Allen Bradley (AB) PLC DF1 Protocol / News: Recent posts

In partnership with http://www.ronbeaufort.com , we have created a great series of training videos. View them at the web site mentioned, or go here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlsJxSK8tPE

Allen Bradley SLC/Micrologix users check out the Advanced HMI project on sourceforge. It uses the latest version of the abdf1 driver and adds some really nice graphical oobjects. This allows you to build HMI's for your PLC without writing a single line of code.

See the AdvancedHMI project. It adds another level to this driver by adding drag and drop controls with eye catching graphics. Also see the video introduction:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-E8NlUNiX4

New major release will include program uploading and downloading. Data saving and writing back to PLC. And better support for ML1100, ML1200, and ML1500. Will be posted by March 7, 2008.

See these new videos that give step by step walkthrough for using this component to build a total free HMI for Allen Bradley SLC/Micro.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiPzqc5jDlE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A6tBXqv7So

The DF1 protocol with a simple modification to make it work on WinCE has now been used in an actual application.

You can read a little about it at:

http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=32269

Protocol was tested over DH485 using a 1770-KF3 from Allen Bradley. Works without a problem.
Simply change the TargetNode property to the node of the PLC you want to read/write and it works nicely.

There was a problem with the full source code when downloaded. It would say the zip file was corrupted. This has been resolved.

Control was very easily ported to work on compact framework. I have tested it to work nicely on a Windows CE device and on a Pocket PC (Compaq IPAQ).

Look for future release of utilities to read and write PLC data tables from a Pocket PC.