Zetor
Member
Hello All,
I just have to share an experience I had today. Up until today, I spend most of my time using RSLogix 5 on 17 different PLC 5’s trying to find why a particular machine will not start, or speed up etc. In other words I have to find which button is left in, what door not closed, what photo-eye is blocked, you know all the electrical problems. (LOL). Anyway the operators on my rewinder have to walk about 250 feet to a case packer to look at a mechanical counter to see their actual case count. Sooo I took it upon myself to see if I could get a counter to display case count onto their Panelmate 4000 at the rewinder. All the PLC’s on this line are hooked together via Ethernet. There is a Master PLC that reads and writes to all the others. So the first thing I did was take the input from the photo-eye that was sending a signal to the mechanical counter and use it with a CTU. This was done in the case packer plc. Then using a move statement I sent the acc. from the counter to the master plc. Here I used move statements to change it from a read to a write and send it to the rewinder plc. Then I added two page icons to the Panelmate program to show present case count and previous case count. Also added a reset button so the operators could reset the count. So when an operator pushes the count reset, it moves that count data to the previous case count icon and resets the present case count to 0. I did it this way in case they actually hit the reset before writing down there count, and also when they change over to a different product. The moving the data to the previous and resetting the present was the biggest challenge for me. But using a latch and a greater than statement I was able to do it. It is hard for me to explain the feeling of seeing the data come up on the Panelmate and pushing the reset and seeing it actually work. And the operators were just as happy as I was. The reason I am going on and on, is this was my first modification flying solo, I had never used move blocks or anything like this before. I hope I can get some sleep tonight, without laying there thinking of all the things that I can add, change, make better, hehehe. I can hardly wait to get to work in the morning.
Zetor
I just have to share an experience I had today. Up until today, I spend most of my time using RSLogix 5 on 17 different PLC 5’s trying to find why a particular machine will not start, or speed up etc. In other words I have to find which button is left in, what door not closed, what photo-eye is blocked, you know all the electrical problems. (LOL). Anyway the operators on my rewinder have to walk about 250 feet to a case packer to look at a mechanical counter to see their actual case count. Sooo I took it upon myself to see if I could get a counter to display case count onto their Panelmate 4000 at the rewinder. All the PLC’s on this line are hooked together via Ethernet. There is a Master PLC that reads and writes to all the others. So the first thing I did was take the input from the photo-eye that was sending a signal to the mechanical counter and use it with a CTU. This was done in the case packer plc. Then using a move statement I sent the acc. from the counter to the master plc. Here I used move statements to change it from a read to a write and send it to the rewinder plc. Then I added two page icons to the Panelmate program to show present case count and previous case count. Also added a reset button so the operators could reset the count. So when an operator pushes the count reset, it moves that count data to the previous case count icon and resets the present case count to 0. I did it this way in case they actually hit the reset before writing down there count, and also when they change over to a different product. The moving the data to the previous and resetting the present was the biggest challenge for me. But using a latch and a greater than statement I was able to do it. It is hard for me to explain the feeling of seeing the data come up on the Panelmate and pushing the reset and seeing it actually work. And the operators were just as happy as I was. The reason I am going on and on, is this was my first modification flying solo, I had never used move blocks or anything like this before. I hope I can get some sleep tonight, without laying there thinking of all the things that I can add, change, make better, hehehe. I can hardly wait to get to work in the morning.
Zetor
