Shawn discusses the Fifth (and current) Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition:

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.

Links mentioned in video:

- Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-1/

- Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-2/

- Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-3/

- Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-4/

- Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Hope you are all doing well today. Please let me know if you can hear me and see me okay. Everything's looking good on my side, though, so I hope you're off to a great day. I was I had a, actually, a special guest scheduled to come on today.

But at the last minute, then a customer called, and, he had to go out and do a sales call or a service call. And, yeah. So these things happen. I mean, I would like I was telling them, customers come first, and, lunchtime tech talks come second. That's always the case.

But in any case, we hope to get him back on. I didn't put all his information in the show because I know, you know, these these kind of folks, you guys out there are very busy, and, you can't make every show. So I also wanna say hi to Rob in the chat. We have the chat coming in from both, YouTube and, LinkedIn. But when I reply, like, hey, Rob, it only went to YouTube.

So in any case, okay. Rob confirms. Thank you, Rob. You're like my producer today. In any case, let's go ahead and get in today's show.

The first thing I wanna do, though, is let me click here. And I am offering this is a a special for, well, we're almost in fall now. Right? So I'm offering a special. I'm gonna offer any viewer of the show, and you can give this to somebody you know because I know a lot of you are already experts.

A lot of people watch this show are already automation experts, so you would not need this. But you can gift this to one person. It is a, a 20% discount on any of my courses that are $99 or more, and, that is, that goes for the bundles as well. And I do this I always do this for returning customers. So let's say a student takes a PLC course, that he wants to take an HMI course, I always offer a 20% discount to on their next course.

And, of course, they can always upgrade to the bundle for the difference in price. But I thought, you know, I wanna do something. You know? This show is only a couple weeks old, so I wanted to do something, special for you guys who found the show here early. This not only goes for those who are watching live, but also for those who are watching after the fact.

All you have to do and you can see here the automationschool.com. I got the email you can use. I got the voice mail. I got the you can actually submit a form to send me an email if that's easier, and you can even book a time. Now this also applies to, group enrollments.

So a lot of people don't know this, but I work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and we enroll, you know, five, ten, 20 people at a time. There's an additional discount off of the sale prices when they do that. And so we'll also have that 20% off just to get started for anybody who has a group. Now a group is three or more. Some people like to say a group is two.

Two is a peer. So, like, we we we did clearly have a group of three or more more students. But in any case, we work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies in, actually, for for going on a decade now. So in any case, you'll see somewhere here I have all the logos of all the different companies. Actually, I think it's on the course pages.

That said, I wanted to show you guys something else too. In, the automationblog.com, you guys now move this to a new server. You know, we're having a little, you know, moving pains. You know, some things are working great. Some things are are, still, still working on.

Every once in a while, I have to talk to them about some speed issues. But in any case, of course, this is your free resource for over 2,000 articles of videos. And I wanted to show you, though, what this show will look like when it's done. So here's the, show from yesterday. So we have the video.

You can watch here. Right? Then you have the audio. Right? And this is the automation tech talk audio, so I rebranded the automation news headlines.

And then I've been you know, it takes an hour or two to get the transcripts, but these are actually pretty good transcripts. Much better than what you get from YouTube, because you have a little time stamps and everything. And so this is more conversational. So I've been trying to do this for the automation podcast and, this show, and it's so far, it's going well. Cost this does cost extra, but, in any case, if we could get you guys, you know, if you ever missed the live show and you wanna catch the replay, you could do it on YouTube.

You can do it on LinkedIn, but you also get that full, nice, easy to read transcript. And I know some people would rather read, especially first thing in the morning than than watch. So in any case so with that, let's get over to what we're gonna talk about today. This is the backup plan I had here. Let's go to present mode.

And so what I'm showing here, we're gonna talk about the fifth generation of CompactLogix. And what I'm showing here are free pro PowerPoint slides from Rockwell. I spent a whole weekend going because I had this rush order come in. A vendor wanted me to go teach their, their, customer how to program their PLCs. Right?

And I was like ecstatic to do that, but I I had to spend the whole weekend, taking all kinds of slides and putting them together. I wanted to give this the customer something that they could keep, something that wasn't something that was free to the public. Right? So in this case, Rockwell gives these slides away for free, and, they're all copyrighted by Rockwell. But in any case, you can call your Rocktell, Rockwell distributor and ask for a copy of these.

Again, if they have any good people left, they'll they'll have this archive like I did. I have, I don't know, twenty five years archived before I started my own business. But in any case, I was just sending somebody, so we do the Automation Museum podcast over the weekends. Haven't released any episodes yet, but I've been sending the guests when they come on. They're like, you know, I wish I had something on this old product that that old I've even helped companies.

They're like, oh, I can't find this old manual. I'm like, yeah. I got it. So in any case, I I did I did, post this for those of you in my compact basics course, CompactLogix course over at the automation school. I did put the this up there in appendix a so you can grab a copy of this.

But if you're not in my courses, just ask your Rockwell rep. If they're worth their salt, they'll have all these presentations free from Rockwell. But I thought we had used this. I thought it would be good because all my you can see behind me let me go back full screen here. You see behind me my, all my, you know, high end or, actually, every one of my CompactLogix except for the one, two, and three generations I showed you earlier in the series, they're all wired in the trainers here at the automation school.

And, again, we're we're good to do four, five, six, seven people. If you wanna send them in, we can actually do up to eight people if you wanna send them in to learn Logix or s seven. We can also do the HMIs. But, you know, you wanna definitely in the falls, the Berkshires is a great place to visit. And, we have within three miles all the major hotels.

Just go to automationschool.com forward slash live. You'll see all that. Plus, we get the Norman Rockwell Museum. We have Jim Jiminy Peak. We have, Mount Greylock.

But in any case, let's get back to what we're talking about here. And, let's see. Wrong one. I wanna be up there. Okay.

Great. Where The Berkshires is about an hour east of Albany, New York. It's officially in Massachusetts, and I'm in the center of The Berkshires in Downtown Pittsfield. So, actually, this building used to be an old paper mill. So in any case and it houses a, a newspaper now, but I don't know if they print here or not.

In any case, thank you for asking where I was located. And, the automationschool.com forward slash live, I got links to all the attractions, links to all the nearby hotels, Hampton Inn, Holiday Inn, you know, all the big ones you can think of we have within three miles of the site. And, you know, one of the things I do that, you know, of, and, you know, that, you know, big corporation can't is, you know, if you wanna learn Siemens and Rockwell the same day, I can do that. Right? The other thing is, if you wanted to start at, like, twelve noon because you wanna drive in, like, I've had people drive in from Pennsylvania.

You know, if you wanna drive in from some place that's four or five hours away, we can start at twelve, 01:00 and then finish the next morning, right, or do two or three days in a row. We also not only have the physical trainers, we also have factory IO. I'm a factory IO reseller. So if you blow through all those, we've got even more. And trust me, you won't finish all the factory IO in a day.

That's for sure. So in any case, back to generation number five of, CompactLogix. And this is a '50 three eighty. Now, again, I wanna I think it was Dean yesterday who said that the fifty three seventies, the l twos and l threes, were just recently marked as active mature. And at the time, I was like, why would they do that?

...

Shawn discusses the Fourth Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition:

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.

Links mentioned in video:

- Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-4/

- Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): So I wanna welcome everybody. Happy Monday. I wanna welcome you all too. Sorry if we get some echo. I'm actually here in the, really the, the foyer, the the kind of the you know, where you walk into my offices.

And today, we're gonna talk about the CompactLogic's fourth generation. I do wanna wish you all a very happy Monday morning. And what you see here is the METTLA Toledo trade show demo from well, I I expect it'll be an automation fair this year and other fairs as well. I wanna say hi to, I think it's Jim's the the because of the setup, the screen is very far away. So but hello to everybody who's watching.

So in any case, this is what I'm working on next couple days. I gotta get this all up and running and do a video on how to set it up and use it, and I just thought it would be really fun. It's a rate control application. So, the the scale feeds into the I n d three sixty, and then no matter how much is left in there, it keeps maintains a steady rate out. So it should be pretty cool, but I'm looking forward to getting that set up later today.

And I was here, so I figured, well, let's just do today's automation, tech talk lunchtime edition from the foyer. Again, I apologize for any echoes you're here. Last minute mic setup change. So I'm wearing the lavalier mic, not the the headset that I was hoping to use. But in any case, let me know if you guys can hear me okay.

If everything looks good on my side, make sure you could see me okay. What we're gonna do today is the generation for oh, I know what I wanted to say. Tomorrow and I believe it's tomorrow and Friday, we have special guests coming on to talk to us about their companies and, what they've learned, recently in automation. So this way, you guys don't have to always just wait to hear from me. And what I've learned, you can hear from other people, and I invite all our audience to also, thank you, Jims, to also, you know, come and join up in, a ten day a ten day lunchtime, automation tech talk with me.

