Shawn discusses the Fifth (and current) 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-1/
– Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-2/
– Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-3/
– Article: https://theautomationblog.com/compactlogix-gen-4/
– Course: https://theautomationschool.com/courses/015-cpx-l12/

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Hope you are all doing well today. Please let me know if you can hear me and see me okay. Everything’s looking good on my side, though, so I hope you’re off to a great day. I was I had a, actually, a special guest scheduled to come on today.

But at the last minute, then a customer called, and, he had to go out and do a sales call or a service call. And, yeah. So these things happen. I mean, I would like I was telling them, customers come first, and, lunchtime tech talks come second. That’s always the case.

But in any case, we hope to get him back on. I didn’t put all his information in the show because I know, you know, these these kind of folks, you guys out there are very busy, and, you can’t make every show. So I also wanna say hi to Rob in the chat. We have the chat coming in from both, YouTube and, LinkedIn. But when I reply, like, hey, Rob, it only went to YouTube.

So in any case, okay. Rob confirms. Thank you, Rob. You’re like my producer today. In any case, let’s go ahead and get in today’s show.

The first thing I wanna do, though, is let me click here. And I am offering this is a a special for, well, we’re almost in fall now. Right? So I’m offering a special. I’m gonna offer any viewer of the show, and you can give this to somebody you know because I know a lot of you are already experts.

A lot of people watch this show are already automation experts, so you would not need this. But you can gift this to one person. It is a, a 20% discount on any of my courses that are $99 or more, and, that is, that goes for the bundles as well. And I do this I always do this for returning customers. So let’s say a student takes a PLC course, that he wants to take an HMI course, I always offer a 20% discount to on their next course.

And, of course, they can always upgrade to the bundle for the difference in price. But I thought, you know, I wanna do something. You know? This show is only a couple weeks old, so I wanted to do something, special for you guys who found the show here early. This not only goes for those who are watching live, but also for those who are watching after the fact.

All you have to do and you can see here the automationschool.com. I got the email you can use. I got the voice mail. I got the you can actually submit a form to send me an email if that’s easier, and you can even book a time. Now this also applies to, group enrollments.

So a lot of people don’t know this, but I work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and we enroll, you know, five, ten, 20 people at a time. There’s an additional discount off of the sale prices when they do that. And so we’ll also have that 20% off just to get started for anybody who has a group. Now a group is three or more. Some people like to say a group is two.

Two is a peer. So, like, we we we did clearly have a group of three or more more students. But in any case, we work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies in, actually, for for going on a decade now. So in any case, you’ll see somewhere here I have all the logos of all the different companies. Actually, I think it’s on the course pages.

That said, I wanted to show you guys something else too. In, the automationblog.com, you guys now move this to a new server. You know, we’re having a little, you know, moving pains. You know, some things are working great. Some things are are, still, still working on.

Every once in a while, I have to talk to them about some speed issues. But in any case, of course, this is your free resource for over 2,000 articles of videos. And I wanted to show you, though, what this show will look like when it’s done. So here’s the, show from yesterday. So we have the video.

You can watch here. Right? Then you have the audio. Right? And this is the automation tech talk audio, so I rebranded the automation news headlines.

And then I’ve been you know, it takes an hour or two to get the transcripts, but these are actually pretty good transcripts. Much better than what you get from YouTube, because you have a little time stamps and everything. And so this is more conversational. So I’ve been trying to do this for the automation podcast and, this show, and it’s so far, it’s going well. Cost this does cost extra, but, in any case, if we could get you guys, you know, if you ever missed the live show and you wanna catch the replay, you could do it on YouTube.

You can do it on LinkedIn, but you also get that full, nice, easy to read transcript. And I know some people would rather read, especially first thing in the morning than than watch. So in any case so with that, let’s get over to what we’re gonna talk about today. This is the backup plan I had here. Let’s go to present mode.

And so what I’m showing here, we’re gonna talk about the fifth generation of CompactLogix. And what I’m showing here are free pro PowerPoint slides from Rockwell. I spent a whole weekend going because I had this rush order come in. A vendor wanted me to go teach their, their, customer how to program their PLCs. Right?

