Lionfan Posted March 15, 2013 Report Share Posted March 15, 2013 Hello everyone in Unitronics land. I am new to Unitronics and I wanted to share my experience with a project that I just completed. First a little back history. The company I work for sold a piece of test equipment that will be used in the Aviation industry. The project was pretty simple and it is something that we are looking to market. The equipment was to do these things: first, run a slide back and forth using an Allen-Bradley Powerflex 40P VFD, second, use a DRO with two scales to monitor the customer's workpiece location and last, the equipment was sold as a manually operated machine with no PLC control. Seems like a no brainer to me. However, after a meeting with our GM and the lead mechanical designer I was asked to eliminate the external DRO and put the scale readouts on an HMI screen. Just one problem. There wasn't any money in the budget, and I had to come up with a solution that would provide everything required to make the system operate and keep the cost impact to a minimum. So to the internet I went and what I stumbled across impressed me. A Unitronics HMI/PLC combination unit looked like it would do the trick, but I had never heard of them before. After a couple of phone calls I had a local vendor that was willing to come in and give me a demonstration. The demonstration sold me and I was confindent that this is what I'd be using. I could eliminate the DRO and the manual controls and do everything from the HMI screens. However, before even beginning to pick out a product or write code I did something that helped me out tremendously. I watched several of the webinars that are offered on this website. I also scoured the forums for any information I could get from others who had already done, or had previous questions on, some of the things I was looking to do. You can't imagine how resourceful that was. So after doing some research, I purchased a V570-57-T20B with a snap-in I/O module V200-18-E46B. This accomodated all the I/O points I would need and then some. I created my program to operate the VFD via the Modbus protocol. In addition I used two 14-bit analog inputs for the MTS scales to display the readings directly on the HMI as requested. I also used the built in alarm screens for my alarms and created my own screen saver. Programming was very straight forward and creating the screens were a snap. After some debug, which I can never seem to avoid, I had a working system and one that I'm sure the customer will be happy with. After completing this simple project I have to give Unitronics a huge thumbs up! For a first time user I had a great experience. I look forward to incorporating this brand of product on future jobs. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MVP 2021 Joe Tauser Posted March 17, 2013 MVP 2021 Report Share Posted March 17, 2013 Sweet! You'll find no shortage of people on this forum trumpeting the advantages of Unitronics. I've programmed many of the PLC brands out there and firmly believe that Unitronics is the best bang for the buck, hands-down. There's nothing I can't do with it. Look into what you can do with the Ethernet port and the SD card. You will be amazed. Joe T. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cara Bereck Levy Posted March 17, 2013 Report Share Posted March 17, 2013 Respect That sounds like a great project! Would you like to participate in putting together an application story for publication with Unitronics? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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