Because, you know, I I'll tell you what. I learn every time I go somewhere or visit somebody or talk to someone, I learn something new, and, I love learning new stuff too. So I wanna invite you all to come on the show. Now with that said, let's see if everything's all still set up correctly. And to do to switch to make the switch because I'm here in the lobby, I'm gonna have to do it like this.

Okay. Great. It looks like it's working. Okay. Let's see here.

Alright. Alright. Excellent. So we're talking about the CompactLogic's fourth generation, which is also known as, the fifty three seventy line. So we talked about on the first gen, we talked about the fifty three twenty and thirty, then we talked about the fifty three thirty one, 32, and 35.

We talked about the fifty three forty three and forty five, and so now we're on the fifty three seventy. And I gotta tell you, this, I thought, was a great product launch. I gotta remember, I'm using my my webcam now, so, don't put my hands in front of my face. But in any case, yes. So I, you know, I thought it was such a great product watch because if I remember correctly, they all came out at the same time, the l one, l two, and l three.

They all have the same features. Now this presentation I'm using is a free presentation from Rockwell. You should feel free to call Rockwell and ask them for a copy, and, they should give it to you. But in any case, I did take this compilation that I've been putting together for some training. I did make it available in my CompactLogix course.

So if you're in my CompactLogix course, go to appendix a. It's the first item up there that you download this compilation. Again, all the slides are free. What I did is I spent over a day going through them and taking out all the good slides and try to put put them into one one collection. But, again, every all the source material is free from Rockwell.

So with that said, let me see if I can find my mouse here, and let's jump into this. So like I said, there were three of these released. Three in this one series, we had the l one, l two, and l three. And these address a ton of the complaints from the previous I mean, the improvements are just awesome. First of all, there's some commonality with all of these that, that, you know, they all have, you know, internal capacitors.

No more batteries. They all have a USB port. No more serial port. They all come with an SD card. No more having to buy a 100 doll explain it to the boss why you have to buy a 100 or $200 Rockwell Compact Flash card.

Right? And so I think those things alone are awesome. Plus they all had a built in two port switch. Now you can't not with these guys. You can't use that that that's just one IP address.

It's a switch. It's not two independent ports, but still very cool. The l two and l three, as you can see here on the screen, supported, the seventeen sixty nine I l, and the l one supported point I l. And the l one was much less expensive, and, you know, it just addressed all the issues we had with the l 23, but in any case, that we talked about earlier in the week. So the l one specifically, you can see it here.

We have one in the training room. I'm not I didn't I decided to do the presentation and not and not rip everything apart in the training room because that's just a lot of work. I figure we could you know, in fifteen, twenty minutes with the presentation, we'll cover everything we need to know. But in any case, it's supported up to two axes of motion. So caveat there.

You know, this is not gonna be, you need a an m version, like an l 18 m, right, or e r m to do a motion. Right? But, it was things that you could do to point IO because that that's so much less expensive. You can only have, I believe, six six modules four or six modules. I have to look that up.

I think it's in here. But in any case, you know, you could get point out with eight point inputs and eight point outputs. So, really good. I covered all this, you know, status indicators. The it didn't have a key, Although, who cared?

Right? Nobody cared. You had the toggle switch on the front, and, you know, the amount of distributed IO you could do on the Ethernet was limited. But still, if you just need, you know, perfect for a new OEM, you need a maybe an HMI and a couple of VFDs, a great, great little controller. And, I was a big fan of it.

I wish they would still do the starter pack with that because that was a great deal too. Then we had the l two. This is and I'm using these I'm specifically using these nomenclatures because this is what we use, to talk about them. You know, the l 23 is the l 23. When I say l one, l two, l three, we're talking specifically about the fifty three seventies.

And, again, I I don't know why they did the slide this way, but I would actually have have named this one the fifty three seventy one that is actually on the module itself on the side. And I would have called this fifty three seventy two. Again, that's exact that's on the module. But But I maybe they just wanted to show, hey. This is all one family, so they just call them all 53 seventies on the individual slides.

But long story short, this is just like the l 23, but a lot smaller, has removable compact flash. There's no serial only version. They have Ethernet. And, this one's motor up to four axis if you had the m version. You know, you could get the built in high speed counter if you wanted.

So in any case, a huge upgrade from the l 23, and then we had the l three. So this replaces your l 35. And and, really, in most cases, we replace your your l four because we're not using Sarcos anymore. We're doing sip motion, and, you can get this this comes in several different sizes. So if you need lots of, servos, you need lots of modules, this guy would do it for you.

Now there is a version of this that they that has no stored energy. So, you know, we have this capacitor backup that's in the model in the unit, so we don't need to have a battery. But, what if you need to have no energy in the thing when it's turned off? Right? Like, let's say in our mind or you're in a explosive environment that when you turn this off all power has to drain, there could be no stored energy.

And so they do because it's not removable like the l seven. They do have a version of this that will not have that capacitor in there, in which case, you're gonna have to reload from the SD card. Right? So, in any case, you can see here just such a jump up from the l 35 e. Again, the ports are on the bottom.

Here's a picture I took of my units. So on the left, you have the l two, and on the right, you have the l three. So you can see the ports there on the bottom of the units. Okay. Now this starts going in the Compact I Logic I o again.

You guys probably already know all about this, but I left this in here for the students who are maybe brand new to this and wanna learn more about this. I did just so the students know, I do have one of these units in the school. I'm getting ready to do some labs on it for you guys. So maybe we'll even do some, some tests. We also have point IO on a on a actually, I should say IO Link on point IO as well.

That will be have some coming up labs. So in any case, if you guys are not in my compact course,...

Shawn discusses the Third Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition:

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.

Links mentioned in video:

- Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-3/

- Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome to Automation Tech Talk, lunchtime edition. I hope you're having a great day. And, I ate my lunch early, so I'm here ready to go. And I just wanna welcome everybody who's joining.

I can see people joining up, and, please feel free to leave comments as you go. And, somebody asked yesterday why I wasn't covering a particular product. I've never heard of that product. So I wanna invite that person to come on the show and tell us all about the product. And I wanna thank everybody who's actually reached out to me about coming on the show.

We had some very interesting guests that are gonna come on and talk about what they're learning and what they're doing. That's all about what this lunchtime show is about, you know, just sharing what we learned. And because I have the kind of disarray in here, I'm going over the generations of CompactLogix. And today, we're gonna look at generation number three. Now you can always watch this if you're not available during lunch.

I know some people can't get to the computer at lunchtime. That's okay. You can always watch the replay. I'm also releasing this as an audio podcast. I've renamed the old automation news roundup news headlines podcast automation tech talk, and, it's also being put on the blog.

And if you're one of those morning readers and you can't watch a video, I'm also putting trying to put every, transcript up there now. It costs me extra to do that, but I'm trying to get those up there. It costs extra to get it, but it's a really good transcript. It's not just like the the captions you get on YouTube. So, not that it's a 100% correct.

It's all AI generated. But in any case, it's nice for those people who wanna read about, what, the video instead of watching the video. Right? In any case, with that said, I hope you are all doing well. I'm just checking my mic, checking my video.

Everything looks looks to be working on this side. Again, if you're seeing not seeing something working, let me know in the chat. Otherwise, I'll just talk the whole time and not know that you can't hear me. So in any case, the first thing I wanna do, though, is let's see if I rearrange this correctly. Yeah.

So I wanted to show you where I wanna try to broadcast from tomorrow. So tomorrow, I'm gonna try to use what I'm gonna call Studio C. So I get this studio set up for, you know, recording my lessons, And so there's not a lot of room on the workbench, and there's a lot of other products I wanna cover besides what's on the workbench here. So that's why I'm, trying to get this set up. I don't know if you can see.

Probably can't. I got a Monoclon PLC on there. And so that will be Studio C for shop for, closet. It's kinda like the you know, when you were a kid, you might had a if you went to a small school, you might had a a cafeteria. This is kinda like the closet slash storage closet slash three d printing area slash studio and, slash tool room, etcetera, etcetera.

So in any case, with that said, also, if you have any questions on what I cover today, if you're enrolled in my course over at the automationschool.com, I did put a link in the description. Please feel free to ask them. I know I probably won't cover this, this new guy as much in the new course as I did in the original course, but don't worry about that. If you have the original course, you get the new course. And if you end up buying the new course, you'll get the original cost.

So there's a big you know, over the years, a lot changes, and it doesn't seem to make sense to go back. But, of course, I can always add lessons. So I had somebody ask me the other day if I could add a lesson, I added it. So, that's what being a full time instructor, that's makes it easy for me to do. So in any case, let's go ahead and go to the overhead cam here, and this is where I'll need to put the old glasses on.

