Automation Tech Talk

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Industrial Automation Tech Talk from The Automation Blog

  1. 10/21/2025

    IND360 on Ethernet/IP: Using with Logix and View

    Shawn walks through adding a Mettler Toledo IND360 on Ethernet/IP to Studio 5000 for use with Compact and ControlLogix, and Imports and Tests the IND360 Faceplates for FactoryTalk View in Episode 31 of The Automation Show, Season 2. For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video. Watch The Automation Show from The Automation Blog: Note: You can unlock hundreds of “member only” episodes for just $5/mo here. Listen to The Automation Show on the Tech Talk podcast: The Automation Show, Season 2 Episode 31 Show Notes: Links for more information about Mettler Toledo’s IND360: IND360 Distributed Control eBook IND360 Industrial Weighing Solution IND360 Ease of Integration White Paper IND360 Downloads (EDS File)*** IND360 AOI and Faceplates*** *** Links mentioned in episode Programming Note: Due to scheduling conflicts, episode 31 is releasing prior to episode 30 😉 Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Automation Show. Sean Tierney here from Insights and Automation. And today on the show we’re going to integrate the Indy three hundred sixty from Mettler Toledo into studio five thousand with Compact Logix five thousand three eighty, as well as into Factorytalk View Studio. And I think you guys are going to really enjoy this. This is a pretty cool integration here, and they did a great job, I think, with, uh, providing all the files that we need to make this happen. Now, that said, I do want to thank Mettler Toledo, who sponsored this episode, so we would make it completely ad free. So thank you to them. And with that said, let’s go over to the computer here and get started and let me press the right button here. Okay. So here we are on the computer. You can see I’ve got SES links open. You can see I have well getting ready for another in-person hands on class. Um, we’re going to be doing a special here. So if you guys want to buy block of times for in-person training next year, let me know. The special price is only good through the end of twenty twenty five. So even though you don’t have to take the training until twenty twenty six. But in any case, um, what we’re going to see here is this is the PLC I’m going to use this is my Or pack. This is my uh, L368 fifty three eighty, I think I got thirty seven in it. And then up here you can see the IND three sixty shows up on the network. But it’s got the big yellow question mark. Right. And you guys all know what that is. If you’ve been watching me for a while we need to load the file now. I already have a Logix uh, studio five thousand project open, and this is the one I used for the 3D, uh, digital twin that I’ll be given to my students. Actually play with that quite a bit this weekend, trying to refine it, get it ready for students. But in any case, that’s great for those students who can’t come in to do hands on training. We’re going to give them a virtual trainer at no charge. So in any case, we’re just going to repurpose this for use with the Mettler Toledo. No. And let’s go ahead and find out a little bit more about the version here. I think it’s thirty seven. Yeah. Thirty seven. There you can see the, uh, catalog number. And so let me go ahead and close that. Now the first thing I want to do here is bring that file in. You guys know I have a shortcut on my desktop to both the editors installation wizard and the device installation wizard. Pretty much the same thing, but, you know, it’s under here on the tools as well. So the device description installation tool will open that up here. And I will include in the description the links to where I got the files I’m using today. So you don’t have to search that and worry about where to get them. You’ll find both links there. There’s one for the editors file, and then there’s another for the add on instruction we’re going to be using. And the faceplates for Factorytalk view. So pretty cool stuff. Let me just walk through the wizard here. Uh we’re going to register a single file. Let’s go browse I think I put it into my documents on this virtual machine. Okay. So empty. And there’s my editor’s file. Okay. And next. Okay. Pretty quick. Brought it right in. There it is. And we’re all done. Beautiful. So now the next thing I forgot to do is I’ve got to add that to my studio five thousand project. I just happen to know I’m plugged into A2. So I’m going to right click and do new module. After a moment it comes up and I’m going to just search on Indd three hundred sixty. Yeah. And there it is. Okay. So because we added the editors file, now it shows up here in the available items to add to our Ethernet. So let’s go ahead and create that. Okay. You can see the configuration. Of course every time we add something to Ethernet IP right. We got to have or add it to the uh to the I o tree. Right I o configuration. We got to have a name for it. So I’m going to call this empty underscore I three sixty underscore zero one. Now the important thing to note here is whatever I name the physical device I cannot give the instance the same name. So we’ll just give our AI. When we get to that point. We’ll just call it indie three sixty without the underscore in the front. Now I’m not going to give it a description, the IP address. I’m going to use the default IP address one nine two dot one six eight dot zero dot two. We talked about that in the last episode that we did on the indie three sixty, and we’re going to go ahead and click on okay. And with that done I’m just going to go ahead and click on okay. And now you can see it down here under A2. All right. So that’s all the I o I wanted to add. Now that’s great I have a unit there I can talk to. But usually you want to get an add on instruction right. That’s going to get all the information and put it together in a nice easy to look at format. Plus it’ll format it for the faceplate we use in Talk View Studio. So let’s go ahead and see about importing that in. Again I’m going to give you the links to the files I’m using today okay. So in any case I’m just going to open up my main routine. And instead of bringing in the AI, I’m going to bring in a run with the AI on it. Um, kind of kills two birds with one stone. So let’s go ahead and import a rung, and I’m going to go back to those files I downloaded and under here. As you can see I drilled down I get to this and you can see you get the AI or rung. So I’m going to bring the rung in. You got to put it on a rung anyway. So eliminates one step right now at this point it’s going to come up and say hey we need some more information here. So on the tags right. It says the instance name. Well what do I want to give this instance. So let me go ahead and select that out of there. And then I’ll come up here and do a find replace. And I’ll say let’s replace instance with what do we say we’re going to do in D three hundred sixty. Underscore zero one making sure we’re not using the same name. We gave the object the actual I o itself. And we’ll do replace all okay. So now we have a real instance names. All right I’m not going to play around with the description. You can play with that if you want. But now I have to actually tell it. Well what’s the module. So let’s go down here and we will see. We have the IND empty IND three hundred sixty inputs okay. So let me select those and we’ll do the outputs as well. There we go. All right. So that’s all good. Now let’s come down here to other components and saying module name okay. What’s the module. Where is it. There she is right there okay. Now if you look over here I have no more flags. Right. All the flags are gone. So I’m in pretty good shape. So I’m going to click on okay. And we should see it. Bring it right in here. It’s going to add all kinds of data types and custom data types, add on instructions, and all kinds of stuff that go with what you would expect with an add on instruction. You see them over there on the left, all that get added in. But what we’re really concerned with is this add on instruction block. You can see right here. Right. And I want to show you something about that right now I think mine went as a program tag. Let’s see. Yeah it went in the program tags. That’s okay. So in any case look at all of this that you get you get all these command bits right. You get all of these uh set you get status. Status is really the stuff I’m looking at here just to make sure it’s updating. So, you know, is the current. Wait, I have a demo on the scale, so I have a demo case on the scale. I didn’t want to bring in all the lentils and make a mess. So I just have a demo case on the scale around thirteen kilograms. And so, um, all of this is done for you all in the names, right? You would think a name of a function block, you know, these kind of follow those same names. So in any case, it just makes everything very, very easy. Now there’s no description over here because I didn’t change the description. All right. So I probably should have put change the description too. But in any case. So I got instance description. Of course those are all coming down from the parent. So if I change this to let’s say empty underscore I three sixty underscore zero one, then all of them change. Right. Because you can see they’re grayed out. So they’re getting they’re inheriting the the beginning of the description from above. Okay. So let’s see what we’re going to do here next. So we get that in we get the main I think we’re ready to download. Let’s let’s try it. Let’s go ahead and go to communications to active. And just waiting for it to come up. Let’s go find our PLC here. Boom I know I say still say PLC sometimes guys, but I know it’s Rockwell. It’s officially a pack, b

