Ethernet enabled Weight Scale Recomendations

General Discussion
1

I’m looking for a weight scale that is easily connected to ignition, does anyone have any recommendations of Ethernet scales that you have used or tried. I’m just starting my search and figured I would check here first.

Thanks

2

anyone?

3

I think it’s more important to get the scale that fits your needs (sturdiness, size of the plate, precision, …).

Ignition is generally not the problem when it comes to communication.

We usually don’t connect to stand-alone scales, but rather to already automated check weighers and the like. For those, the supplier usually uses a regular PLC (to read the load cells but also run the belts), and Ignition is able to communicate with it.

4

If you find a scale that allows Modbus TCP connections you are set for plug and play. The scales that we have seen sends a telegram that you can use TCP drivers to receive. You will need to do some scripting to decipher the string, but its doable.

5

I like the Mettler-Toledo scales and knock-offs that can be set to continuous transmit over (nearly) raw TCP. I script a listener thread and write to memory tags as data arrives. Such packets include useful information like motion/stable and tare data.

6

Thanks for the suggestions, I have a few scales I want to use. Output options being USB, Ethernet and serial. I was just curious to see what other people used, I don’t want to spend a lot of development time incorporating it and wanted to see what other people used.

Thanks Again

7

Hi Phil,

Saw you have been connecting to Mettler-Toledo over raw TCP.
Are you able to help me walk through the script listener thread that you created?

8

I don’t have that project in a VM at the moment, and am away from my office today. Maybe later this week.

9

Dug this out. It depends on the background thread management (clientserial.py) described in this post:

The above can be modified to run in the gateway with regular tags instead of client tags... I recommend that for most processes. It also needs an update to use the LifeCycle module instead of system.util.getGlobals(). See this topic for details:

So, prereqs satisfied, this is the script, lightly edited for NDA compliance and copyright statement:

https://www.automation-pros.com/ignition/ethernetMettlerToledo.py

Have fun!