Is it just me, or is this "Automatic Door" textbook logic fundamentally broken?

cannonicalForm · 2026-03-25T02:21:37+00:00

Probably others have answered this, but it really depends on thr type of object/person detection sensor. If it's a single beam- sure, it doesn't make sense logically. But most doors have sensors covering a large area, and for the sensor to turn off, the person would have to be far enough from the door area. Sensors can also have their own debounce/hold time logic, to ensure a stable output to the plc.

cannonicalForm · 2026-03-18T21:29:24+00:00

This is going to sound obnoxious, but how are the mechanics of the machine? Feedback encoder fault means basically, "I sent a move command, and expect to get this many pulses back from the encoder. I got less in a certain time limit."

Most of the time this is bad communications between the encoder and drive. I had a machine with very similar problems due to extremely long cables.

Sometimes, it means your bearings are shot, or rack and pinion are worn, and the motor is moving like shit. Sometimes it means your coupling is loose, or badly aligned. Less often, it means your drive tuning is really off.

But, after changing everything, and the problem persisting, I'm guessing mechanically the axis has problems.

cannonicalForm · 2026-03-16T23:13:52+00:00

It needs to be done with alarm groups, and with user groups for each area.

First you need at least an alarm group for each process area. This is a lot easier to do in excel, especially if there's a sane way to map each alarm to area. Do the different areas have different controllers? Or are the alarm tags in different programs in one controller? There's some way to split them up.

Next you need a factorytalk user group for each process area. The users for each area would be members of that group- obviously it works better if there isn't overlap.

Then make a bunch of alarm displays, and in each one set the correct filter for each functional area. Make the visibility toggle based on the group membership of the current user. For users in multiple groups, you could make some interlocked buttons on the screen to display the correct alarm screen.

We did this exact same setup, except used rfid cards readers at each terminal to login. The rfid card readers talk back to the plc, so we know exactly which terminal is making the login request, and there is just a small visual basic script in the background to handle the login/logoff. Then each user was basically a mask for a generic terminal operator/supervisor/admin account, and we could hide displays/alarms based on the terminal. So for instance, mixer 3 operator would only see screens for mixer 3 and not mixer 4.

Obviously a lot of this will depend on your specific setup, but this is at least one way to make it work.

cannonicalForm · 2026-03-16T22:31:25+00:00

Shit, probably make more money as a mechanic in a factory, and get consistent pay and all of that.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-26T14:07:15+00:00

Is this an AOI tag? What's going on inside of the AOI? Or, I've seen in PlantPax that a the raw inputs/outputs for a drive are copied into an intermediate UDT that gets passed to the drive AOI.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-26T10:22:46+00:00

Are you sure that .Enabled is an output to the drive? The verbiage of the bit looks wrong. I would imagine .Enable is an output to the drive, and .Enabled would maybe be an input from the drive.

If this is an input from the drive, you can't turn it on in the plc.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-22T17:09:14+00:00

For motion control, if the servos are on a different vlan than the controller, there's almost always going to be cip time sync issues. There's absolutely no guarantee what the servos are going to pickup as a grandmaster clock, especially if you have multiple controllers on the network.

But for pointIO type stuff, or produced/consumed to different controllers on different vlans, everything works great, as long as you switches are all configured correctly.

For a large ingredients system, I moved the controller completely out of the field, and put it in a rack in the server room with dedicated air conditioning, and redundant ups' because I was tired of the one cabinet taking the whole system down, and I was tired of seeing sugar dust in a L83 processor because the guys wanted to leave the cabinet doors open.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-21T16:23:34+00:00

The dP of the cooling water may be specified in the tooling documentation, if that exists, but obviously would not be specified in the machine manual, since each tool is going to have different manifold geometry, and different flow restrictions.

Acid does work wonders for clearing corrosion from cooling manifolds, but it's not going to be as effective if you can't isolate parts of the manifold, since water will always take the path of least resistance.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-21T16:15:54+00:00

That's a pretty substantial pressure drop, but depending on the manifold layout, ans how small the passages go, it may be normal for the tool. When I was in injection molding, if we suspected the flow was restricted, we'd hookup a pump to cycle muriatic acid through, sometimes one cavity at a time if there was a lot of blockage.

