Application Scenarios:
Picture a field service engineer arriving at a mid-1990s bottling plant where a bank of SLC 5/04 processors still controls the filler, capper and palletizer lines over a shared DH+ trunk. The plant’s original engineering workstation is long retired, the plant’s modern SCADA laptops have no serial port and no PCMCIA slot, and the production scheduler needs a live upload of the running program within the hour. This is precisely the scenario the 1784-PCMK/B was designed for: slot it into a legacy Toughbook or any PCMCIA-equipped industrial laptop, attach the DH+ dongle cable, launch RSLinx Classic, and the SLC 5/04 appears in RSWho within seconds — no gateway configuration, no IP addressing, no protocol conversion. The same profile addresses three chronic pain points for plants maintaining legacy Allen-Bradley installations: laptop-availability friction (modern machines lack PCMCIA slots, so the card must be paired with a purpose-sourced field laptop), cabling ambiguity (Series A and Series B dongle connectors are not interchangeable, and quoting the wrong cable is one of the most common sourcing errors), and brownfield support (RSLinx Classic with the 1784-PCMK/B driver remains the shortest path to a live DH+ link when a plant needs to read, edit or upload a program from a working SLC 5/04 or PLC-5 system).
Parameter:
| Main Parameters | Value / Description |
|---|---|
| Product Model | 1784-PCMK/B |
| Manufacturer | Rockwell Automation (Allen-Bradley) |
| Product Category | PCMCIA Type II communication card (legacy DH+/DH-485/RIO interface) |
| Form Factor | PCMCIA Type II PC Card, CardBus-aware silicon (Series B) |
| Supported Protocols | Data Highway Plus (DH+), DH-485, Remote I/O (RIO scanner mode, Series B) |
| Network Data Rates | 57.6 kbps, 115.2 kbps, 230.4 kbps (network-configurable) |
| DH+ Node Addressing | 0–77 octal (up to 64 nodes per trunk) |
| Power Consumption | 5 V DC @ 250 mA typical, drawn from host PCMCIA slot — no external supply |
| LED Indicators | Network status and activity LEDs on the card edge |
| Compatible Software | RSLogix 5, RSLogix 500, RSLinx Classic (with 1784-PCMK driver) |
| Operating Systems | MS-DOS, Windows 3.11, 95/98, NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP (with limitations) |
| Operating Temperature | 0 to +50 °C |
| Weight | Approximately 0.02 kg (card only) |
| Lifecycle Status | Discontinued (DN) — available through tested surplus and refurbishment channel |
