Internet PLC Forum

This email reply to you was provided to support for this thread:

The best way is to use the STEPMOVEABS and STEPCOUNTABS commands to change and measure position around a fixed point. What you would do is move your motor to a position you would like to call zero and run the STEPHOME command.

From there you can move forward or backward using STEPMOVEABS and return the count from your zero position using STEPCOUNTABS. If you want to define a "home" position as 1000, then you can use define variables to create constant or variable values with names relevant to you (anything allowed by the define table naming conventions), and then use these as parameters for the STEPMOVEABS command.

STEPMOVEABS 1, HOME_1000, 1

It will be even more accurate if you can provide position feedback from your stepper driver to the PLC HSC inputs. STEPCOUNTABS will account for the pulses sent out of the PLC outputs, but it can't know about the actual physical movement, which requires encoder feedback from the driver itself.

The only problem is when the PLC loses power and you don't know for sure what the position of the stepper motor is when it powers up. You can always store position and home values in permanent memory, but the motor could have physically moved after power is lost and the PLC obviously can't detect that, so your power up position will be different than expected (the same problem will exist with any additional stephome command to support your request.

To resolve the issue of position loss when the PLC is powered down, you can add limit switches to zero the motor on power up and then use my solution to create fixed or dynamic home positions.

Here is a description of the STEPMOVEABS command, which you can also view online:

http://www.triplc.com/TRiLOGI/Help/tbasic/stepmoveabs.htm

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STEPMOVEABS ch, position, r 

Purpose
   

This new command allows you to move the stepper motor # ch to an absolute position indicated by the position parameter. At the end of the move the relay #r will be turned ON. position can be between -231 to +231 .(i.e. about ± 2 x 109) steps. The absolute position is calculated with respect to the last move from the "HOME" position. (The HOME position is set when the STEPHOME command is executed). The speed and acceleration profile are determined by the STEPSPEED command as in the original command set.

This command automatically computes the number of pulses and direction required to move the stepper motor to the new position with respect to the current location. The current location can be determined at any time by the STEPCOUNTABS( ) function.

Once STEPMOVEABS command is executed, re-execution of this command or the STEPMOVE command will have no effect until the entire motion is completed or aborted by the STEPSTOP command.

See Also
   

STEPMOVE, STEPCOUNT( ), STEPCOUNTABS( ), STEPSPEED, STEPSTOP, STEPHOME

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Did you ever remove the SmartTILE-Fx CPU board from the carrier board previously?

It sounds like the SmartTILE-Fx board may have suffered some damage.

However, the best way is to request for an RMA (email support@triplc.com) and ship the PLC back to our office for testing. It is likely to be repairable unless there was catastrophic damage to the board.

Please include your company name and contact person name when contacting us. Some explanation of what the PLC underwent would be helpful for diagnosis.

Yes if the Linux server is listening on a TCP socket the FMD1616 PLC is able to using PRINT #4 "<TCPCONNECT ...>" command to connect to the server port and interact with the server.

Attached is a sample program for using the LSHIFT function for multiple bits.

A parameter X that contains the number of bits is passed to the function fnLShiftXBit which then uses a FOR NEXT loop to shift X bits to the left.

Note:
We cascaded two relay channels so that the single bit will shift across both RELAY[1] and RELAY[2] - total 32-bits. You can change the number of channels to 1 if you just want the shift to happen within RELAY[1] and not moving into the higher RELAY[n] channels.

You need a program inside the PLC that run the ADC(n) function to read the value of ADC channel n.

The PLC does not want to waste CPU cycle to read ADC if it is not required in the program.

You can use a clock pulse such as 0.1s to drive a custom function. Inside the custom function you can write the following:

FOR I = 1 to 8
    DM = ADC(I)
NEXT

The ADC channel data will be read into DM[1] to DM[8] and their value will also be available on the online monitoring screen.

I can think of 3 reasonable approaches:

• Use the SetHigh statement to build a 32 bit variable in A:
  A = RELAY[2]
  SETHIGH16 A,RELAY[1]
• Build a 32 bit variable in A
  A=RELAY[1] * &h10000            ‘ shift left 16 bits
  A=A | (RELAY[2] | &h0000ffff)   ‘ OR in least significant 16 bits
• Take advantage of the fact that the DM memory can be accessed as both 16 bit and 32 bit values.  In "C-like" programming languages this is an example of a "union" data structure. This code will build a 32-bit value in DM32[1]:
  DM[1]=RELAY[1]
  DM[2]=RELAY[2]

Try them in the simulator. Pay close attention to where the bits from RELAY[1] and RELAY[2] end up in the 32 bit value.  Set the most significant bit of each group of relays and verify that you get the correct pattern in the 32-bit variable.

Gary Dickinson

Great answers to the question that Lorne posted, Gary!

The 3rd approach is very efficient but just need to remember that when DM32[1] is formed by two adjacent 16-bit DM[1] and DM[2], the upper 16-bit is contained in DM[1] and lower 16-bit is contained in DM[2] (known as the Big Endian representation).  So in order for the relay #1 to 32 to form a 32-bit number the correct assignment is as follow:

DM[2] = RELAY[1]  ' the lower 16-bit
DM[1] = RELAY[2]  ' the upper 16-bit
A = DM32[1]

The following links is a screen capture of an external 4K monitor connected to a 4K screen laptop with a GTX960M graphic card. Connection was via a HDMI cable.

https://www.triplc.com/smf/attachments/20191214/external4Kscreenshot.jpg

The i-TRiLOGI runs properly on either 4K monitors. We have tried different settings and font sizes on i-TRiLOGI and also mouse-over the buttons (see popup tooltip) but the function panels was never messed up like on your screen shot. 

Question - what display scaling did you use on your 4K monitor? We were using 125% and 100% scaling without any issue. Can you try with 100% scaling and see if it works for you?

No it should be 32-bit JRE. I thought you may have installed 64-bit JRE which won't work properly.

For graphic card RTX2060 - unfortunately we don't have such a graphic card handy. If the graphic card driver screws up the display there is very little we can do on the Java source code side to mitigate it since it is not a programming issue but a glitch in the underlying interaction between the O/S, JRE and Java bytecode. Perhaps the glitch can be reported to the graphic card manufacturer to see if they have an updated driver software that will address the issue.

Meanwhile, you may want to keep the editing done on your laptop screen if it works well in the HD mode.