The device ID is to be used for the multi-point communication protocol so that the host computer can
selectively communicate with any controller connected to a common RS485 bus (see Chapter 3 for details). The ID has no effect for point-to-point communication. The device ID is stored in the PLC’s nonvolatile
memory and, therefore, will remain with the controller until it is next changed.
E.g. To set the PLC’s ID to 0A (Hex), send command string “IW0A*” to PLC.
Important: To prevent a potential human error that could occur when a host PC or master PC accidentally send this command to a network of RS485 connected PLC, thus causing all the connected PLC to be assigned the same ID and effectively disabling the network, starting from Wx PLC (as well the embedded PLCs used in all the Alec SmartLighting products) the firmware will not accept point-to-point version of this command if it is received from a serial port.
i.e. If you send the point-to-point version of this command: “IW01*” to the PLC via RS485 port it will send an error response “ER:P2P*” to the master, indicating that the command is not accepted because it is sent as Point-2-point (P2P) version. Therefore if you are changing the ID of a PLC you need to send it using the multi-point version so that only the PLC with the correct ID will process the command.
However, if the command is received via the TCPIP channel (either WiFi or Ethernet) then the PLC will accept both the point-to-point and multi-point versions of this command.
The 8-bit inputs of each channel are represented by a two byte ASCII text expression of its hexadecimal value. For example: if inputs 1 to 3 are logic ‘0’s, inputs 4 to 10 are logic ‘1’s and all other inputs are logic ‘0’s, then if you send command “RI00*”, you will get the response “RIF8*” (F816 =1111 10002).
Please refer to the Input/Output vs Channel Number table described in the section “3. Read Digital
Input Channels” for details.
The PLC supports 512 internal relays, the channel definition of the first 256 internal relays is the same
as the inputs and the outputs. The remaining relays and their assigned channels are shown in the
following table:
A timer contact is a single bit of memory and 8 timer contacts are grouped into one 8-bit channel similar to that of the inputs, outputs etc. The following table shows the timer numbers defined in TRiLOGI’s Timer entry table and their corresponding channel numbers.
The 64 counter contacts are assigned channel #’s in exactly the same way as the 64 timers. Please refer
to the last section: “16.6. Read Timer Contacts” for details.
The present value (PV) of the specified timer is returned in decimal form as four byte ASCII text characters from 0000 to 9999.
\
The Set Value (S.V.) of the specified timer is returned in decimal form as four byte ASCII text characters from 0000 to 9999. Note that this command header contains small letter “m” instead of “M” in the “RM” command.
The Present Value of the specified counter is returned in decimal form as four byte ASCII text characters from 0000 to 9999.
The Set Value of the specified counter is returned in decimal form as four byte ASCII text characters from 0000 to 9999. Note that this header contains small letter “u” instead of “U” in the “RU” command.
E.g. To read the value of the variable “K”, send host-link command “RVIK*”. If variable K contains the value 12345610 (=1E24016), the PLC will send the response string as “RVI0001E240*”.
E.g. To read the value of the string variable “M$”, send host-link command “RV$M*”. If variable M$ contains the string “Hello World”, the PLC will send the response string as “RV$Hello World*”.
E.g. To read the value of DM[3600], send host-link command “RVD0E10*”. If variable DM[3600] contains the value 1234510 (=303916), PLC will send the response string as “RVD3039*”.
(Note: This new command is available only to Fx and Wx PLCs)
E.g. To read the value of DM[3600] to DM[3609], send host-link command “RVD0E10000A*”.
(Note: This new command is available only to Fx and Wx PLCs)
E.g. To read the value of the floating point variable “M#”, send host-link command “RV#M*”. If variable
M# contains the number 123.4567, the PLC will send the response string RV#42F6E9D5*” – IEEE 32-bit single precision floating point representation of the number 123.4567 is 42F6E9D5 HEX.
