Hi everyone, today we're going to be looking back at our process mixer and we're going
to be simulation, doing a simulation of that process. And if you remember, we used the five steps of PLC development in order to create our program
So, in this task, which is our case here, we have a solenoid that fills up when we hit
the start. It then will pass the empty sensor up to the full sensor, where it stops
Then it will mix the motor for 30 seconds and then what will happen is that the motor
will stop and then the release valve will turn on, which will empty the motor
Now the stop can be hit any time within that sequence in order to stop the process or hit
start again to continue that process. So, that's the finding the task
The next step that we did was find our input and outputs, which were the push buttons and
the empty and full sensors in the time where we had the solenoid empty and we developed
our logic, a sequence of operations. And we did that by using a table
And the table actually had several different steps and the corresponding inputs for those steps
Then what we did was develop the PLC program. We put this program here and went through each step and the last part, or the last step
that we did, was we actually tested the program, where we actually mimicked what was going on
So, that was what we did prior. Now what we want to do is just continue with the testing of the program
And there's a few facilities that we're going to be using. The first one here is we're actually going to be using an actual PLC and it's actually a BRIC PLC
by AutomationDirect and it has, before what we used was to do more designing software in order to
program this and simulate it manually. But now what we're going to do is use what they call Factory IO
And here is Factory IO. It's a three-dimensional image of what you're looking for
And if you see, we have our panel here. And I'll zoom in a little bit here
And you can see I have my start, my stop, and I have, I just called that dwell time
So, it refines that image in 30 seconds. Then, if we look at the top, we actually have a fill valve that will actually fill up the tank
Down here, we actually have an empty valve. And along the path here, what I've added to the tank is a couple of sensors
The first one here being the fill sensor. And we also have here the empty sensor
So, these are just capacitive sensors looking through the tank in order to determine whether the tank is full or empty
So, what we can do is just flip back to the front of our tank here
And we'll just leave it there for now. If you look at actually our program, here's our program that we developed last time and we did our testing
And all I'm going to do is how Factory Ido will work is it uses Modbus TCP and it acts as a client or the master talking to the BRICS TLC Modbus server
which is displayed. So, my start is going to be empty when I go to my start
And on MC2, I have full switch MC4 and empty switch MC5
And then we have our output. We have a cylinder A to fill and a cylinder B to empty
And there's my corresponding value. So, basically what I do is I start up my program here
I'm actually taking my inputs and putting them into the PLC, the actual input itself
And remember, we do have a couple of links on the website about PLC scans
And yes, I can take an actual input like X1 and fire it off
Or initially here, X0 was my start. So, once I do that, then I have my outputs
There's my two outputs here and they fire off the simulation here
And then what I do is for my timer, I do a little bit of math and basically do the present value of that math
And I manipulate it using the integer of that value and it just basically counts from 0 up to 30
So, it shows me that value. Now, so that's all it is to program my ILO
So, I just basically set that up. Now, if I go back to my factory and make sure that we're actually in run mode, which we are
You can see down here we're in run. Everything looks good. So, we go back to our factory ILO and if we look at the file and look at the drivers, here is actually how it maps
So, here's all my sensors and this goes into my plate ID here, which is server 192.168.111
That's what I labeled the virtual PLC that we're looking at right now
And I have my start, my stop, my end being my full sensor and for my other side is my fill valve, my dispair valve
So, I'm using the tree right now. You can always use more
It's kind of people. And if I want, I can just look at my other part here and I can actually see what's happening
So, flipping back now, we go to our configuration and just to make sure you know how to set that up
If we go into create and here's my ethernet port right here set for 192.168.111
So, everything looks good. Over here I have enabled my MyFastBT controller
That opens it. So, it's labeled right here. And so, that's all there is for setup in order to simulate this process
So, we'll say enable that. The other thing left to do is actually just try it out
Let's just go to a, we'll say start edge here. So, what we'll do is just go to the front of the unit
And you'll see right here I'll hit the start. So, I hit start
You'll see that now it's filling up the tank and it's going to fill it up until we hit this top cursor
The graphics are quite nice and I think any time I can just move around and see exactly what's happening
So, we're filling up and you'll see it's going to reach that top cursor soon
So, it's going to stop off that input that's filled up. There we go
And we'll swing around and now we should see if there's a wall turning right now
So, I'm going to switch to time. Here, it's working, 15 seconds
At the same time, we should be monitoring our actual logic like we did before and view that
Now, after the 30 seconds, which is really close, we can see that this valve now will open up
and we will actually then start emptying that tank. At any time, we can actually hit stop
And when we hit stop, it will stop the process for any given time
And we hit start again to continue our process. So, we'll let it finish off and empty the tank
And when it does, what will actually happen is that we will reset our dwell time back to zero again
So, there's your emptying. So, you have different views all together
And we swap between different views all the time. Very nice. And that's the end of the process right now
So, if we want to start it again, we'll hit the start button
And again, here we go with our process again. Stop it any time we want
So, this is the best way in order to troubleshoot and ensure that logic in the PLC is going to do exactly as we want
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