Shawn discusses the Third Generation of Compactlogix Controllers in today’s Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:

Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. Links mentioned in video: – Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-3/
– Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/ Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome to Automation Tech Talk, lunchtime edition. I hope you’re having a great day. And, I ate my lunch early, so I’m here ready to go. And I just wanna welcome everybody who’s joining.

I can see people joining up, and, please feel free to leave comments as you go. And, somebody asked yesterday why I wasn’t covering a particular product. I’ve never heard of that product. So I wanna invite that person to come on the show and tell us all about the product. And I wanna thank everybody who’s actually reached out to me about coming on the show.

We had some very interesting guests that are gonna come on and talk about what they’re learning and what they’re doing. That’s all about what this lunchtime show is about, you know, just sharing what we learned. And because I have the kind of disarray in here, I’m going over the generations of CompactLogix. And today, we’re gonna look at generation number three. Now you can always watch this if you’re not available during lunch.

I know some people can’t get to the computer at lunchtime. That’s okay. You can always watch the replay. I’m also releasing this as an audio podcast. I’ve renamed the old automation news roundup news headlines podcast automation tech talk, and, it’s also being put on the blog.

And if you’re one of those morning readers and you can’t watch a video, I’m also putting trying to put every, transcript up there now. It costs me extra to do that, but I’m trying to get those up there. It costs extra to get it, but it’s a really good transcript. It’s not just like the the captions you get on YouTube. So, not that it’s a 100% correct.

It’s all AI generated. But in any case, it’s nice for those people who wanna read about, what, the video instead of watching the video. Right? In any case, with that said, I hope you are all doing well. I’m just checking my mic, checking my video.

Everything looks looks to be working on this side. Again, if you’re seeing not seeing something working, let me know in the chat. Otherwise, I’ll just talk the whole time and not know that you can’t hear me. So in any case, the first thing I wanna do, though, is let’s see if I rearrange this correctly. Yeah.

So I wanted to show you where I wanna try to broadcast from tomorrow. So tomorrow, I’m gonna try to use what I’m gonna call Studio C. So I get this studio set up for, you know, recording my lessons, And so there’s not a lot of room on the workbench, and there’s a lot of other products I wanna cover besides what’s on the workbench here. So that’s why I’m, trying to get this set up. I don’t know if you can see.

Probably can’t. I got a Monoclon PLC on there. And so that will be Studio C for shop for, closet. It’s kinda like the you know, when you were a kid, you might had a if you went to a small school, you might had a a cafeteria. This is kinda like the closet slash storage closet slash three d printing area slash studio and, slash tool room, etcetera, etcetera.

So in any case, with that said, also, if you have any questions on what I cover today, if you’re enrolled in my course over at the automationschool.com, I did put a link in the description. Please feel free to ask them. I know I probably won’t cover this, this new guy as much in the new course as I did in the original course, but don’t worry about that. If you have the original course, you get the new course. And if you end up buying the new course, you’ll get the original cost.

So there’s a big you know, over the years, a lot changes, and it doesn’t seem to make sense to go back. But, of course, I can always add lessons. So I had somebody ask me the other day if I could add a lesson, I added it. So, that’s what being a full time instructor, that’s makes it easy for me to do. So in any case, let’s go ahead and go to the overhead cam here, and this is where I’ll need to put the old glasses on.

And we can see the, third generation of CompactLogix. This is the l four, commonly known as the l four x. This particular one I picked up, on the secondhand market was a, l 43. I, did check with some distributors to see if they wanted the pot with their demo cases. They did not.

So I I’m sure they are collecting dust dust in there in there or sitting at some customer site in collecting dust. But in any case, this actually came in two different flavors. There was an l 43 and an l 45. And a lot of people don’t know this, but this is actually like an l six in a, in a, CompactLogix form factor. So and you don’t know.

A lot of people never use these, but they were very powerful, bringing that, control CompactLogix ControlLogix down to the CompactLogix. So, some of the things here, let’s just look at the, look at the unit first physically. This is the only CompactLogix that had a left hand bust or left side bust, and we’ll talk about that all more in a minute. But the right side, we still used our regular old 1769. Okay?

And then in the front, for whatever reason, they put a cover over the CompactFlash slot. Okay? But this is a good cover. It like, it’s not like the l 71. The first l 71 I got or l seven I got, I broke the latch because I was pushing down so hard.

My finger just kept going and broke the, and broke the little tab. So I actually took it off my l seven I have here for the training room because, I don’t want anybody to break it. But in any case, this one’s good. This is not like that. This is very, very good, easy to open and close.

Don’t know why they put it in there. Maybe they had to meet some kind of spec, and it was sticking out farther than what it does on the, the ones we looked at yesterday. But in any case, and just like the l three x that we looked at yesterday, gen two, these units had a, serial port. The key, they changed the key. Not a fan of this.