    17 min

  2. 10/20/2025

    Discrete vs. Digital: Automation Tech Talk for 10/20/25

    Shawn discusses how many so called “experts” don’t use the correct terminology when referring to Rockwell and Siemens Modules in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. Link mentioned in video: – Shawn’s Online Courses – Shawn’s In-Person Courses Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey everybody. It’s Sean Tierney here from Insights and Automation. And I’m trying something completely new. I hope it’s working. I hope you can hear me. I’m actually in a different room here. What I’m calling studio C, which as I’m updating all my PLC courses, I need to I needed another spot to be able to, um, film videos. And so I’m kind of looking off to the side because I need to get another monitor in here. But in any case, I hope you’re doing well. I don’t know if you guys are seeing my audio. I don’t know if you’re hearing my audio or seeing my video. I don’t know what the quality is, but hey, you get to try things out. I’m actually trying Restream instead of StreamYard because there’s some audio delays with the StreamYard that, uh, if you’re not using the webcams, audio or whatever. So in any case, I just figured I’d just, uh, show you, uh, you know, test this out. And I wanted to talk to you about discrete versus digital. I o so I’ve seen some people who call themselves experts. Of course, you guys know I train for a living. I teach, uh, you know, Allen-bradley, Siemens PLC, HMI and SCADA and, uh, you know, there’s a lot of competition out there, a lot of people saying they’re experts and a lot of them actually share incorrect information. And one of the not so, not so horrible information is shares when they’re calling Rockwell’s IO discrete IO. And of course, if you want to use the word discrete, fine. Right. I always use the word digital. And I’ll show you why I use that word. And I know even in Rockwell, there was controversy years ago, I remember seeing a, uh, a letter come out from Rockwell. I don’t know if it was rescinded or not, saying we’re going to go from one to the other or whatever, but in any case, it kind of came to mind. Uh, I was reminded of this. Let me go to my my screen here, but I recently, uh, partnered with Schneider Electric, uh, great company to cover their modicon edge. Io wants a new a whole bunch of io they came out with, and I think it’s really cool. I filmed, I think, a forty five or fifty minute, uh, episode on it. They’re reviewing it now Ensure there’s no additional graphics they want to add or anything I technically got wrong. That’s one of the things we do with our sponsors, is they can go through and say, did you cut this? Add this. You know, just just we want to make sure it’s technically correct. They don’t they don’t get the storyboard, a script, the the episode. But in any case, it was a lot of fun doing that episode. It’s again, it’s not ready to go out yet, but soon. Uh, in any case, um, I noticed I kept saying digital I o and their modules specifically say on them discrete I o. And so, um, I just noticed that the restream is putting their logo right over my face. Isn’t that nice? So let me take care. See, this is what we call about testing things. You get to test things out. And I have a very easy fix for that. No, that’s not what I wanted to do. Thank you. All right, we’ll put that over there. Okay. That solves that problem. So in any case, um, you know, and I so I’m recording the video. I keep saying digital I o and then I’m opening the boxes and they see discrete and I’m like, oh that’s, that’s very interesting. It’s a different um, they use a different name for that. And I’m like, you know, I’m curious, you know, I’m saying digital I o because it’s a Rockwell thing, right? I’m like, I’m curious, what does Siemens call their I oh, now they call their I o modules. Signal modules. Right. Which is a slight difference. So I brought up the online uh tool here with Siemens. I said let’s see. And it’s digital modules digital and analog modules. Right. So you have digital and digital digital in out. Right. I’m like okay. So Siemens is using the word uh digital instead of discrete like Rockwell. And uh, but but Schneider is using discrete and not that it’s a big deal. Again, I’m doing this part as a, you know, tongue in cheek picking on some of my competition or uses the wrong terminology with the wrong brands, but also just to test out. And we already found some some mistakes already, but with the Restream. But in any case, before buying Restream, I want to test it out to make sure it does what I want it to do. So in any case. So I’m like, okay, Sean, are you are you sure Rockwell uses the word digital, right? And I remember this letter coming out twenty years ago saying, you know, digital, discrete, blah, blah, blah. I don’t remember the detail. So I said, let’s go up and look at the latest control logics IO module, um, selection guide and or control logic selection guide. And you can see right here very clearly they call them digital input and output modules. Let’s see if we go down we see some more of these. Okay. So the IB sixteen being one of the most popular ones. So I checked around and compact logics was the same. And I’m like well let’s go back in time. Let’s check. Uh slick five hundred. Yep. Digital I o and analog io. And I’m like, how about the flex back from the early nineties or mid nineties I should say. Yep. They use flex IO digital and analog okay. And I’m like, all right. Great. So these other people who claim to be experts aren’t using the right terminology with what they’re supposed to be an expert with. That tells you something, right? That tells you something. But I’m like, can I find any instance where Rockwell uses the word discrete? Right. So I came over to the selection guide for the Micrologix digital I o. Okay. Not discrete good. So I said, you know what? I’m just going to search the knowledge base. Um, actually the literature library on ABC.com, I’m going to say let’s look for anything that has the word discrete in it, because I know I’ve seen this word before with Rockwell, and I did find a few. There’s only twenty results out of the entire, I don’t even know, hundreds of thousands of literature out there that had discrete. And so I wanted to pick out a few that relate to plc I o cards that use the word discrete. And so here we have some of the old block I o. I actually got some will be adding that in the PLC course I’m filming. I will be doing that on remote I o but the old block I o you can see this manual. And what was the year on this? Let me just go to the. Sometimes you have to go to the back nineteen ninety four. And they’re calling it the block I o discrete I o blocks okay. So that’s an example right. And then there was another one here. Right. For I o Ponyo installation instructions. They use the word discrete as well. I thought that was interesting. What year is that from? Uh, well, it was updated in twenty. It’s twenty twenty five. So. So, you know, apparently they’re okay with using interchanging the terms here and there. And then I found this old compact io um, release note that called them discrete IO module. So my question to you is what do you call them. Now I know there’s there’s like twenty. And these all are some of these have to do with um machines with sensors, light arrays and all that kind of stuff. There’s very few, probably under ten documents you can find on Rockwell’s. Um, I’m just checking to make sure the video is coming out on Rockwell’s, uh, literature library. That will refer to IO module as discrete versus digital. And I already showed you at the beginning here, you know, all the current literature and all the old literature really had a preference for digital IO and that that kind of just reinforced when I was doing that. Modern, um, video. I was like, I keep saying digital, but the modules say discrete. Where did this where did this digital come from? It’s the vast majority of Rockwell’s documentation. Call it digital IO not discrete, but I’m curious, what do you use? Do you say digital IO or discrete IO? And do you agree with me that if you’re working with Rockwell or Siemens, as we saw on their website, that you should be using the term digital? But when you’re working with Schneider, at least the edge io nts, you should be using the term discrete. And I know it doesn’t matter one bit, but, you know, hey, if I’m going to test out the studio and the mic and the video camera, it might as well might as well have something to chat about, right? This is automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition, and I thought this might be a fun little topic to talk about again. Does it really matter? No. But, um, you know, one of the things I try to do is pay attention to the different, um, vendors terminology because I don’t like getting it wrong myself. Right. And so in any case, I just thought that would be something fun to talk about. Now, I don’t know if because I’m trying out Restream. I don’t know if I’ll be able to see any chat to see if anybody’s chatted. So let me see if I can do that. Uh. I would need that. Okay, great. So I don’t see anything in the chat, and, um. Which is fine. As a matter of fact, uh, Restream seems to be a long way behind me. So if you’re. You may just be watching this now, it looks like Restream is, like, five, ten minutes behind me, which is really weird. I don’t know why they would be so far behind, but. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. In any cas