(Note: This new command is available only to Fx and Wx PLCs)
E.g. To read the value of FP[20], send host-link command “RVF0014*”. If variable FP[20] contains the value 1.2345E-2 (0.012345), PLC will send the response string as “RVF3C4A42AF*”.
(Note: This new command is available only to Fx and Wx PLCs)
E.g. To read the value of FP[101] to FP[110], send hostlink command “RVF0065000A*”.
This command allows you to read all the Fx PLC’s 16-bit system variables such as the inputs[ ], outputs[ ], relays[ ], counters[ ], timers[ ], timers’ P.V., counters’ P.V., CLK[ ] and DATE[ ]. Although inputs, outputs etc. are also accessible via the “RI”, “RO”, “RR”… commands, the RVS command can access them as 16-bit words instead of as 8-bit bytes in those commands. For the 32-bit system variable HSCPV[ ], use the “RVH” command described in the next section to access it. It may be more conventional for some SCADA software driver to use a single header command “RVS” to access all the I/O, varying only the “type” number to access different I/O types.
The RVS command also can be used to access the internal variables used to store ADC, DAC and PWM values obtained during the latest execution of the ADC(), setDAC or setPWM statement. These are however not system variables in the TBASIC sense. E.g. it is illegal to use ADC[2] to access the ADC channel #2 in TBASIC (you have to use the ADC(2) function instead). An 8-bit hexadecimal number is used to denote the “type” of system variable, as shown in the following table:
Example: To read the value of DATE[2] (which represents the month of the RTC), send command “RVS0902*” and if the PLC responds with “RVS0005”, it means the month is May.
E.g. To read the value of HSCPV[2], send hostlink command “RVH2*”. If variable HSCPV[2] contains the value 12345610 (=1E24016), the PLC will send the response string as “RVH0001E240*”.
Please note that the timer number starts from 00, which represent timer #1, then 01 represents timer #2… and so on.
Note: the 2nd character is a lower case “m” instead of the upper case “M” of “WM” command.
E.g. To assign variable “K” to number 5678910(=0DD516), send hostlink command “WVIK00000DD5*”.
E.g. To assign the string “ Super PLC” to the string variable P$, send hostlink command “WV$P Super PLC*”.
E.g. To write to A# the value 6.265599E9, send command “WV#A4FBABABABA*” where “4FBABABABA” is the IEEE 32-bit representation of the floating-point number 6.265599E9. See TL7 Programmer’s Reference on how float number are represented using 32-bit integer in IEEE single precision format in i-TRiLOGI.
E.g. To write the value 123410 (=4D216)to DM[1000], send hostlink command “WVD03E804D2*”. (100010 = 3E816)
Note: The response to WVD command in the Nano-10 and FMD was simply “WVD*” without the variable count.
E.g. To write the value 6.265599E9 (=4FBABABABA in IEEE) to FP[1000], send hostlink command “WVF03E84FBABABABA*”.
This command forces the PLC to refresh the value of its ADC data at the analog channel before returning
its value in the response string (i.e. no need for the PLC to execute ADC(n) function to refresh the analog
input).
This command forces the PLC to send the DAC output data to its analog output(s) directly.
Maximum allowable word count per command is 32 (01 to 20 Hex). If “count” is > 32, only the first 32 words will be returned.
E.g. To read the 10 words of EEPROM data starting from address 100, send host-link command “RXI00640A*”. The response string will contain 10 sets of 16-bit data (4 ASCII hex digit per set).
E.g. To write the string data “Hello TRi” at EEPROM String address 12, send hostlink command “RX$000CHello TRi*”.
This “Wbnnnnxx” command allows you to change a single I/O bit on the PLC. You can force set or clear any single input, output, relay, timer or counter bit. This has an advantage over other write commands such as WI, WO, etc that affects the entire group of 8 or 16-bits organized into “channels”.
