Databases?

[HarveyW]

Anyone familiar with getting AutomationDirect DL205 and DL405 PLCs to work with databases? Currently looking for something where I can add an entry to database for each cycle.

Thanks,
Harvey

 

[Boxer55]

well i dont know what your expertise on PLCs are but they're not designed to work with databases. youd have to somehow set up a communication protocol between the PC with the database and the PLC.

if your familiar with vb programming you could probably make a winsock connection and establish some kind of communication system between the pc and the plc. gonna be a lot of work though

you could probably do this very quickly with this product i've been hearing about, dataworx plc pro, that's supposed to allow you to do stuff with databases by some new technology called report by execution or whatever. i think they have a demo for you to try out at

http://www.inteworx.net

hope that helps

 

[HarveyW]

Boxer,

Thank you for your suggestions. I'm not a real good VB programmer so that winsock thing is gonna be a lot of work like you were saying.

But that dataworx looks pretty neat - the only thing is that it doesn't seem to be a typical polling product where the PC just constantly interrogates the PLC for information. All I have to do is send a UDP datagram to the PLC with the WX command in ladder logic and that's it.
That would be especially useful because in the plant we have to add records at a pretty fast rate, around 2-4 records per second and polling products just wouldn't cut it.

I'll let you know how this dataworx fares.

Harvey

 

[skills]

Ok, Get a copy of Lookout from National Instruments. It has the Kseq and directnet drivers. You could use the Kseq driver. Then you may log to the Citadel database on data change, which is the most efficient anyway, for any data point you want. Or, if you don't want to use Citadel as the database, you can get DSDDE OPC/OLE server from Automationdirect and then write to database using it.

I personally prefer the top method, but then, Citadel is my preferred database. Using Lookout in this way is overkill; but, then you may have other needs that are addressed by it.