumping a lot of data through a DDE connection? According to the information at the following URL http://www.aut.sea.siemens.com/networks/prof_int/newprod.htm#METTLER "Jaguar features an open system architecture allowing upward enhancement as your application grows or as technology changes. Simply select the appropriate interface cards, or standard software options, for your application. The Jaguar supports connectivity for one or two bases and has built-in networking to tie multiple indicators together providing simple connection to a PC or PLC. Features exclusive TraxDSP(r) for superior vibration rejection and noise suppression eliminating plant vibration. Direct PLC connectivity through analog signals, Allen-Bradley's RIO, PROFIBUS and Modbus+ enhance its application in process control environments." What I get from this is that your ability to get data from the Jaguar into Cimplicity or a PLC is a function of which interface card you have in the Jaguar, and which protocol drivers you have for Cimplicity and your PLC. (For instance, Cimplicity can talk Modbus+.) It also appears that you might be able to wire an analog output from the Jaguar to an analog input on the PLC. I'm not sure I've told you anything you don't already know, but maybe this helps. Greg Goodman Chiron Consulting
 
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Mettler Toledo offers a software data server called "MTConnections", which is windows, 95, 98 NT and 2000 compliant. With MTConnections you can attach to Mettler Toledo instruments; Panther(serial), Cougar(serial), Lynx(Serial), Jaguar(ArcNet or Serial) or JAGXTREME(EtherNet or Serial) with PC and then use the "MTConnection Active X's" to put this data into a "container" like Cimplicity. Or let the MTConnection data server automatically dump the data in a "flat file", and read it through a spreadsheet or database program. Incidently MTConnections supports data xfer using microsoft "COM" and "DCOM". For more detail go to MT.COM
 
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