And I was like ecstatic to do that, but I I had to spend the whole weekend, taking all kinds of slides and putting them together. I wanted to give this the customer something that they could keep, something that wasn’t something that was free to the public. Right? So in this case, Rockwell gives these slides away for free, and, they’re all copyrighted by Rockwell. But in any case, you can call your Rocktell, Rockwell distributor and ask for a copy of these.

Again, if they have any good people left, they’ll they’ll have this archive like I did. I have, I don’t know, twenty five years archived before I started my own business. But in any case, I was just sending somebody, so we do the Automation Museum podcast over the weekends. Haven’t released any episodes yet, but I’ve been sending the guests when they come on. They’re like, you know, I wish I had something on this old product that that old I’ve even helped companies.

They’re like, oh, I can’t find this old manual. I’m like, yeah. I got it. So in any case, I I did I did, post this for those of you in my compact basics course, CompactLogix course over at the automation school. I did put the this up there in appendix a so you can grab a copy of this.

But if you’re not in my courses, just ask your Rockwell rep. If they’re worth their salt, they’ll have all these presentations free from Rockwell. But I thought we had used this. I thought it would be good because all my you can see behind me let me go back full screen here. You see behind me my, all my, you know, high end or, actually, every one of my CompactLogix except for the one, two, and three generations I showed you earlier in the series, they’re all wired in the trainers here at the automation school.

And, again, we’re we’re good to do four, five, six, seven people. If you wanna send them in, we can actually do up to eight people if you wanna send them in to learn Logix or s seven. We can also do the HMIs. But, you know, you wanna definitely in the falls, the Berkshires is a great place to visit. And, we have within three miles all the major hotels.

Just go to automationschool.com forward slash live. You’ll see all that. Plus, we get the Norman Rockwell Museum. We have Jim Jiminy Peak. We have, Mount Greylock.

But in any case, let’s get back to what we’re talking about here. And, let’s see. Wrong one. I wanna be up there. Okay.

Great. Where The Berkshires is about an hour east of Albany, New York. It’s officially in Massachusetts, and I’m in the center of The Berkshires in Downtown Pittsfield. So, actually, this building used to be an old paper mill. So in any case and it houses a, a newspaper now, but I don’t know if they print here or not.

In any case, thank you for asking where I was located. And, the automationschool.com forward slash live, I got links to all the attractions, links to all the nearby hotels, Hampton Inn, Holiday Inn, you know, all the big ones you can think of we have within three miles of the site. And, you know, one of the things I do that, you know, of, and, you know, that, you know, big corporation can’t is, you know, if you wanna learn Siemens and Rockwell the same day, I can do that. Right? The other thing is, if you wanted to start at, like, twelve noon because you wanna drive in, like, I’ve had people drive in from Pennsylvania.

You know, if you wanna drive in from some place that’s four or five hours away, we can start at twelve, 01:00 and then finish the next morning, right, or do two or three days in a row. We also not only have the physical trainers, we also have factory IO. I’m a factory IO reseller. So if you blow through all those, we’ve got even more. And trust me, you won’t finish all the factory IO in a day.

That’s for sure. So in any case, back to generation number five of, CompactLogix. And this is a ’50 three eighty. Now, again, I wanna I think it was Dean yesterday who said that the fifty three seventies, the l twos and l threes, were just recently marked as active mature. And at the time, I was like, why would they do that?

But then I remembered, the micro 1,400 has been active mature for a long time. So maybe maybe they’ll still be around for a long time. There there’s really no low capacity fifty three eighty. Right? And that’s the point I’m trying to get to here is, they’re they’re expensive and they’re high capacity.

Right? So, you know, you know, if you like, to use a comparison, there’s no s seven twelve hundred version of the CompactLogix fifty three eighty. Right? So in any case, you know, if you know anything about Siemens, it’s a twelve hundred and fifteen hundred program with the same software, but the 12 hundred’s a little micro size PLC. In any case, so, this and I’m gonna tell you that that this line has really just taken off for those high performance needing applications with the dual giga gigabit.