And we can see the, third generation of CompactLogix. This is the l four, commonly known as the l four x. This particular one I picked up, on the secondhand market was a, l 43. I, did check with some distributors to see if they wanted the pot with their demo cases. They did not.

So I I'm sure they are collecting dust dust in there in there or sitting at some customer site in collecting dust. But in any case, this actually came in two different flavors. There was an l 43 and an l 45. And a lot of people don't know this, but this is actually like an l six in a, in a, CompactLogix form factor. So and you don't know.

A lot of people never use these, but they were very powerful, bringing that, control CompactLogix ControlLogix down to the CompactLogix. So, some of the things here, let's just look at the, look at the unit first physically. This is the only CompactLogix that had a left hand bust or left side bust, and we'll talk about that all more in a minute. But the right side, we still used our regular old 1769. Okay?

And then in the front, for whatever reason, they put a cover over the CompactFlash slot. Okay? But this is a good cover. It like, it's not like the l 71. The first l 71 I got or l seven I got, I broke the latch because I was pushing down so hard.

My finger just kept going and broke the, and broke the little tab. So I actually took it off my l seven I have here for the training room because, I don't want anybody to break it. But in any case, this one's good. This is not like that. This is very, very good, easy to open and close.

Don't know why they put it in there. Maybe they had to meet some kind of spec, and it was sticking out farther than what it does on the, the ones we looked at yesterday. But in any case, and just like the l three x that we looked at yesterday, gen two, these units had a, serial port. The key, they changed the key. Not a fan of this.

So the new key they had on these guys, and I I don't have one out. Probably should've got one out, but it's like a hollow key. It's a plastic hollow key. And so you may if anybody knows me, knows I keep a PLC five and a and a six five hundred ControlLogix, key on CompactLogix key on my keychain. And the reason is because, you know, I've driven someplace for three or four hours just to get there to see the PLCs in a hot run.

And I'm like, do you guys have any PLC keys here? And they were like, no. They're like, well, you just wasted four hours. Now eight hours because I gotta drive back home of my life because you don't have a key. I mean, that's like saying, you know anyways, help us with a computer, and you don't have a computer.

Right? It's, like, ridiculous. Anyhow, so that would that memory was buried pretty deep there. In any case, these keys, I had one on my key chain for a while, but it broke. It's just it was a cheap plastic, and it was hollow, and it broke.

And so was not a fan of the key. Again, if you just leave the key in there, it's not a problem. But in any case, I I again, I don't know why they changed to that key, but I would have preferred if they would have stayed with the same key. I know tolerances would have been a little tight, but maybe they could have moved it over. I don't know.

But in any case, that key doesn't return in any other product that I know of. So that's good. And I wanna say hi to the folks who are saying hi in the chat. Hi, guys. Alright.

So what else do we wanna talk about this? This did have a default comms button. Now we talked about how with the, first generation, that default comms button, right, it just erased, what was there, replaced it with the defaults, and we actually tested it. Right? And so that doesn't change here, but what does change, because this does not have a battery.

Woo hoo. This doesn't have a battery. That you can use that default comms button to reset the memory. Right? So if you hold it down while you're powering up, you reset the memory.

Yeah. So that's cool because, like, with the other, controllers, we just took the battery out and waited, and, we lose, sometimes you do as this, as capacity you would short. But in any case, with this guy, since there's no battery, thank goodness. And that was a big problem with the l six. Now this is based on the l six.

Right? But the l six, you know, they that battery they were using in the l six was designed for the l one, right, which didn't have a lot of memory compared to the l six. When you get to the l six and, you know, the memory is four or five, ten, 20 times bigger, a 100 times bigger, the battery wasn't lasting very long, maybe a couple of weeks. And that's not enough if you ship it a machine overseas. Right?

So, you know, of course, people would not put the contact flash card in, and then then they would have a problem. They'd have a machine with no with no program. So in any case, with the l four, what they did they decided to do was, do something very similar to the Micrologix 1,000. If you remember the Micrologix 1,000 that came out in '94, it didn't have a battery because it had a built in EEPROM slash flash memory on the circuit board, what we call nonvolatile memory. And when you power it off, a capacitor just held the memory long enough so it could transfer over to nonvolatile.

Never had to worry about an EEPROM. Never had to worry about, a battery. And so that's what they did with this unit,...

Shawn discusses the Second Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition:

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.

Links mentioned in video:

- Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-2/

- Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Automation Tech Talk lunchtime edition. I had a little, issue earlier, so I watched the replay. Everything looked great. So, again, I wanna thank you for hanging out with me at lunchtime.

I also wanna thank those folks who've reached out to me about actually being a guest on the lunchtime show. I really appreciate that. And, you know, it's it's nice to actually hear what other people are doing. Right? And, we got some pretty cool guests lined up.

I I also have some vendors who, maybe they're not ready to sponsor an episode of the podcast, but they just want to, tell us the cool things they're doing. And so, inviting them on as well. Just trying to share everything I've learned and share help people share what they've learned over the years, during lunchtime, right, when we all get to take a break from all the serious stuff trying to make money to pay the bills and all that. So in any case, with that said, I had and and I'm assuming I guess I'll just delete the original five minute livestream, because, things didn't seem like they were working. So I got a couple things I was talking about in that livestream.

Number one is that that big box in the middle of the training room, that is, some hardware for the add on lessons I'm gonna be adding. I have a lot of different hardware here from all kinds of different vendors, and I will be adding those as bonus, lessons add on lessons to the courses. So if you're in in any of my level one or two do I still have the automation school up? So if you're in, my level one or two courses, level one and two courses, I should say that correctly, over at the automationschool.com, you will get those, add on lessons at no charge. And, plus, there's some other courses you're gonna be getting at no charge as well as I kinda mix things up, and and I think I covered that over at the automation school and the updates for each of the courses.

Also, I ran across somebody on Reddit who was looking they're like, you know, what do I need to get started? I'm like, hey. Lesson one zero two in all my courses is free and all my PLC courses, and it tells you everything you need to know to get started programming PLCs, software options, hardware options, demo options. So if you know anybody looking to get started and they don't know where to start, like, how much does Rockwell software cost, and is it free, and can I get a free demo, and, you know, how about for Siemens, and what starter packs are available? I cover that all, and I make that lesson free.

Because quite honestly, I don't want anybody signing up for a course and then be like, you know, I didn't wanna do a simulated PLC. I wanna do a real PLC, and I can't afford it. So I want everybody to know upfront what the costs are. For a lot of people, it's not an issue. They get a bunch of PLCs in the software at work, so and they're gonna do it at at during their lunchtime.

But in any case, I did wanna share that with you. And, now I wanna talk about the second generation of, CompactLogix. Let's see here. Yes. CompactLogix.

This is where I gotta put the old glasses on. And, let's see if I can go here. Okay. Great. And so let's see if I can zoom in.

I don't wanna zoom in on both cameras, just the overhead one. And so you might be asking, Shawn, why do you have all this hardware in the test stand? That's because I am filming the new twenty twenty five courses. So, I got a lot of wiring to do, but but, you know, there's no getting around that. So we talked about generation one.

Let me see if I can slide this a little bit. Maybe four. So not sure. Don't push it off the table. That would be bad.

Okay. So if we look at these three controllers let's see here. Maybe I can move them this way a little bit. Okay. This is what we call the second generation of CompactLogist controllers.

I don't know that Rock will ever call it that, but it's kinda makes sense because you can see these are all very similar. Right? And they all came out around the same time after the, I don't and I I just can't look at the camera with everything appearing backwards to me and make them straight. But in any case, these were the three options. Now this first guy, you know, I had some OEMs buy these, and they were very unhappy because just the speed of the serial ports.

Yeah. It was great. You had two serial ports. One that could be connected to, you know, an HMI, and the other one one could be for programming. But it was just really slow.

So, yeah, you can muddle through some online edits, but uploads uploads and downloads, you know, for the impatient northeasterner like me, it was kinda tough. It was like, yeah. You know? We used to call those, coffee downloads. You'd go grab a cup of coffee while it downloaded and hope nobody pulled the, and then you had to flash the firmware, of course, you had to flash everyone.

So flashing the firmware via serial is a very dangerous prospect because if anybody breaks the connection, you could end up with a brick, an unusable, PAC. Although these days, that I think Rockwell has figured out ways to resolve that. I think one of the ways they do that, and don't quote me on this, but talking to product people over the years is they put, like, a basic firmware on the unit. So if the firmware is corrupt, it'll just load, like, one dot x, which is just like a stub. It doesn't can't really program it in one put one dot x.

But in any case, so this is the l 31. And let's see if I can get a little closer here. You guys can see that. And this is I don't know if you can see it on there. Let me take a look at it myself.

It should say somewhere on here 5331, but it doesn't. I'm sure it says it somewhere. Let's see. Let me find ah, there it is. Okay.

I found it. And again so you can see it on the label right there. If you can't see it, no worries. But, in any case, 50, 50 331. There was also a 53, 32, and 35.