So the new key they had on these guys, and I I don’t have one out. Probably should’ve got one out, but it’s like a hollow key. It’s a plastic hollow key. And so you may if anybody knows me, knows I keep a PLC five and a and a six five hundred ControlLogix, key on CompactLogix key on my keychain. And the reason is because, you know, I’ve driven someplace for three or four hours just to get there to see the PLCs in a hot run.

And I’m like, do you guys have any PLC keys here? And they were like, no. They’re like, well, you just wasted four hours. Now eight hours because I gotta drive back home of my life because you don’t have a key. I mean, that’s like saying, you know anyways, help us with a computer, and you don’t have a computer.

Right? It’s, like, ridiculous. Anyhow, so that would that memory was buried pretty deep there. In any case, these keys, I had one on my key chain for a while, but it broke. It’s just it was a cheap plastic, and it was hollow, and it broke.

And so was not a fan of the key. Again, if you just leave the key in there, it’s not a problem. But in any case, I I again, I don’t know why they changed to that key, but I would have preferred if they would have stayed with the same key. I know tolerances would have been a little tight, but maybe they could have moved it over. I don’t know.

But in any case, that key doesn’t return in any other product that I know of. So that’s good. And I wanna say hi to the folks who are saying hi in the chat. Hi, guys. Alright.

So what else do we wanna talk about this? This did have a default comms button. Now we talked about how with the, first generation, that default comms button, right, it just erased, what was there, replaced it with the defaults, and we actually tested it. Right? And so that doesn’t change here, but what does change, because this does not have a battery.

Woo hoo. This doesn’t have a battery. That you can use that default comms button to reset the memory. Right? So if you hold it down while you’re powering up, you reset the memory.

Yeah. So that’s cool because, like, with the other, controllers, we just took the battery out and waited, and, we lose, sometimes you do as this, as capacity you would short. But in any case, with this guy, since there’s no battery, thank goodness. And that was a big problem with the l six. Now this is based on the l six.

Right? But the l six, you know, they that battery they were using in the l six was designed for the l one, right, which didn’t have a lot of memory compared to the l six. When you get to the l six and, you know, the memory is four or five, ten, 20 times bigger, a 100 times bigger, the battery wasn’t lasting very long, maybe a couple of weeks. And that’s not enough if you ship it a machine overseas. Right?

So, you know, of course, people would not put the contact flash card in, and then then they would have a problem. They’d have a machine with no with no program. So in any case, with the l four, what they did they decided to do was, do something very similar to the Micrologix 1,000. If you remember the Micrologix 1,000 that came out in ’94, it didn’t have a battery because it had a built in EEPROM slash flash memory on the circuit board, what we call nonvolatile memory. And when you power it off, a capacitor just held the memory long enough so it could transfer over to nonvolatile.

Never had to worry about an EEPROM. Never had to worry about, a battery. And so that’s what they did with this unit, and they added added it to the series b. That’s what they did with the series b l sixes. But in any case, that was that was a big deal with this guy.

And, let’s go ahead and talk about the IO here. And I also have the article linked that I wrote, quite a bit back, back, six years ago over at the automationblog.com where I cover a lot of this stuff. But let’s go back to the overhead cam. Okay. Great.

And let’s take a look at, I wanna zoom out just a little bit. Okay. And let’s take a look at what we could put on the left hand side. Okay? So the right hand side was pretty much the same as all the other CompactLogix, but what was new was what we could put on the left hand side.

Now first of all, we always had a power supply. Look at the size of that guy. So much bigger than the regular PA two or PA four. But in any case, Yeah. So we always had to have a power supply.

Now one thing you can need to know is that these latches here. Right? And I always forget this. But these are latched in by the, DIN rail clips. Okay?

So these are not just DIN rail clips like they are in the rest of the products. These actually also latch in those, those side pieces. So, k, so these right here. Okay? So you gotta keep that in mind.

I recently had, one of my students replacing one of these at a big name company. And, actually, he just added a Cognex camera or BACo reader to the existing out four. Didn’t even take it out, which is cool that you can go back. And I think he was using 18. He was able to go ahead and add that functionality, the AOI, to version 18 and get the system up and running without replacing the PLC.

PAC. Sorry, Rockwell. In any case so, yeah, big honking. So this is always the leftmost thing. I know with the other compacts, you could put, you know, the power supply up to four modules typically away from the controller.

But on this guy, yeah, he has to be on all the way on the left. He’s big too, but that’s because he has to power some stuff. Right? And so we had a choice. Now with the l 43, you could have, only two modules to the left.

Okay? With the l 45, you get a four modules, but here’s the problem with that. You still only have two of each type of module. So there were two types of modules. There were Circos motion control modules or there were communication modules.

And a lot of people wanted to put in, like, four Ethernet or two control net and two Ethernet. Can’t do that. Right? So even if you had an l 45 and you had four available slots here, you can only have two communication and two motion, and that was Circos. I have not I don’t have any Circos motion, so I I didn’t look to buy any Circos cards.

But what I do have is Ethernet. So sometimes people would use this as a bridge, and they put two ethernets in. Okay? Because I have an l 43. I only can have two, or in some cases, they would put control net in.