    5 min

  3. 09/17/2025

    MD-34A-DD Win10 IPC Tablet Dock

    Shawn details the MD-34A Windows 10 Industrial Tablet Desk Dock from Siemens in Episode 45 of The Automation Minute, Season 5. Listen to The Automation Minute on The Automation Blog: The Automation Minute, Season 5 Episode 45 Show Notes: The links mentioned in the video are listed below: MD-34A Product Website Previous episode on the MD-34A  Shawn’s Siemens S7 Course Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host):  Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Shawn Tierney here from Insights. And today, we’re gonna take a look at the desk dock for the MD dash 34 a Windows 10 tablet from Siemens. You remember I took a look at this I five tablet a while back, and at the time, I asked if they could send me the desk dock or docking station so that I could leave it here on the stage and actually use it because it’s a gray I five Windows PC that happens to also be a tablet and a barcode reader and an RFID reader and all these other things too. In any case, it did come in, several weeks later, and I filmed an episode. I don’t know what happened to it, but it never got published. So, I wanted to in appreciation for them sending this over and sponsoring this episode so it’s ad free, I did wanna cover. So in any case, let me first, though, take this guy out and, shut her down because her fan is running. I got it doing all kinds of cool stuff. Now I was really surprised. I turned it on and it still had all battery. Even though I hadn’t used it in months, it still had a full battery. So I really appreciated that. That’s cool. A lot of times at home, my tablet, you know, even if it’s off, it still will, drain batteries. So I didn’t like that at all. So look at that guy turned off. Now I’m not gonna do an unboxing because the, the box was just a simple cardboard box that came in there wrapped in plastic and very secure, but there wasn’t a lot to show with that, so I didn’t go and dig up that archival footage. But what I do wanna do here now is go to overhead mode, and then let me go ahead and unplug the ethernet cable and the power cable. This This is the same power cable that came with the tablet. Right? So you don’t have to go and buy that again. And let’s take a look at what comes with this, what they call their, desktop or what I would call a docking station. And I think we can even zoom in a little bit more on it. Here, let’s try. Okay. The first thing I wanted to show you is that it has these two metal pegs that make it very easy to align the actual tablet when you go to pull it in. I’m gonna go ahead and bring the tablet back out here, and we can see those two little holes there. And so that makes it extremely easy to align it up and put it in there nice and secure. Right? And so I really like that. And so that’s the first thing here, and you can see all the connections down there at the bottom. Alright. And then if we take a look at the back here, this is where we see this is where I have the power going in. And here we can see two, sorry, two USB two point o’s, not three point o’s. Alright. There is a three point o and a USB c in the unit itself. And then we have another RJ 45. This is a ten one hundred. So this is great if you’re just leaving it on your desk and, when you plug in, you wanna get off Wi Fi. Again, there’s an r j 45 in the unit itself as well, for Ethernet. Then we have the, VGA out. Like I said on the unit, it has an HDMI and a USB c, But, VGA now a lot of you may be saying, well, VGA, what am I gonna do with that? I have a lot of VGA output devices here in the studio that actually are very easy to convert it to either DVI or HDMI or, you know, display port, you know. So, 99%. I have actually haven’t found a monitor or a television that didn’t, accept converting VGA to high definition and it looks great. Then we have our serial port, which is awesome too because if you had some legacy serial device you had to connect to the computer, you know, you could do that right here. Right? So, a lot of times, you may have that if you’re replacing legacy equipment. So those are the major ports here. Now on this side here, we do get two more USB two point o’s and these are great for I I just plugged in the dongle for my wireless mouse and keyboard, but, that’s great having that on the side as well. And then on this side, there’s really nothing. You can see the front. Again, this is sturdy. It’s it doesn’t feel like it’s going to float away. Like, it has some weight to it. So when you set it down and it has rubber feet too. Let’s take a look at those. And, you know, I can zoom in too. So So I I feel very comfortable about leaving it here on the workbench and that it’s not gonna slide off. And, you know, it has enough, heaviness to it. I know some of the the inexpensive stuff you buy these days, you put it on your desk, every time you move a wire, it sloshes around. Right? But, in any case, you can see it’s the MDDash34 A Dash D D. So you can see that there. And, I gotta say, I haven’t had a docking station for a really long time. But with a tablet like this, I think it’s extremely useful because, you know, the whole point of having the tablet is that you’re going out and, you know, you need to be mobile. Maybe you’re checking on instruments or maybe you wanna just check on maybe you have an HMI or WinCC running on this. You wanna check on your, you know, and they do have a hand strap that you can get for this. Maybe you need to use the barcode reader. They also have a dock for the forklift if you’re gonna use it with a forklift. But this allows you to get out there and do what you need to do mobile. A lot a lot easier to use than a laptop. Right? Trying to juggle a laptop. But in any case and it’s aeronautic too. I know what my laptop, my, and I did a review on it, the MSI. It has some, some of its mounting feet depending on how you hold it. I’m not very comfortable. I’ll do that. I’ll do an update on that in the future, but in any case, but, you know, you get back to your desk. You don’t wanna use this little screen. And then I know if you’re like me, you want a full size keyboard and a mouse. Right? So if I’m gonna be doing any type of serious, work on my computer, I need a full none of these small ones. I need the full number pad. I need the full up, down, curses, everything. Right? All function keys if I’m gonna be efficient. And so you can do that with this. Right? So I actually plugged this keyboard and mouse in there, and it was what is you know, it was exactly as, expected. One thing I didn’t do is to see how many monitors I could put up to it. I just didn’t wanna take everything apart and see if I could hook up, like, three different monitors to it. But in any case, I do think it supports, multi monitors. And according to, the the manual for this set talking about extending the display versus mirroring. So in any case, you know, something to check out. You might wanna talk to your Siemens rep if you want more information about it. You know, if you’re thinking about, getting this and using the dock in your workspace. But with that, that’s really all I had unboxing of this desktop. I’m gonna set it up over here, and I hope to use it from now on every day when I’m doing my videos and doing our automation, Tech Talk lunchtime additions, which will be coming back. Haven’t forgotten about those, but I do have a backlog of videos I’m trying to get through by the end of the fiscal year. So in any case, and this is one of them. I mean, like I said, I filmed it. I don’t know what happened to it. Didn’t get released, so I wanted to make sure I got that out. And I got some other great stuff coming for you as well as we just had an episode of the History of Automation podcast that I’m doing on weekends with people talking about old automation products. So if you’re interested in that kinda old stuff, you know, pre February, like, you know, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, PLC five, some old monocons, and whatnot. We were talking about old TI five zero fives in a recent episode. Check that out. If you go to the automationblog.com/automationmuseum, also, automationmuseum.org should take you there as well. But for some reason, it’s not redirecting today, so I got a tech support link in again, this is common stuff that should never have a problem, but I gotta take support link into them to get that redirect fixed. But in any case, I did wanna bring this to you. I do also wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. Vendors: Would you like your product featured on the Podcast, Show or Blog? If you would, please contact me at: https://theautomationblog.com/contact Until next time, Peace ✌️  If you enjoyed this content, please give it a Like, and consider Sharing a link to it as that is the best way for us to grow our audience, which in turn allows us to produce more content 🙂 Shawn M Tierney Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator Support our work and gain access to hundreds members only articles and videos by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You’ll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com. (110 views)