Now when it first came out, you could not have two separate IPs. But from the beginning, they’ve always talked about the ability that will that they will allow you to have dual IPs. And I believe it was version 19, ’29 19. Version 29 that came out, with the dual IP support. And it was so it was just a firmware flash.

So the the scan time is, you know, much faster. Okay? And, the core languages all execute with the same performance. That’s a big difference. And then screw to screw performance from, like, input to output, they’re much, much faster.

The IO is the backplane is just so much faster. Right? So, I mean, not that it’s a physical backplane, but you know what I mean. Right? The connection between the modules and the controller.

So in any case, let me make sure here. I don’t wanna pass a slide here. Okay. Because these look very similar. So if you think about the fifty three eighty, 20% increase in capacity.

Right? So that means, you know, just generically, 20% more servos, 20% more memory, 20% IO, you know, 20 more you know, 20% in most categories. Right? And you can see here, 32 axes that that this is all dependent on the controller you buy and, 80 Ethernet IP nodes. Right?

So just think 80 drives or 80 racks of IO off of one controller. Pretty cool. Now if you do a motion control, of course, you want the m version. One of my two are an m version, but I don’t have any of these beautiful looking servos. But, in any case, 32 drives in a single controller.

Multiple cost update rates in advance. Now they even have testing. You can actually test the moves now, or simulate them. I we when we had Rockwell on the show, they talked about that. Advanced tuning with the load observer and tracking notch filter.

I am not a motion guy, so I I don’t have any of that stuff here. So, but my motion people tell me that’s really cool stuff. So in any case, security, you know, the control based change detection, there’s a bunch of stuff that people don’t realize this for years, though. Compact and ControlLogix have been logging stuff to the nonvolatile memory. So, that’s been going on for years, and now they’re doing even more.

So that’s very cool. What do we have here? So the onboard display now, this morning, early this morning, in the wee hours of the morning, I was trying to change the IP address on my s seven fifteen hundred. Thank you, Siemens, for sending that in. And, this is the one I’ve showed you guys years ago.

And, I just went up to the screen and did it like it was a micro 1,400, you know, but in color. Right? So s m 1,500 has this gray screen. I’m not trying to belittle the screen on the fifty three eighty, but, you know, we’ve had these on the IO modules for a long time. And quite honestly, it’s so two thousands.

Right? Or maybe 20. But, in any case, I I would rather have it than not have it, but I should maybe maybe throw a little ping out there to Rockwell. Take a look at the competition. They are doing some awesome things.

In any case, I did love the you know, comes with the SD card still, switch the set of key, which I’m I you know, at first, I was not a big fan of, but it’s really doesn’t matter. U USB, perfect, like the fifty three seventy. Terminal blocks, I don’t believe it comes with the terminal blocks. You have to either buy them either screw or or spring type. So always make sure.

That’s why I always tell people when you’re buying rock, we’ll always use IAB, integrated architecture builder. I’ve done many videos on that in the past, and, it’s in all my courses. Probably have to do an update for the courses soon because, you know, every few years changes. But in any case, I really like it. And then this cover here on the right hand side, unlike the 69 IO, this is just a piece of plastic.

So I like that it’s just inexpensive, just a dust cover for the for the terminals, which are live. Right? So very important to have that on there. But and I always thought this one was a little odd. It supports up to 31 local IO modules.

So we’ve been 30 IO modules local for so long. Right? CompactLogic’s up to 30. Slick 500 up to 30. Right?

Here, they got to 31. I don’t know why. It’s just kinda, like, funny. Maybe just because they could do it. Right?

What do you guys think? But in any case, up to 31 local IO modules. Very interesting. And, of course, it supports all the now this is what we kinda took a sneak peek at yesterday, and this is what I was saying. Hey.

It is truly high performance versus fifty three seventy. Now when the fifty three seventy came out, we were like, wow. This is so much better than the 50 well, than the l three series. Right? But in any case, if we look at some of these thing, of course, you get dual one gigabit, not a 100 megabit, one gigabit Ethernet ports.

