Controlling "cab SQUIX 4 M" printer via Allen Bradley

[Chaldaean]

I'm a Manufacturing Engineer with limited PLC experience and I am doing some research for our Controls Department.

Does anyone have experience running a "cab SQUIX 4 M" printer from Allen Bradley?

The printer runs on Ethernet TCP/IP whereas the PLC uses Ethernet I/P.

Any resources or code samples would be appreciated!

 

[Ken Roach]

Welcome to the PLCTalk forum community !

The past two generations of ControlLogix and CompactLogix support some rudimentary "open socket" communications to send binary or ASCII data to devices like this. It is not, in general, easy to do. I'm an A-B expert with decades of experience and I avoid it.

That printer brags about support for quite a few different protocols, to one extent or another:

LPD, RawIP printing, SOAP web service, OPC UA, WebDAV, DHCP, HTTP/HTTPS, FTP/FTPS, TIME, NTP, Zeroconf, SNMP, SMTP, VNC

None of them are going to be particularly easy to do with a CompactLogix.

What part of the label do you need to change based on information in your controller ?

 

[Chaldaean]

Ken, I really appreciate you being generous with your time and digging into this.

We have five variable fields on the label that feed into a concatenated barcode. I've attached a redacted print to illustrate.

We are using an Allen Bradley CompactLogix 5069-L320ERM.

 

[Ken Roach]

Neat !

Do you know if you can provide that barcode data as a Current Label Content Field via OPC-UA ?

cab and the Smart Factory: Networked labeling with OPC UA

In the matter of marking components, products or packaging within a plant, cab label printers of the current generation as well as IXOR labeling devices are already OPC UA-ready.

www.cab.de

That model of CompactLogix has a newly-implemented OPC-UA Client feature that might make this work more smoothly than attempting some other integration protocol.

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[Chaldaean]

...Do you know if you can provide that barcode data as a Current Label Content Field via OPC-UA ?

....That model of CompactLogix has a newly-implemented OPC-UA Client feature that might make this work more smoothly than attempting some other integration protocol.

Hello, Ken! Firstly, I sent this forum post to one of the members of our Controls group and he was familiar with the forum and recognized your name. His response was that you are a "legend". It seems you have quite the reputation and I'm honored to receive your advice.

We had not previously considered OPC UA and are looking into this. Thank you!