Home / Micro800 / Micro800 Simulator
Description
How to use the Micro800 Simulator that comes with the Standard and Developer editions of Connected Components Workbench (CCW) software.
Transcript
(00:01) okay in this video i want to show real quick how to use the micro 800 simulator in the ccw or connect the components workbench software so if you have installed the software on your computer downloaded it and installed it then the next step would be to open it and to uh to create a project and create a project for the micro 800 simulator so this is what you’ll see when we uh when you first open up ccw you should get this kind of home screen or start page as it’s called you have a couple options right here new new project open existing
(00:42) discover any recent projects that you’ve already created cannot get listed here um you also have some some support over here in getting started you have the uh some training videos and some sample code as well so i invite you to kind of just you know play around with it and click on some things and just kind of see what you discover um but if you’re ready to start we will click on new with new and it comes with what a default project name it usually goes project and then whatever next one in order is you can rename this whatever
(01:13) you want i will just call it simulator it also has a default location where it installs the the file you can change that location as well i’m going to say create so once create the project you have to add a device so ccw allows you to do multiple things from rockwell they you can do controllers you can do drives you can do starters safety components as well as graphic terminals so we’re doing a controller so we’re going to choose controllers and then under controllers we have um several members of the micro 800 family the 8 10
(02:05) 20 30 50 and 70. for this simulator we’re going to go under the micro850 if we were doing this with the with the actual physical plc that we have in the lab we’re going to choose the h20 but again for the simulator it belongs the simulator is under the 850. and it happens to be the very last choice with a dash sim behind it so you want to choose the sim if you don’t choose that if you choose any other one then you’re choosing a physical real controller and not the simulator controller so i highlight that it kind of gives me
(02:42) a little detail of what it is i’m choosing and we must hit this select button in order to actually select it and then we’ll say add to project so it’s creating the project building whatever structure required for the simulator so our first uh kind of thing we we get when we create this project and add the device is we kind of get the the uh the devices um kind of just basic properties screen here so this just kind of gives us a picture of what the simulator looks like or what your controller would look like if you’re choosing something else
(03:25) we got our name which we could change at this point some details about it versions as well as the uh some additional configuration set points that we might need to make here typically we don’t have to worry about that um at this point but there are some additional um configuration set points perhaps you need to work on on on some of your real projects that you might work on so two things to really get the simulator going um when we have to start the simulator and then two of course we would have to you know create a program to actually
(04:00) download the simulator this video is just going to show you how we would actually start the simulator and get connected to the simulator um as if we’re going to make that download so to do that we have two ways to start the simulator one is we can come up here to tools and we can choose micro 800 simulator that will actually start the simulator in a separate window the other way to do it is right here you have a start micro 800 simulator button on the menu bar as well it doesn’t matter which one you do i’m going to choose this one
(04:42) now this opens up a separate window and it’s a micro 800 simulator so we get an actual picture of what this simulator looks like we get the inputs on the top the outputs on the bottom we have these plugins so if i had configured these plugins right here then you might see some additional um you know i o options being populated in these plugin spaces so at this point the very next thing we need to do is we just start the simulator all right so we just opened it but we didn’t actually start it or power it on i should say and get the right
(05:18) terminology there so we’re going to power on the simulator so right now it’s in a it’s an off state you can tell that because nothing’s lit up none of these are all black none of these are lit up so i’m going to press the device i’m sorry i’m going to press the power on button now this very well could be hap it could happen to you it was happening in in the class and uh this is a known issue and it says that the ethernet p port 44818 is not available because it is already allocated to the rs links in g so to to get
(05:58) through that little issue you’re going to do control delete and you’ll hit the task manager and we will go under um if you’re in windows 10 we’ll go under details and we will scroll down until we find rs links in g and if i can catch it right yep i’m going to uh highlight it and then it keeps bouncing around come on i want to hit in task and it says do you want to end rs links in g.
(06:33) exe we’ll say yes and process when i do that i can kind of immediately press the start button and i say immediately because the rslinxng.exe comes right back in very quickly after i uh turn off the process so if you can kind of catch that quickly you can start it it’s a little bit of a quirk um i don’t know if it’s just a buggy thing in the version 13 or not but if that’s happening to you that is the uh the easy work around so now we’re powered that our little power button has turned green our power led is lit um it’s possible you might have a red
(07:14) fault light showing on yours it’s okay we will that’ll go away in a bit um you probably should not have the run light on unless you’ve already been you know playing with the simulator before you watch this video and can figure it all out the runway should not be on right now the other thing to note is that it gives it a ip address so this is basically taking the ip address off of your computer so uh so you don’t you won’t do anything here you’re not going to change anything that is the ip address of the simulator
(07:49) so to get connected to the simulator we’re going to if we go back to the ccw software we want to make a connection to that simulator because at some point we have to program we’re going to write a program and we want to be able to send that program to the simulator and have the simulator actually um you know test the code so we’re going to do we need to do a con we need to connect um so if we hit connect and if you haven’t made a connection before it’s going to pull up basically a um a path for you to choose you have to choose
(08:31) you know what are you going to connect to and you should see this kind of come up and we’ve got a couple of options we got ethernet a b e t h one a b e e t h i p one and ethernet it doesn’t really matter of course in usb which would be a usb physical usb serial cable connection it doesn’t really matter if it’s which one of these you choose i’m going to choose ethernet it says 192 168 86 38 that matches what i had back here right so i’m going to just highlight that and i’m going to say okay so what happens is it should put that
(09:14) path right here in the um underneath the connect button that way we know the path and then and then it’s going to kind of continue the connection now the very first time it is going to ask you hey you know the current pro current project doesn’t match what’s you know you know what you have there’s a mismatch between what you have configured here and what you have configured in the actual simulator do you want to download the current project we’ll say yes again there’s nothing done there’s no program written yet but is going to go
(09:49) ahead and make a download and kind of at least just establish the simulator kind of based on what we’ve told it so far here and it’s still doing its uh connection it says hey the project is in the controller will be overwritten do you want to download in this case yes we will choose download and it will uh overwrite again there’s no program in the in the project so it’s really not doing anything um to the controller and we are now uh downloaded so you could see the bottom download one succeeded zero failed zero update zero skip zero error so that’s
(10:33) good everything went good so we are actually connected to the controller and we are have downloaded to it you don’t really know anything’s happening i will you know admit there’s really no no lights or anything here to let you know what’s going on but in our next uh in our kind of our our next step or our next lab we will create some code we will download to it and then you’ll be able to see that actually executing live through the simulator