Right? That’s pretty cool. Right? So you can see there’s a chart over here that kinda goes through this. You know, complex applications, high performance applications, you know, you’re gonna use the fifty three eighty.

K? Communications is now separated from control. This is huge. Right? So there’s no more with the fifty three eighty.

Right? There’s no more what we call the, overhead. 20% of, you know, the communications overhead. Yep. Previously, 20% of the control scan by default was set for the, you know, overhead time slice totally gone, eliminated.

This unit is now a quad core if you haven’t looked at the the, books on it. So they just give a core to that. I think we have a slide on that. But, yeah, that is that’s very cool. Right?

So no system over head time slice. Now if you’ve never run into that, you probably never used one of the old contact logics because maybe not so much with the fifty three seventy. But back in the day, I still remember when they went from 10% default to 20% default because, HMIs were having a hard time getting all the data. You know, you have 20 HMIs going to a single PLC. They can put a quite a load on that PLC.

Right? PAC. I know. I know. Before everybody types it in, I know Rocco caused their newest generation PAC, so does Schneider, but not everybody does that.

So PLC, PAC, it’s all vendor specific. Okay. So program I actually had somebody tell me once. PAC, is there anything that doesn’t isn’t called PAC? It’s old, old, old.

And I’m like like, like, dude, you can get out more. Look at some of the other vendors. They they have every feature that your PAC has, but they call them a PLC. So, you know, it’s marketing. Sometimes we just buy into it.

Like, it’s not a tissue. It’s a Kleenex. Right? Well, that’s life. Programming language extension and task switching enhancements.

What I really wanna show you here is how much faster. Right? How much faster the, the fifty three eighty is over the fifty three seventy. Not that the fifty three seventy was bad, but look at this. Here’s your l three.

Like, so l three x. Right? We talked about l 35, l 32, l 31, if you’re unfortunate to get that. Still here, a 168 for this program, hundred and sixty eight milliseconds. L three, forty five, huge increase.

Fifty three eighty, nine. Talk about fast. Yeah. Really fast. K.

And then the test switching time, we used to say, you know, budget a millisecond every time you switch tasks. Now we’re down into the microseconds. Right? So and, again, they’re saying a hundred and sixty five microseconds for the, l 35 e. I don’t that’s not the rule of thumb we were using, but in any case, very interesting slides here.

Dual IP mode, we really already covered this support for DLR. You know, fifty three seventy had that too. I think that was one of the big things about the fifty three seventy having that dual port switch in every unit was just amazing. So lower investment cost with higher performance. Now, I would say, space reduction for sure.

Right? So look over here. So you could here you would need the, let’s say, the l 30 e r, right, fifty three seventy three, PA four, and ECR. So that’s three items, but now the power supply is built into the controller, like the PLC twos. And then, here you have the mini twos.

Right? LSP, like, two sixteen with the built in power supply. In any case, then you have the l three ten e r. So you can see much less space because everything’s kinda built into one. Because if you’re lucky enough to have the l four, you save him even more space.

Right? So because that power supply was we already saw earlier in the series. Right? Now as far as cost, I I’m I don’t know. I don’t no.

On the l four, yeah. Sure. But was this, like, real cost, or is this, like, inflated cost? I don’t know. So, and you know what?

You I guess you could pull up an old old price list from ten years ago to see if that changed, but we got better things to do. As you can see, full memory utilization. So, you know, this is a big thing because we used to say you can’t use all your memory. Right? Don’t use it all.

You need may need to save some for some firmware or something else. Not anymore. That’s all stored somewhere else. So you can actually use all your memory. Now I would always save a little bit.

You never know. Right? But, in any case yeah. We’re not we’re not you don’t tell people anymore, hey. Save 20% just in case you have to add a new firmware, and it gets a little bit bigger.

And you may say, well, I’ll keep it at version x forever, and then you may find there’s a bug in version x. You may have to go to version x point two. Right? So but, yeah, that that is just another advantage. You know, not only thing is this thing really fast, but now we can use all our memory for program.

