LSIS experience?

Just curious if anyone has worked with these controllers at all?


Experiences good or bad?


We received a used piece of equipment yesterday from Korea, and it came with this type of control system.



PLC/HMI/VFD


In all honesty it looks pretty clean, and not that old. Just wondering if this will be a good machine, or if I can expect a lot of issues.


Thanks

Early in my career, I used a Honeywell MasterLogic, which is a rebadged LSIS PLC (bing image search them both). Had some problem with their 240V power supply not liking short duration voltage spikes. Technically the incoming power quality's fault, but sometimes it is nice to allow a bit of wiggle room in the spec. Also had a firmware issue with Modbus TCP, where you could only have several thousand unsuccessful requests before all Ethernet comms would lock up and you had to reboot the PLC to recover.
Both problems an engineer flew out from LSIS Korea to resolve, and resolve it promptly they did. It was great seeing them work.
Both problems were of the type where normal levels of testing would not have picked up these errors. (Why test for +280V spikes when the spec says 230+-10%?) (Why test for sending several thousands of unsuccessful Modbus TCP requests?)

So In my experience following the straight and narrow should be ok, and I received excellent support when things were not.

We used a few of their VFDs (H100 series). I like the way they program and communicate using Modbus.

I did not like when 3 of the 125 HP VFDs melted down when the plant we installed them in lost a primary phase.

I could have forgiven them if they would have warranted the hardware, but LSIS says that it was my fault for not enabling single phase protection. It is turned off by default. I complained about that. It should be turned on by default in my opinion. They said, 'Well a lot of our customers use them in single phase applications...' My response was 'So...make those customers disable the protection.' They balked. They billed us ~$500 in shipping charges to perform a failure analysis. We had to pay for the new drives and all the labor to R&R them.

Reading the manual I still would not have understood for certain that single phase protection is disabled. The manual is pretty thorough and better than the average translation, but can be confusing in some cases like the section on phase protection. Their support staff was quick to respond and tried to be helpful, but they could have kept me from publicly slamming them a little bit here by simply eating 3 vfds. Had they helped us, we would likely still be using them, prices are unbelievably good. (I know what you are saying right about now).

I might still use their selector switches or mini-contactors... No chance of them selling me another VFD or low end HMI or PLC...

Glad to hear some people have worked with them as they are completely new news to me.


I preemptively reached out to their stateside office just so I have someone to ask things if I run into anything.



My plan at this point is to just buy a transformer to put in front of the control panel and fire it up and see what happens. Luckily it looks well constructed and pretty simple. Will need some safety additions, but we've definitely had worse starting points.


I looked on their website and it appears the development software is free, so that's a plus. Hoping I can upload the HMI runtime and work on translations, but I wont be surprised if that's not a possibility.



Modbus is not something I've dealt with before, this system has an ethernet card with a connection going to the HMI, but the programming interface is serial.


Thanks for the responses.

and oooooof about that vfd, that thing went down in a blaze of glory :O

FWIW, it appears that Factory Mation is carrying their PLCs

https://www.factorymation.com/LS_XGB_PLC