OT a little-serial number sensor

Hello All Again!
Building a machine that is going to ship in modules and when it gets on site it will be put back together again into one unit. One module will have a pump, another will have a filter another will have some instrumentation and so on. Now the cool part is if one of these modules fails then the customer can call up and get another, in other words you can mix and match from different units. With that being they would like to have a way to electronically keep a serial number for each module and the PLC can log it, when a module is change the PLC will recognize the difference and log the new serial number. SO what is my question ? Is there a magical device that runs on a bus network (maybe modus TCP?) that will give me a serial number, or some type of unique number? So when this unit is put together it will automatically read the serial numbers of each module?





Just to be clear I am not looking for programming and data logging help, just looking for a magical device

stooperbike,

There is this idea. Using something like a DB9 connector
http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=33972&highlight=tags+machine

You could use an RFID tag on each module and write a serial number on it before it goes out but that "magic" device (RFID Read Head) is a little expensive to use just to ID something 1 time.

If there are a limited number of possible modules, you could just burn a few I/O points and set jumper wires or switches on the module to ID the type of module. I have seen that with plastic injection molds where the mold has a small junction box that just contains a terminal strip with certain wires jumped. When the mold is put into the machine, a cable is connected to the box which basically connects it to an input card and depending on which wires are jumped, the PLC knows which mold is in the machine. Using 8 inputs give you the ability to track 256 molds.

THanks again for the help, I like the idea of RFID. We plan on making 300-500 of these units, where each unit had 7-8 modules each requiring their own serial number.

thanks,
Stooperbike

It's a little vendor-specific, but all Rockwell Automation devices that use a CIP network (EtherNet/IP, ControlNet, DeviceNet) have a serial number embedded in each device.

If you had a POINT I/O adapter on EtherNet/IP, for example, as the I/O connection for your modular component, you could just have the main controller read the Serial number from the device with a MSG instruction, over the network.

stooperbike said:

(maybe modus TCP?)

Click to expand...

You coule use tha MAC address of the adapter module that would give it to you.