Getting data from Injection Molding Machines (ex Toshiba)

I need to find a way to collect data from our injection molding machines for Ignition.

I was wondering if anyone has connected Ignition to any of the following injection molding machines:
Toshiba Model: EC180NV21-4
Toshiba Model: EC310NIIV30-8
Toshiba Model: EC390SXV50-17AT
Toshiba Model: EC380SXV50-8
CINCINNATI Model: A07B-1530-B 003#U01
CINCINNATI Model: ROBO 110I-138
NISSEI Model FN4000
NISSEI Model FN6000
Engel Model: E-MOTION 440/200US
Engel Model: TG650/300 US
Engel Model: ES330-250
Engel Model: ES1300/300
SODICK PLUSTECH Model: LS180R
SODICK PLUSTECH Model: LSR180EH2
SODICK PLUSTECH Model: LS180R
FANUC ROBOSHOT 110I-138

1 Like

Hello,

I was wondering if you had any luck with this request that I found on the Inductive website?
I have a couple of Nissei machines and have been trying to get the data from them.

No, I have not. There are a number of third party systems for Injection Molding, but I’ve found nothing that can connect directly with Ignition. We also have a couple of Nissei machines (same issue), seems like the injection molding industry likes to keep its data to itself.
Good Luck!

[quote=“reckstein”]Hello,

I was wondering if you had any luck with this request that I found on the Inductive website?
I have a couple of Nissei machines and have been trying to get the data from them.[/quote]

Ok a couple of years later, hoping that you were able to get data out of your injection molding machines.

We have several Nissei vertical molding machines with the TACT controller and we have a project to interface with the machines and collect data. Thus far, we have been told that they dump a text file to a share folder, but that will not work for us.

Thanks!

Oscar.

1 Like

I was told that Toshiba doesn’t have an OPC driver for the presses. They have the Ipaqet software to collect data from/to the Injection Molding Machines.

I am interested in using Ignition for my project instead of their software. Did anyone find out how to do this?

Thanks

Kepware has some Toshiba drivers in there KepServerEX product.
You can download a demo of it and see what you can do with it.

Hi @joseut76!
I am not sure if you were able to figure out how to connect Ignition to the Nissei Molding machines; we worked with Nissei to provide an text-based interface (they would not go the OPCUA route, unfortunately)
Our custom code on the TACT controller will spit out a status file to a shared folder (to track uptime/downtime and reasons, mainly for OEE) and another file with process data (Flows, pressure, etc.)
We then run a GW script to parse that data and put it into tags.
Not the ideal solution, but it works!

Thanks.

Hello Oscar:

We are still working on this project for our Toshiba machines. I can only save those text files with machine data to a thumb drive, but I cannot get real time data. Are you sending the files to a network folder?

Can you share with me how you do this?

Thanks

Hi Jose!
Yes, we finally had to settle for using the file on a network shared folder. It’s not the cleanest solution, but it works, for the most part.
What we did was setup a Raspberry Pi(*) to act as the file server (using Samba); we created a shared folder for each machine, and configured the Nissei TACT controllers to dump the process data (MONDAT files) to the shared folder.
We also had NISSEI Japan modify the software on the TACT to spit out a “machine status” file that would allow us to detect machine up/down and error codes for OEE measurement.

There is a gateway timer script connecting to the shared folders that opens the file, parses the values and writes them to tags on Ignition.
Also important, is that the shared folders need to be mapped from the Gateway (inside ignition.conf), instead of Windows. There is documentation on how this works here:
https://docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC79/Mapping+a+Network+Drive

(*) We initially tried to host the shared folders on our Windows file servers, but there were some crazy file-locking issues that we couldn’t afford to spend too much time fixing…

We are working on a solution to have the Raspberry Pi push the file contents out to MQTT directly, since we are moving our environment to MQTT altogether.

I hope this helps.

Cheers!

Do none of these machines have a Modbus Module? That really seems odd, unless they are very old machines.

We just hooked up to Stulz (Air control system) all that had to be done was add the Modbus Module to their controller and setup the addressing and now we can control/monitor the whole air control system at one of our “POT” plants and this also allows remote connection/control.

You would expect that of any vendor, right? No, these machines do not provide any output other than a file-based output to USB or a shared folder. They aren’t even old machines really, the manufacturer simply does not offer any standard industrial protocol options.

Cheers!

Hi Oscar,

Any chance of a handy-dandy tutorial for your Raspi setup? We have several Nissei presses in-house, and this may alleviate the effort of reinventing the wheel. Plus, I’m lazy… heh.

I don’t have the process documented, but I would gladly assist you with it over teamviewer/remote desktop support if you can get on the RPi console. PM if you’d be interested.

Cheers!
Oscar.

Oscar,
Thank you for sharing the information on how you were abele to get data from the Nissei TACT controllers. We have a similar project pending and this was very helpful insight. It sounds like we should be able to get started with basic process monitoring without the custom code similar to that which you had Nissei Japan developed, but if you could point me to where I can find information on configuring the TACT file dump that would be a huge help. If you prefer to contact me directly, I sent a request for connection via linked-in or my contact information is under the Gold Level integrator listing (InteCraft Automation).

Thanks Again!
Tom Halbrooks

You help me a lot with this information. Do you have another solution (2021)? If this is correct, I am doing a similar project but I would appreciate if you could send me updated information.

Hola Gabriel!
Unfortunately, no. The file dump and GW script is about best you can get to interface with these machines. One improvement would be to skip the Gateway Script and have something on the file server side that can parse the file and push the data to OPCUA or MQTT.
Cheers!
Oscar.

these signal is use the communication euromap63(file based communication )
or higher version EUROMAP77 (base on opc-ua)?