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Description
Quick tip on how to change a direct contact to a reverse contact, or normally open to normally closed contact, in Connected Components Workbench (CCW) software without having to delete and insert a new instruction.
Transcript
(00:02) okay here’s a tip for connected components workbench based on a question we’ve been getting uh during the labs and that is how do I quickly change a contact in the program without having to delete it we’ve been finding that when you right click on here there’s really no way to change the element there is an option to delete or cut it if I were to say insert a ladder element here direct contact it’s going to actually add a new contact into the rung so is there an easier and better way to do it and the answer is yes it’s just that it’s a
(00:38) little bit of a hidden hidden secret if I were to click again on this contact say I want to make this contact now a normally close contact I can right click and choose properties that’ll open up the properties pane here on the right hand side now the reason why this wasn’t really intuitive is because they use the term modifier and then direct contact so if I were to actually click in this box we now see a pull down menu appears and I can choose reverse contact when I do that the contact changed to normally closed
(01:16) if I go back to direct contact it goes back to normally open so it’s as simple as that but there is another way to do it that some people might like if you enjoy typing and that is up here kind of hidden above the the ladder editor our two gray bars and there’s a white line between the two and if I were to take that you can see now my arrow my mouse changes to where I can actually drag this I can actually open this up and this lets me see kind of the text string of what this ladder is down here so going back to some older Allen
(01:58) Bradley PLC programming days uh there there was the ability to kind of write out the the Boolean instructions in this kind of shorthand method and in those days the term uh was you know they used these xic and xio terminology to stand for examine when closed and examine when open so basically it was the the shorthand uh method of a normally open contact and a normally closed contact now in this case the C uh is actually would be used X I should be used to put a normally open contact and an xio would be used to uh
(02:39) to place a normal closed contact so the way to do this is pretty simple I just take that xic and I change it to xio and when I do that it becomes a normally closed contact if I were to go back to x i c go back to normally open so the one catch here is to be careful and that is the natural kind of inclination when you’re typing is to always kind of hit enter right I just made an xio I hit enter well if I do that that will really mess things up so we’ll be careful to not enter that’s basically what’s creating this when I
(03:18) hit enter it basically created a second rung it split the rung into two so I can do a quick Ctrl Z and put that back to the way it was and uh correct my mistake I’m going to go ahead and make that back to an xic just to put it back to the way it was originally so that’s it uh two two easy methods to change this without having to delete the contact and insert a new one