So What did I use the Clicks for?

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Thread Starter

Curt Wuollet

A little while back I reviewed the Koyo Click PLC and I thought I’d follow up with the real world use I was picking a PLC for. Why? because this is the type of info that is really hard to find out about a product.

I just installed and commissioned a 30 or so conveyor project to move doors around without touching and do various loads unloads and traffic control. Most of them are in one circular line where the doors are fed in, inspected, hand sanded and then fed to a sanding machine. After one side has been sanded the doors are flipped and go around again.

I admit I was a little nervous doing a large project with 30 or so, $69.00 PLCs, but they certainly do everything you need for a conveyor line. And they are working pretty close to perfect and I am well pleased at the thousands of dollars saved. Most are just straight conveyors, but there are some special features.

The sander wants the thickness set to .1mm. So, the feeder conveyor has an analog Click and a pair of Banner Laser Gauges to measure the doors in real time. And one of the features wanted towards the end Is a touch screen in lieu of a box of buttons, done with a $450 CMore. ASCII or Modbus to the sander? No problem, the Click has the extra ports.

Once installed, the wish list grew and it became clear that adding all the wiring would take downtime we really can't spare. No problem, end to end control with Modbus RTU for the cost of the twisted pair wire and a little time. I did have to swap a few $69 PLCs for $99 PLCs with the RS485 port, but I'll certainly use the replaced units elsewhere. I like this Click.

Yes, it's just good old Modbus at 38.4k baud, but it's reliable and certainly fast enough for what conveyors do. And at the flipper we needed to tell which doors had to be flipped and which were done. This is done with a UV sensor and ordinary price stickers on a bottom corner. Sticker, and it gets flipped so the sticker is on the other side. No sticker and it's done.

With the network, new features are done in software and loaded during lunch or breaks. The Click is fantastic for this project and the cheap analog and networking would have been prohibitively expensive with many of the small PLCs whose first cost was many times more. I have one renegade ML1200 I want on the network and it will cost dearly, But that was the only gotcha in the whole project.. But other than that, it would be hard to do it better with any PLC and no hope of doing it for less. All the units are modular and can be reordered or repurposed plug and play the way the customer wanted.

At every turn, the capability was there with no extras needed. You guys can appreciate that. I am pleased.

Regards
cww
 
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Curt Wuollet

It can be configured for both master and slave. And since it has a free RS232 port as well, It can do point to point as well as multidrop. It also has a pretty versatile ASCII capability with no protocol imposed. I forgot to mention that several of the units also have an add-on 16 port I/O module and that was all configured automagically. The Modbus is pretty efficient as well, to keep things organized, I have the master writing and reading a set of registers from each slave, whether used or not, so the burden will stay the same as features are added and changed and slave x can send and receive bits from y with a simple copy. I use a state engine for interlocking and it repeats several times per second so there isn't much overhead. I use state machines quite extensively in the project as many of the resources perform multiple functions and the state machine enforces which rungs are active at any given time which eliminates unintended side effects. It makes it really easy to follow and modify for the wish list.

regards
cww
 
Great Review of a great product. These little "gems" of automation are not to be considered so little any more. I have worked a few times with some small package, low cost, sometimes even FREE software devices like this and the value is impressive. Good thing too. Perhaps it will help keep the big players more realistic in costs and design.

Thanks for the information.
 
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Curt Wuollet

When you consider the click is expandable to 128 points at low cost, it's not a little PLC. I think this is the way forward for Koyo and AD. And from my perspective it's far more mainstream than the two other"compact" PLCs I've looked at lately. Both were, I'm sure, decent PLC's but the software bloat was way, way, out of control. I doubt that I would select the S7 1200 even though I like the built in ethernet, but if the Micro800s used something sane like RSLogix for programming, they might have got the nod. I think getting the high IO count with the AB product would be far more expensive, but the basic units were somewhat feasible. IMHO, neither is even close to competitive for the everyday, garden variety, ladder logic project we all know and love, so Koyo is driving right down the middle of that road. The other guys are trying to steer us to ??????? I don't want to go, I've seen the place:^).

Regards
cww
 
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Don't really care for the Clicks (although ADC's new Do-More PLC is a fantastic product except for the moronic name), but the Click software has kind of a cartoonish PLC-for-dummies feel that I can't seem to tolerate.

The S7-1200 looks like a pretty cool product, though I wish they'd quit pushing TIA portal like it was a solution to some problem WE have. Looks to me more like they're trying to tie the PLC and HMI more closely together to help THEM fight back against people who like to buy best-of-breed in both PLC and HMI whether they happen to be the same brand or not. They act like register mapping is some onerous task, and they're here to save you from it. Please.

The AB 800 seems like a reasonably good product, and I like that you can create custom ladder boxes, unlike most small PLCs, but again the software has the garish cartoony feel.
 
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Curt Wuollet

> Don't really care for the Clicks (although ADC's new Do-More PLC is a
> fantastic product except for the moronic name), but the Click software has kind
> of a cartoonish PLC-for-dummies feel that I can't seem to tolerate.

---- snipped by moderator ----

> The AB 800 seems like a reasonably good product, and I like that you can create
> custom ladder boxes, unlike most small PLCs, but again the software has the garish cartoony feel.

It depends on what you are doing. the click is perfect for this project because I can afford to put one in each module. and if it's just a straight conveyor, it's overkill, but if it needs to network and control an absurdly high point count (for a conveyor) for transverse belts and a bag lift and sensors for 3 different functions and talk to an HMI _and_send data to a second network. I just moved it over a little and added a $59 16 point IO module and loaded the program. That is capability. And getting it with the others is either impossible or incredibly expensive. The software could use a switch to turn off all the newbie dialogs and "help", but I found I can be as productive with it as with RSLogix, and that's my standard for no nonsense production tools. For changes, I can be in, out and done before TIA or CCW would finish loading, _if_ they finished loading :^). Online editing would be nice, but the biggest factor is you simply do so much less screwing around and get right on task. TIA almost drove me nuts in comparison. I can't imagine updating 30 PLCs with that on lunch break. And that's the real world.
 
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