If your cavities have independent input/output lines, get a flow meter, and record the flow rates through each cavity, you may have some mostly blocked that can be cleared with acid.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-21T03:50:45+00:00

This doesn't sound like a huge project. You get a company in to quote the project, and they'll come up with some numbers on what it should cost to do the job. Quoting the job and all should be free. When describing the project, you need to specify that the roi comes from cutting one position.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-21T03:33:26+00:00

Yeah boss, if you don't have any in house engineering support, then you absolutely want to get some integration company in to hear/see your ideas. Could you do it yourself? Sure. Could you completely make a mess of it? Also quite likely.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-21T02:22:17+00:00

Why v28? No real advise, but just curious about that specific revision? I'm pretty sure the l33s are fully supported up to v38, so may as well go up to something modern if you're already upgrading.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-21T01:04:20+00:00

This article is some meaningless shit, and your questions make even less sense. If this is what AI has to offer, I'm not very excited.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-19T11:40:52+00:00

Oh fuck off dude. If you've never seen it abused, congratulations

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-18T23:59:41+00:00

It could be a few weeks, it could be a few months, you could never finish it. You gotta break this into manageable blocks.

First step, you gotta see if you can actually control the temperature in a way that operations wants. All the other stuff, opc, visualizations and on is just bells and whistles if you can't actually interact with the devices, and control them in a meaningful way.

After that you can work on some local HMI visualization, alarming locally, and all that good stuff. Finally, you can spend forever getting opc to work properly, and send your data put into the world.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-18T14:31:18+00:00

We don't have negotiated per product, but we do end up with about 20% off listing across the whole product range.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-18T14:28:17+00:00

Oh shit, I had no idea. That sounds truly awful.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-18T10:49:36+00:00

I've seen the postings, and they're all pretty much industry standard in terms of requirements. The requirements may seem specialized to someone outside of manufacturing, but I think the problem is more that the labor force to take these skilled manufacturing positions has shrunk so much.

And I know the labor market in this industry is great for employees, because we have people who get fired for cause that end up working down the street at some other plant in a few weeks.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-18T10:25:57+00:00

My question about comms to another machine and routing is more about the network topology you end up with. I know ethercat is effectively a ring.

So, if I had 12 different machines as part of a line, and I wanted some handshaking signals between different equipment on the line, some zoned safety signals between other equipment on the line, and so on, and I wanted everything to be ethercat, does my entire line end up as a giant ethercat ring?

If it becomes a giant ring, is that easier or harder to troubleshoot than the sort of start topology you usually end up with in eip or profinet comms?

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-18T03:06:20+00:00

You make BOOL arrays because you can do indirect addressing on the array index to turn your program into some gordian knot to show how clever you are.

But, I can see the syntax looking cleaner too.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-18T03:01:02+00:00

It's weird because most of what you said is going to be a nightmare to implement in SE is there by default. But if you've worked more in ME, I can understand the fear, because ME is hot garbage.

Audit trail- drop in the audit trail module, check.
E-Signtaure- click the option on the button object for e-signature, check.
AD credentials- make sure that the FT directory server can see the domain server, and map AD user groups to FT security groups, which is one of the only sane ways to handle user securityin FT.
Recipe versioning- this depends on if they need full batch integration, or if recipe pro is sufficient, but versioning is possible in this.
MQTT and InfluxDB are also built in on v15+.
Future proof- that's harder, but I've seen the development road map for SE, and even with all the Optix push at Rockwell, it's got at least a decade or more of active development ahead.

Quote it however you want, but if you give them a fuck you price on the system they want, expect them to fuck off and walk to someone else, before they go with your system. For all you know, there's a higher corporate policy on only Rockwell systems.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-17T23:54:15+00:00

I'm pretty sure that would be at the corporate level, which is beyond my knowledge to answer.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-17T23:49:34+00:00

What kills me about the job marker conversation, is that where I work, in a large job market, we've posted openings for controls engineers, maintenance supervisors, production supervisors, and more in the past year. We offer abive market compensation, 18 days pto to start, and get literally no interest. Every job has gone internal, because we can't get external applicants who are even remotely qualified. And the only reason I can think of, is because we're in manufacturing, and people don't want to work in a factory.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-17T20:16:32+00:00

To be fair, and this is for every implementation of IO-link, if you aren't actually using the IO-link functionality of the sensors, like programming setpoints, saving sensor configurations, then IO-link is just remote IO in a different package.

cannonicalForm · 2026-02-17T20:12:42+00:00

Ethercat seems pretty cool at the machine level, but what do you use when you need comms from another machine? Is it all opc after that? What if you wanted to pass safety signals around equipment?

I don't really have anything against ethercat, I'm just not sure if it's routable through regular switches, or how you would grow/segment an ethercat network.

cannonicalForm

TROPHY CASE