    8 min

  4. 09/12/2025

    Adding IO-Link Devices to Logix: Automation Tech Talk for 09/12/25

    Shawn walk’s through adding IO-Link devices to an IO-Link Master connected to a Rockwell Logix PAC using Studio 5000 in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:  Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. Link mentioned in video: – IFM AL1322 Webpage (includes AOI downloads) – Shawn’s Online Courses – Shawn’s In-Person Courses Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey everybody. Happy lunchtime. I hope everything is going great for you today. It is Friday, and I am pretty excited about that. Planning on spending a lot of time building more of these demos, this weekend. I got all the stuff finally came in. So and then I’ll be sharing it with you over the next couple of weeks. Next week, I may have, more recorded content than live content. I’ll still try to release it at lunchtime, but, just some of the things I gotta do requires me to have, you know, to go through and do edits and whatnot. So in any case, though but I should be around almost all of next week, lunchtime, whether it’s recorded or live, I’ll be here. But in any case, I just hope you all are having a great Friday. And today, we’re gonna do part two, and we’re gonna actually set up the two devices, the two IO Link devices. I thought this would be fun. Now if you guys are having any troubles hearing me or seeing me, please put it in the chat. Everything on my side looks like it’s working. So, I’m just gonna go ahead and get started. Now I did play around with, some settings early this morning to see if I could get this to work. There we go. Okay. I I’m not a a huge fan of how they design everything, but, at least this is better than what we’re doing the other day. In any case, we’re back in Studio 5000. And for anybody who didn’t catch yesterday’s show, what we did was we added these two. Let me see if I can switch over to those. We added nope. That’s not what I wanted to do, and that has to do with the selection. You always have to select this. So let’s try it again. There we go. So we added these two devices to our ControlLogix, And we have one IO Link device here and one IO Link device here, but we already have the masters added to logic. So let’s go back here, and, yeah, I’ll click over here. And now we’re inside logic, so you can see them right here down here. Make sure you guys are seeing what I’m seeing. And, now what we need to do is get the data in from the devices. We already have it coming in as, you know, just control the tags, but this is this is not, you know, what you would want. I mean, it’s it’s the twenty first century for crying out loud. Right? We want our data, you know, to be more, massage than that. And, thankfully, the vendor, IFM, has some AOIs, and they’re in that same folder, that same download, the Allen Bradley download. They put all the AOIs in here, which I think is great. At first, I went to the actual pages for the different products, and there were no AOIs there. And I’m like, I think they’re actually in the, the starter package for Allen Bradley. So I went into there. Again, we downloaded this yesterday. I talked about where to get this yesterday. There’s the add on instructions, IFM devices. And the first device I have well, the device plugged into number, the first, IO MetLink master is, this was the RVP. So we’re looking for RXP. Okay. And so what we wanna do is bring in this. We have an eight port, so we need one that goes all the way up to eight ports. And so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna copy this path here. I’m gonna come over to our assets folder here, add on instructions. I’m gonna, input and add on instruction. I’m gonna give it the path open. We have eight port devices here, so I’m gonna use eight port, and that’ll bring it in. I’m gonna accept all the defaults when it comes in. Bada bing, bada bang, bada bada boom. Excellent. Excellent. And now I know the other one I have is a temperature sensor, TN something. So let’s see here. TN. K. A port, because that’s what I have in the field, eight ports. And bringing that out of instruction as well, except the defaults. And on just a mere moments, they both come in now. You know, you probably know you can go to this add on, you know, toolbar here and bring them in that way. Although, did you know you can bring them in like this too? Right? Which is pretty cool because sometimes it’s easier to see it here because this text is really small. Okay. So in any case, we have them in. Now let’s see if we can zoom in here now. We have to create tags for these. Okay. So I’ll just do a new tag, and I’m just gonna call this these are the AL1322. I’ll call this a. Actually, this is actually for the device. So let me call this the RVP 510. I’ll just call it a in case we have another one in the future, and then, I’ll create it. K. And I’ll do the same thing here. I might as well do that right now, and this is for our t n I think it’s a 2511 a. K. Boom. So I got the backing tags for each of the add on instructions. Now I have to give it the PLC input. This one, you you know, it’s pretty obvious. Of course, we have I named thirteen twenty two a and b. Those are the two devices, the masters out there, but you have to grab the data. K? You have to grab the data. I tried grabbing this when I was testing it early this morning. It’s like, oh, I don’t like that. I want the data. K. So we’ll do that. That’s a, and then this guy is connected up to b. K. So we’ll go over to input data. K. Port number. Now if we I don’t know if this thing will let me do this. Let’s try it like this. Okay. Good. So let’s see this guy. K. This is the RVP he’s in. And this encoder, we’ve we’ve showed it in the show before. We’ve we’ve had it on connected at, Allen Bradley and Siemens PLCs, but, we can see it’s, plugged into port one. K. This is the power port Ethernet in and out, and then this is an IoT port. And, again, we we’ve covered that in previous episodes. And then for the temperature sensor, I have it in Port 2. K. So let’s see if we can get string yard to go back to this view here. Alright. Great. And now, so this guy is gonna be Port 1 because that’s the RVP, and this is gonna be Port 2. This is, no nobody’s complaining that they can’t hear me, so that’s good. The vendor ID. So, let’s see. I do have the website up here, and let’s start with the temperature sensor. So this is IFM. So the vendor ID is always going to be 310, and this particular device ID is 582. So this is a temperature sensor. So let me go back here, and it will go 310. And what is it? 582582. And in the gradient listed in that if we search on gradient, we will see it’s point zero one. You guys see that? Yeah. Yeah, that’s on the screen. Okay. So let’s go back over to the VMware point zero one. Beautiful. Okay. Now we gotta do this guy. Point number one. Vendor ID, we know it’s gonna be 310 because it is still IFM. And then device ID. I have no idea what it is. So let’s go back to the IOD datasheet, and I think it’s at the very top. Just scroll up. Yep. It wasn’t. Here we go. Device ID, 496. 496. K. And then I’m gonna leave that all blank. Alright. So if we’ve done this correctly, this should massage that data and give us, you know, a counter, like, how many pulses per rev. I think this is defaulted to ten twenty four. And then the temperature and for whatever reason, this is even though the unit’s set for Fahrenheit, this block is showing that it’s Celsius. I did not have a time to figure out why that was. I did look through the block to see if there’s any way I could toggle it in the block itself. There wasn’t. And so, let’s go ahead and download this bad boy and see if we get it to work. Come on, puppy. Yeah. So all these limitations of StreamYard StreamYard is great for doing, interviews. Right? But, when it comes to doing things like this, I’m really struggling. I may have to go back to, restream. Yep. Put the controller back into run mode. I’ve been using StreamYard for the for the interviews we’re doing the automation museum, which will come out Monday, but, the first episode anyways. We’re recording episode four this Sunday. But, in any case so you can see it right here, and everything looks like it’s working. So let’s take a look here. I am going to turn you just have to trust me because I can’t do a split screen with this software. I’m gonna turn the encoder slowly, and we can see the counter turning up. Right? And that is now represented by a tag, not just some random data tag, but it’s actually did these go as a program tags? K. Yeah. That’s, the add on instruction. That’s not what I wanted. Nope. They’re controller tags. So here’s the RVP five ten. And we can see the count right there. See all the information about this. Let’s leave it in this view. See if you guys can see that. K. And then the beautiful thing is, yeah, it’s in the data table. Right? In the controller tags. Caught me there. Went a little legacy on you. You can see it here right on the block too, which is really nice. Right? So it just takes that data, massages it, and, makes it look nice. And then on the temperature You know what? Something happened. How come my vendor ID didn’t get put in there? Because I I thought I pressed center. Sometimes when you do it yeah. Look at it. Did I get that number wrong? That’s weird. You guys thought it was easy to live stream. 310582. I’m just joking. 310582. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Port 2. You see this? I didn’t choose the right one. Typo. You guys probably sa

