ACC Automation: PLC & Industrial Control Learning
Practical Tips and Techniques
An LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) is a great way to display information in our Arduino Uno controller. We will be wiring and programming an alphanumeric, two rows with 16 characters on each row. The display has an LED (Light Emitting Diode) backlight with adjustable contrast. This white and blue LCD will display “Hello World!” on … Read more
Node-RED Modbus TCP can recover from communication errors automatically. Options are available to you the programmer to continue the Node-RED flow upon detection of these errors. Broken Ethernet cable, Modbus Server power, and Node-RED Client offline are just a few of the errors that can occur on the industrial plant floor. Our Node-RED program must … Read more
We will be installing an industrial USB to RS485 converter on our computer. The Waveshare USB to serial port is a 2-wire USB to RS-485 serial communication adapter for RS485 use. It does not require an external power supply or complicated configuration. It has a Type A (plug) USB connector for the computer side and … Read more
If you want to install a USB to RS485 adapter on your computer, you’ve come to the right place. We will use the CH340/341 USB to Serial port, an adapter that translates USB data into RS-485 communication. There is no need for an external power source or a head-scratching setup. It’s as easy as insertion, … Read more
We will now be installing Node-RED on a Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer. A static IP address will also be given for both the WiFi and Ethernet connections. The Raspberry Pi has quickly become a fixture in the industrial environment when utilizing the internet of things. (IoT) We will be utilizing this low-cost computer to … Read more
Node-RED HTTP Request can be used to read any BRX Do-More PLC memory area. This HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) communication will only read information from our controller. The BRX Do-More REST API is used to read information using a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or web address. We will be using the HTTP request node in … Read more
We will now look at the data logging capability using our Click plus PLC. Data logging is the collection of data over time. This is usually used for data analysis at a later time. The amount of data (System Information) stored and the frequency of the storage will depend on your specific application. The hardware … Read more
We will now look at the connection to our SQL database using a spreadsheet application. Previously we used Node-RED to communicate Modbus TCP and RTU to our Click PLC and Solo Temperature Controller. The information collected from the controllers was then put into an SQLite SQL database. Spreadsheets like Excel are great for analysis of … Read more
We will now look at the MQTT communication capability using our Click plus PLC. MQTT stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport. This simple ‘publish and subscribe’ communication protocol, does not take too many resources. Constrained devices with low bandwidth are ideal for MQTT. This protocol provides machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity which is ideal for the Internet … Read more
Node-RED can easily log data to a database. SQL (Structured Query Language) can be used to communicate to a SQL database. Databases separate analysis from the data unlike spreadsheets like Excel. The database is designed to hold more information than spreadsheets and allow multiple users to access the information. We will be creating an SQLite … Read more