Control.com - Nerds in Control

Found the software title, "6200-2CV5". But, it is no longer supported or selling. All the software licenses we have in plant and AB products, this service should be reasonable or free. Rockwell wants me to send the PLC-2 file. They can converted for some charge. In order to send some file either via email or mail, it will be an ACT OF GOD to pass through our company policy. Can anyone can help me find a way to convert it myself? Link to a site will be okay.

There's not much better than plain old brute force. Open the file, and start rung by rung if you can't hand it off to someone because of company policies.

The bean counter that turned down the earlier requests to get rid of the PLC2, or the production engineer who didn't see the use in changing, should be shot if this is truly an emergency.

If I were you, assuming that I/O is in a 1771 rack, I would postulate the plant skip the PLC5 and put a ControlLogix processor with a "bus of your choice" card in the I/O racks and use the existing I/O with the new processor.

Of course, if you're still running PLC2s, that may be too radical a change for them.

MB

I agree, the time has come to move on... You are trading one dead horse for another. The PLC 5 is in or close to "silver status", I cannot remember. This means that the pricing goes up to "encourage" you to move.

Go with the ControlLogix and step up into the 21st century rather than the 20th.

Dave Ferguson

Davco Automation
"The Developing Automation Value Company"

Well, thanks for your response.

But you just beat the purpose of this upgrade. The reason I'd like to upgrade to PLC-5 will be $$ saving. We have spare 5/25 processors in our plant. Adding ControlLogix processor may save more in the future, but wasting in my case.

Rung by rung, huh? Okay, even though there are about 1129 rungs and not to mention, I gotta add more for remote I/O scanning, no thanks.

Thanks anyway for the response...

Do you have SPARE plc-5's when this one fails. I understand the no money thing and doing things on a shoestring, but as I said you are trading one dead horse for another.

How critical is this machine, do you have spare PLC-5's when this fails ?

In the end you have to do what you have to do buuuuut

You can choose any two items time, money or quality the other one will bulge out. So there are really no cheap, fast, and good alternatives. There are a couple of outfits, Javelin is or was one who do this and there is the AB software route which I have a copy of but it is a licensed software which I paid for (15 years ago) to convert, and as someone said on the list, it is about 80-90% depending on what you have. You will still have to go through
it line by line and fix it.

Pick two items.........

Dave Ferguson

> Found the software title, "6200-2CV5". But, it is no longer supported or
> selling. All the software licenses we have in plant and AB products, this
> service should be reasonable or free. <

Ha ha ha ha ha...... free? From Rockwell? heh heh

> Rockwell wants me to send the PLC-2 file. They can converted for some
> charge. <

This is, of course, the easiest option.

> In order to send some file either via email or mail, it will be an ACT OF
> GOD to pass through our company policy. Can anyone can help me find a way to
> convert it myself? Link to a site will be okay. <

You will basically have to print out the old PLC 2 program, and hand enter it into the PLC 5. This is a very tedious process, and some addressing differences need to be accounted for, as well as some instructions that don't translate cleanly. I did a project like this about 10 years ago, and it wasn't fun.

I agree with Michael though. If you are upgrading now, why upgrade to something that is that old of technology? Apparently your plant isn't willing to upgrade often, so I would also strongly encourage you to use a ControlLogix processor, and a network to control your I/O rack. Minimizes the cost of I/O upgrade, but still gets you at least into the proper century, technology wise. Plus, the conversion won't be any more painful, really, than the conversion to the PLC 5.

It will be ugly either way, it is just a matter of how soon you want to do it again.

--Joe Jansen

You can probably re-type the whole program much faster than pushing an approval through the bureaucracy. The PLC-2 and PLC-5 are similar enough that it won't take a lot of thinking to do the conversion manually. That is why PLC-5 was designed to be so similar to the PLC-2.

Since it's a PLC-2, the program probably isn't very big, so re-typing it is usually practical. Even if you used an automatic conversion program, you would need to check the program over rung by rung anyway, since most programs of this type are only about 80-90% accurate.

I would suggest following up this episode with a plan for long term repair and support for the rest of the machines in your plant. That doesn't necessarily mean replacing everything with the most up to date hardware. It just means writing down on a case by case basis what the risks are for each machine and what your alternatives are.

