ABB robot talking on deviceNet

[rigicon]

By discrete - do you mean Remote digital IO separate Inputs & outputs then yes.
HMI will probably be Proface , I did like red lion but we got a sweet deal from Proface.
PLC's well most really Siemens, Allen Bradley, schnieder, omron, mitsubishi, toshiba etc.
Was tending towards Allen Bradley for this one. Just finished a controllogix job nice PLC.
Problem stems from the fact that on the one hand talking devicenet and the other hand talking over ethernet to the HMI's/Scada so the PLC will have to have both ports at least.
Thanks for the reply.

 

[thiem]

Between your two threads on this topic, it looks like you have picked your path and are now moving forward. Your choice of network (given that you fully understand the details of implementing each) is not nearly as important as how you are going to implement it. There are at least two (and probably many more) things you cannot program your way around; breaking the laws of physics (no matter what production will tell you) and bad/incorrect hardware.

Between your posts, there is very little about the actual system requirements. Therefore it is hard for anyone to say that your concept will or will not work for you. Does your system require complete correlation between the motion planner and the tooling reactions? Are you already concerned with the speed/cycle time of the system that shaving 200-300 msec on a couple moves will be needed to make rate? Is the process intense so that a multitasking controller is needed to keep shoving points into the motion planner and leave the comm handling to another background task?

If you plan to have very simple, straight forward robot code that looks like:

MoveL
MoveJ
waittime
Set grippersON
MoveL
MoveJ
Reset grippersON

Then your system reqirements are lax, and you should have no worries about motion planner correlation and shaving time out of your cycle time (meaning you have at least 0.5 seconds to spare already in your cycle time). If you need to know that your grippers are going to close at exactly 14 mm from point x on your part, then I really question your topology choice for your I/O handling (meaning you plan to use trigg statements to run your tooling I/O).

At any rate, at best you will only break even on money (total cost of system, time included) by using the singe channel comm card. Sure, your hardware is a couple hundred dollars cheaper per IRC5, but your going to pay for that in DeviceNET mapping, and PLC programming and Commissioning time. The worst case I saw was a pretty large system going on line with 3 people setting up robots and the other guy was doing the supervisory PLC system. PLC system was having some 'issues' and the 3 guys working on the robot cells all went on a long, long break. Why? Their PLC also controlled the Robot I/O.

 

[Paul T]

By discrete - do you mean Remote digital IO separate Inputs & outputs then yes.
HMI will probably be Proface , I did like red lion but we got a sweet deal from Proface.
PLC's well most really Siemens, Allen Bradley, schnieder, omron, mitsubishi, toshiba etc.
Was tending towards Allen Bradley for this one. Just finished a controllogix job nice PLC.
Problem stems from the fact that on the one hand talking devicenet and the other hand talking over ethernet to the HMI's/Scada so the PLC will have to have both ports at least.
Thanks for the reply.

If you're comfortable, or even just acquainted with, ControlLogix then that would be spot on for this job assuming that the Proface has a driver for it.

The DeviceNet and Ethernet is not an issue. They're totally separate and what one is doing doesn't matter in the slightest to the other. As a matter of fact, the cell that we did last summer has nine DeviceNet nodes for the IO, while the HMI, the PLC and a 4-axis Compumotor 6K motion controller are all on Ethernet. It is fine, except that the 6K's are a little archaic in their Ethernet; and, my HMI is exchanging several thousand tags with the PLC and so things are a little competitive. If I have to work on the PLC, I turn the HMI off first else it takes minutes to upload or download program changes. However, the day to day networking is perfectly uneventful... which is of course what you want.

A CompactLogix is not going to be taxed talking over Ethernet and Devicenet to the system you've described so far. Neither is anybody else's PLC that you mentioned. So, make sure your HMI has a driver for your PLC, over Ethernet, and you're all set.

Sounds like a fun project.

And, thiem, if there are requirements to couple other actuators tightly to robot control, or robot position, then I'd buy physical IO boards for the robot and wire those sensors and actuators directly to the robot controller, then let the robot use them as needed.

That in fact is what we did with ours, although there was no real need to. In some ways, it makes it more difficult. Since the PLC is in overall control of the cell, and the robot only "knows" a limited piece of the cell state, there are times when it would be convenient to be able to have the PLC control the grippers directly. Mostly, when "something bad" has happened and you're trying to clean up.

We did eventually write a little debug interface that lets the PLC (based on HMI inputs) control the grippers by requesting the robot to open or close them; that suffices. But during normal operation, the PLC isn't aware of the grippers at all and the robot runs them itself to do whatever the PLC asked it to do.

 

[rigicon]

Thank you both thiem Paul T for your input. I did make a mistake the last job was a compactlogix not a controllogix used rs5000 and factory view ME - apologies - I therefore have NO experience with controllogix.

The proface can talk EthernetIP or modbus tcp/IP etc most protocols supported.

 

[Paul T]

Thank you both thiem Paul T for your input. I did make a mistake the last job was a compactlogix not a controllogix used rs5000 and factory view ME - apologies - I therefore have NO experience with controllogix.

The proface can talk EthernetIP or modbus tcp/IP etc most protocols supported.

Since CompactLogix and ControlLogix both use the same software, you're all set. And, I'd confirm with Proface that they can talk to an AB CompactLogix, but sounds like you're good to go with that.