I think I have both, both of these are 30 fives. Right? So the difference between I would have to fix this backwards thing. It's killing me. The difference between the '32 and the 30 fives are just memory, how much IO they can support, but there were also of the thirty two and thirty five, there were also control net versions and Ethernet versions.

Now they kept the because US they didn't have a USB port in their PLCs at this time. They kept the serial port, and and serial ports are great for, you know, serial ports are great for third party products, barcode readers, ASCII. You could do d h 45 with them and all that good stuff. Right? But in any case, you know, it would be better to have USB.

Right? And the new the new gen threes had US gen four had USBs. But in any case, what else do we have here? So a lot of people get confused with the control net. So the control net's unique because it has the control net ports coming out the bottom.

Now the l 35, c, but it's actually a c r because it had two control net ports. The l 32 c only had one control net port, so you couldn't do redundant media with that guy. But in any case, control net really confused a lot of people. It was very easy to use, but the software cost quite a bit of money. Right?

And so RS networks for ControlNet was expensive, and I think that's what eventually led to its downfall, plus Ethernet just became you know, Ethernet's built in every laptop. You didn't need an expensive ControlNet card. Right? So in any case, I think control net, was very fast. If you're running Ethernet at 10 meg or control net at five meg or even Ethernet at a 100 meg and control net at five meg, control net was so efficient that you could really do this get as much data through.

However, ControlNet was scheduled. Right? So that you were scheduling the data to show up every so often. Kinda like how your RPI is off in the backplane when you put IO modules in the backplane. And, I always liked it.

I always thought it was easy. A lot of people would try to make their own cables and, you know, the, coax cables, and, they wouldn't do a good job. I went to some places where they're like, this piece of lousy piece of junk keeps falling off the network when you open up. And first of all, they have this the coax, r g six coax, and it's going into, like, a a one one or two inch, one and a half inch piece of pan to it. Right?

And it's, like, making a right turn. Right? And it doesn't doesn't bend radius to these things. Right? And so it's going and a lot of times it would be right at the connector.

I'm like, oh, I want I wonder why your why your network's in a minute. Here, let me try it. You shake it and it'd be like, oh, on, off. It's like, really, you gotta have some common sense people. And so a lot of times, engineers don't see inside the, panel that, they just order a panel and expect it to come in work.

And so, you know, sad but funny now after the fact, but a lot of people would get upset because, you know, they would self crimp their connectors with not using, you know, the expensive tools, a $100 tool, a $150 tool. They go buy a $5 tool and expect that the work and last forever. And it's you just kinda wonder, you know, what kind of stresses they have in their life. They actually think that because, you know, if you're doing professional work,...

Shawn discusses the First Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition:

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.

Links mentioned in video:

- Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-1/

- Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey everybody. Hope you can hear me. I'm trying something a little bit different here. Welcome to automation tech talk lunchtime edition, and, I hope you guys can hear me. I hope, you can see me because I've changed everything around.

But, because I have all the equipment here for my new twenty twenty five courses on the workbench, and I don't have any of the other studio set up for what I want to cover today, I decided to cover generation one of the CompactLogic. So I'm just gonna look over here. It seems like audio is working. Okay? It seems like the video is okay.

So in any case, feel free to say hi in the chat if you're watching. But, lots going on here. I just had, three vendors send in, samples for me to look at. Actually, one is a trade show demo from Automation Fair, so I'm looking forward to, covering that. The other is a brand new line of IO.

Very exciting. And then the third are some Ethernet push buttons. So I hope to have more about that. Plus, I have, more boxes of stuff donated to the automation museum. So, just so much to cover in the coming weeks and days.

And, but in any case, one thing I do every day too is work on my courses, not only, answer questions, but also work on my courses. And I'm getting ready to update them all for 2025. And I just wanted to say if you are already enrolled in any of my Compact Logics, whether it's level one, level one, two, you get the new cost for free, so don't worry about that. So in any case, today, I wanna talk about, though, is the first generation of CompactLogix because a lot of people have never even seen them, not even know they exist, but have never seen them. And, just some real interesting stuff here.

And, let me first show you with the, overhead cam here. Let's see if I can do this. Do I still have audio? Yep. Okay.

So, in any case, you can see here, this is the l 30, and I'm actually connected through a serial port. I'm using a USB, a USPS rev three from Rockwell that I bought years and years ago. And, let me see if I can zoom in on that. You can see I don't have everything wired up for the new courses yet. So, be spending some nights and weekends doing that.

But you can see there, I have one of just my, sample program in there. This is the one I use. If you're in my VUE course, you'll be very familiar with this program. But in any case, with all the molding simulators, code in there and whatnot. So but I also wanna get on here.

I'm just gonna stick it off top of the Polysplike, the l 20. And in the description of today's show, I have an article I wrote years ago that kinda detailed some of these things, but the l 20 was the very first CompactLogix to come out. Now I had sourced its release to late twenty I'm sorry, late two thousand or twenty zero zero in any case. But, but, you know, whether it came out early two thousand one or late, February, you know, that was almost directly after, like, a year after the ControlLogix l one, the 5550, controller. So pretty quick.

And, this, unit came in either a single serial port or dual serial port. Now the, the, l 30 I have written down here is, came out the following year, okay, about a year later. And so if we look at that, I mean, it may have been six months later, but, I have one coming down at, one coming out in February, one coming out in 02/2001. And these were known. I'm trying to get close so you can see the label there.

This one was known as the 5320. See it up there? And this one was and I know it's hard to see because it's at a different level there, but maybe it'll zoom in better if I take it off. 5330. And so we talk a lot about fifty three seventies and fifty three eighties.

Right? But this is where that whole nomenclature, began way back when. And, yeah, so 25 years old, 24 years old. And, there were some interesting things about that. Now first of all, this guy had no removable memory, no SD card, none of that stuff.

It did have a battery in here. Oh, that's noisy. See the battery in there? And I believe this is the same battery we were using in the slick one hundreds. I'm sorry.

Slick five hundreds, the seventy forty seven b a, but I think it was had a seventeen sixteen maybe a 17, 69 b a one. But I'm not gonna take it out just to see it. I always leave them unplugged because they would just go dead. So screechy. You can see there some of the pinouts on the side of the unit.

And, you know, the one cool thing about them is is kinda like the the original ControlLogix. This particular unit had built in a EEPROM. In other words, there was a flash or EEPROM equivalent soldered to the board, and so you could actually store your program internally. So if the battery died or if you get a lightning strike and a power surge, sometimes that'll make these guys forget what their program is, then you would have, you still have your program there. Now a lot of times, people would make changes to their program, and they would forget.

They would forget to, to update the, the internal memory. So but, hey. That's gonna happen with every PLC that has flash or, you know, removal of memory or, you know, built in memory. Now the problem with that was that, you know, OEMs typically like the lower, less expensive version of the controller, like, for instance, CompactLogix versus ControlLogix. And without removable memory, how do you how do you set them an update?

That was one of the big problems with the l 23, but that's the next generation. We're not gonna get into that. But still, it was a great it does take a long time to download the serial at nineteen two, which is kinda what everybody defaults to. A serial at '21, I'll tell you what. It I was really annoyed because I had to download it to reset some things, and I had to download it again to change some things and so on and so forth.

So, it was like, I actually brought the air conditioner in here because it was getting so hot with the lights on. I'm like, how long are these downloads gonna take? But in any case, in the days of Ethernet, serial just is so hard to go back to, but, it works. And, in any case, so these guys were very interesting. Now the l 20, besides only having a single serial port, it has no isolated ports.

Right? So if you want to take the communications out of that serial port, maybe you wanna do d h 45, you definitely have to go through an AIC plus to May to give you an isolated port because NEC says you can't have a network that runs to your POC that's not isolated. Okay? So if this port's not isolated, then you need an isolator, and the AC plus is the ice isolated link coupler, I think, or something like that. Anyways, so, that was one of the limits of the l 20.

The speed uploading and downloading to it was a limit, and they picked up something from the from the, Micrologist guys, this port reset. Right? And we'll we'll take a look at that in a minute. But, this channel zero default button, it wasn't a toggle. It was a reset.

A reset channel zero settings, it didn't toggle them. Like, in the Micrologix, it toggles between default and what you had to set at. So if you had to set at d h 45 or a modbus, you press the button, it toggles back to d f one full duplex. You press it again, it goes back. Well, not on this guy.

It kinda, like, erases it. And we're gonna test that out, but that's what that's what the manual says, and that's been my experience. But in any case, so no removal merit memory, only serial, I e very slow. And then this guy only could do the l 20 can only do eight modules where the l 30 could do 16. L 20 can only do one extra bank, so two banks total.

