Home / Micro800 / Micro800 Simulator
Description
This video provides a walk through of how to configure and use the Micro800 Simulator that comes with the Standard and Developer Editions of Connected Components Workbench (CCW).
How to add plug-in modules and expansion I/O to the simulator.
How to add the virtual wire connections in the simulator.
Transcript
(00:03) let take a few minutes to show you the micro 800 simulator that comes standard with the connected components workbench software it doesn’t matter if you’re using the the standard edition or the Developer Edition of CCW the micro 800 simulator is included in both there is a difference though if you’re using the free standard edition which again is the free unlicensed version the micro 800 simulator will only run for 10 minutes at at the end of 10 minutes basically if you redownload or or kind of stop the controller and restart the
(00:38) controller then you’ll get another 10 minutes if you’re using the paid version which is the Developer Edition then the micro 800 simulator will run for 24 hours continuously now uh before we actually create a project I just want to show you the simulator itself so it actually open open it up we’re going to go to tools and we’re going to say micro 800 simulator and that’s going to open up a separate program which is basically the micro 800 simulator um so it looks like a micro 850 because it’s basically it’s based on the micro 850
(01:19) controller now um if you’re kind of looking for anything to kind of help you about the micro800 simulator under help you can come to view help and it will open up a um kind of a help file in your browser so you know a lot of times people ask if there’s a manual something right U this is basically the the best place to go so uh all the help features are here talks a little bit more about uh it use cases the difference between the real controller and the simulator kind of tells you what the simulator can and cannot do versus a real controller
(01:57) for instance we can’t do serial Communications we can’t do modbus Communications through it right so it’s going to be certain things here that we just uh that we can’t do um it also talks a little bit about the differences between the standard and uh Developer Edition as far as the timing goes like I just mentioned earlier and it also talks about how you can go about uh configuring the simulator and resetting stuff like that right so um before I come back before we start to configure this let me first create a project in CCW so we’re
(02:35) going to create a project that is for the simulator so we’re going to go uh new project and it’s okay we’re going to call it project one doesn’t matter the default project here is fine and we’re going to say create um and under our ad devices we want to go to controllers and then we need to go to the micro 850 and then we need to choose the lc50 the l50 is the newer generation of the micro850 controllers the E for enhanced ethernet the lc50 is the kind of previous generation um but the simulator itself lives underneath the lc50 so we want to
(03:20) find this 2080 lc50 48 qwb dsim that is the simulator and and there is no choice here other than version 12 so we’re going to leave it at version 12 and we’re going to say select and once we select it we can say add the project so this now builds the uh the controller project in CCW which we will get that uh pop up here in just a moment so while that happens um in this in this uh you know for the the simulator itself uh there’s a few things we can do here um we you know first there’s a power button on power on
(04:07) button we don’t want to push this yet we want to make sure that we make any configuration changes to the simulator before we power it on the other thing is the the uh the IP address so right now it defaults to the loot back IP address which is the 127.0.0.1 we can leave it as that if you need to change it for some reason you can choose the various uh differences here um but we don’t have a lot to choose from so we’re going to stick with the 127 001 the other thing I can do is um I do have five plug-in modules and I have the
(04:47) ability to also add the expansion IO so the 850 line gives you expansion IO as well as the plugins so if I wanted to add a plugin to this uh simul controller I can right click on one of these plug-in modules say analog or digital and I’m going to choose uh for this I’m going to go ahead and choose an analog so I’m going to put the if2 here and in the second plugin I think I’ll add the analog output which is the O2 but I could I can add any of the of the Allen Bradley um brandit plug-in modules to this to the simulator and then if I
(05:28) wanted to go ahead and add one to the expansion I can rightclick in this space over here and I can add either the analog expansion modules or the digital expansion modules to to kind of add those to our simulation I’m going to go ahead and add the 16o input card uh into this just to have that there as well it’s very important that we make these changes now because once we turn on the simulator we will not be able to make any edits if we need to make an edit to this we’d have to stop the simulator restart the simulator and then
(06:02) make the edits before we power it on the other thing that’s uh I want to show that’s also of Interest here is that we have this uh icon for configure IO wiring so if I click on this um what this does is it allows me to tie a particular output back into an input so I can kind of make a virtual wire that would say okay here’s my outputs from the simulator let’s go ahead and rewire that back into one of the inputs on the simulator um again references virtual wire so for instance I can say add so in this case uh when when output z0 which
(06:45) is this guy right here when it turns on it’ be a virtual connection to input 00 0 okay and you can add a delay in here um right now at the it’s a say 0 millisecond delay which is which is good we can also do the same thing with analoges but the key is the analoges can only be kind of wir between the plugins so I could have this output feeding back into this input type of thing um so we can go ahead and try that uh so in this case AO 00 will wire back into uh the analog input all right this is totally optional not anything that