    15 min

  5. 09/11/2025

    IFM AL1322 IO-Link Master to Logix: Automation Tech Talk for 09/11/25

    Shawn walk’s through connecting an IFM AL1322 IO-Link Master to a Rockwell Logix PAC using Studio 5000 in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:  Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. Link mentioned in video: – IFM AL1322 Webpage – Shawn’s Online Courses – Shawn’s In-Person Courses Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host):  Happy afternoon, everybody. Shawn Tierney here from Insights and Automation. Today is Thursday. What is today? September 11, I believe. I hope you all are having a great day. And, you know, I didn’t even know if I was gonna be able to do this, give it everything that’s been going on. Plus, I just got off the phone, actually off of out of a meeting with a larger vendor talking about their brand new IO, which I’ll be covering in a few weeks. Pretty awesome stuff. Can’t wait to share it with you guys. But in any case, if you were here yesterday, I actually ended up deleting the livestream after the livestream because I ran into an issue that something didn’t work. And I believe I resolved that. So I’m gonna try it again today. And what am I talking about? What are we gonna cover? Well and, again, if you can’t hear me or if there’s a problem with the visuals, let me know in the chat because there’s no nobody in the control room. It’s all just me. But in any case, we’re gonna be integrating these two. I have, a long time ago, the folks over at, IFM sent me in some products. They didn’t sponsor any coverage on it, and I’ve really struggled covering it. So I did cover these modules with a, with a, a PLC they sent me, and I did, cover these devices with Allen Bradley and Siemens products as dumb devices, not as IO Link devices. But I thought, you know, the automation, automation tech talk lunchtime edition, I think, would be a great time to cover some of these unsponsored products that have been piling up, and I try not to accept anymore because I’m out of room. But in any case, it’s it’s, I thought this would be a good time to test them out. And today, based on what happened yesterday, today, I’m going to try to get both of these set up on our CompactLogix. Now try to go back here to full screen. What happened yesterday was Logix kept crashing, and I believe it’s because of, Connect Components Workbench when I upgraded it and installed something that was incompatible with the version of Logix I had. So we’ll find out. But in any case, let’s go over to the computer here, and I have to do this kind of a different way because if I do it through the camera system, I do have a I do have an, request into the company, this whose software this is, and it’s not showing me the view I wanted. That’s the view I wanted. But I’m like, guys, you gotta help me make my you know, zoom in on this camera, but in any case, I won’t, bother you with that. What we are looking at here, though, is what’s the first step in getting these things to work? And the first step is where’s the web page I had up? K. We gotta go to the product’s web page, and on the product’s web page, we wanna grab a couple of downloads. Okay. If we’re gonna integrate these, IO link blocks on EthernetIP to our CompactLogix, we’re gonna wanna get the download. So this is the web page. After the fact, this is an AL thirteen twenty two. After the fact, I’ll go and put all links. And, again, I ran right over here from the meeting I just had, so I didn’t have a chance to put those links in. But any case, we wanna go to downloads. And the two downloads I needed, and I apologize if you caught yesterday’s show. I’m gonna repeat myself a little bit, but I got the Allen Bradley collection here. Right? And I also got the, NetSetter software. K. So this allows me to configure the device’s IP address. Okay. Now I don’t know if both of these are set up or not. So let me minimize that, and let’s go over to, the net set of software, which I just opened. Right? Unzipped it, and you get this error here. I didn’t show this yesterday. You gotta have a PCAP library. Now PCAP, if you’re not familiar with that, packet packet captures. Right? Capturing packets as they go down your Ethernet. Okay? So we need to have, some software that does that. So let me close that, and they they recommended two different ones. I just went and got WinPCAP. It seemed like, seems like good software. And, no. I don’t wanna start it all the time, and finish. Now let’s go back to the NetSetter, IFM NetSetter here, and let me know if I’m leaving anything out. I’m kinda did this yesterday, so I wanna make sure I’m being clear on what I’m doing here. And what we’re looking for let me go back to the overhead, and nope. That’s not what I wanted. Let’s do this. K. So these are the a l. Let’s see if I can get an even closer here, and I don’t have the overhead lights on. I feel like I’m missing a light, but in any case, let this one be easier. So you can see that this is the Ethan IP version of the a l thirteen twenty two. So I also have PROFINET versions of this, and maybe I’ll do those next week. We’ll see how things go. But I wanted to show you guys that, and let me back that out. Alright. Excellent. So let’s go back over to it it hides that view. Okay. And now we can see the net setter. Alright. So let’s go ahead and run a scan here and see if the IFM nets, and it says, the installed PCAP library has been restricted to limited to admin rights. I’m also got this security. I’m gonna get rid of that. There we go. And it says, hey. The PCAP library you guys see in this has been, restricted to to admin rights. And saying I won’t find anything pro profi profinet if it’s restricted to that. So let me go ahead and see if it’s running. Let’s see here. PCAP, when PCAP? K. Let’s run this as an administrator. K. It’s saying it’s already installed. So windows, why didn’t you find it? You always get you had to love that. Let’s go down to the w’s. There she is. Now see, I don’t see, I don’t see an executable to allow that. So we’re just gonna press on here. I don’t wanna get stuck with any of those issues. Let’s go ahead and do a scan. And I know it saw my 7069 l 30 e r, and it’s not finding these because I just wired them up. Again, I just run-in here, and so I did not put power back on. Looks like no smokes coming out. I shouldn’t joke about that. We had a fire alarm today, which also kinda threw a cold curveball in. But, in any case, Yeah. Now they’re coming up. K. Let’s see here. It does seem like it’s cutting off part of my screen. Why is it why would it do that? Stream. Yeah. What’s wrong with you? Maybe it’s just the browser I’m in. Alright. So you can see it found them. And you know what? I wanna make one of these one thirty 1, and, the other one’s already 132. So I’ll make one one thirty one, right to device, and 132. So that’s how you configure these out of the box. That’s how you would set them up. And so now let’s go ahead and, close this up and go to RSLogix. Now to save time, I, just created a blank, l 30 e r program. Okay? And this is where we were having problems before. I would right click and do new module and I crashed, but one of the things I had to do to make sure this would work before we went live is I wanted to go into the downloads and register the EDS files. K? So inside the starter package for Rockwell, there are EDS files. Right? And so what I did is I copied this path, and then I ran the EDS hardware, installation tool, or there’s another one called the device, depending on the version of software you have. There’s another one called the device hardware installation tool. Let’s see if we can find that here. Yes. See, this one has the EDS one. Sometimes you’ll see the device hardware installation tool. They they do the same thing. They just change the name to device because it can support IO Link as well. So let me go ahead. IO Link uses an IODD. Oh, speaking of IO Link, let me switch over here. They did not get the IO Link did not get the IO Link episode out last night. I’m hoping to get it out tonight. So, stay tuned if you follow the automation podcast and you look at those kind of technical presentations. We should have the IO link out tonight. So let me go back to this view. Okay? And we’re going to bring in those EDSs. Now I’ve already done this because I, after what happened yesterday, I want to make sure everything was working, but if you’ve never done this before, I just wanted to walk through it with you. Okay. And now in Logix, and I may have to close and reopen Logix. I’m hoping I don’t have to. It’s acting a little funny. It’s like refreshing. K. I’m gonna right click on Ethernet here. I assume it’s already refreshed, and I’m gonna add it in. You can see I already did it once. Oops. Yeah. It’s it’s definitely host. K. New module. K. AL1322. It’s been added as an EDS, so there it is. Create and this is where it was crashing yesterday. And what I did with and you see it then it crashed this time. Thank you. AO1322. We’ll call it A and b A, and it was 1921681Dot131. K. And I even checked the version. Hopefully, the version’s right. K. And then the next one will be I accidentally hit, add again. AL1322B. I’ll give that an address of one ninety two one sixty eight. Come on. Sometimes in VM, if your mouse goes off the screen, it stops working. +1 32. Okay. Close. Alright. So they’re both in there. And, again, just to kinda stress the point here, when I was doing that and it was crashing yesterday, you know,