The l 30 could do three banks. So if you had a very narrow enclosure, and and these are not rated. I I I tell these just to people. I know a lot of proud panel builders are showing their panels on, on, LinkedIn, and, a lot of times when I see them put a product, vertically instead of horizontally, there's not many Rockwell products you can put vertically. So always check the manual, but I always, like, secretly send them an instant message saying, hey.

You may wanna take that that picture down because you have it mounted incorrectly. So in any case and and most of these products, something like a like VFDs and other products, you get derate them when you mount them vertically. Most of the rockwove's POCs, you can't just can't mount them vertically. They're just not designed for that because you don't get the convection airflow. Now, I mean, you could do whatever you want.

It's a free country. Right? Free world. But if you want a warranty, don't tell them you'd mount it incorrectly. Right?

So in any case, so that is the l 20 and the l 30. And, I wanna take a look at the, l 30 specifically, when it comes to, defaulting that serial port. Okay? So what I did is, I I uploaded the program. I changed this party.

It was DH45. I changed it to DF1FullDuplex nineteen two. BCC is the default for this line. I know a lot of the products Raquel makes is CRC. And then I changed this guy to DH45.

Let's go over to the computer and check that out because I'm doing everything live, so I'm hoping you guys are seeing everything okay and you can hear me fine. In any case, alright. So here, you could see I'm in the program, and let's go to control the properties....

Shawn Tierney shares an update on the Automation Museum fundraiser, as well as a look at one of the items the community has donated, a Square D SyMax PLC.

For information about donating to the Automation Museum, please click here.

Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Thank you for tuning back in. Shawn Tierney here from Insights, and I wanted to give you an update on the automation museum. So let me go over to the computer screen here, and you can see we're still stuck at about 7%. We're at about $200 of our $3,000 goal to get this unit set up, this, you know, new nonprofit set up.

And a couple of things we're doing to drive attention to this across this video, but we're also launching a history of automation podcast to try to drive awareness to this goal of actually setting up maybe first a virtual museum and then a physical museum. And I got a ton of stuff I wanna donate to it, and I really would look enjoy having people come in and teaching them what I know, but also learning what they know. And with that in mind, I wanna talk about some of the, samples that have been sent in over the years. And I've actually told people to kinda keep things in your attic or in your storage unit because I'm just out of space. And when the town comes in here, they wanna tax everything they see.

You know? It's hard to explain to them that this is a donation or whatever or it's personal. Right? So in any case, I wanna share with you this particular unit. Now I did send a very kind gentleman who sent this in a few years ago.

I did send him a message on LinkedIn and, to try to get some backstory and learn a little bit more about it, But, he must be very busy, because I haven't heard back from him. But this is again, this is not a POC that I, started programming back when I got into the into this business back in the nineties. I gotta make sure I do this correctly here. But this is a really old Symax and, yeah, I'm gonna have to put the glasses on. But, check this thing out.

This is a Symax demo. Have I have no idea how old this is. I have no idea what I'm even looking at, but I think it's super cool. You know? Square d PLC.

Right? And, if you guys know anything about this, I'd love to have any links or any literature, PDFs, or anything you have. But this is something I could see that we could restore and set up in the nonprofit automation museum and, actually teach people how what this unit used to do, how it used to work, and so on and so forth. But, it is very reminiscent to the PLC five in my opinion or PLC two and, 1771. So, just one of the very cool things that I've been sent here over the years that, that I would like to get into a real, physical museum.

And a Cuesta Museum would have, like, computer technology in it. It would have all the other technologies in it. But the focus here is the automation museum and that's what we're fundraising for. I think can I go back to the screen here? Yeah.

So, if you look here, this is, give sengo.com/automationmuseum. You can go to also go to automationmuseum.org, and it'll transfer here. I don't even have a bank account set up to withdraw the stuff because if, you know, if we can't reach the goal, then I'll just return everybody's money. But, I'm not gonna touch any of this money. It's gonna go directly into a 5013 c, charity fund, to set up the, to set up the the organization.

So in any case, if you have an extra $20 maybe this week and, you know, you're you're doing good at work and you, you know, you're interested in industrial automation, which I think you are because you're watching this channel, consider, helping us get to that $3,000 so we can actually, get the five zero one three c set up and we can start sending when people send us stuff, we can start sending them official, you know, tax deduction letters and whatnot. I know it differs between where you live and and what you're working on, but, in any case, I just wanted to share that with you and give you a quick update on how things are going. And keep your eyes out for the new History of Automation podcast that I'm working with, couple of other older guys, and I'm pretty excited to bring that to you. And I think the the first episode will be an author who's coming on and talks about the history of Wonderware and Triconics. And, then we have somebody coming on and talking about the history of Allen Bradley.

And then I want you to come on too. If you're an older folk and you know some how to use or maybe you're younger, but you learn how to use some older stuff, I'd like to get you on, including everybody who's donated. You guys, put some great comments in the donations. We'd love to get you guys on as well. But with that, I'm gonna wrap up this week's update on the Automation Museum Fun Drive.

Really look forward to having you guys, join us in this journey to preserve our, automation history. And with that, I wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends. Peace.

Show Notes:

Special thanks to everyone who already donated! You can see the current status of our fundraiser at:

https://www.givesendgo.com/automationmuseum.

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.

(14 views)

Shawn meet's up with Giovanni Mendoza of GM  Automation and Controls in today's episode of Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition:

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. You'll also find Giovanni's website here.

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Giovanni, thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate you coming on. I know we've talked a lot about ControlLogix and CompactLogix over the months and years, But I recently saw you did a project, and I know your company and you guys do a lot of different projects. But I noticed you recently did a project on the micro eight hundreds. And I wanted to ask you, well, just a bunch of questions.

It just really got me curious. So if you don't mind, I would like to start off with why you chose the micro 800. And I just for so everybody knows, I teach both Logix, you know, Compact Control Logix micro 800. You know, I teach other brands as well. And, you know, I like them all.

But I a lot of times people who use Logix never use the micro 100. So this really piqued my interest. So I wanted to start, asking you and, really, before we get to that, tell us a little bit about what you do. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): Sure. Well, first thing, thanks a lot, Shawn, for, having me here. It's, it's an honor to be on your podcast. Yeah. So I am a systems integrator, essentially.

A, I'm a business owner here in California. And so we do a lot of, bakery automation, but we just dug into the, foam molding industry with this project. So that one was very cool. Yeah. You know, I know that's pretty much all we do as far as our typical projects, you know, logic stuff.

But we pretty much had to ask the customer what was their budget.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yep.

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): And, you know, I have used the micro eight hundreds at home. And I know they were very, you know, versatile as far as what you can do with them. So and the cost was awesome. You know? The Yeah.

Very justifies the cost for the customer and whatnot. And so we sat down with the customer, and we were like, hey. Like, what are you guys expecting with this project? What are you expecting it to do? What do you wanna see on, like, a screen?

What is it that you guys want? And the application was very simple. It's a hydraulic press, essentially, that was, automated with a MicroLogix 1,100. But

Shawn Tierney (Host): Okay.

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): The entire program wiped out, and the person that programmed it was long gone and actually passed away many, many years ago. Ugh. The there was no records or anything that we can pretty much use for, essentially, just to get kinda, like, a picture of what was going on.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Mhmm.

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): So, thankfully, the process was very basic.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Mhmm.

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): And so, you know, the customer was a little bit on a tighter budget, and so we couldn't really justify the cost to put in, like, a CompactLogix in there. So we picked out the micro 800. And, the environment I know there's a lot of people that don't really like CCW for Mhmm. You know, many reasons. Sometimes the software is a little different in certain aspects.

Right?

Shawn Tierney (Host): It is. Yeah.

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): But, it wasn't bad for the application. You know, we had a lot of inputs, but only a couple outputs. So that was pretty nice. And it was cool in the aspect that we we were able to combine the HMI and the PLC program into one file, right, all in CCW.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah.

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): So pretty much it you know, it was very cool to just you're working on your your programming, and then at the same time, you got the HMI popped up in the same file.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yep. You know,

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): you don't have to open up a separate software. You know, it's all conjuncted into one. So it was very easy as far as, you know, integration goes. You know, we were, you know, jumping around two softwares and, you know

Shawn Tierney (Host): Mhmm.

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): Doing all that stuff. So it was it was cool. You know? It was all in one whole piece. And it was nice because we were able to just, you know, put it in a small file, email it out.

It's just one just one simple file they have to save in there. So, yeah, I I definitely, this was the first time we cut our teeth into really providing a micro 800 for a process. So, you know, definitely not as bad as, you know, some people say as far as the software platform goes. Definitely did its job. I I really did enjoy the migrate 100.

I think it was it's very, very powerful controller indeed.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know, I was surprised how powerful it was when I did my training course on it. Gee, it must be almost going on ten years now. I'm actually in the process of upgrading, all my training courses. But one of the things I wanted to do first was solve the Factory IO lessons.

