Thursday, July 1, 2010

RSLinx v Windows XP SP3

I'm in charge of a little, fully automated system that has it's own PLC and computer interfacing to it. The computer runs RSLogix 500/RSLinx and it communicates with a MicroLogix 1500 PLC.

The computer recently imploded (quite literally), so I migrated everything over to a new computer we had lying around. Everything was installed and running nicely in the office, I sent it off to site (in another state) to install the new PC, but we could not communicate with the PLC.

According to my site contact, the error we kept getting was something like (she spelt it out over the phone to me, it won't be exact):
initDriver failed code:-1
parentdriver (linx gateway may not be running)
After a few hours on the phone with Rockwell (we didn't have the tech support package, which made it difficult), I learnt something amazing.

RSLinx cannot communicate to devices using Windows XP SP3. Amazing. Our PC was recently rolled back from Windows 7 to XP, and I guess it was SP3 that was installed. Everything else works beautifully, but the RSLinx communications drivers (at least for Ethernet) will not.

So now I'm trying to figure out how to roll back to SP2 without losing anything. I'll keep you posted

2 comments:

  1. Did you ever get it to work with SP3?

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  2. I computer with XP SP3 I was able to download to a 1747-L552. Once in RSLogix, don't use the Online button near the top of the screen.. From the Menu Bar select Comms>System Coms to open the window similar to RSLinx. Open the tree to your processor, click on it, then click on Download or Online at the right side of the window to connect.

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