Does anyone have experience with an Allen Bradley E300 Electronic Overload Relay using EtherNet/IP

[labviewman]

Please skip if you have never used an Allen Bradley E300 Electronic Overload Relay

I've never used EtherNet/IP until last Friday, yet within the day I was able to figure out some basic communication using the EtherNet/IP toolkit from IT (explicit messages). For never doing this before, I was pretty surprised I made it as far as I did, but I hit a major roadblock that I'm pretty sure is a configuration issue with the E300.

I reset the E300 it to factory defaults, using the web interface, set relay 0 as a control relay and relay 2 as the trip relay. The E300 does not complain of any configuration issue via it's web interface. I can read from the device w/o any issue with LabVIEW, even issue a command to reset a trip fault, so the get/set service codes via Get and Set attribute via the EtherNet/IP toolkit work correctly.

Here is the issue: when I try to control the control relay (which is physically configured to provide power to the contactor), I get error code 0xc. I am writing this with my personal computer and not my work computer so I don't remember the exact verbiage of the error, but it was along the lines of "incorrect/invaid mode for operation". There are actually 2 different class/attribute/instances that I found to control the control relay (I tried making it a normal relay too...no change), but both give the same result.

I tried the same thing with another application called Easy Builder Pro (from Weintek, which provides very nice computers that support over 400 different PLCs), which gave the same result (as seen with WireShark.

I contacted Allen Bradley support 2x...they tried to help, but everything they suggested, I had already tried. I suspect the E300 needs to be put into the right mode to be able to accept commands to control a relay (I assume controlling one of the 3 relays is needed to enable the contactor...Allen Bradley didn't say one way or another, but seem I'm on the right track.

Does anyone have experience with the E300? I know I'm very very close..

Thanks,

Todd

[labviewman]

Spoiler

Error 0xc: Object not in proper mode

[labviewman]

From an Allen Bradley help article:

"The RSNetWorx for DeviceNet CIA editor uses spaces to delinate between bytes and uses hex format, so the Data sent to the device: section is writing nothing to bytes 0 and 1, nothing to bytes 3-7, and 00000001 to byte 2. You can see from table 131 above that this is writing a 1 to the first bit of INT 1 which is NetworkStart1. You can write to the other bits of Instance 144 in a similar way."

Interestingly, their example screenshot shows exactly what I'm doing, yet, I get error code 0xc

[billko]

I'm guessing that there are (at least) two modes of communication.  Maybe somewhere in the manual shows something about the modes.  It could be, for example, streaming mode and query mode, and streaming mode doesn't accept commands, something of that nature.

Edit: Oops, sorry - you already know this.

[labviewman]

Hi Bill,

I am completely new to EtherNet/IP as of late last week...I have much to learn.

AB support keeps referencing communication mode class 3, which as far as I know is explicit messaging, which is what I'm doing.

The manual does mention the modes, which I am going thru now one by one, but all my testing has been with a couple modes that it specifically states does allow relay control via what they call instance 144, which is really class 4/instance 144/attribute 3.

I am so very close...