So I did three factory IO courses. And so I decided to do them in the order of Micrologix, controller CompactLogix, and then Micro 800. And I really get to see the differences between the three packages. And the micro 800, you know, I think, like, an eight twenty, if somebody's out there thinking of getting one for a small project, I just looked up the list price today. It's August, you know, 2025, and it's it's about $3.97 list price.

Now this doesn't have, like, a huge discount off it typically. This product line, you gotta call your local representative, and they'll give you your actual price. But don't expect, like, 50% off that price. Right? That's been my experience anyways.

But, still at that price, you know, list price on the $400, it's you know, when I started this, it was $2.50. So, you know, you know, over time, over the decades, it goes up over time, of course. But, it can do a lot. Now, you know, I there are some people out there who say, if it's not a lot if it's not Studio five thousand we used to say Logix. If it's not Studio five thousand, I won't use it.

And, you know, I I really found there are some things in the ladder editor that are just great, drag and drop. You know? You can change, you can change, you know, different instructions and do do the things you're used to doing. They added in the where you can edit the rung in text. They added that a few years ago.

So if you're one of those guys who do that a lot, I just happen to be one of those guys who like to do that. Because in the June Micrologix, we kinda had to do that because you couldn't just toggle a destruction from XIC to XIO or latch to unlatch or whatever. But, you know, I really like that feature. They do have a, a a a Logix theme, which I love the idea behind, but I've had some students get in trouble with that when they did a lot of subroutines and the way it handled those subroutines. I haven't I haven't done a lesson on that yet.

But, you know, there are some usability things that I'm just used to, you know, like, putting in the tag values, right, into different instructions. So if I have a bunch of rungs that are very similar, I just wanna go through and change each of the tag values. I find that tag browser did you find this as well? The tag browser is a little clunky. It depends on where you click, which browser you get, and then it just seems a little bit harder to navigate than the other packages.

Did did you find the same thing, or was that not a big deal for you guys?

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): Yeah. It it was. You know, it is kind of a challenge with tag browser that they have, even just to kind of, put in descriptions on the tags

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah.

Giovanni Mendoza (GMAC): They have to open up the tag browser and then kinda just pop up another page and then put all your info in there. So, yeah, it was a little clunky, compared to, you know, the Logix environment where you could create a tag on the fly and then, you know, just open up the tag properties and just put in your descriptions or, you know, do the alias tags if you're you're gonna do that. So, yeah, in that aspect, it was a little bit, challenging, but, you know, it's it wasn't too bad.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And for those people who say and I know the MicroLogix says only the 1,400 left and, you know, it's end of life. Right? And or active and mature, I think, is the correct way to say it. You know, talk to your Rockwell people to get actual information.

I'm just a I'm just a, instructor. But, you know, the Micro 800 supports, you know, function blocks and structured text, and I think it does a good job at it. So, you know, as much as I love my old MicroLogix and I use the 1,100 in, 14 and here's the thing too. If you wanna you program the 1,400, you're gonna have that $300 package of, software. You know?

The software is free for the, for the, 1,100, and it has an emulator built in, a simulator built in. Yeah. With the free software, it only runs for ten minutes, but still, you don't get that with Logix. Right? You don't get a free simulator built in.

Other vendors do that. The other big vendors include that for free. And with Rockwell's Studio 5,000, they don't. And I also, you know, I also like the integration of the panel view 800, formerly the panel view component or, the what we used to call the PVC slow because it was so slow. But the 800 has been very of a very good product line.

You know, and and, did you do the HMI on that as well? Did somebody else do it? Did you we did you do the HMI? Yep. What did you think of that?

I mean,...

Let's talk about how the Series C 1756 Chassis differs from the Series B in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition:

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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.

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Happy lunchtime. It is Shawn Tierney here from Insights and Automation. I'm actually back in the training room working on a bunch of different stuff, but, I did wanna jump on here at lunchtime. Actually, I have to, be in another meeting at 01:00, but still, I wanted to stop by and do a automation tech talk with you at lunchtime.

And, I was just thinking of something, like, I just learned. Well, I shouldn't say I just learned it. But, in any case, guys, feel free to post any comments, questions, or in the in the chat. I don't see the names when you post them on LinkedIn. I don't know why this is a StreamYard limitation, but I should see your username if you post them from YouTube.

And, of course, afterwards, I do post these on the automation blog. I post them on the podcast channel, and I try to do the, the, the text version of the show afterwards when it's ready. So So if you wanna read it the following morning or later that night, you can. So with that, in any case, I hope you're having a great lunch. Today, I wanted to talk about a couple things here first.

The first one is if you're in any of my courses, I wanted to talk to you about I'm adding a bunch of new lessons every day as I work on the new ones, the new courses, which you all don't have access to yet, but you will get access to them, you know, and the appropriate ones. I updated the IO devices, lessons. So and I actually have all the updated IO here and addressing and whatnot. So I just wanted to make you guys aware of that. I'm doing that for all of the existing PLC courses.

I'm updating them all. Also, I have stop files coming too, updated stop files. So, keep your keep your eyes out for that. But now let's get into today's topic, and it's about the series c chassis, the 1756 ControlLogix series c's chassis. Let me go back to full screen here.

So recently, I'm I'm setting up a, an alternative, a filming studio in the house. Right? So if, you know, if we have a bad winter and I get snowed in, I wanna be able to film. Right? And so what I have had up to this date is, and, again, all these were purchased us on the secondhand market because of the expense of the new trying to keep my courses affordable.

But this is a series b seventeen fifty six chassis. I'm I'm sure most of you have seen these before, and this is actually getting mounted in this room. And I don't know how good this webcam is. I don't know if you guys will be able to see that label. I haven't I didn't try that before the show.

Everything on my screen is reversed, but that is definitely a series b. And I just wanna look at these patterns here. Right? Now one of the things that you may have noticed with newer products from Rockwell, and we've had them on the show that cover this stuff, and I hope to have them on the show many more times this year too. But in any case, I I love having all vendors on the show.

I think I was telling you guys early in the week. I met with, local, integrator who carries a lot of the brands that I have not had on the show, and I wanna get those people on the show. So they're gonna they're gonna I'm sorry. I should say a local reseller and panel shop, and they should, they're gonna try to hook me up with them. So great guys over there, Chris and Amy.

But in any case, I wanted to, you know, when when we came out to the new modules like this guy, you could see they now have this huge I hope you guys can see this okay. Huge heat sink on them, and there's a warning even on the, like, the LA. I don't have an LA, but there's actually a warning here. You can you probably can't read it from there. But it's like, hey.

This thing could be hot. So when you take it out, be careful. And they feel a lot heavier. If you compare this to, like, an l seven right? So here's my safety l seven.

The partner's still in the chassis. But look at that. You can you can see right through that. K? Not as beefy.

Right? It's still a very powerful controller, but when you compare it to this guy, the heft of that that, heat sink And the l eights, I think, are even hell heavier than this. I don't know about the l nines. I I hope to get my hands on one, in the near future, but, you know, they're not even out yet. So I don't wanna put myself too far ahead.

But in any case, you know, when when Rocco was releasing new chassis, they decided to increase the venting. So, again, just for comparison, here is the series b chassis. Okay? Right. And let's see if I can hold these both up.

I haven't practiced this. I it's just lunchtime. And, look at the series c chassis. So I picked this up from my home studio. I had to drop a $110 on it, but, hey.

You know, now that I got it, I got it. Right? Look at the difference of the amount of airflow you can get through that baby. Okay? And now they say and I I you know, I didn't test it.

I'm not consumer reports. I don't have heat cycling ovens and all kinds of strain gauges and stuff that, you know, I could test this, but they say it's just as strong as the other one. Right? I gotta be careful not to break it. I don't wanna have to buy another one.

But, in any case, it's a lot more venting. Right? And it makes sense because these newer products generate a lot more heat because it's just the chipsets are in there. Now I thought it'd be fun, though, to let's let's see what Rockwell officially says about these new chassis. So now we'll go back over to the stage here, and, I am logged in.

This is a free I do not have a tech connect. I don't, like, need all the tech support they offer. So I had one a long time ago, but I let it expire because, well, I'm self employed. But in any case, I haven't needed to call them. So here, this is a tech note I found just right before coming on.

I just typed in ControlLogic series c's chassis. Boom. Came right up. I I love the simplicity of their and the ease of use of their knowledge base. I really do.

But in any case many companies have good knowledge bases. Those who don't should look at the people who do because it it does make a difference from the user perspective. In any case, they say, hey. Series c, direct replacement for series b, and then they have a nice little story in here. So the difference is the ventilation, alright, the knockout pattern in the sheet metal for the convection airflow.

