ACC Automation: PLC & Industrial Control Learning
Practical Tips and Techniques
The Productivity 2000 series of PLCs has five built-in communication ports for easy connectivity to your PC or various industrial networks. Serial protocols like Modbus RTU can be utilized with the RS232 or RS485 ports on this PLC. Modbus RTU (Serial) is an open (published) protocol that uses the Master / Slave architecture. It’s a … Read more
The Do-More Designer Programming Software (2.9) or higher includes a Modbus I/O Scanner with some profiles for Modbus Server (Slave) devices. This will greatly reduce the time it takes to implement and troubleshoot communications in your projects. Modbus communications are done independent of the PLC scan time and will have little or no ladder logic … Read more
The newest Do-More Designer Programming Software (2.9) version includes a Modbus I/O Scanner. This Modbus scanner will simplify Modbus RTU serial communications to any device. Communications are done independent of the PLC scan time and will have little or no ladder logic for the program. We will be communicating to a Solo process temperature controller … Read more
All Solo Standard Process Temperature Controllers that support RS-485 serial communications can use the SL-SOFT configuration and monitoring software. This free package will communicate to monitor multiple SOLO controllers using Modbus RTU or Modbus ASCII protocols. We will be installing the SL-SOFT configuration and monitoring software package on our Windows 10 PC. Communicating through our … Read more
Many questions come from serial communications using the Click PLC. Most of these questions deal with communication timing when using multiple send-and-receive instructions. We will show you how to deal with serial communication timing in the Click PLC. Receive and Send instructions will allow you to send and receive serial data to an external device. … Read more
Node-RED will be used on the Raspberry Pi 4 to communicate serial Modbus RTU to a Solo process temperature controller and Click PLC using twisted pair RS485. This will be done on the same serial network so the devices will be daisy-chained together on the two wires. We will be reading the PV (present value) … 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 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
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