(07:28) you have to do but if you want to create some virtual connections between outputs to kind of drive back into inputs for simulation purposes then you can use this uh virtual wiring basically so now we have all this configured I’m going to go ahead and start the simulator by powering it on we see now that we get the power on light turns green all right so everything’s good now back at our back in our CCW project now it’s very important important that we match our project to what we just configured in the simulator
(08:04) um so once we come into the uh kind of the the micro850 tab here we have the options to add our plug-in modules now we don’t need to really do anything else to the configuration of this virtual simulated controller we don’t need to put an IP address we don’t need to tie the IP address to the 12701 we don’t have to do that here um what we need to do is we need to add the plug-in modules that we added to the simulator because the simulator and the controller project have to match in that respect so I’m going to come to the
(08:40) plugin modules I’ll rightclick and analog and we had an if2 in that first um plug-in spot uh we can leave this as current and then right click on the second slot analog of2 for the output and then the last thing is on our expansion modules down here right click and I’m going to do a digital iq6 so that matches what we did in the um in the simulator right so so at this point we can go ahead and download I’m going to do one thing though I want to make at least one program just to show the virtual wiring con concept so I’m going to add a lad
(09:33) diagram and I’m going to create a a simple rung that will basically when I when I press uh when I simulate the one of when I turn on one of the expansion IO um points it’ll turn on that first output which of course will in turn drive a virtual wire connection to the to the input so I’m going to put a uh a contact here in a coil and then I’m going to say that if I use the iox DI 0000 and we will turn on the D the embedded d00 all right so just real simple Rong there again if I come back to my Global variables which I did not show you yet
(10:24) uh here are all my embedded IO points the emdi or the embedded discrete inputs the emdo are the embedded discrete outputs and then my P1 and P2 are my plugins plug-in one plug-in two and my IO X1 is my expansion uh card one X1 and they are that that expansion card is a digital input so that’s why it’s a DI so analog in analog out and then digital in for expansion card all right so now we’re ready to connect finally right so we have our our virtual s our simulators up and it’s running very important that it’s running and we
(11:09) have an IP address set to it when I come back here to my CCW I don’t have a connection path to find yet so I can say connect so in my connection browser I’m going to go to the E-1 which is the ethernet and I see here I got a 127.0.0.1 and it’s the micro850 uh controller you notice here I have a red X on this micrologic 1100 so it’s not currently connected but my simulator is so I’m going to highlight that guy and say okay this will now make a connection to the simulator and it’s going to start to pop up a few things here one is uh do
(11:59) you since there’s nothing in the simulator versus what’s in my controller project here it says hey do you want to download I’m going to go ahead and say yes once it downloads it’ll uh then it’ll say hey do you want to do the the current project download once again another thing to to click and then one more thing after that is the download is complete you want to change the controller to the remote run and we’re going to say yes and I get a popup here that will Bas that basically says you know it’s going to run for one day if you’re running the
(12:35) free standard edition it’ll say 10 minutes so I am connected to controller you can see that the background turned yellow and it says I’m connected if I open up the simulator again you’ll see now that we have the Run we have the Run light uh green so to just show the the virtual wiring uh connection here u i again if I had a a simple rung here that when I turned on this first uh input on this expansion card it’s going to turn on this output and when this output you see when I put my mouse there it shows that that orange kind of virtual wire so when
(13:15) I click this it turned on the output and it it drove you know back into the input here so I’m able to basically simulate you know kind of an output turn on an input through the virtual wiring which is pretty pretty neat to be able to simulate some things now if I come back to my variable list I just want to show you that um if I come down here to the plug-in modules in the simulator I can basically type in an analog value now um I did have it to where the this analog output was driving back into this analog input
(13:58) so for for these I’m going to go with the the SEC the the second analog input which is 01 and if I just type in a number here like [Music] 15,000 we will see that 15,000 shows up here in my controller tag and let me change that 25,000 you can see that changes 25,000 so I can just type in a value to uh to go right into my controller program to to simulate um or if it for this analog output um if I go ahead and type in a value here say it’s a 10,000 so now 10,000 shows up here but it also went into the analog input
(14:47) because I’m I’m driving uh that analog input is going right back into this analog I sorry this analog outputs going right back into this analog input right so if I were to change this number to 30 or 20,000 we’ll see that 20,000 now comes back into here so so again virtual wire connection so an analog output can uh feed back into a an analog input for for simulation purposes or I can just type in a value here uh in my analog input bring it into to to the uh into the tag and if it’s an analog output I can also
(15:28) just type in a value and that shows up in the tag in the simulator so U so easy easy way to to simulate our our control uh then all these other inputs up top I can just basically toggle them on one by one just by clicking on them they turn orange when they’re on you can see in the little light uh simulated light turns on as if it was an actual uh real controller same thing with my expansion IO of course my expansion IO I do not get lights over here this is just for the embedded IO but I can basically turn these
(16:10) on and if you go and look in our um you look at our back here in our controller tags we can see that there’s a blue checkbox for di01 and now it’s off d02 on off all right so that’s how we can interface the simulator into your program