While the design team was making the sheet metal changes, they took the opportunity to incorporate a few other mechanical and physical enhancements, that have been received in the past. Improve card guide. Now I haven't compared the two, but I can tell you sometimes those old chassis, the the guides were sticky, and it was very annoying because you're spending a lot of money for something you want that card to slide in and out. New additional optional mounting hole for high shock vibrate slash vibration environments. That's always good.

Improved ventilation for future high performance modules. I think somebody at Rocco told me they were getting to the point where you're gonna have to start derating. These things were generating so much heat. They would have to start derating the you know, you know, a lot of companies do 20, you know, zero to 50 c or zero to 60 c without getting into the extreme products. So, but, yeah, they with with the they needed more airflow to avoid that derating.

So saying, hey. You only can go to 40 c or whatnot. What else do they have here? Improved stiffer mounting tab. I don't know, I don't know what what we're talking about here.

The plastic seem the same. Maybe it's the, maybe it's the, the ears, the mounting ears here. I don't know if they feel stiffer. Just trying it out now. Trying it out live.

They they feel the same. So I don't know. I don't know what I don't know what that is. Because if somebody from Rock was wanting watching and you wanna join, join, let me know. New additional grounding screwed.

Is there a another grounding screw? Oh, yeah. There's two now. Let me go back to full screen here. I didn't notice that.

Full screen. Okay. So there is now two. I don't know if this is coming out well on the camera. One, two.

Whereas before, there was only just the one. So, you know, two's better than one. I mean, I I don't know what that cost them to do that, but I'm thinking probably less than a buck of chassis when I don't know. They sell for a lot new. I mean so you think that if people want it, give it to them.

Okay. So let's go back to here. Please note, the series c's chassis will carry all the same certifications as series b. Temper temperature ratings improved from zero to 60 to minus 25 to 60. You wonder I I I don't wanna think the additional airflow would allow you to go cooler.

Right? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the additional the additional, no. It has to be something else. I don't know.

You guys tell me. What do you think? Why can it go cooler now? Nonoperational shock will decrease from 50 g from 50 g to 30 g. Interesting.

Interesting changes. So, yeah, that's it. Let's see what techno this was. This was QA twenty three six eighty five. And so that is what I learned new today.

Actually, I knew about this back. I think it it happened back in 2015. And, you know, I think the the cool thing was that, you know, they told us ahead of time, it's a 100% direct replacement except for this the the storage fee, I guess. But, I just wanted to share that with you because I finally got one in for the,...

Let's talk about Ethernet/IP versus PROFINET in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition:

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Thanks for listening! If you'd like to join the show sometime, don't hesitate to use the contact us link.

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Happy lunchtime. It is Shawn from Insights and Automation. I wanna welcome everybody who's tuning in. Thank you for joining me.

Really wanna make these lunchtime sessions of the automation tech talk show, collaborative. So, please feel free to post questions or comments. For some reason, StreamYard has not taken those from LinkedIn, so my apologies. I don't know why. But in any case, maybe, if somebody could do a test post there, it says can't post comments to LinkedIn, so maybe I still can read them.

Who knows? In any case, I hope you're having a great lunch. I'm giving myself thirty minutes to get ready for these things, and then, like, I was editing to this afternoon's podcast, and I'm like, oh, I gotta hurry up and get over here. But I put together a little, presentation just to talk about, you know, Ethernet IP versus PROFINET. Right?

And so before we get into that, again, if you're having problems hearing me or anything like that, it looks like everything's working on my side. And and by the way, today, I'm coming to you from my office. It's not very clean, but this is where the work gets done when I'm not in the studio or in the training room. But in any case, so, let me put some things out there. So as somebody who's used Ethernet IP well since it came out.

Right? So, you know, we were back in the days in Data Hour plus and remote IO, and some people call it Rio. And I was like, Rio is a city. Call it remote IO or r I o. But in the case, that's how my weird brain works.

Hey. Thank you, Emmanuel. Really appreciate it. It's good to see you again. Great.

It's been a while since we talked. So in any case, you know, one of the thing these vendors have done is made these things easy to implement in their products. And I gotta say, like all the major vendors I've used, they put that first in their thought process, at least from my perspective. And I can go into that programming software. I can add things on their network, and it works.

So and there's a lot that goes on under the under the scenes behind the scenes in the software that makes that all work so well. I know with Ethan IP early on, we had the whole, you know, unicast with versus multicast. Everything was multicast. Some of you younger folks won't even know what I'm talking about, but we had to run around saying, use a use a switch with IGMP snooping. Use a switch with IGMP snooping.

And then it was IG snooping and querying. And it's like, but in any case, that's all going away now with Unicast support. And, again, if you guys if I say something wrong, I'm just going off the cuff here. It's just lunchtime, so let me know. But, long story short, you know, I use both, both networks in the house here with just commercial switches.

They run great. Of course, you wanna use industrial switches in an industrial environment. And I think most of you have the same the same experience with that. So, what I wanna do is kinda, like, take a look at them now. The one of the reasons I'm doing this today is I'm editing.

I'm not quite done. It takes about three hours to edit these shows and publish them. But I'm just at the final steps of editing today's podcast, which will be on Profinet. And I thought, man, the this, this guy had some great slides, so I wanted to compare him to the slides I typically use for Ethan IP or at least one slide, which is, really based on a Rockwell slide that they were giving away for years and years and years. So without further ado, let's go ahead and take that look at that slide.

And here you can see that it's not showing the right thing. It's supposed to be showing PowerPoint full screen. So let me fix that really quick. You know, I'm still getting used to let's see here. Share screen.

Share window. Let's share the full screen window. I've yeah. I haven't used StreamYard in a few months, and they've changed it around quite a bit. So, yeah, that should be better.

Here we go. Somebody's asking, hey. Before you go any further, can you explain unicast versus multicast? Yeah. Great question.

Now it's not showing me your name, so I apologize. It's a StreamYard issue. But multicast, basically, you send them you put the your information on the wire, and then those people who want it can grab it. But what happens is and I know for some of you, you're probably rolling your eyes, Shawn, why are you talking about this stuff? But somebody asked about it.

So in any case, what happened is for the switch to route those pack typically, our standard switch routes packets based on the IP address. Right? The MAC address. Right? So it makes a list of and I won't go into good gory details.

Let me try to keep this verbiage very simple. The the switch typically for IP addresses, right, will keep a list of what MAC addresses on what, port. Okay? So it knows that PLC number one at one nine two one six eight one dot one is on port one and maybe a PLC number three on port three and it's dot three and so on. And so it can't do that it can't do that with multicast packets.

You need INGP snooping. In other words, you can open the packet, see which INGP group it belongs to, and querying so it can ask people what group they belong to to be able to route those packets. So in essence, if you use that if you use the multicast with a standard switch, it's like turning that switch to a hub, and every message goes to every port. And we had a lot of people call up and say, hey. All my devices on my network has stopped stopped working because they've gone off hook because they're getting a lot of messages that don't belong to them.

So I hope I did that justice. Unicast is now the message is sent just to the person who needs it. It's not broadcast to the whole network. There's ups and downs about that, but that's what I'm not what I'm here talking about. If you guys wanna see me talk about that in a future episode, I'd be happy to.

If you guys think I made that too simple of a description, let me know that as well. So in any case, here we are in, back in PowerPoint, and this is your typical layers. Right? So you have your OSI as, seven layer network model, and this is actually comparing this is for common industrial protocol. So this is comparing, Ethernet IP, ControlNet, and DeviceNet.

So you can see, you know, we have on the very lower end here down the the green area, we have the physical Sabrina's Ethernet. So we have the physical media, bits and bytes. We have data links, frames, MACs, LLC. We have packets, path, IP addresses. So all of this, you know, if we think about that OSI seven layer network model, that's that's nothing to do with Rockwell or Siemens.

That's just part of network design. And then we have, of course, the application layer. This is can be split into in the OSI model, application presentation and session layers. With, Rockwell. We're just talking about the application layer.

Okay. So I thought this is a very interesting, slide, that kinda shows you how you can do the, seamless bridging or routing between Ethernet IP, control net, and device net. You can go in and out one or the other. You don't have to do any, you know a matter of fact, we were kinda debating I should shouldn't say debating this, but, I was trying to give people some insight on this last month or two months ago on LinkedIn. It's like, look, When the 1756 ControlLogic stuff started coming out, we didn't have any POCs.

And we were selling the racks with a data plus card and an Ethernet card so you could and it was a DHRO card. So you could seamlessly bridge between the two. And I don't know how many plants I've been to, even, like, metal stamping plants where they'll have one Ethernet card and a whole bunch of DHRIO cards so they could go Ethernet to all their their Data Highway pluses. And so not that Data Highway Plus supports CIP, but that kinda you know, when when you would do a control or a device that you could just go out Ethernet and go to those other devices and boom, everything worked. You didn't have to set up a router like a k f two or a k e card if any of you guys have used those.

