What is the oldest PLC system you have running?

We still have several machines running with air logic. The heart of the system is a Festo Quickstepper sequencer. Yes, it is a hot mess, but everybody is afraid to try and neaten things up. The very worst sound you can hear is a quick succession of pops, followed by the hissing of air from multiple tubes popping off. And no, not all of the nipples coming off of the logic elements are used, so it isn't a simple matter of deduction as to what tube popped off from what nipple....

One of the very first machines I did a control system for was built using air logic. It was fun drawing out the boolean logic and translating it into physical valves.

Ah, bummer. Pictures don't show. Imagine overflowing containers of orange spaghetti.
 
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I worked on an "AirLogic Brain" in the early '70s.
NO electricity required ONLY air.
It was a stainless block that was about 10" square with lots of holes for I/O and metering. There were flow adjusters and regulators that were used to control inputs and outputs, speed of movement, AND also had a "dwell time" adjustment to set how long it would remain extended or retracted before it reversed direction.
It was used to control a welder arm with a torch mounted to it. It went back and forth, in a circle, and up or down...at the same time....all on air power. Genius device....but a pain to adjust.
 
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There's old Star Wars fan fiction that claims that the Millennium Falcon had fluidic flight controls and that's why she could survive so much damage and still be repaired by a Wookiee and a third party R2 astromech droid.
 
I also interfaced once with a case packer in an explosion proof environment that was 100% air logic. Back panel had about 50 little air relays with small tubing for the 'logic'. Even had air switches and indicators on the operator panel. It packed high explosive rounds into a case. My interface was an air tube coming in the PLC panel to an air switch to say it's running.
 
NO electricity required ONLY air.

Thats reminds me.... I worked on OLD printing presses in the 80's they were large sheet fed from the 60's and they were mechanical pieces of art, one gearbox that ran the length of the machine (about 80 feet long) and ran everything it was all mechanical, pneumatic or both. It was amazing what they could do with vacuum switches and air blowing things around

The company was International Paper and they were located in downtown San Francisco in the clock tower building (now apartments)... they moved to Newark (CA) and I started working for them but it was really good working there I learned a lot, one of the guys I worked with was in charge of the clock and said it would take about 1 day a week to maintain it, but he liked taking breaks ;)
 
Thats reminds me.... I worked on OLD printing presses in the 80's they were large sheet fed from the 60's and they were mechanical pieces of art, one gearbox that ran the length of the machine (about 80 feet long) and ran everything it was all mechanical, pneumatic or both. It was amazing what they could do with vacuum switches and air blowing things around

The company was International Paper and they were located in downtown San Francisco in the clock tower building (now apartments)... they moved to Newark (CA) and I started working for them but it was really good working there I learned a lot, one of the guys I worked with was in charge of the clock and said it would take about 1 day a week to maintain it, but he liked taking breaks ;)

I saw some small clips of these on a documentary series on netflix about Vietnam. I paused it and was checking it out, and the same thing crossed my mind. These things were magnificent.
 
Interested in old machines and technologies, and thought my english is not so bad at all. Watched each of these videos twice, and didn't understand what the heck these machines are doing at all

Googled for turboencabulator... :cry:

Thomas, these were play-on-words, farces, Jokes.

I use them mainly to embarrass the new engineers. After they watch them with serious faces and try to explain to each other what a "Dingle Alarm" is.

It's good for a quick laugh/spit on the monitor...............LOL
 
The company I left last year still have about 15 Cutler Hammer D100's running. I had already upgraded several with the Productivity 2000 and contracted to do the others when they are ready. These assembly machines where built in the mid 80's and still ticking along 6 days a week.
 
The factory I spent the last week at still has a handful of PLC5's running. One in particular that I had to work on has 6 remote racks (mixture of PLC5 and SLC) and the processor logic is at capacity. It has a sprawling DH+ network and is also pretty much at the limit with MSG communications. It runs one of their most important lines.


Another one resides in a control panel which is about 4m x 2m x 0.8m and now controls...a single DOL motor. On the shutdown they installed a huge new conveyor system that made most of it redundant, but for some reason that one single motor got left out. I ended up finding the rung that controlled that motor, and commenting it "this is the only relevant rung in this PLC". I also commented the first rung in the main program to point people to the one relevant rung.


In the late 2000's I worked at a paper mill that had many, many Siemens S5 PLC's, one of the GE PLC's that you program with the cassette deck (pretty sure we even had the same cassette deck as in the pictures posted!) and a LOT of pneumatic control loops. I worked on 20-100kPa and 3-15PSI a whole lot more than I worked on 4-20mA or 0-10V. Every tech had their own little pneumatic calibrator with a high precision gauge, a regulator, and some quick-connect pneumatic hoses to tune the loops - but one 4-20mA calibrator was shared across the whole division.
 
The oldest system I programmed from scratch would still look modern since it used a B&R PowerPanel 220, X20 I, and Powerlink ACOPOS drives. Only the panel is not sold as new anymore and would simply be replaced with a C70 panel. That was not long after X20 came out, it was the new hotness at the time.

The oldest hardware I've programmed was B&R 2005 stuff (released well before 2005, don't let the name fool you). I did do some Trio stuff that might have been older, but I don't know.

The oldest still operating controls with an analog input I have seen still in normal operation is tons and tons and tons of B&R blackline minicontrol stuff. I saw this stuff for the first time a decade after I started working with B&R stuff, so it was a bit of a surprise to run into it.

The oldest in operation without any further qualifiers was a Modicon something or other that was listed as having been made in 1979. I've seen much older Modicon devices, but none in operation. This was in 2012 and it was being replaced by a Twido because they needed an auxiliary contact and reverse engineering the logic and replacing it was easier than trying to figure out how to program it. It was running some conveyor system.
 

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