Productivity Sync Time to a SNTP Time Server from AutomationDirect
https://www.automationdirect.com/productivity
(VID-P2-0026)
- The Productivity PLC line has now added the ability to sync your time to a SNTP Time server. This will allow you to keep your process time accurate across your platforms.
This video details the process of setting a Productivity CPU to a Public SNTP time server on the Internet.
Link to list of Public Timer Servers
https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi
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The Productivity PLC platform has now added Network time service. This will allow the Productivity to reach out to a SNTP Time Server and update the current time on either a regular interval or based upon a triggered event. This time server can be local to your network or you could use a public Time server on the internet. There is a link provided in the description below that lists some of these public time servers. I am going to use this public server, in this video. To start this setup, you must have at least version 3.4 programming software and download the latest firmware into your PLC. Once you have that done that, select here under services. Check here to enable the service and enter in the IP address of the server you will be using and if you would like to place an alternative here. This portion will apply Day light saving time, when the tag entered here is set high. For the time zone offset have two options. You can use a constant and select eastern time zone for example and enter in a constant offset. Or you can use a Tag. Using the tag option, would be very useful if you are shipping your product to multiple time zones. You can place a floating tag here and be able to change the time offset to accommodate the final location of the CPU. Make sure to note, that this is in minutes and not hours. Once you have this filled out, select apply. Now, to sync your time to this server you will need to use the time sync instruction. I will start by adding a Time update enable bit. Add in my time sync instruction. Now, you can select to have this instruction work on a regular interval or triggered by the enable bit. I am going to select this as a triggering event, so you can see the update later in the data view. I am going to select to create a structure for this Instruction. This will be helpful for trouble shooting the instruction. Select here. and this will finish creating the tag of that structure. I would advise increasing this string to at least 64 characters. That way if you do have an error response you will see the whole message. Select ok. Now, write this project to the CPU Now, let’s test our instruction. Start off by Right-clicking on this rung and selecting to monitor this in Data View. Open up the Data View. Now, I am going to add the system Time to this data view just, so you can see the time update. I will manually enter in my Time offset. This PLC is in the Eastern Time zone which would be negative 5 hours, but this tag needs to be in minutes. So, I will enter in negative 300 and enable our time sync instruction. And you will see our time is updated. If you have an error this tag will display the error cause. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to comment below or call into our Free Tech support team. Select here to see more videos on the Productivity PLC line. And select here to subscribe to our YouTube channel to keep up to date with our new products and solutions.
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