    22 min

  6. 09/04/2025

    MicroLogix to Micro800: Automation Tech Talk for 09/04/25

    Shawn walk’s through converting an RSLogix / MicroLogix program to a CCW / Micro800 project in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:  Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. NOTE: There is no show planned for this Friday (9/5). Links mentioned in video: – Migration Guide – Conversion Tool Released – Conversion Tool Updated – Conversion Tool Download – Conversion Tool How To Article – Conversion Tool How To Video – Shawn’s Online Courses – Shawn’s In-Person Courses Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome to Automation Tech Talk lunchtime edition. Shawn Tierney here from Insights. And today, we’re gonna take a look at something different. We’re gonna take a look at migrating a Micrologix program to a Micro 800 program, and we’re going to do this because, I had somebody ask a question about connecting to a Micro 800 from a SCADA package. And, you know, when I did my VSC course, I did I think every Allen Bradley PLC except for the Micro 800. So I thought, you know, this would be a good time to convert my my VUSC application that I use to simulate the data for that for that course. And, anybody in my VUSC course can download that, in Micrologic, PLC five, ControlLogics, CompactLogics, multiple versions. You know, you know, I recently converted it to Siemens because I wanted to add those advanced graphical lessons to my unified comfort panel and unified, a basic panel course. So I need to convert it to Siemens, and then somebody asked me to test their SCADA package with Codesys. And as you know, I had a couple of vendors step up and send me Codesys PLCs. So I converted well, not all of it. There’s five molding lines. I wanted to do something different than a bottling line or, you know, a a widget maker. And so, I only did one molding line into the into the code Sys because, you know, I I I we all we’ve talked about that before. But in any case, needs a little love and tender love and care to the code sys, IDE does. But in any case, yes. I figured, hey. Let’s use this to convert my existing program, which I which I wrote from scratch to the micro 800, and let’s see how it goes. Now I did this this morning around 04:30. I went through it once, and it seemed to work okay. So I figured, we would do this during lunchtime. And so if you guys have any questions on this or anything, let me know. Oh, a couple of housekeeping things. There will be no episode of the show tomorrow. I’m kinda backed up trying to get through a couple of videos that I’m, sponsored videos with vendors. And, also, I have to, just get all the stuff to do with the the automation school, but I do I did record this morning an update for any students at the automation school. So that I’m gonna schedule that to go out this afternoon because I said September 4 in it. Now looking backwards, I probably should have said September 5. But in any case, that’ll come out this afternoon, and I kinda update a lot of the new lessons over at the automation school. So, especially customers and PLC courses, PAC courses over there, you wanna check that out. I did have a great conversation with a gentleman who was who knew what a Symax 300 was, so we’ll try to get him on the automation museum podcast, which is I’m calling the history of automation. I have we’ve recorded three already. History of Triconics, history of Wonderware, history of, Rocco PLCs. And these are all from people’s perspectives. This is, like, the definitive history, but, you know, it was been a lot of fun hanging out with these people who work with this old stuff, and, I really have enjoyed it. Sunday, my goal is to edit those three and, and, start scheduling them to release. They’ll they’ll come out on the on the regular channels I have now because we haven’t even funded the Automation Museum yet. So if you have a an extra dollar or 2 this month, please consider going to automationmuseum.org and making a donation. I wanna thank everybody who has already donated. Last time I checked, it’s been a few weeks, but, we were, like, 7% of our goals. So, I mean, we’re we’re you know, there’s no rush on this. The old stuff’s not going anywhere. So, and I have a lot of people asking if they can send stuff in. I’m asking them to hold on to it into their in their attics for right now, because I just I don’t and when when when they when when you get taxed as a business, they wanna tax everything that’s in in your business. Right? And so it’s hard to explain to them that this is stuff that’s for a future museum. So to avoid getting taxed on stuff that I don’t use for my business, I’m asking people to hold on to it. Now if you absolutely have to get rid of it, I do have room in my attic at home, and, I’ll stick it up there for the meantime. But in any case, you can imagine I hate their that stuff all the way up and then bring it back down later. So in any case, with that said, I do appreciate everybody who sent stuff in. And now I’m gonna try something new. I wasn’t happy with the the the way StreamYard, which is a software I use to livestream. I wasn’t happy with the way they were doing the graphics. So I’m trying to put a little bit different today. And so I’m gonna switch over, and try it this way. I hope this is better resolution for you. I don’t have as much control when I use StreamYard natively. Like, I can’t crop myself out instead of having the whole studio here, but I’m hoping the graphics are better for you. So here’s an example. And I wrote this program. I wanted it to be something that my VUEs students could understand. I don’t wanna make, like, some new algorithm that was, like, gonna win a Nobel Peace a Nobel Prize or anything like that. But in any case, I don’t know if it would be a peace prize, but some other prize. But in any case so it’s a very simple program. Basically, I have a bunch of JSRs in the main routine. So many people are used to that. I figured I would just go with that. And, because, this had to run on a Michelogix 1,000, I put all the simulation in one ladder program. Now this is the 1,400 version. I didn’t change it. I just you know, I did it all in the 1,000, tried to cram everything in there. Actually, could not fit everything into the 1,000, but I came close. So in any case, that’s why you’ll see the, the the lead numbering here of the of the files. And, I did separate the molding machines here because, you know, you only have 15. You know, I think it’s, fifteen and sixteen is your debug. So, that’s why I did it that way. So if you’re asking, hey, Shawn, why’d you do it that way? That’s why I did it that way. So this is a program we’re gonna convert to Micrologix. And to do this, I’m gonna first do a file save as, and I’m gonna save it as a SLC, a library file. Okay? Even though it’s even though it’s a 1,400, we’re saving as an SLC. It doesn’t mean slick 500. It means library file. At at one point, it probably meant slick 500 library container or something, but in any case now I have found that if you have the free software. Right? So if you have the RS Logix micro starter light, I found that that option is not in there. So you may wanna reach out to your local Rockwell rep, and usually, they have a real nice guy named the PLC specialist. That’s a job I did for twenty five years, and they’ll do that for you. Look at it just takes some you know, it’s so, I mean, we’re talking seconds. Right? So in any case, usually, that’s something I would do for my old customers, you know, over morning coffee. So in any case, I’m gonna save this. I have a folder, my VSC basics folder. I downloaded all the files just a few minutes ago, and, I’m going to go ahead and export with comments, and I’m just gonna leave all the defaults there, and voila, it’s all been exported. Okay? So now we’re ready to switch over to CCW. And in CCW, this utility used to be able to be downloaded separately. A matter of fact, I put all the links because I have covered this quite a bit. I put all the links in the description so you can see all the different links to all the articles and videos I’ve done on this in the past. But now in the mic in connect components workbench, I’m gonna go to tools, micro MicroLogix to micro 800 converter. Okay? And so and if you guys can’t hear me or you can’t see me, let me know in the chat. But any case, that brings up this little guy here. This is version five point o five. I’m in CCW version 22. It just happened to be what was installed. Okay? So in any case, let’s go ahead and choose the MicroLogix file. I put it into my I think it’s in documents, VSC basics. Boom. I have this checkbox checked because the files match. K. Those the the files have the same name. I’m gonna go to well, I happen to have here the I think I have the L24QBB. Yeah. That’s what it looks like. Yeah. So that’s what I’m gonna use there just because that’s what I have on the workbench. And we’re gonna do, okay. And I wanna thank everybody for tuning in. Guys, if you have suggestions on what you would like to see for future episodes, please contact me, throw them in the chat. Also, if you wanna come on the show and share a trick that you learned, I’d love to have you on the show. This is, my new lunchtime thing that I do to learn. You know, why browse the web and, you know, read the bad news? But I can share tips with the with you folks. And this is something I was doing anyway, so I had to do it for my I wanted to add those lessons to my VSC course. So figured, why not do