It doesn’t show you yeah. It’s kinda like you buy a computer, has a terabyte, and then there’s, like, 200 gigabytes worth of spam built on the hard drive. It’s like, why do they do that to me? But in any case, so you do get the diagnostics. Right?

That’s much better than the $53.70 and, the security with DigiSign. Enhanced diagnostics and the web page. I don’t spend a lot of time in the web pages, but it’s there if you’re having problems. Here’s where we talked about the memory, not having to reserve 20% anymore. You see message instructions, trans alarms, RS links, online edits, all that goes away.

K? So here here’s where they’re recommending you kept 20% open, and now you don’t have to. So you’re really getting 20% more usable memory. The the this this reminds me the way the system’s laid out reminds me of no point I o in in some respect because you have the, these different buses here, and you have the field power distributor blocks so you can, feed more power through. I don’t know if they’re changing from AC to DC here.

Those kinda look like relay boards. K. But in any case, let’s go around the easy identification. Yeah. You know, now they these these are the original look.

They did they did stop painting them black. One of the reason I’m not a fan of that because the black scratches off sometimes. Not that you should be scratching your program or controller, but, I kinda like the kinda beigey gray, the light gray color. But in any case, I don’t know. You guys like the would you like do you like the controls about the new black look with the hourglass, or do you like it better as light gray?

I’ll I’m a light gray guy. Both my units here are like grays. Hey. Maybe that’s why I got deals on them. Though they wanted the black version.

The DIN rail connections, I’m still not like, the oh, well, the 60 nines is snapped on. These, I’m kinda like, is that really on there? But, reduced space, this is true. One inch of thermal clearance. That’s big.

You save because I think the other ones were, like, two and a half inches or two inches at a minimum. There is a vent triggers, instantaneous event triggers. So that not everything could do an event trigger in the CompactLogix. There’s very limited what you could do an event trigger on. The high speed backplane, that is true.

If you look at your RPIs, you can go much faster. Now remember filters. And so I had even wrote articles on the blog about this. Yeah. Filters, they had the of, you know, trim off that noise, eliminate noise, analog and digital.

And so, you can have this high speed you know, you can put a higher RPM there, but if you have a filter in there, right, then, you’re not gonna see that kind of speed. Time stamping of inputs and scheduled outputs, I haven’t done anything with that. Alright. So I think we covered all that. K.

So he has a ladder diagram, 13 times faster. Structure text, 21 times faster. Function blocks, seven and a half times faster. Sequential function shot, 20 times faster. Very, very cool.

K. So a 20 x improvement. K. So this is why this is why the $53.80 came out. This is what it addresses.

It just makes it everything you can do a lot more. You don’t have to jump right into the control logics to get this high speed. Right? Alright. What else do we got here?

Ah, yeah. See, I highlighted these. Don’t forget to order these. I need to get an extra set myself. You do get the MCAP, though.

Thank goodness. Imagine forgetting that. K. Here’s a closer look. K.

See the ports on the bottom? They’re I wish they were a little closer, and they’re separated a little bit too. I I really like the fifty three seventy ports, but, you know, these have more functionality, so maybe they need more spacing. Hey. You could see your reset button.

Okay. And USB port. And there’s your part numbers. They’ve added a bunch of models since the this came out. I’m sure, there’s no start energy.

There’s all these. I think it there’s so many more of these now. The m promotion. K. What else we got?

Zero to 60. I’m not seeing any anything else there that’s interesting. Okay. So that’s kind of the summary slides. So that’s it for our tour of the fifth generation CompactLogix, the 5380.

Don’t know if there’s gonna be a 5390. Probably. Right? But I don’t know. We did have Rockwell on talking about the l nine or 5590.

Right? That, they’re gonna be showing our automation fee. Very excited for that. And, you know, probably a year or two later, they’ll have a fifty three ninety. I’m wondering if the reason they act and mature the l two and l three is because they’re gonna have a fifty three ninety one, like an l one that’s actually a fifty three ninety.

Or maybe they’ll do a fifty three eighty l one. That would be very cool. You know, that that smaller level, I think, is you know, when it comes to doing large systems, high performance, there’s no no problem with Logix. They’ve always been able to do that, but they’ve always struggled on the small the small end. And then the l one was a great until it went from, like, I don’t know, $1,400, $2,400.

