Hi - Does anyone have experience connecting a Dorst compaction powder metal press (Bachmann MPC 293 PLC) to ignition. My research indicates that it has to be done through Modbus. But I don’t have experience with Modbus. One option from Dorst is to buy their IoT server which is quite pricey.
Thanks
You'll need to get a copy of the modbus register map for your device, as well as determine what type of modbus it supports (ASCII, RTU, TCP). The map should tell you what registers hold what values on the device. You would then need to make tags in Ignition that point at the modbus registers of the data you want to bring in.
Depending on what type of modbus is supported, you can either connect directly to the device from your server, or you might need to get a protocol converter (modbus RTU to TCP or RTU over TCP) to allow you to connect to the device.
the press OEM brought up a concern (due to the PLC being 10 years old) that the CPU may not have enough power/capacity to install the Modbus addition. They are saying that we could check the CPU usage online during continuous mode and then decide we need a new CPU. My requirement is I am only interested to know when a part was pressed (usually these presses run around 10 strokes a minute) so the data requirement is 10 signals per minute and only need the timestamp. I can do the logic in Ignition to count the signals (thereby the parts).
Consider the following approach, if possible:
Have an integer register in the PLC behave as an odometer (never reset), increment it by 1 for every cycle, and roll over the value to 0 at a very high known value (32500 for a 16 bit int or 2,100,000,000 for a 32 bit int, for example). Have Ignition monitor this value and log it at a set rate to a db table.
From there, you can determine number of parts made in a certain time frame by utilizing lead/lag functions in a SQL query.
This method requires you only use 1 or 2 modbus registers (depending on integer size) and is tolerant to lower poll rates and network outages.
Thank you so much for the information. I got some updates. The press company said they have already provided us OPC UA interface with the following information. So I will be looking into how to connect Ignition to their OPC UA server.
LifeBit of the press control
Stroke counter of the press control
Total strokes per shift and batch
Good parts per shift and batch
Production status (status is set when the machine is running continuously)
Error status (status is set when the machine is in emergency stop mode)