What cool, non conventional things have you seen done with a PLC?

TL140

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I have seen on MrPLC forums where he connected a modem to a PLC and set it up to call someone when a machine was down. I also hear people talking about interfacing PLCs with MS Excel. What other cool non conventional things have you seen/done?
 
I have a terrible habit if leaving my garage door open all night. So I took a old Mico810 that was laying around and programmed it to close my garage door automatically at 11pm every night.
Just wired in a microswitch on the door that made when it was in the open position and have the RTC close one of the outputs at 11pm and the door is open.

I dont know if you would label this as COOL but certainly non-conventional 🍻
 
Bullzi said:
I have a terrible habit if leaving my garage door open all night. So I took a old Mico810 that was laying around and programmed it to close my garage door automatically at 11pm every night.
Just wired in a microswitch on the door that made when it was in the open position and have the RTC close one of the outputs at 11pm and the door is open.

I dont know if you would label this as COOL but certainly non-conventional 🍻
Click to expand...

I think it is pretty cool! do you have your Micro 810 performing any other home automation tasks?
 
My boss has a PLC automating his house. At one point he tried to use solid state outputs to vary fan speeds by means of rapid switching - sort of like trying to emulate a triac based dimmer switch. Didn't quite work, but it was close ;)
 
TL140 said:
I think it is pretty cool! do you have your Micro 810 performing any other home automation tasks?
Click to expand...

Not yet. I did the same thing about 10 years ago with a vacation light timer and a external relay. The PLC made it much simpler. Less wires. :)
 
I've seen showers with light/music/water variation controlled by PLC.

I've seen several homes with various things controlled by PLC and I think Lutron even sold PLC based systems for lighting control.

A local growler store uses a system that cleans and fills your growler at the push of a button in a completely headless, fill from the bottom way.
 
I don't think it is that unusual, but we set up some small non-supervised hot water boiler to heat up a soccer field. really heat up means keep the artificial turf from freezing and keep snow from accumulating.

The system would send SMS with alarms, but could also receive SMS for changing set points. This was fairly easy to do with Unitronics. I really don't like Unitronics, but this feature was pretty easy to do and fairly cheap.

Related story. One of these installation was bought by the company selling natural gas and rented out to the athletics club. They were also in charge of maintenance, but the LNG and rent of installation was billed to the club.

Somehow, the gas company managed to set the temperature to 20C (not the 2/3 C that is usual) for the entire winter and billed all of this to the club. How convenient :).
 
Sparkie, I'll lay even money on it that those are both done with DMX controllers. They use MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) signals to control lights with both on/off and intensity.
 
Just in the planning stage (need to find a 12VDC brick PLC) but planning on disconnecting the wires to ALL the exterior lights on the SUV & running them to PLC inputs (12V) then controlling each bulb individually as called for. That's boring - so I'm adding a dashboard switch that changes the mode & flashes all the lights in a pattern (except NO alternating red lights on back - that's illegal.)
 
TL140 said:
I have seen on MrPLC forums where he connected a modem to a PLC and set it up to call someone when a machine was down.
Click to expand...

Did that in my younger days and it worked good http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=24796

I ended up calling a cell phone with one system and also call the maintenance radios and logged the downtime it on the the machine... that ended up being a very large system, 2 RSView HMI's and 15 Automation Direct PLC's also a web server so the plant manager could have remote viewing of the machines running or not

It was a lot of fun and gave them a lot of feedback data
 
geniusintraining said:
Did that in my younger days and it worked good http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=24796

I ended up calling a cell phone with one system and also call the maintenance radios and logged the downtime it on the the machine... that ended up being a very large system, 2 RSView HMI's and 15 Automation Direct PLC's also a web server so the plant manager could have remote viewing of the machines running or not

It was a lot of fun and gave them a lot of feedback data
Click to expand...

WOW, how long did that whole setup take?
 

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