Wedg1e
They call me Mr. Bodge-angles
- Messages
- 7,735
- Location
- Teesside, England
Excellent
We had a machine upgrade job at work that required a Siemens PLC to be programmed. Our collection of recent electronics graduates collectively failed to get to grips with the coding; luckily the customer wasn't stuck as we were pushing 2 years late on delivery.
In desperation I asked my son-in-law if he knew anyone, and when I outlined the job he asked what we were poncing about with PLCs for, a Raspberry Pi could do the job just as well.
Raspberry Pi? I asked, you mean the kid's toy that 5 year olds learn to program?
Yep, he replied.
Find a five year old, I instructed.
Sure enough, in under two hours the bulk of the code was written. We had to use an Arduino clone to read a resistive height sensor as the Pi has no provision for analogue input, the Arduino plugs into one of the USBs on the Pi.
The Pi was stacked with a 16-input card and an 8-relay output for the hardware (doors, scissor table etc.) and talks to the system electronics via RS232 (even in the 21st century ). I designed and 3D-printed a case to hold the whole shooting-match together (even has a fan to keep things cool).
Bloody useful things, these kids' toys
Had to make a little piggyback cradle for the Arduino and somewhere to fit the DIN rail mounts...
We had a machine upgrade job at work that required a Siemens PLC to be programmed. Our collection of recent electronics graduates collectively failed to get to grips with the coding; luckily the customer wasn't stuck as we were pushing 2 years late on delivery.
In desperation I asked my son-in-law if he knew anyone, and when I outlined the job he asked what we were poncing about with PLCs for, a Raspberry Pi could do the job just as well.
Raspberry Pi? I asked, you mean the kid's toy that 5 year olds learn to program?
Yep, he replied.
Find a five year old, I instructed.
Sure enough, in under two hours the bulk of the code was written. We had to use an Arduino clone to read a resistive height sensor as the Pi has no provision for analogue input, the Arduino plugs into one of the USBs on the Pi.
The Pi was stacked with a 16-input card and an 8-relay output for the hardware (doors, scissor table etc.) and talks to the system electronics via RS232 (even in the 21st century ). I designed and 3D-printed a case to hold the whole shooting-match together (even has a fan to keep things cool).
Bloody useful things, these kids' toys
Had to make a little piggyback cradle for the Arduino and somewhere to fit the DIN rail mounts...