DATE in Control Expert

[aj-emkj]

Hello,
I am experimenting with using specific time and dates to control various actions and I have created a variable with data type DATE in a Premium PLC with Control Expert.

So far I am not even able to read any value from it, when I monitor it from an animation table, the value says "???"

Anyone has experience with it or knows if I need to do something other that just creating a DATE variable to be able to read the RTC from the PLC?

I know that the RTC is working, I updated it to sync with my PC and I can read the system words %SW50, -51, -52 and -53 to get the time, date and year.
- only thing I can think of is that the DATE variable ("Dato") is not categorized as global - apparently I need to perform a full download to this and I cannot do that right now, the PLC is running and cannot stop executing.

Any advice or input will be appreciated, I am aware that I can combine the system words and setup the conditions and I might end up doing that, but right now I am trying to figure out how to use the DATE data type.

[MatthewM]

Read the help on DATE.  It is just a data type, and you have to enter data into it in the format d#yyyy-MM-dd.

If you want to read the PLC RTC, I suggest either decoding the %SW as you describe, or using the RRTC_DT function which read the PLC RTC to DT format dt#yyyy-mm-dd HH:mm:ss.

There are a number of functions available for use with both the DATE and DT types.  Use the 'Function Input Assistant' and filter on DATE or DT to see what can use them.  You might find you can do what you need with those functions, but if not you might have to do manually from decoded %SW.

[aj-emkj]

Thank you, using DT did allow me use the RRTC fb and read the RTC.

I found out how to separate the SW51 and SW52 into minutes, hours, days and months with the WORD_AS_BYTE function and this made it a lot easier to combine them.