Commercial microwave unit that can be controlled by a PLC?

Does anyone one of you have knowledge of a commercial microwave unit that can be controlled by a PLC? One of our customer in the food industry wants to avoid having operator to enter the:

Power on cooking
Timer for cooking
ON-OFF

Instead they want to have the operators select a recipe on a Touchscreen and then the plc will communicate with the microwave via discrete, analog, or communication the needed parameters for any of their 50 recipes.

Please let me know if a unit like this can be bought on the market or perhaps be modified and used for this application.

Thanks

well you can modify one since its all a matter of digital signals but the hard part is getting values back for dubble checking.

ojz0r

Have you done this? How would you modify the touch membrane –keypad- of the microwave and convert these into discrete and analogs? I will love to try this route if it is possible.

no i havent done this. But since they are ordinary buttons you can rewire them to a relay output from a plc and simulate a "push". Analogue values can be handled by rewiring from the internal potentiometer to an analogue output.
The hard thing is making sure you get the correct buttons pushed for every sequence unless you can reset the memory of the microwave and always change from the same "start-up" values.

Most microwaves have a "clear" button, that should give you a good starting point for any sequence.

The rest is just timing the "poke-and-hope" setup, since you would likely not have any feedback as to whether the transaction was successful.

Although.....you could use a vision camera to identify patterns on the display to ensure the correct action was accomplished.

For that matter, you may even be able to tap into the outputs that run the display and figure out the "correct" pattern for each display.

I would guess it shouldn't be more then 32 inputs.

Sounds like a fun project!

You aren't the first person to want to control a microwave oven in a food processing facility where a typical commercial or residential type microwave is completely unsuitable. I suggest you substitute the word commercial with industrial and try to search again - google returned several suppliers of microwave heating devices made for the food manufacturing industry that can be incorporated into a manufacturing line.

http://www.industrialmicrowave.com/