E.g. To force output 1 to ON, send “Wb0100FF*”. To turn it OFF, send “Wb010000*”
When the PLC receives this command, it temporarily halts the execution of the PLC’s ladder program after the current scan. However, the PLC continues to scan the I/Os and processes host link commands sent to it and will report the current I/O data and internal variables to the host computer.
When the PLC receives this command, it will resume execution of the ladder program if it had been halted previously by the “C2” command. Otherwise, this command has no effect.
This command allows the host PC or PLC to read the text displayed on a 4 x 20 characters LCD module connected to the PLC. When the PLC program executes the SETLCD command, a copy of the text lines to be displayed will be stored inside a memory buffer within the CPU. The PLC sends response to this command by retrieving the text data from the memory buffer and this command therefore will work regardless of whether the PLC has a real LCD connected to it.
E.g. To read the text of line #2 in the LCD buffer, send host-link command “RV$2*”. If line 2 contains the string “Hello World”, the PLC will send the response string as “RV$Hello World*”.
This command is more efficient as the PLC concatenates the text content of all 4 LCD lines into a
single string and return it in a single response. The text on each line are separated by the two
characters “&|”
E.g. If line #1 contains the text: “This is Line 1”, line #2 contains the text “This is line 2”, line 3 contains the text: “This is line 3” and line 4 contains “This is line 4” then it will return the response: “RV$This is line 1&|This is line 2&|This is line 3&|This is line 4*”
Since the PLCs also support OMRON C20H Host Link commands, which are very similar in construct to our multi-point command/response format, you can also make use of OMRON commands to supplement the native host link commands.
The following table shows the memory mapping of the PLC’s I/Os and internal variables to the OMRON register space.
We will only discuss four of the OMRON host link commands “RR”, “WR”, “RD” and “WD” in this section because these commands can be used by users to read/write to multiple I/O registers and data memory in a single command (Note: maximum length of command string should be <=80 characters).
Note: The Fx and Wx PLC native protocol command set now includes reading and writing of multiple DM and FP that are not available on F2424/F1616-BA, FMD and Nano-10 PLCs. To maintain backward compatibility with FMD and Nano-10 PLCs that only support read/write of single DM (there is no FP[ ] in these PLCs), these OMRON host link commands may be used to read/write multiple DM locations in a single command.
This command refers to Table 14.1 to map the PLC’s I/Os to OMRON IR register space from IR0 to IR519
E.g. To read Timer PV #1 to #7 using this command, send:
@01RR012800074D*
The PLC will send return a response “@01RR00xxxxyyyyzzzz….*”
E.g. To Write to CtrPV #1 to #2 using this command, send: “@01WR0256xxxxyyyyff*”
where xxxx and yyyy are the hex values to be written to CtrPV 1 & 2.
E.g. To read DM#112 to #130 (19 words), send: “@01RD0112001357*” (note: the last ’57’ is the FCS)
The PLC will send return a response “@01RD00xxxxyyyyzzzz…*”
i-TRiLOGI version 7.4 now adds a new menu item “Hostlink Command Test” to the “Controller” menu that allows you to test all the Hostlink commands mentioned in this reference manual.
When you run the “Hostlink Command Test” the following window will open and you simply have to enter the Hostlink command (in either the point-to-point or the multi-point format) inside the “Command String” text box and press the Enter key. i-TRiLOGI will present the login window and lets you elect to connect to the PLC via either the serial port, the Ethernet/WiFi or TLServer. Once the i-TRiLOGI software successfully connect to the PLC it will send the command string to the PLC and display the returned response string it receives from the PLC on the “Response String” text area. You can now test different commands and examine the response immediately.
If you want to send the complete multi-point command string including the correctly computed FCS value, you can simply enter the full command without the FCS first, then click the “Compute FCS” button to calculate the FCS value. Thereafter you can append the correct FCS to the command string and terminate with the “*” character and send it to the PLC.
An alternative way of testing the Hostlink command string is also available via the “Serial Setup” screen which is opened when you click the “Configure Serial Port” button (visible when you select the “Serial / USB port” checkbox)