Smooth Breakthrough

This week is absolutely the refresh stage not only for the work but also for the daily life. Due to the good news acquired on the Monday, we eventually can let the pressure down and arrange the new plan for next phase. After completing the learning schedule of Flash, Premiere and Inventor, what I only need to do for next two months are the preparation for trip and finished the animation works. For the work, I have also entered the new stage, which I am able to focus on specific issue at least. So far, there are the three major projects in my hand. Except settling the annoying lower data transfer problems, another perplexed issue was the communication between the driver and human machine interface.

Unfortunately, this problem have existed for more than three months. In the beginning, the hardware structure including the HMI, PLC, and driver. For the above framework, the critical communication is between the PLC and driver. It offer the RS-485 protocol for further application, but there are no easy-use functions to make the connection directly. We have to define and build the entire data to connect smoothly. Furthermore, the standard connector employed make us require making it for ourselves. If there are any mistakes in the building process, we will not know what happened exactly. However, when the project have reached to the third quarter of the entire process, we found that the PLC is the replaceable element in the system. Thus, the PLC had removed out and what we had to do next is to connect the HMI and driver directly. However, not like the PLC, the delta HMI already have the connecting function between each element of Delta at least. Although, we still had encounter several problems during the building the structure, the critical points had been solved by discussing with the developed department of HMI.

Return and Go Home

General speaking, the progress of the three major projects have been breakthrough in this week. The first one is the most long time on-going project, which has carried out more than ten months: the software of the servo press. It would applied in collecting the data from sensor in machine and make the further analysis for exporting the report. However, the fundamental functions had been developed prior to the automation in Taipei this year, the additional application still have been demanded for gaining competitive. Recently, the issue of over slowly data transferring and recording have been discussed and required to make the clearly improvement. Due to the transfer speed rate limitation of the Modbus protocol, we are not able to solve the problems merely revise the code slightly. Thus, we attempt to seek the broadly application such as building buffer and read the batch of data once a time.

Fortunately, the batch read in Modbus is not the rare application. We have found out the available library soon after, although it only support for the 16 bits and acquire the data from 100 register at one time. Above problems will not be difficult to be solved by building the proper program. We can read more times to settle the limitation of acquiring data and combine the two 16 bits into the 32bits data. Nonetheless, the coming function might be much more challenging. We have to read the batch data according to the command in PLC. The PLC would save the data in two main buffer regions. Thus, when the PLC is saving data in one region, our program is necessary to acquire the batch data from another in the short time. Afterward, the batch data is supposed to be combined and sort into something seems like transferred one by one. Finally, I have built the complete class to carry all of above process. The key point in this function would be the switch the reading buffer and sort out the large amount of data without messing up.