Now the control net did come in both the standard one single port and the redundant port. I have a single port here. Then you can see that NAP network access port that is not an Ethernet port. That is not a d h 45 port. So, just be aware of that.

And then, you know, there you go. So that that is what you could do. Now these Ethernet modules were, they handle lots of distributed IO. Right? So a lot of times, you would see people go to this, and you could tell these are closed because I can’t slide them together.

Come on, boys. Open up. K. Here we go. And now let’s try that again.

Okay. So a lot of times, people would do this because they had a lot of distributed IO, but they wanted to save. They don’t wanna get the big expensive chassis and power supplied. It’s a lot bigger too. So, they could have two modules.

They could talk to a bunch of distributed IO and, still have some local seventeen sixty nine IO. So that that was pretty pretty popular. I don’t know if it was a technical reason why they didn’t let you do four Ethernet modules or if it was a marketing slash commercial decision because they didn’t wanna eat into the, ControlLogix. But I think it kinda made the life of this a little little, shorter because, you know, it couldn’t do much bigger systems. Right?

So I don’t know. I I it’s a great system, but it did it ended a life, pretty quick. And we’ll look at tomorrow, the fifty three seventy series, which was pretty which was extremely popular, very well launched in my opinion. Probably one of the best product launches I’ve ever seen. And, but in any case so now here on the right hand side, we could put a device net module, because I always check the book to see if something’s compatible or not because who knows?

My memory. You know, I’m getting older. Right? And we could have some, compact. These are some of the, one and a half, slot modules I picked up.

This is, I think, a 32 module. Just digital in 32 points. K. And over here, we have, what’s this guy? Relay?

Yes. 16 relays. K. And, of course, you always need your end cap. So that is the, the third generation of CompactLogix.

Now let’s take a look at the article, see if what else I missed here. Again, you’ll see a link there in the in the description. Again, the same key, the same, no modem cable we talked about earlier in the week, same c p three or just a regular no modem cable. We talked about the mode switch. We talked about the, communication reset.

Talk about no battery. That was good. What else do we have? We talked about the module limitation. The, there’s also an IO limitation.

I’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s see here. So with the l 43, you could only do four axes, four position axes, and up to 16 local IO modules and up to two banks. The l 45 supported 30 modules, local IO modules up into up to three banks. And, while the l 43 only had two meg, the l 45 had three meg, and the l 45 supported eight position axes across two surplus modules.

K? There was also an EWEB. I don’t think either of these are EWEBs. I guess I’d just assume that neither of them were. Let’s see.

EMBT. EMBT. Yeah. So they’re both EMBTs. So can I show can I share my, screen here?

No. I don’t have that over there. Alright. Well, in any case, let me just go through the article here. You guys have a link in the description.

And no. I think I covered everything. So let’s go back to we’re already on full screen. So, yeah, so that’s everything I wanted to cover about the l 43 or the third generation of CompactLogix. Now the fourth generation will cover tomorrow.

The fifty three seventy is pretty awesome. I remember one of that launch, and it was just a great, great product launch because they came out with all these new versions, and they come out with them all at the same time, and they had truly small ones. It’s not like the l 23. They had truly small units. Used to be affordable, you know, with inflation.

We talked about that earlier. I think they’re up to $2,400 now when they used to be, like, a, you know, $1,100. So $1,200. So in any case, they used to have starter kits too, which were awesome. Excuse me.

But the the fourth generation, I think most of you are familiar with, and, of course, the fifth generation will cover on the last day. But because I have those things already installed, I’ll probably, cover those a different way from the other studio. But with that, let me see if any questions have come in. I’m not seeing any questions from you guys in the field. Again, if you have a if you’re in my courses, you have any questions on anything CompactLogix related, just post it there.

Also, you’ll notice there’s a lot of new lessons in the existing CompactLogix course. The new course is also being filmed and updated, but the existing course has a lot of, a lot of, updates in it as well and more coming. So as I’m filming the new course, I’m updating the existing course, not everything, but, you know, things that are common and, things that I felt like need to be updated, like, like, lesson one zero two on, like, what the software costs and, you know, what simulators are available and whatnot. So with that, I don’t have anything else on my list to cover. Again, if you know anybody who needs CompactLogix training, please mention the automationschool.com.

That’s what pays the bills and keeps the lights on. So if you know everybody needs some training, We will have to update the pricing in mid September due to inflation held off as long as I can. Also, I have some exciting things coming. I’m setting up a trade show automation fee, a trade show demo here in the office later today, from a major company. Can’t wait to bring that video to you.

We got some great, podcasts already recorded. We got some new ones coming. I had some an Ethernet push button, demo I wanna show you, which is awesome from a major vendor. Also hope to get them on the podcast. So lots of things in the works behind the scenes, but for now, I’m gonna leave it there.

I wanna wish you all good health health and happiness. I hope hope you have a great day. I hope I can start talking with off. Mess it up. And until next time, my friends, peace.

If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

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Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.