Hooking up a plc to a monitor without a computer

I'm working on a display for a speed, battery power etc. on a solar car. We want to hook up a monitor to a plc. We just want to display all the variables sent in to the plc. We don't have enough room for a pc and sunlight readable HMIs are out of our budget. Is there something that we can program to spit out all of the plc data to a monitor?

Thanks.

I have seen (Not used) Beckhoff PLC - CX1000 with a VGA port. It comes with a memory card which holds the operating system, either WinXP Embedded or WinCE. You can have your data load into any applications, such as VB etc and display it out through the monitor attached

Good Luck.

Is there a reason that one of the many PLC HMIs wouldn't work? I'm thinking that if you worked with the brightness and contrast a little bit, and chose the correct display, you could get it to be just as tolerant of sunlight as a VGA monitor. Something like a Siemens TP27 is small enough such that could mount it in the dash, and if it were recessed a little bit, the sunlight wouldn't get to it.

If your PLC talks modbus you might check out
ControlMicrosystems SCADAPack Vision-10 operator interface
http://www.controlmicrosystems.com/

If your project is student project or lab setup for testing that do not require industrial type equipment, toys with good user interface is an alternative. Our student have very good success using Gameboy Advance with some coding to build colorful graphic panel. It receives data from plc through its communication port. Lots of information about hardware, programming and tools for the GBA are available on the net.

For my car I took a Basic Stamp II and attached a LCD display via 5 I/O pins. I tapped into the cars diagnostic port via a serial input pin. Grabbed the data stream, decoded it and display a couple of items like speed, battery voltage, water temperature, ... You could do something similar.

If your plc supports serial ASCII output, you could use a serial LCD display and program the plc to send the variables to the LCD.

Or if the plc supports Modbus (or other simple protocols) , program a Basic Stamp to read the data from the plc, format it, display it on either serial / parallel interfaced LCD display.

See http://www.parallax.com/ for Stamps, LCD code & hookup & many application notes.

If your PLC deosn't have a usable serial port, you could send the binary data via a couple of outputs, multiplexing it out one 4 bit digit at a time, letting the Stamp put it all back together into words.

How about a low tech approach...

Use a group of LED's controlled by DC outputs to make a quasi-bargraph. Use enough LED's to get suitable resolution. Doesn't take up very much space.

My friends motor home uses 5 LEDs to display water tank level (Empty, 25%,50%,75%, & 100%) and something similar for battery voltage.

solarcar,

Try one of the Automation Direct PLC's (DL-06, or DL-105) with an Automation Direct EZ-Text or EZ-Touch graphic display panel. The EZ-220P is about $240. It has 2-line x 20 character text display, 5 user-defined pushbuttons, 3 LED indicator lights, and a 12-button numeric keypad. Each line of text can be programmed to have 0, 1, or 2 variable displays. Many other models and variations are available from automationdirect.com. The screen brightness is adjustable for any degree of sunlight. Programming softwawre is very reasonably priced. This type of operator interface will be much smaller and will fit better into your car than a video monitor.