Neptune Labs

Productivity PLC’s just received a massive upgrade in functionality! They can now do function blocks or what Allen Bradley calls add on instructions(AOI). It looks and functions very similarly to how AOI’s work.

A very simple example of this is say I have three stack lights over three different rooms and I want the lights to tell the operator if the room needs attention because inside the room a hopper of material is running low or empty lets say these are Banner stack lights and are using IO-Link communication. In the past I would create a program that would map the color commands to an integer that would then be put into the correct location. But I would have to make this code in triplicate for this scenario. Now we just need create the code once and turn it into a user defined instruction (UDI). We then set the inputs and outputs for the instruction, basically what we want to stay local to block of code and what we want to be input and what outputs we want.

At the bottom of the page I have added a sample program of a UDI that can be imported into productivity and placed in code. The real benefit to this is being able to make blocks of code that can be reused over and over again in different projects and in the end will ultimately reduce the time spent programing and saving you or your company money! Let me know if this is something that interests you and I can do a deeper dive into this subject.