USB-9162 with NI 9421 view state in Excel? OPC?

[TurboD]

First of all, I'm a total newb, and the company IT guy. I don't do anything with PLCs. 

What would be the best way to monitor the state of a channel in Excel? (true/false) Live

I think I need an OPC server, but not sure how to go about it. 

I have a USB-9162 with a NI 9421 PLC plugged into it. I have all the drivers installed, etc. I can view the PLC channels in Signals Express when I toggle my switches they light up. 

Basicly, I'm going to have MS Excel send out an e-mail when a condition is true.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I'm sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong forum. 

[nantek]

First of all, the NI 9421 is NOT a PLC

Secondly, if all you need is to send out an email when one (or more) of the digital input line(s) goes high, you could ask someone to program it for you using either LabWindows/CVI or LabView.  It should be no more than a couple hours of work (with plenty of times in between for coffee & tea).

[TurboD]

Thanks for your reply..

Okay, so it's not a PLC.. It only accepts inputs right? We don't have any NI stuff at our plant, but hundreds of AB PLCs. What I was trying to do was just have this receive an input from one of our AB PLCs, and from there do my own stuff. I know I could ask one of our PLC guys to just give me an input when a machine stops, etc, and I know it would only take him a few minutes to do that.  Nobody here has used labview, and I don't really want to have labview even running.  Maybe I just need to go a different route. 

[nantek]

If you already have hundreds of AB PLCs in your plant, then you must already have RsLinx running on your local network.  In that case, you don't even need to use the NI 9421 at all.  All you need is to have the PLC programmer to create a controller tag for the condition that you want to see, then you can write a program in Visual C/C++ or Visual Basic to monitor this tag and send out an email when the condition is met.

[TurboD]

Thanks again for your reply. 

We aren't doing any data collection, and the only time the programmer touches the PLC is when he connects to it via his laptop with a serial connection + RSLinx/Logic whatever it is. 

So, all of the PLCs are just running as standalone units, and the only time they are ever changed is when a part it updated. (rarely) 

I know we do have some newer AB stuff that has ethernet, but nothing is on a network, or is accessible anywhere on the LAN. 

We thought this might be a good way to start collecting more data, and it seemed pretty straitforward, I was just hoping to do it without labview since I have already made a bunch of excel spreadsheets that e-mail information when the operator puts in data (manually)

Thanks

[nantek]

If the PLCs are not on the LAN then, at the minimum, you will have to develop/write a simple program to read the digital lines from the NI-9421 and write them into an Excel spreadsheet.  Of course, you don't have to use LabView.  You could write the program in C, C++, or Visual Basic, whichever programming language that you're good at.