But in any case, and that's kind of what you see when you use your USB cable with a with a Compact or ControlLogix or with the network cards. Those were added to the network cards after a while. You get that seamless bridging and routing. So that is the Rockwell side of the fence. Okay?

And I just thought, look at how similar it is to PROFINET. Now, again, different vendors, different formats of slides. And Tom from PI is gonna go through this in lots and lots more detail that I'm gonna cover here at lunch, when that releases, probably at 03:30 today if I finish it on time. I also am waiting for a trade show demo to show up for one of my, sponsors, so I may have to run out in the middle of the show and go let them in. But in any case, take a look at this.

We have the same OSI seven layer, network, model. Right? And you can see all these are the same things. Right? This is all the same.

But over here, now we have the PROFIDAT. You see how it lays right on top of that, you know, Ethernet. Right? And I just think it's so cool. This is what makes Ethernet so cool is that so you know, it's not a locked down network.

It's an open network. Anybody can use it. Right? And so you can see they have their non real time data and their real time data. And in real time data, there's also time critical data.

Right? And so you'll notice,...

Let's talk about sub-$400 Ethernet PLCs (and more) in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition:

Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:

 

Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:

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Below you'll find the links from this week's show:

Automation Game

LinkedIn Post

The Automation School 

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host):Hey, everybody. Welcome to Automation Tech Talk. Shawn Tierney here. You know, it's been a long time since I've used StreamYard, and they've actually added some really cool things. I can actually see if my mic is working.

So please, leave a comment in the chat. I'm, we're going out live to LinkedIn and YouTube. Of course, this will be released over on the podcast and at the automation blog later, when I'm done lunch. But in any case, I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about the, the thought process behind the show is, you know, I learn so much every day, and I just I can't I can't keep up with the courses. I can't add everything I learn into my courses or do, like, full blown productions on it.

And so I'm like, you know what? Let me just meet up with all my followers on LinkedIn and YouTube and just share what I'm learning, and then I can just watch the chat and see if you guys have anything else to say about it. In that way, all this stuff I'm learning every day, I can get right back out to you guys, and you guys can share what you're learning with me in very informal, you know, type of show. So that is what automation tech talk lunchtime edition is all about. I'm doing this to my lunch because there's no there's you know, I'm not making money from this.

But, in any case, I do wanna say say thank you to all my students at the automation school, and thank you to all my members at on YouTube and the automation blog. Thank you guys very much. Now I am you know, I wanted to bring the news, show back, but it's, like, three hours a day, and it makes zero money. So it's just like I can't invest the time to do that. And so that's why I'm doing the show, but I'm gonna reuse the new show podcast.

So if you're listening to the podcast, you're like, hey. Showed to the new new show, and you're getting this instead. It's expensive and time consuming to spend the new podcast. So, I'm thinking from talking to some of the listeners out there, I'm thinking you guys would enjoy this, maybe not as much as the news, but maybe, as close to it as I can provide right now. With all that said, thank you again for tuning in.

And today, what I wanted to talk to you is about, low cost Ethernet PLC. So as an instructor, I'm always looking for how people can can get, you know, learn PLCs. Right? Program controls, PACs, PLCs, whatever you wanna call them. They are, like, to me, the heart of an automation system.

The IO comes into that. You know, devices talk to the IO. IO talks to controller. HMIs and SCADA talk to the controller. IoT connections, IoT connections.

You know? So that's like the brain of the system, always has been. Right? And it's kinda like the motherboard in our computers. Right?

And so, you know, I I think people will always wanna learn them as long as we're we have control systems. And, I know some people will say, well, you know, there's DCSs and this this that I understand that. I understand that. But in any case so, you know, I recently posted let me see if I can share it with you. I recently posted over on LinkedIn.

Let's see if I can get this up here and bring it over to the right screen, and let's see if we can go to this. Again, I haven't used this in a while, so it's a little new for me. But in any case, this is not what I wanted to show you. Let's see if we can show something else here. Let me see.

Bear with me a second. Share screen. Let's share the whole screen. I think that will be that. Okay.

Great. So this is LinkedIn. I've tried to clean up all the red spots. Of course, I got more now. But this I was talking about the code, Sys, for a scan, and a lot of people totally misunderstood me even though they are trying to add helpful advice.

And I appreciate everybody. I gotta shout out to some of the guys. I I don't wanna say the names, but several people in there were super awesome and helpful. But one of the things this post over on LinkedIn got me talking about was, you know, what happened to the sub $300 PLC, Ethernet PLC. Right?

And so what I did is I'm like, you know, it's it's been a long time since I looked for a sub $300 PLC with Ethernet, and that's the key for me, Ethernet. Right? Because nobody wants to use a serial cable these days. USB is not bad, but Ethernet is better. Right?

So I said, you know, my I used to really be a big fan of the micro eight twenty. I still am. I guess I should say I still am. But in any case, you could see here in proposal works, I updated it recently, and it's showing it at $3.97. Now this model, used to be February or February.

I'm thinking this is the February model. But in any case, you can see how much inflation we've had over the last ten years. Just a lot of inflation to bring that price up to $3.97. So what we used to say maybe is a $250 Ethernet POC, which is a great thing to learn on, it's now more like 400. I think, you know, back then, it was the price of a of a video game console.

And I guess today, video game consoles have gone up in price because I think it's still the price of a video game console. But in any case, the the reason the reason I like having a physical POC to learn on is because a lot of times, this would be something that, you can actually use. You know, you could build your own trainer or maybe it's an OEM who wants to install it in a machine. Right? And so not all vendors have a program like ProposalWorks.

It makes it very hard to find pricing on them. Now, some other POCs to consider, Ethan, the POCs that you can learn on, that are under, let's say, $400 or under. 1 would be the s seven twelve hundred. You guys know I teach a class on that as well as the micro 800 and Compact ControlLogix, MicroLogix, all that. The s seven twelve hundred, I think, you know, it's great in one way compared to the micro eight fifty no.

A 20. Now the micro eight twenty is great that it has free software and free simulation built into that free software. The only downside or I shouldn't say the only downside, but the major downside with the micro eight twenty is the small Ethernet PLC is it doesn't program identically to its bigger siblings like the ControlLogix and CompactLogix. I think the low and I did not look one up in here. We can do this live if you want, but I think the smallest CompactLogix you can get is around a thousand dollars.

You know what? Let let's try it. Let's try it live. Now I did update this last week. I think the lowest one is the, $53.71, the CompactLogist cell one.

And let's just see if I can do it. Now these are all list prices. And from my and I don't know if they changed this over the ten years since I've been self employed, but, there used to be a bigger discount on CompactLogix than there were on micro eight hundreds. They want the list price of the micro 800 to be closer to the real price, versus a, the micro 800. They want the list price to be closer to, you know, the actual place where they give a bigger discount on the CompactLogix.

I don't know if that's still the case. Right? You guys let me know if you know the if you know. So I'm gonna throw this in here. They always seem to throw an Ethernet cable in.

I don't want an expensive Ethernet cable. I don't wanna spend $50 for an Ethernet cable. Thank you. Not to learn at home. Maybe if you're working in the field of $50, it it just doesn't seem that seems a little little expensive.

Okay. So this little guy, this l sixteen e r, this guy used to be I I thought it was around $1,400. It's now $2,400. So this is the smallest CompactLogix you can get. And so when we're talking about small Ethernet PLC, if I go the the Microw eight fifty, I get the Allen Bradley I mean, the Microw eight twenty.

Don't ask me why I keep saying the Microw eight fifty. I have no idea. If you go with the Micro eight twenty, you get an Allen Bradley for $400. You get an Ethernet PLC, but, it doesn't program like the rest of the those PLCs. And, yeah, I think $2,400 is just beyond what most people wanna invest in their personal training.

Now having said that, another option if you like Siemens or if you use Siemens at work or if where you're gonna apply it is is Siemens or if you work in Europe, is the s seven twelve hundred. Now that product is probably in that $400 range for the small guy. $400 for an s seven twelve hundred is a great price, and the biggest advantage there is that that unit programs identical to the 1,500. Now the hardware is different. You know, I've had videos where I did the high speed counter on the 1,200 and the 1,500.

You can see how they're different. Right? So, and there's different you know, there's more data types in the 1,500. But what I think is really good now the s seven twelve hundred, if you just run out and buy one, right, the software's not free. You can get a free twenty one day demo, but it's not free, like, on the eight fifty.

So that's kind of a downside. But then if we look at the upside there, they have starter kits. And I couldn't find, the starter kit with just a controller. I know they have a $700 starter kit with the controller software and HMI, which is a good deal. But I was looking for the old one.

I used to promote my courses in the 4 or $500 range, which were, just the controller and the software, lifetime copy of the software, perpetual license. And those were in the $4,500 range, and that is a much better deal if you wanna use Siemens because you get a lifetime copy of the software