Moving Ethernet TCP/IP to a PLC Made Easy

There are a ton of perfectly good scales, barcode readers, printers and display devices that communicate with TCP data. This is equipment that you’ve used for a long time. You know how to set it up, how to make it work and that it’s reliable.

The problem is that you still have to connect these devices into your Allen-Bradley PLC. That means writing and testing PLC logic. Not hard – just another task to do and more code to support. But there is a better way, a much better way. If you could move the data right into the PLC’s registers, it would save you time, money and a pile of headaches

That’s the device we have developed for you. It quickly and easily moves barcode data, weigh scale data and other TCP device data to Allen-Bradley PLCs. The 490NBX moves your raw TCP data to a PLC with little or no delay. Milliseconds after receiving your raw TCP data, it is transferred to your user-specified tag in the PLC. Simply configure the input data format, the IP address of the PLC and a PLC tag using a very simple browser interface and you are ready to run. No standalone or custom software is required. It’s that simple.

How it Works

You don’t need to use message instructions to move data into a PLC. We have found a simpler way to send the data. You define a tag in the PLC for our unit to monitor. Our unit watches the string length and anytime it sees a non-zero value we send that data and set the string length back to zero.

Whenever we see data in our unit from your device, we send it out to a tag in the PLC. On the TCP device side, we transfer raw TCP data. Our unit can connect to your device by imputing the device’s IP address or it can wait for the device to connect to it by leaving the address 0.0.0.0.

Is It Really that Easy to Use?

Yes, these units are so popular because they are so easy to set up. There is no software to download or code to write. You simply map the tags to monitor and set your device’s connection and you are done. This is all done via a built-in browser-based interface. You pull up the webpage and enter your configuration. The whole thing can be set up in less than ten minutes.