Adding I/O Cards

Normally when youre creating a new project, youll be starting from an electrical design. I didnt
bother creating one for this tutorial, but assume were dealing with the following:

One 16 Point Input Card (1756-IB16)

One 16 Point Output Card (1756-OB16I)

One Motion Control Card (1756-M02AE)

Before we add them, realize that we need to give each one a name. Naming of devices and I/O is a
Big Deal in the design of a control system. Consistency is important. Specifically, its important that
its easy to identify the device, I/O wire, input point, and the contact or coil in the program with each
other. Ideally, a person who has to look at the program later just wants to find a tag name in the
program that matches the wire number or device name in the real world.
Im also a fan of short tags and long descriptions. When youre trying to fit lots of logic on one rung
without wrapping, its helpful to have short tag names. If you came from the SLC 500 side, youll
appreciate the conciseness of B3:5/0. Programmers who are new to RSLogix 5000 tend to create
Really_Long_Tag_Names_Just_Because_They_Can. Thats really bad practice. Come up with short
forms for all the equipment and components of your system, and stick to that for tag naming. Then
use descriptions to document thoroughly.
So, we typically divide I/O into Local and Distributed, and its common to use L and D to denote
them. Since we only have Local I/O in this tutorial, lets start our input and output tag names with L.
Its also normal to denote whether a tag is an input or an output, so we can make the input tags start
with LI and the output tags start with LO. Finally, we typically want to know what slot number each
I/O card is in. Since the processor will be in slot 0, lets put the input card in slot 1 and the output
card in slot 2. Well put the motion card in slot 3, and lets use M to denote it as motion, rather than
an I or an O. Here are the names Ill use for the input cards:

1756-IB16: LI01

1756-OB16I: LO02

1756-M02AE: LM03

In a later section of the tutorial, Ill describe how to setup tags that will match these card names.
That will make everything consistent. For now, if we were labeling wires in the panel, I would
suggest using LI01.0 as the first input, LI01.1 as the second input, etc., and LO02.0 as the first output,
etc.
Lets start by adding the input card. Locate the I/O Configuration folder in the controller organizer
window:

Since this is local I/O, its connected straight into the backplane of the rack. So when we add the new
card, we have to add it to the backplane, not as a child of the processor. A ControlLogix system can

actually support multiple processors in one rack so processors and I/O cards are peers now. Right
click on the 1756 Backplane item in the tree and youll see an option for a New Module:

Click on New Module. Thats going to pop up the Select Module Dialog:

You can browse for the I/O module you want, but since we know the catalog number, just click the
Find button (highlighted above). Youll get a simple Find Text dialog box that pops up. Enter IB16 in
the text box:

Click the Find Next button, and youll be back at the Select Module Dialog with the 1756-IB16 card
highlighted:

Click OK in the Select Module Dialog. For some unknown reason, it needs to know right now what
the Major Revision number of the module will be (even though chances are youre writing this
program before the parts have been ordered, let alone arrived). In general, always pick the newest
revision. If youre buying new hardware for this project, chances are thats what youll get. You can
always change it later by deleting and re-adding the card.

Click OK and youll get the New Module Dialog:

Enter the card name we chose above (LI01) into the Name field and check that the slot number is
correct (it should default to 1, which is right), and click OK. Youll now see the new module hanging
off the backplane:

Youll also see the new Module Properties Window:

The defaults are quite reasonable for 99% of the applications Ive seen, so just click OK to close it.
Now follow exactly the same procedure to add the output card and the motion card. If youre
successful, it should look like this:

Now double click on Controller Tags near the top of the controller organizer window, and youll
notice that by adding these cards, it has automatically created several tags that you can access to
interact with these cards:

Normally we dont interact with these tags directly (for reasons I will outline later). For now, go
ahead and poke around in them to see whats there. Youll see that it only created tags for the input
and output card. The motion card requires us to create an Axis before we see any tags. Were going
to do that in the next section of the tutorial.