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Plugging a USB cable from your computer into the Do-more PLC is the easiest way to get started because it doesn’t require any Ethernet or Serial Port setup. Power up the PLC and you’ll hear the familiar Windows connected sound. When you start Do-more Designer, you can choose if you want to work on a previous project, create a new one off line from a PLC or in our case we want to create a new on-line project. If you have an existing link to a PLC you can click on it here. We have a new PLC so we’ll click ADD to create a new link. We’re connected via USB, and Do-more Designer shows us the one PLC that is connected via USB. Give the new link a name and now we can select that guy as the PLC we want to work with. We can skip these dialogs for now. Since we’re connected to a Do-more PLC, we get a dashboard with an image of that PLC, groupings of all the things we can do with the PLC and hot spots right on the PLC so you can just point and click to configure whatever part of the PLC you want without having to search through a bunch of menus. We really just want to start writing ladder code so just click on View/Edit Program. I’ve been using this PLC so let’s reset it back to factory default. Normally you want to clear everything BUT the system settings because it has the Ethernet settings you need to communicate with the PLC, if you are using Ethernet. We’re using USB so it doesn’t matter, so let’s take it all the way back to factory default. Are we sure? Yep. The clock is fine and we don’t need to change the system configuration. Great, we now have a clean factory fresh PLC. This little exclamation point is reminding us that we don’t have a current project in the PLC – we know that – we just cleared the memory – right? That will go away when we write our first project. Move the switch to STOP and then to TERM. Great, our systems should be in sync. In ladder programming our goal is to get power to flow from this power rail, through some controlling logic over to this output column. This hollow cursor reminds me I’m not in edit mode, so I’ll click on the edit button. The cursor becomes solid and our instruction toolbox appears. Let’s un-pin that so we have more room to work. Let’s grab a normally open contact and drop it on the first rung. Let’s use the X0 input. Ok, let’s grab an output coil and drop it in the output column. Let’s drive the Y0 output. The yellow bar reminds me that I haven’t accepted this program yet so I’ll do that. This is kinda like compiling – Do-more designer checks everything to make sure it is ready to transfer to the PLC. Now I get a green bar which tells me the change hasn’t been saved and the blue bar which says it hasn’t been written to the PLC yet. Let’s save it – green bar goes away. And let’s write it to the PLC and the blue bar goes away. Perfect. I see down here that the PLC is in terminal mode so I’ll reach over and flip its switch to RUN. Now it says the switch is in RUN mode and that the PLC is in fact running the program. I wired a push button to input X0, so if we enable status monitoring, and I press that button, sure enough we see output Y0 go active. Exactly what we expected. Well … That’s all there is to connecting to a PLC via USB, writing a quick program, and transferring it to the PLC. Could you download this program to the built-in simulator to test it with no hardware? Sure. Go to the start page and click on this button to search for videos on using the simulator. You can type simulator here, or click the simulator category and even show all related videos. You can watch that video right now or download it so you can watch it later off line. And if you need any help with Do-more Designer, please contact AutomationDirect’s free award winning support team during regular business hours. They will be happy to help. Spend Less ... Do-more ... with AutomationDirect.
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