I have some software that you can use as long as you respect the license agreement etc. How can I help?

Cheers from: Jeremy Pollard, CET The Caring Canuckian!
www[.]tsuonline.com

Control Design www[.]controldesign.com
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We own a license for the AB software to convert PLC2 to PLC5. Having used it a few times, I can tell you it works pretty well as long as the guy who wrote the PLC2 code did not use a whole lot of strange coding techniques.

There tend to be some issues with the PLC2 3 digit arithmatic and BCD coding of numbers, but most things translate OK.

I think you are far better off to just bite the bullet and jump to
Contrologix as some other posters suggested. Going from an obsolete product to a product that is all but obsolete is not much of an improvement.

You could always convert it rung by rung, but that is tedious for such a large program and prone to error.

The option always exists to pay someone to convert it. The company I work for does this, as do many other integrators and AB itself. But if actually paying for this outside service is a problem, I think you are out of luck.

I'll stand by my original comment. The guy who kept it on the PLC2
platform this long should be shot.

> I think you are far better off to just bite the bullet and jump to
> Contrologix as some other posters suggested. Going from an obsolete product to a product that is all but obsolete is not much of an improvement.

--
Michael Batchelor
www.IndustrialInformatics.com
Industrial Informatics, Inc.
3281 Associate Dr.
N. Charleston, SC 29418

Well, thanks all for great comments.

Those who works in OEM, read carefully, it might really help you understand end-user's needs. I have currently 12 PLC-2 running machines, side by side at same location.

You may change 1 or 2 to control logix. The cost of this upgrade will be, not bad. That's nice but, what about others?

Now if a new maintenance person enters plant, he/she must have two different trainings for running same machine.

It is so easy to say, upgrade! Well, with this economic crisis, it is very hard to start a project with not much a return.

We have over 30+ PLC-5/40 and we'd like to use it. These processors are from one project just finished, upgrading to compact logix.

Again, thanks all

I can concede that there may be compelling reasons to convert to PLC5 over Control Logix, and having everything on PLC5 instead of some on PLC5 and some on PLC2 is certainly better than nothing. Note I suggested you "consider" bypassing PLC5 in the first response rather than saying you were nuts to want PLC5. I've certainly seen cases that I can justify using a PLC5 myself.

My particular comments were that it should not have been left on PLC2 this long. I don't know what you make, but if you don't get it off PLC2, then unless the return on the product is so low or it's so close to end of life that your company can afford to drop the product if it crashes, you've already passed the meniscus of risk vs payback in a standard risk assessment analysis. Even if you can't justify to the bean counters that it needs to be changed over, just call the company's insurance guys and let them do a risk analysis. They'll present a bunch of power point slides to the suits and it
will get approved. (The political danger there is that they'll say you, the poor guys down in the trenches begging for the change, were the idiots for letting it wait this long. Never trust the suits too far.)

I know of a plant that has a number of lines running on PLC2s, and every budget year the manufacturing engineer submits projects to change them over. Every year they get denied. But in his case, when the inevitable happens and one of those machine crashes costing the plant literally millions of dollars in downtime, his butt is covered. It's the bean counter who said "no" that will swing from the yardarm. Nobody knows when that will happen, this year? Next year? Or if there's a giant economic recovery and they're just swimming in money before it happens so they approve it before the tragedy then bean counter will look like the hero for delaying the capital upgrade.

MB

--
Michael Batchelor
www.IndustrialInformatics.com

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

IMO, the risk of converting from PLC2 to PLC5 with that many lines of code is very high. I understand the desire to try and do this under the table with existing hardware that can be reused, but even if you can do that you should make it clear there is a window of downtime that you must have to get it functional again. Without looking at your PLC2 code I cannot say with any certainty just how bad the conversion might be, but even with the software guided conversion it is not trivial. And sometimes it is not even real obvious when you have an issue.

Thanks all for response.

Again, the only solution I still feel is to get software. With old software, it converted with only minor errors. As you guys feel, I don't want to spend any money here. That's all.

So, upgrade to CTRLX5000 or Compact is out of the question. Thanks again.