BRX Do-more PLCs - How to Use a C-more HMI Display from AutomationDirect

Connecting a C-more HMI to a DoMore can be done via the typical Modbus route. When you create the TAGs in the C-more, you’ll just have the usual four options and those four options will correspond to the 4 memory areas reserved for Modbus commands in the Do-more right here. The Do-more can then use those to control IO or anything else you want. That will work just fine. OR you can do it the EASY way. All you have to do is specify the DoMore protocol in your C-more more project. And all of the sudden the C-more has full access to ALL of these memory areas in the DoMore. Let’s take a look. When you create a new C-more project, You give it a name, select the panel you are using – I’m using this guy right here - and then right here, just select the AutomationDirect DoMore protocol – I’m using Ethernet, so I’ll select that one. You can do the Protocol setup right here, but I prefer to do it over here in the panel manager. In the Panel manager, I just select the device I want to talk to, and fill in the Protocol. The nice thing about doing it here though, is I can change the name of the device. We just enter the IP address of this DoMore and a password if you’re DoMore is setup to use one. Mine doesn’t so I’ll leave it blank. If we had chosen the serial version of this protocol you would be filling in baud rate, stop bits, parity, etc. Well, that’s all there is to it. Just enter the IP address, give your device a name, say OK That was setting up the Do-more in our C-more project. now we need to setup the panels networking information. Under the Ethernet port tab we put in the panels IP Address and enter a subnet mask. So again, to set this up all we had to do was: 1. Setup the DoMore device under the panel manager, 2. And setup the panels networking under the touch panel network. That’s it, now everything becomes real easy because when I create a TAG to talk to the DoMore, I just select the Do-more device, Give it a name – let’s have this TAG control – oh I don’t know – how about output Y0. I’ll call it Out Y0. That’s going to be a discrete, and when I select that, it automatically selects all of the memory areas in the Do-more that are a discrete data type. In this case, I want the Y’s. And I want to modify Y0. That’s it. And while we are at it, let’s go ahead and control an analog output. That will be a signed 16 bit integer, and once I have selected that, the C-more automatically populates all the available memory areas in the Do-more. In this case, we want the analog Y out at address 0. Let’s add a pushbutton to drive that Y0 output we created. And let’s add an increment decrement to drive that analog output. Let’s transfer that to the panel I have here on my desk. Here is a new online DoMore project. You setup the Ethernet connection right here under the info button: Set node and IP configuration. In this example, I have already setup our Do-more for this IP address and this subnet mask. Now we’ll just save and download this to the DoMore. And we are up and running. Note that we didn’t enter any ladder code. If I bring up a DataView to monitor those TAGs we created – one was driving Y0 and one was driving the analog Y0 – and I reach over to my panel and I press the OFF button, sure enough – Y0 toggles on the Do-more. Likewise, if I hit the increment button, I can see my analog value changing. Again, without any effort on the part of the Do-more – it just works. So because we selected that Do-more driver in the C-more application, the C-more now has full access to all the memory areas in the DoMore, the DoMore doesn’t really have to do anything. All the data just ends up where it is supposed to ready for the DoMore to use it whoever it wants. Here’s the hardware setup we used in this example: The C-More is connected to the DoMore via Ethernet – note you need a crossover cable to do this – and the PC is connected to the C-More and the Do-more via USB. Be sure to check out the other videos in this series for more ways to get up and running quickly with the DoMore PLC Spend Less. Do More. From Automation Direct.