Hot Tips from Product Support: Changing PAC Control Variables to Persistent
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Hot Tips from Product Support: Changing PAC Control Variables to Persistent
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Opto 22's Product Support Group (PSG) develops some helpful tips as they work with customers who contact them for free product support.
In our control programming software PAC Control, you use variables to store pieces of information that your control program (or strategy) will act upon. For example, these pieces of information might be the on or off state of a switch, or communication parameters for a peer on the network.
Sometimes, after you've defined a variable in your strategy, you may decide it needs to be persistent rather than global.
- A global variable is set to its initial value whenever the strategy is run or whenever it is downloaded to the controller.
- A persistent variable, however, is initialized only once, when the strategy is first downloaded, and its value is saved in the controller's memory.
PSG engineer Josh M. says that customers think they need to go through a lot of steps to change a variable from global to persistent. But it's not that hard to do. Here's the best way.
1. Create a new persistent variable that is the same type as the global and has a similar name. For example, if the global is named josh, name the persistent josh1.
2. Choose Edit-->Replace. Find josh and replace it with josh1. This Find/Replace does the bulk of the work.
3. Save the strategy.
4. Delete josh. Rename josh1 to josh.
All done!
Questions? Contact Product Support.
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Need a CAD Drawing of an Opto Product?
Yes, we have CAD drawings on our website that you can download and use. Here's how to find them.
From any page on our website, click the Products tab and locate the product you're interested in. Or search on the part number if you know it; for example, search on SNAP-PAC-S1.
When you get to the product page, click the DOCS & DOWNLOADS tab.
Scroll down past the Documents and look for "CAD Drawing" in the Downloads section. Click the title to go to the download page for the drawing.
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