    21 min

  7. 09/03/2025

    Module Discovery and Reading IO Config: Automation Tech Talk for 09/03/25

    Shawn discusses Module Discovery and Reading IO Config in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. NOTE: There is no show planned for this Friday (9/5). Links mentioned in video: – Online Courses: https://theautomationschool.com – In-Person Courses: https://theautomationschool.com/live Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Happy Wednesday. Right? I was gonna say Tuesday. It’s not Tuesday. It’s Wednesday. I hope you’re all doing good. I hope, my mic and video is coming out okay. Let me know in the chat if it’s not. But in any case, I do want to, wish you all a great lunchtime here. And it is Wednesday, and, this is Automation Tech Talk lunchtime edition. And, feel free to chat in the, both on YouTube and on LinkedIn. And, of course, you’ll always find the audio, the video, and the transcript up on the automationblog.com later in the day. Typically, right after the show’s done, I try to get that all up there before going back to work. So in any case, today, I was gonna do one thing, and I decided to do something else. So, we’re actually gonna take a look at discovering IO, automatically discovering IO so you don’t have to crank in all those different part numbers. And, we’re gonna do it today for Rockwell. And I did have some things that, I’ve been telling myself, Shawn, you gotta kinda remember to mention some things to everybody, when you’re doing the show. So let me just pull my notes up here and bring them over to the screen right below here so I can read them. So, first of all, the idea for today’s, discussion about discovering IO, adding IO, reading IO was, based on some lessons. I’m I actually had to I found some bugs in them, so I had to rerender them. So I’ll be updating them, and, several of the courses over at the Automation School are getting updates, including my CompactLogics and ControlLogics. They’re getting the most updates today. But in any case, I also wanted to mention that I already have two industry veterans who I’m talking to about coming on the Automation Museum’s History of Automation podcast. And so I mentioned this because we already have three shows in the, in the can. We talked to experts about the history of Triconics, the history of InTouch or Wonderware, and the history of Rockwell PLCs. But, again, these are things where we want to have multiple guests on about each each product and, to share their own experiences with them. And, you know, everybody remembers things differently. Like, some people remember some features, other people remember other features, and so on. So, we have two new people who I’m talking to to get them to come on the show. And I wanna invite you, whether you’re a vendor, user, integrated OEM, if you have done something with automation before the year February, I’m just using that as a kind of a benchmark. Right? So, you know, we’re talking legacy stuff. We’re not talking, you know, fifty three seventies and fifty three eighties or a ‘7 you know, fifteen hundreds or December, or m two sixty twos if you’re a Snyder guy. But, we’re talking we’re talking, you know, older stuff, legacy stuff. The automation museum is not gonna be a museum of what just came out this this year. It’s gonna be a museum of all that old stuff. And I wanna thank everybody who sent me stuff in. I will be doing more automation museum videos on the stuff you guys send in. I got a PCMK card. I got a net alert or or net net alert, I think, device too that I wanna show off. So, in any case, thank you everybody and, for that. So what else do I have to cover here before we get started? There is no podcast today. The next podcast it takes, like, a day to produce every podcast. So, I’m taking this week off because I just got so much other else going on. The the next podcast will be next Wednesday, of course, we release on Wednesdays, and that’ll be on IO Link. And that’s gonna kick off a bunch of IO Link coverage. So, I’ve been working after hours and weekends getting all the IO Link hardware I have together built into demos that we can not only use as labs here in the office, but also to do videos on. So, we got Siemens, we got Rockwell, we got IFM, Even had a a good friend of the show send in some stuff, so we’ll be looking at the stuff he sent in too, which just depends if I can get it working at 05:00 in the morning. We’re not drinking my coffee, but, hopefully, I can. And, also, I’m looking at some really cool three d simulation software I wanna use in the school, but it can also be used as a digital twin, and it’s affordable. It’s not like the 10,000, $50,000 packages you see out there. Right? So, I’m actually been working on that, working with the vendor on that after hours as well. And a lot of things going on. We are getting ready. I just got off the phone with the vendor, actually off a meeting with the vendor. We got a exciting new, episode coming up on, OPC. And then we have another episode coming up on Ethernet push buttons. This one actually was re requested. We actually have the equipment here, but we’re waiting for the vendor to schedule that. I’m also guys, you probably remember the, military trade shows demo I have in there. I’m just gonna work through a couple of bugs, and that should be that video should be coming out. And, I actually have a major vendor approached me and said, Shawn, come and interview our folks at our trade show. And so we’re finalizing the details on that. So that’ll be in several weeks from now, but I did wanna share that with you guys. So in any case, hey. Before I forget too, and I wanna say greetings to Nicholas. Before I forget, anybody, any of you guys out there, if you’ve learned something you wanna share with the rest of the community, please just send me a message. I know we had people sign up, and then they couldn’t make a customer’s call, the boss calls. I totally get that. Totally get that. But if you are using I saw one person said he was he had created a video showing people how to use safety in a Siemens drive, and he got a lot of really, good feedback from it. I mean, those are the type of things. You know, a lot of you probably don’t even know what that video is. Right? So we wanna get people like that on the show to talk about, you know, what they’ve done and and sharing, useful tips. And I think it’ll be easier, on the audience if they’re not always hearing from me all the time because I’ve been doing this for full time now for over ten years, going on eleven years. And, so you guys you know, I got thousands of videos in Ako, so you guys know all about me. But in any case, let’s go ahead and go over to the computer. And, again, feel free to, chime in on the chat. Let’s see if I have everything set up here correctly. I think I’m in the top right. So, of course, this is a live thing right over my face, but that’s okay. I don’t think you guys see that. So in any case, what are we gonna look at? We did not wanna see my desktop. We wanted to see VMware. Okay. And I’m actually in, and if you guys didn’t notice here on the, workbench, I have an old Suck 500 full of stuff, just full of IO. And I try to pick up so many different types of IO modules for my course, which I’m filming now in the slick 500. So I wanted to pick up a a a real, you know, assortment of of IO cards. You know? And I could go in there and I could say, you know, let me type in each and every model. But one of the great things we got with the slick 500 that we didn’t have with the PLC five, now correct me if you think I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s any redial thing on the PLC five. Maybe I’m just having a senior moment, but I don’t think it existed. But in the slick 500, it did. And this also worked for the compact for the, Micrologics as well. And so what you could do here in this old platform from the nineties, early nineties, late eighties, is you could go across RSLogix 500 didn’t come out until, like, 9596. Right? I was actually I beta tested it. It was really cool. When it first came out, it was like Winlogix five on steroids. Right? So in any case, what I’m gonna do here is I got I got Studio 5000 open in the background. Let me hide that a little bit. I’m gonna go to IO configuration, and I’m gonna do something called a read IO config. K. This is, again, a feature from the nineties, early nineties. Right? And what’s what’s this work? Right? Now I do have to have the path to the PLC correct or I can’t read IO config, but I’m just I’m not online, but I’m giving it the path to where the PLC exists. Read IO config and look at that. It started off with a four slot chassis, and it was like oops. Let me minimize that. Get that back. And it was like, nope. He has a 13 slot, I guess. And look at it. I have an IB, ITB, IB, IB, IV, IV, IV 32, OBOV, NI 4, NI 4, NI four, I, NI four, I, NI four, INO4I, blah blah blah. But look at it. I read it all in. I didn’t have to type that all in. Now how often are you gonna have all the equipment on your desk before you actually create your program? Well, maybe not that often. But this was a feature I loved about the Slic 500 and the MicroLogix. And, you know, so when Rocco came out with ControlLogix and CompactLogix and it did not have this it this feature, everybody’s kinda like, bummer. That kinda stinks. Right? And so but they added it. They added it inversion starting back in version 20.011. Yes. I looked it up. And, what they did, though, is they only added it for, originally, seventeen fifty six modules. And so

