EP2 - Tour of the Test Bench

Video: https://youtu.be/d64TWerx4Ug

#PLC #TwinCAT3 #Beckhoff #Motion_Control #Hardware #Industrial_Automation

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A) Tour of the Test Bench

Welcome back to episode two of learning motion control and some IO with PLCs.

In this video series, we're gonna talk about:

• IO,
• servo,
• steppers,
• some stuff like that...

just to give you a general idea of how this works in the PLC environment.

Jumping right in, we're gonna establish communication with this PLC,

but I wanted to give you a tour of kind of what we're working with in this series. I'll be showing stuff as it moves later on, but this would be your general tour of what we have to work with.

Read more here: EP4 - Beckhoff TwinCAT IO (EtherCAT Master for Digital Inputs and Outputs)

A.1) Beckhoff CX5130 PLC 🧠

Up at the top left, is a Beckhoff CX5130 PLC.

It's very similar to all the CXs, because they all have that same form factor, so it's essentially a Windows-based PC x86 architecture, usually like 2 to 4 GBs of RAM, but you can spec them all the way up after that if you want.

It's got the following ports:

• a DVI port on its side
• two Ethernet network cards at the top left
• four USBs,

And you can expand out on this left side,

and put additional equipment there, extra network cards and stuff; that's essentially a PCI Express bus, I believe. So you can add sound cards and kind of weird stuff like that, but they're very expandable on that side.

On the right side we've got some IO slices there,

and this is all made to be DIN rail mountable, so those IO slices will mount right up, and they connect to what they call an E-bus; that's just like a little six or seven conductor bus,

Very similar to the EtherCAT bus that's this network system to talk to all these EtherCAT devices.

So, I'll get into that a little bit more later on, but I just want to let you know this is kind of the brain of the whole process up here, so it talks to the rest of this IO and the IO that's directly attached to it, and that's how it works.

A.2) AX5000 Dual-Channel Servo Drive ⚡🔄

Some of the other stuff we have going on here: this beast right here in the center, that's an AX 5000 dual-channel servo drive,

Video: https://youtu.be/CknwWViNUNU

so it can actually run like two of these motors at once completely separate.

It's just like having two servo amps but built into one chassis, so you can get single-channel versions of that, and the dual-channel, it's an absolute animal. It will pretty much control anything: VFDs or servo motors or just DC motors or whatever you want, really. It's really configurable.

I've got a lot of extra IO up top here that comes in handy,

and then you've got your 24 volts coming in here, DC for the DC bus,

and then right up front here, that's your, what we call the high voltage,

which normally would be, you know, 480V 3-phase or something. This one's rigged up for 120 single-phase though, just for testing.

A.3) 24-Volt Power Supply 🔌⚡

Other than that, top right, we've got just an off-the-shelf 24-volt power supply,

it supplies the PLC that runs on 24 and all the IO as well.

A.4) Servo Motors ⚙️⚡

So, it's just worth noting that that's up there. And then we have some servo motors.

A.5) IO Cards 📥📤

A.5.1) EL7201 (Servo Controller) ⚡🔄

I think it gets interesting here on this slice though;

the first one with this taller set of lights on it is actually an EL7201 styled servo slice.

So it's an entire servo closed-loop system in a single slice, which is pretty incredible. It runs 8 to 50-volt DC.

Some of their big ones, actually, they're double wide at that current, but they'll run up to 8 amps, which is like comes out at 400 Watts or pretty well close to half a horsepower, actually.

So, they get pretty big for such a small and really excellent form factor there. I really like those, and I've used them on a project before, and they worked out really well.

A.5.2) EL7041 (Stepper Controller) ⚡🔄

Additionally, on this right side here, we've got an EL7041, and that's a stepper controller.

So just something like these little steppers or like the ones on my 3D printer back here in the background.

Note: I'm actually gonna dig into that a little bit later in the series; that's why I don't mind showing it now.

A.5.3) EP2318 (EtherCAT Box) 🖧🔗

We have an EP Slice Stone here. Those are really nice IP 67 rated, I guess they call them pods, not really slices, but they're great.

So you get power in and power out and EtherCAT in and EtherCAT out, and it lets you do a lot of cool stuff with IO on the end of a robot arm and stuff like that. So it really saves you on cabling and stuff, but they're a little more expensive.

A.5.4) EK1100 (EtherCAT Coupler) ⬅️↔️➡️

Another option would be like this EK1100 down here (it is an EtherCAT Coupler -from Ethernet 100BASE-TX to E-bus),

A.5.5) EL1008 and EL2008 (digital IO) 📥📤

so I've got a bus coupler and then some IO slices, some like EL1008,

and EL2008,

are just 24-volt DC digital IO, so your proximity switches and cylinder valve actuators can come off of those, or you can get crazy with a bunch of other different kinds of IO.

But this is just a pretty basic setup that should get us going on some motion control and just showing how all that stuff works inside the PLC.

A.5) CFast Card and CMOS Battery 💾🔋

One other thing to mention real quick on these CXAs, the actual hard drive in the system is stored on this little CFast card behind this little door.

There's also a CMOS battery there,

so the CFast card runs on a SATA interface.

It's very similar to the old CF cards that were in digital cameras;

they were actually in the old Beckhoff PLCs as well. So when you pop that in there, boot it up, and that's where it loads the OS.

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Z) 🗃️ Glossary