OPTIC FIBER, LCD AND BARCODE SCANNERS

[philipjoseph]

TO EVERYBODY.
I'M CONNECTING A T100-MD888 AS A MASTER WITH 2 T40H AS SLAVES, THE MASTER PLC IS AT THE SERVER'S ROOM 400' FROM THE PLANT, AND IT WILL RECIEVE THE PRODUCTION'S INFORMATION.
I'M SENDING THE COMMUNICATION TROUGHT THE 400' BETWEEN THE BUILDINGS USING OPTIC FIBER.
 I'M USING TWO RS485 TO OPTIC FIBER CONVERTER, ONE AT THE PLANT SIDE AND TH OTHER AT THE SERVER'S ROOM. THE CONVERTERS WERE TESTED BY TRIANGLE REASERCH TECHNICAL SUPPORT AND IT WORKS FINE.
AS MY PROYECT WILL BE DONE ?I LET YOU KNOW.

THE TQUESTION IS,
AS I AM USING T40H PLCS
MAY I CONNECT SOME LCD420 DIRECT TO THE NETWORK SO THE LCD DISPLAYED THE INFORMATION SENDED FROM THE MASTER PLC?
USING A AUTO-485, MAY I CONNECT A SCANNER AT ANY PLACE TO SEND INFORMATION TO THE MASTER PLC?
IF THESE IS POSSIBLE, HOW CAN I PROGRAM AND CONNECT THEM?

[support]

What are you trying to do with the display? If you are trying to let the Master PLC send messages to certain location that has the LCD to display messages to the operatior, then you can use a MDS100 which can reside on the same RS-485 network and it can be set with its own unique ID.

If your purpose is to monitor the communication traffic between the master PLC and the T40H, then a LCD will not be adequate because there could be many messages being sent every second and you can't read the content of a message before it is overwritten by the next message. But you could use an Auto485 connected to a PC to "snoop" on the RS-485 network. The PC can run the HyperTerminal software provided by Windows to let you monitor the traffic and these can be captured to a disk file for analysis. (You may need to add a line feed to the incoming carriage return so that it will not overwrite on the same line).

If the master PLC is sending data continuously on the RS485 bus then you can't use a scanner to send data to the master PLC unless you have a way of pausing the master PLC temporarily from sending out of the serial port.   A better way is to use a slave T100MD888+ PLC connected to your scanner. The scanner data is then read into the slave PLC and the master PLC can retrieve the scanner data periodically from the slave PLC.