Ready to try something more challenging

Hello again everyone,

About a month ago I bought 90 micro plc and a 12vdc power supply off of ebay. I got an old panel that was being thrown away at work and fashioned myself a plc training board. After a quick visit to radio shack to get some lights and switches I was up and running in no time. What I ended up with is 7 inputs: start/stop/sw1/pb1,2,3,4
and 6 outputs: Light 1/2/3/4/5/6
Now I've spent the last couple of weeks getting pretty good at writing programs(cimplicity) that make the lights do pretty much whatever I want them to do. All the relay functions, timers, counters, one shots, etc. I'm pretty comfortable with.
What I want to know is if any of you guys think it would be possible to use the existing I/O's i have, to use function blocks(i.e. math functions,data functions).. I don't know a heck of a lot about how to utilize these functions or even how many my older plc will support, but if anyone has any ideas for something *simple* to start with, I would like to give it a try. I believe once I do a few simple ones, the more complex ones won't seem so bad.

thanks
Tom

Check out the downloads section of this site - they've got example programs for washing machines, traffic lights etc. All of these programs are a good place to start.
And as Morpheus might say "welcome to the real world"

Good luck.

If all you want to do is play with the math functions, you don't necessarily need a connection to real world I/O. You can simply put a constant in a register, and then use the four function math to manipulate the value, and use comparisons to test it, and so on. Then you can see if what happens matches what you thought would happen.

Since you only have discrete I/O, if you want you can do the same manipulations on the counter value for the number of times various inputs have transitioned, etc. You could also have an ouput on a timer, and have the pre-set for the timer be one of the values calculated from the input count, and so on.

Thanks Tom, That sounds like an interesting project to try.