Allen-Bradley PLC to Profinet

Many of you know that I have been educated as an Engineer. I
did the whole thing. Went to Engineering school, got a BSEE and graduated Cum
Laude.

If you look up Cum Laude on Google (nobody uses the
dictionary anymore) it is a Latin term for “he spent too much time in the library
instead of at the Gym Bar chatting up the young ladies from O’Donnell Hall”.
Yeah, I was the guy in the library every night practicing calculus problems. I
got a full 8 hours sleep almost every night. Still fell asleep in Chemistry
class but that wasn’t the lack of sleep.

So, I’m an Engineer, a software Engineer. And I’ve done some
really fine work. None really at RTA lately, I have people for that, but at
Kimberly-Clark and Allen-Bradley. I Got a lot of recognition there for my
software expertise.

But what I am going to tell you about today is really
amazing to me. It’s beyond anything I had hoped for. We releasing a product for
moving data from ControlLogix PLCs to Profinet IO Controllers that just amazes
me. They’ve done an incredible job making something that is so functional and
so adaptable and so easy to use that I think this will be a real hit.

The product is our 464ETCPS. On the PLC side you will be able
to read and write any Tag in a ControlLogix or CompactLogix PLC. Or write any
file in a PLC5E, SLC5/05 or MicroLogix. That’s pretty cool.

The real interesting thing is what you can do on the
Profinet IO side. If you’ve been paying attention to me you know that all
Profinet IO Server devices look like I/O racks. They have a series of Slots for
Input and Output. In the real world, each slot is populated with a specific
type of module; 16 channel discrete input or maybe, 4 Channel Analog. Well,
that kind of organization follows here.

You configure the Profinet IO side by assigning data types
and data lengths to each of the 10 input slots and 10 output slots. So input
Slot 1 may be 4 items of Floating point data. Input Slot 2 may be 16 items of
Discrete input bits. And you do the same for each Output Slot.

Here’s the magic. You can then either manually assign all
your Tags (or files) from the Allen-Bradley side to the slots on the Profinet
IO Server side or let our Automatic mapping tool do it for you. If you have 10
Floating point tags they will end up in the first slot configured for Floating
point with unassigned Floating point items. When that slot fills, any remaining
floating point tags are assigned to the next slot configured for Floating
point.

All of this is done easily and automatically for you. It’s
very IMPRESSIVE. If you need to move Tags from ControlLogix to a Profinet IO
Controller, the 460ETCPS is going to be your best bet,
both functionally and economically.

Add in all the enhancements we’ve made to the product line
over the past year including email support, login security, diagnostics, data
translations, mapping enhancements and more and you are going to really like
this product.

I guarantee it!

(Hope using that line doesn’t get me kicked out of my own company!)