My PLC Programming

Roger, this looks pretty awesome, I would say.

Back in that time frame I made a robot cell that edgefolded carpet around a formed package tray containing a CHMSL (Center high mounted stop light). The operator plugged in the light (two bulbs) and I checked to see if we drew two bulbs worth of current at the end of the hotmelt application, edgefold cycle.

Some of the bulbs we used didn't make it.

Wes

-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

Thanks Iggy, It's not that difficult to get a machine to do many processes at the same time, the biggest obstacle is to un-learn what you learned about programming through the examples that taught you to hold up the process while waiting for a condition to be met.

RogerN

Sounds related, the machine in the video was to supply bulbs for a manufacturer of automotive lighting assemblies. Not in the video is a station we added later to install O-rings on the sockets, the leak test instrument could detect a hair under the O-rings. I also wired and programmed some of their workcells that performed different operations on the lighting assemblies. Some induction heated studs to press into the fixtures, some welded housings, etc. It was a neat setup, they had machines that operated like a press but the die sets were easily changeable for the tooling for different model years.

RogerN

I can't help but visualize the machine spitting out wire brushes!

Very nice. How are you with A-B SLC500 plc's? If I ever get back to re-programming my Brown and Sharpe surface grinder I may have some questions. I started a year ago and then got busy and have not had a chance to get back to it.

Thank You, Randy

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Do you have to place your final product in a tray like roger did. That looks to be the tuffest part of this little machine. Keeping track of part place position through machine stops, Estops, and restarts can be a stone bitch.

Say, aren't you looking for an underemployed PLC ladder logic type a guy? maybe there's a marriage made in RCM about to happen.

Karl

I was thinking about something on that line. At work we have Siemens (among others) controls and have Siemens form Germany to go online with our equipment for programming. I'm not sure of all the networking details but Tom could probably set up a PC that I, or anyone he wanted, could VPN into and program his equipment. He would need someone that could wire switches and coils but once that was done the program could be downloaded, troubleshot, and improved all by VPN (We use UltraVNC, free and works great).

RogerN

Y'know, that works great for some things. But there are just points in the design & debug process where I want to be close to the power switch, so I can slap it off if things start melting.

No chit. When I bought a license to RSLinkx I realized I could do some real damage from my office. Had to change some wiring and programming to deal with that possibility.

Wes

-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

SLC500 is one of my favorites, I have a SIC 5/04 (and a couple of PLY 5's) at home that I play with. I got the PLY 5's because the 1771 rack cards are relatively cheap and plentiful but I connect it to the SLC500. That Mitsubishi PLC has the entire program in one ladder file, AFAIK they don't have separate ladder files like a PLC5 or SLC500.

On the machine in the video I used the help of a spreadsheet to organize the program and it is very easy to find out what is going on very quickly. Each station has a set of bits for each step, if the thing doesn't index, you just look at the index rung and one of the stations won't be ready for index, go to that station and see what step it's hung up at. At the time of the video I had just got it running that day and it had about 2500 instructions. The final program had around 5600 instructions, many of the additional instructions were to display errors on the screen, if the machine stopped they needed to know why without plugging in a PC.

I added an "index permissive" bit for each station that allowed the table to index as soon as each station was clear of the table, it didn't have to wait for each station to be done and home before indexing. This saved time and the customer said this machine out ran all their other machines and they were setting it up to run more different types of sockets.

RogerN

Yeah, for the major part of the programming and start up the Germans were on site, it would be kind of dangerous messing with 5000HP worth of motors and drives from a long distance, then again you don't want to be too close either.

In my programming experience I've learned from mistakes and I made a lot of them so I guess that means I learned allot!(?) :-) The programmer doesn't necessarily have to be on location but there has to be someone there to operate the machine, make sure it's safe, and stop it in an emergency.

It seems like the Germans that program our equipment have a goal to make something as complicated as possible, they seem to think it's cool if no-one understands their program. I'm the opposite, I like to make things so simple that even I can understand them! For the machine in the video, the electrician at the plant was able to understand the program and add additional parts himself. Product options included 1 or 2 filaments and clear or amber bulbs. The station after the bulb insertion has 2 banner mini-beam photo eyes, a red one could see through clear and amber bulbs and detected if the base wasn't fully seated, the other photo eye was blue and detected amber bulbs.

RogerN

THAT could be interesting! As soon as we have direction and timing to start pulling the trigger...

If you use cygwin to implement a ssh server, putty to tunnel with, you can then use a *VNC to get a secure connection to a remote windows desktop. This is an all Windows example.

Until they changed the admin pw at work, I had a neat way to get back to my pc at home using their copy of RealVNC with a tunnel using Putty on my usb drive. Oh well, it was sweet while it worked.

Wes

-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller