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