DirectSoft5 PLC Programming Software - Editing DS500.ini File at AutomationDirect

hello and welcome to automationdirect media series we're going to walk through editing your ini file in any of your direct soft versions of programming software so as you can see right now i'm actually in the ds launch screen which we suggest you go to anytime you launch direct soft and i'm actually in direct soft five which is a newer release and over on the left hand side in the toolbar here we have an icon for the ds 500.ini now if you have an older version it's going to be whatever that version is so if you have version 3.0 it's going to be a ds 300.ini if you do not have the actual icon over here you can go find it and let me show you how you can do that you do it a couple different ways you can go to your windows explorer and do a search for that ds 300 dot ini or 400.ini but four and five should have the icons um it could even be ds200.ini but what i actually did is just went straight to see colon and then windows and if you look down here i actually have direct soft 400 ini and 500 ini because i have direct soft four and five both installed on my computer so you can do it that way or you can do a search either one okay now i do have direct soft five so i have the nice logo here can go directly to it now what is that knife for why would you need it or why would you want to go in and edit anything with it okay first thing let me close that out and we're gonna launch the screen and notice when i launch it's actually going to start searching for all our communications links so you notice right here we're searching all of our com links okay and it comes back and says okay you've got a few comm links that are uh disabled and you've got one that is enabled well let's just say for instance you got 40 or 50 machines on here and you don't want to have to let it sit there and go through every of those comm links trying to see if they're enabled or not that's you know taking up your time it's bugging it's a hassle okay so we're going to go into the ini file so i already have it open we're going to go down here and we're going to scroll down this ini file and as you can see here it says auto sense equals zero well zero means it should not go out and auto sense those column links but default they put a little semicolon which disables it so we're going to delete that hit file save we're going to close it and we're actually going to close our launch screen now watch what happens this time when we launch it pops right up doesn't go out and sense anything now downside to that is this is not going to tell you which links are enabled and which ones are disabled but it will save you time if you have a lot now personally i would just leave it alone unless you have a lot of links and that's really becoming annoying the second thing you can go in is let's say that i need to create a link and com1 and com2 on my computer are already tied up with some other devices i need to use let's just say i have multiple comport serial com ports so i need to use com port 4 that's what i want to program my plc with well you notice we're only getting one and two on here what i do if i need three four five six seven or even eight because you can enable up to com 8 with the ini file in direct soft so let's cancel that let's go back to our ini let's close this one out and we're going to scroll down and as we get down towards the bottom or the middle here you'll see it says divasync.dll and it talks about all of your com devices or it shows all your com devices and says com1 and two enabled equals one well three four all the way up to eight all equals zero so like i mentioned we wanna enable com4 so all we gotta do is put a 1 in there hit file save we're going to close it we'll close our launch screen and we'll relaunch and guess what we can go to comm links add a link one two and four are all enabled now you can disable them if you have a full list here enable them as you need same thing with the modems and ethernet and so forth okay that's what it's for now let's back up just a hair and we'll show you a couple of things there are some uh application notes out on the website you can also contact techno support if you need some further help so we'll go to our home website at automationdirect.com go to tech support and when you bring up that page as you can notice we're going to scroll down here but we have technical and application notes and you can scroll down to software products direct soft 32 and we actually have pdfs here that'll walk you through editing your ini files going through communications and stuff like that let's back up and let's say okay still not helping me out i have some problems what can i do how do i get a hold of you guys well you can go to contact technical support and you can see here we have our free 770-844-4200 it's a free phone call to our technical support also you have a fax number you can fax them in a request or question or simply just fill out the email here and you can ask them if you feel like you may you know want to go out on a forum and post a topic or ask some questions you can go there as well so i hope this helps you out with your direct soft eye and i and you better understand it a little bit better so thanks have a great day