Practical Tips and Techniques
We will now look at ink mixing and bottling PLC programming. EasyPLC software suite has a feature called Machine Simulator (MS) that comprises several machines that can be programmed, or you can design your own. One such machine is the ink mixer, which is used to mix different inks using the red, green, and blue … Read more
A stack light is a valuable tool for displaying the status of a machine or process. This is used to draw the operator’s attention to the operation or condition of the machine. It is usually a vertical tower of colored lights programmed to turn on or off in various combinations to indicate different conditions. For … Read more
We will now look at communication between the Productivity 2000 PLC (Modbus TCP Server) and Node-RED (Modbus TCP Client). Node-RED is a powerful, adaptable HMI/SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) development package that uses flow programming. Minimal coding is required; you can see the program flow visually. The best thing is that the software is … Read more
We will connect a lighted pushbutton switch to a programmable logic controller (PLC). Using our Click PLUS PLC, we will be assembling, wiring, programming, and testing our pushbutton switch system. The Fuji Electric pushbutton, normally open (NC) contact, will be wired to the first PLC (X1) input. The LED light will connect to the Click … Read more
We will use an MQTT broker in Node-RED to communicate to the productivity PLC clients. 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, perfect for the Internet of … 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