Motor Control Design
Today’s topic is in response to Saravanan who posted a request last week on my “Panel Layout and Electrical Design” post of about a year ago. He asked “Thanks for the post. I want to learn about designing control circuits …
Category: Hardware
Mechanical and electrical hardware
PLC Manufacturer Rankings
After spending the last couple of weeks teaching PLC programming, I decided to do a little research on the popularity of the different manufacturer’s platforms worldwide. I have been asked many times in the past who the biggest, most popular, …
Safety PLCs
As safety systems become more and more complex (primarily because of the influence of European safety standards), the cost-effectiveness of safety PLCs has improved. I first noticed Safety PLCs being used only about five or six years ago, though according …
Scales and Load Cells
Last week I described some of the vibratory equipment used in the system I was working on. I wrapped up most of the work on that system and have moved on to a different type of machine, but I thought …
Process Types
Processes may take various forms in automated production. They may be continuous as with the mixing of chemicals, synchronous where operations are performed in unison or asynchronous where operations are performed independently. Manual and automated tasks may be mixed to …
Magnetostrictive Sensors
Several of my topics in the past have dealt with gauging and measurement. Most of the systems I have worked on in the past used LVDTs, encoders, optical sensors or machine vision when it came to accurately measuring the physical …
Anatomy of a Photoeye
One of my first projects when I was in engineering school was to make a coin counter that would detect the size of various coins as they rolled down a ramp and total up the denominations. The circuitry was fairly …
Pneumatics Chart
Well, I finally finished all of the pictures and tables for my book and I thought I’d share one of them here. I must make a confession: I use pneumatics a lot, specify components for systems, troubleshoot machines with air …
Vision Guided Robots
This week was my first experience using vision and robots together. I have integrated many vision systems in the past and also done a number of robotic applications but this was my first time using vision to guide the robot. …
Motion Control
Following is a subchapter on motion control from my forthcoming book. My philosophy on writing these articles is to cover the topic very generally since the book is intended to cover the entire field of industrial automation including business systems, …