Questions about SlimLine system

[Bart]

Thank you for you help last week with my problems on the slimline CPU. That you mentioned to create functions-block by ourself was really an eye-opener. In school I learned to programme in LD (some 20 years ago). To use the ST language to create blocks is interesting. Thanks to the manual I managed somehow.

Yesterday I found on your website the new firmware and the new LogicLab2. I’ve installed both of them, this time the installation of the firmware was a little bit faster, only 15 retries. Problem with the new firmware:

After installation I connect to the SlimLine by using Toolly, by serial connection everything is fine. But the TCP/IP the connection is not possible. So I went back to the serial connection, I checked the ip, same result. Then I used ifconfig command to change the IP and everything went well.

With the old and new firmware I have still 2 problems.
In the program I wrote I designed some variables as RETAIN, but this is not working. I also tried to give them a MX100.2048 address, but also this did not work.

I want to use a SDCard (2Gb Kingston) but I do not manage to format. If I understand well you have to configure the card with mciconfig, but this is not available on our PLC (Full RS485 version).

Could you please help me on this 2 points.

[Sergio Bertana]

As you mention, one of the advantages of the IEC61131 norm, is the possibility to use the 5 different program languages, to cooperate in develop the PLC program. So it’s very useful the possibility to create own functions and/or function blocks by using the ST language and then use them in a ladder program.

This allows, in a development of a complex program, to divide the responsibilities in programming, the experienced programmer can develops functions and function blocks in ST language, while the installer technician, with a more friendly language as the ladder, can adapt the program to the plant. Moreover functions and function blocks can be crypted and reused in different programs.

About the firmware upload on SlimLine module we know that the Toolly program has some difficulties, so sometime, the upload firmware procedure aborts and it must be repeated. We are working to solve this problem and a new Toolly version will be released.

About the IP connection it’s a very strange problem, all the configurations are stored in a EEPROM and they are reloaded when the system starts. And as you report the IP after the software upgrade was correctly configured.  Sincerely I don’t know why the system was not reachable by the IP connection (Telnet). Anyway by reconfiguring the IP using the terminal utility of Toolly (By serial connection) has solved the problem.

About your 2 problems, for the RETAIN variables please see this post. SlimLine accept SDCard up to 2Gb but it manages only 512 Mb on it. The MCIStats command returns information about the SDCard inserted in the system as you can see in this Toolly screenshot.

To fomat the SDCard you have to use the Format command, the Format s, c command, formats the 2 disks managed by the system (s=”Storage” c=”SDCard”). It’s possible to have up to 12 files in total, you can share this amount of files between the Storage area and the SDCard. So the command Format 2, 10 will enable to create up 2 files in the Storage area and up to 10 in SDCard. You can see the result of Format command by the Dir command as reported in the Toolly screenshot. Attention! After sent the Format command you must confirm it by sending the Y character otherwise the format is not executed.

After the formatting you can operate on the system by using a FTP client like TotalCommander or Filezilla (See Post).

[Autore]

Post