MajorWheat
Member
Hello everyone.
I am currently working as a member of an aerospace enterprise and am working on a ground station to communicate with our satellite. In the last station the team worked on they used a computer controlled relay board as a sort of intermediary between the umbilical that connects to everything inside the satellite and the ground station computer and the other objects used to test the satellite. I was recently asked to find out whether a PLC would be a better choice since it could be smaller and cheaper. When I looked up PLCs to buy I didn't really see any info on how much voltage or current they could handle which I think is my biggest concern. Other than that I welcome your input as to which is the better choice and suggestions as to what PLC would be the best choice.
The PLC would be transferring power to test the charging and discharging of the battery, other than that it would mostly be handling data going between the computer and satellite.
I'm pretty sure that a PLC is capable of this but I feel I should leave this in here as well. The ability to test charge or discharge on the battery needs to be done without changing any hardware around. The way this was handled before was to have the line connected to the battery in the umbilical pass through two relays so that it could be set to charge, discharge or neither but it was impossible for it to be both charging and discharging.
Well if any of you read through that mess of text I thank you for your help.
EDIT:
Once again I think a PLC is capable of handling this but I feel I should mention it anyway.
We plan on having this connected to a computer with a GUI so that the people running tests when we send it away just have to click a button and basically everything will be configured for the test they want to run.
I am currently working as a member of an aerospace enterprise and am working on a ground station to communicate with our satellite. In the last station the team worked on they used a computer controlled relay board as a sort of intermediary between the umbilical that connects to everything inside the satellite and the ground station computer and the other objects used to test the satellite. I was recently asked to find out whether a PLC would be a better choice since it could be smaller and cheaper. When I looked up PLCs to buy I didn't really see any info on how much voltage or current they could handle which I think is my biggest concern. Other than that I welcome your input as to which is the better choice and suggestions as to what PLC would be the best choice.
The PLC would be transferring power to test the charging and discharging of the battery, other than that it would mostly be handling data going between the computer and satellite.
I'm pretty sure that a PLC is capable of this but I feel I should leave this in here as well. The ability to test charge or discharge on the battery needs to be done without changing any hardware around. The way this was handled before was to have the line connected to the battery in the umbilical pass through two relays so that it could be set to charge, discharge or neither but it was impossible for it to be both charging and discharging.
Well if any of you read through that mess of text I thank you for your help.
EDIT:
Once again I think a PLC is capable of handling this but I feel I should mention it anyway.
We plan on having this connected to a computer with a GUI so that the people running tests when we send it away just have to click a button and basically everything will be configured for the test they want to run.
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