    15 min

  8. 09/02/2025

    Studio 5000 Logix Designer v30 vs v31: Automation Tech Talk for 09/02/25

    Shawn details how Studio 5000 Logix Designer’s look and feel changed from version 30 to version 31 in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:  Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Coming after the show Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. NOTE: There is no show planned for this Friday (9/5). Links mentioned in video: – Online Courses: https://theautomationschool.com – In-Person Courses: https://theautomationschool.com/live Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Happy Tuesday, everybody, and happy, September. It is September now, the second, and, please let me know if the video or audio is not working, but everything’s looking great. I can actually get the, streaming out over here on the right. And, I was hoping to have a guest come on the show today. We were all set up. There was actually one that was, rescheduled, and, no guests. Now it could be a problem with StreamYard because I have seen the delay when somebody tries to join as a guest and when they actually show up in my in my web browser. I’ve, like, refreshed a 100 times, so I don’t know what else to do. But in any case, I still have something that I was just working on for my students that I figured we could talk about since the guest is not connected. So and I was really looking forward to having a Julio on to talk about his company because it just sounded really interesting. But in any case, I don’t see anything in the chat. So let me go ahead and switch over to this view. Now I’ve had many people, actually, I shouldn’t say many people. I had one person I was talking to about two weeks ago, and they said, you know, Shawn, I was taking one of your courses, and I didn’t recognize I didn’t recognize Studio five thousand. I’m like, what do you mean? He’s like, it looked totally different. And I’m like, well, that’s not good. And so I’m going back, and I’m like, I think I know what happened. So some people work with only new products. Right? So they’re only using the latest and the greatest version of the software, and I’m like, wow. You know, that that that’s not me. I’ve been using RS logic since beta. Right? And so I’m like, wow. So some people make it that, you know, look and feel shock when they, when they, use the latest version and then go back a few versions. So I thought, you know, I did an update a lesson. I just rendered it for my students, and I figured we hey. Since we had a new show, again, he could still connect if he wanted to, but I figured, hey. Let’s cover that. We’ll call this, Studio 5,000 Logix Designer version 30 versus versus 31. And so what I wanna show you here is I actually have version 10. Now to save time, I typically will will often not install one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Right? And so and some of those versions don’t exist. Right? So in any case, so this is what, Studio 5,000 Logix designer, a k a RS Logix 5,000, if you didn’t know. This is what it looks like, brand new program. This is what it looked like the version 10. 10 is the first version that supported multi, multiple installs or what they call side by side installations where you can install ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen and so on. Before that, you can only install one, kinda like everything else that’s come before it. Like, you can only have and and you guys correct me if I’m wrong, but, typically, you can only have one copy of Microsoft Word installed or one copy of, you know, most any application, Excel or Premiere Pro or whatever you’re using. You can’t have two installed at the same time. It’s kinda annoying, but because Logix is has to be lockstep. In other words, you have version, let’s say, a version 16 in your controller. You have to have version 16 to program that controller, unless you wanna upgrade the firmware, which why would you wanna do that? It’s long. It’s complicated. No reason to. Right? And so I like this idea of side by side installations, And, people used to complain a lot when it first came out that it could take 500 megabytes to install a new version because it’s a lot more now. But but with hard drives so big, like a terabyte, two terabytes, three terabytes, you know, what’s the big deal? Right? So in any case, rather have the feature because you only have to install the versions you’re working on. Right? If you have sixteen, twenty, and, you know, 34, those are the only three versions you need to install. So in any case, here we are. To me, this looks like RS Logix 5,000. Let’s compare it to version 20. Okay. Well, this is this version 20 is for my course. Okay. If you could see this, they look pretty similar. Okay. Except I got extra routines here, but look at look at the look and feel pretty much the same version 10. Right? You see there’s extra stuff in there. Some things have been renamed. Okay. If you look at the toolbars, very similar. I know on the above one, I went, I went and did this, so I didn’t show you that. You can see the path. I don’t know why it’s up there now. It used to be down here. But yeah. So version 10 and version 20 were looking very, very similar. Right? And so now let me go ahead and migrate this to version 30. And, I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on all this. Okay. Version 30. Of course, it can’t be an l one if it’s a version. Notice that’s one thing this the old versions. Right? So let me change because you used to be able to do the version in the controller as two separate steps. Right? Okay. So see, this will only go up to 63 because it’s version 10. So let’s let’s see what happens. Let’s just try. We’re just experimenting live on the ear here because we had a, a guest not show up. So let’s see let’s see what happens. And it could crash. That’s okay. It’s just the lunchtime edition of automation tech talk. If you guys have questions or thoughts or ideas, things you wanna share, please, post them in the comments. Unfortunately, today, because I’m in the classroom working on new lessons for my students, I do have to go and get back to the METTLEDO, the episodes I’m filming. I ran into a little glitch with that, so I gotta do some research. But, in any case also, I was playing with some IO link early this morning over coffee. So it’s gonna go from l 71 from an l one to an l 71. Sure. That’s great. I get an l 73. You can’t see it’s off the screen here, but I have an L73 my L73 s back here. I was just, had the camera. I had to pull it over because I had the camera up to it to, you know, the to show the I wanted to show the analog testing the analog and digital out. So in the trainer, as opposed to in the in the, you know, what it would look like in the, classroom. So we get a warning here. Let me switch back. I I know I often forget to do that. There’s no control room. It’s just me. I’m doing it all. But in any case, so we’ll convert that. So we we just established here so far that version 10 or version 20, they pretty much look almost identical. Right? So that’s good. That’s good. So if you’re using 10 or 20, you’re feeling pretty good. Again, minor minor differences here and there. But let’s go ahead. I wanna make sure I open the same one. Okay. Now let’s take a look at version 30. Okay? Still looking pretty much the same again. These these are two different programs and not the same programs. One big thing you’ll notice here I know this throws some people. I don’t know why. Program tags were renamed parameter and local tags, and it’s much better because now you can use what used to be program tags in other locations in your code, you know, which is great because you can make them parameters, like, in our parameters. Right? And local tags, of course, would be very much similar to what program tags were. And it’s all good. You know, version I mean, looks similar. Right? This is 30. This is version 30. Okay. Let’s look at the toolbars. Right? Everything you know, slight coloring differences, I think. Yeah. Right? So thirty, twenty, and 10, they all look really practically identical. So now let’s compare 30 to 31. Boom. Oh, well, this is actually 34, but this you you won’t see a difference between thirty one and thirty four. And this is where Rocco did a graphical, refresh with 31. And now look at all these icons. They’re all, like, kinda new looking and fancy versus the old icons. Again, two different programs. One thing that is different, kind of a major difference is this assets folder. So if you’re in 31 and up, you’re gonna have an assets folder, which that stuff you should just be all here in the main tree. Right? So, yeah, it looks a lot newer. Right? You can see instead of gray, it’s kind of this dark blue. K. You see that? Get rid of the arrow windows. I should just close them. But the toolbar is a lot different as well if you look at the toolbar. K. So one thing that gets me is I’ve been going here for well, since the product came out in the late nineties for controller properties. Now it’s over here, and it’s smaller. I’m getting older. It’s out of the sea yet. So in any case, I I, that’s one thing I don’t like that they did. But, hey. You know, they may have a good reason for it. Also, these drop downs here are now over here. Look at that. Interesting, Except for, you know, all these lights now move to the left. K. The biggest one gets me is control properties, and the other one is verify project or verify controller. Verify used to be pretty easy to see. Now it kinda looks like controller properties. It’s like, well, not as

    13 min
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Industrial Automation Tech Talk from The Automation Blog

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    Insights In Automation
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2025
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