It was a great small fit for small OEMs now. You know? And everything’s going up. It’s just incredible. I you know, the one thing that I was checking that didn’t go up was, or substantially, anyways, was the starter pack for the micro eight twenty.

Now I know there’s a new micro eight twenty coming. I start referencing a couple manuals. I didn’t actually see it anywhere, and I I I would love to get somebody from Rockwell on to talk about it. Because, you know, they upgraded the states the five the, was it? The August, the August, and now it’s August turn, and I see it referenced in some manuals that they’re gonna update it.

And I think they add, like, the f one and some IO support, Ethernet IO support. They probably add on things too, but I don’t have any, so I haven’t looked into it. But you can still get a a micro eight twenty. According to proposal works updated last week, you can still get that for around $250. And I was actually looking at an eight ten.

I’m trying to get that eight ten input simulator to show it to my students, but they want about the same price for the eight ten solder pack. So it’s like, yeah, I’ll pass on that. I got a couple of eight tens, and I don’t use them much. So in any case so with that, you know what I should probably do is just, first of all, I wanna invite any vendors, cuss, any users, or any, SIs out there, OEMs who wanna come on to talk about well, if you’re a user, whether you’re an SI or an end user, talk about what you’ve learned recently about products, automation products. Doesn’t matter if it’s Allen Bradley, Siemens, whatever.

You know? Love to have you on. And then vendors, if you want well, and also SIs, if you wanna talk about your company and services you provide. OEMs, if you wanna come on during lunch, talk about the machines you build. You know, I wanna use this lunchtime as a way to just educate everybody, you know, quickly, you know, during a half an hour and, you know, I’ll pass on my information.

But if you can pass on yours and vendors, you get a cool new product. You you you just wanna come on and do a casual livestream. We still have the automation podcast, which is kinda like that sit down half hour, one hour, you know, not recorded. You know? I’m sorry.

Not live. It’s recorded and edited. But, actually, I’m editing tomorrow’s got about half done. But in any case, yeah. So just wanna invite you guys to contact me.

You can contact me on LinkedIn, on YouTube. Let me pull up the automation school again. There’s all kinds of contact links up here. If you wanna know about training, you can even book a presales meeting if you wanna sit down and talk about some options. The automation blog, there is a contact link up here.

It’s more of a generic contact link, but, you know, you can contact me that way as well. And, you know, don’t forget if you want 20% off any of the courses, $99 or more, you know, these are buy once or forever. Right? This is not $90 $9 a month for $500 a year. Actually, you can get almost all of my courses for $500 a year.

Not all of them, but a a big bundle of them for that price. So, let me see if I can go back here. So with that, we are recording, and I’m reaching out to people who know stuff about old automation products for the Automation Museum podcast. We did one with a gentleman who actually wrote the book on Triconics, and, we got that in the can. This is something I’m doing on Sundays.

It’s totally nonprofit for automationmuseum.org. We’re trying to raise money for it. And we did another one last weekend for on the PLC one and the PLC two from Rockwell. And, we talked about the PLC three and got into the PLC five some as well. And, I’ve reached out to some folks who know a lot about Cymax.

I reached out to folks. One of the guys is reaching out the the founder of, Wonderware, one of the founders to have him come on. So, I don’t know when those will start releasing, but they’ll have their own like, I gotta find an inexpensive way to do this because this is off a charity, but, they’ll have it’ll have its own podcast. I won’t be mixing it up with this one. But it will still be out of my YouTube channel until we actually get the Automation Museum funded.

Right? So I’ll just stick because what’s the sense of publishing it on YouTube if you have no followers, with a brand new channel? But in any case so lots going on. I still got the middle of Toledo and the other room I’m working on and a lot of all this stuff, but I am gonna let you get back to what you have planned this afternoon. I wanna make sure I’m done before I hit that half hour mark.

So I wanna wish you all the CFM up to date on the chat. Thank you, everybody who chatted today. I wanna wish you all good health and happiness. 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.