Wireless I/O in Industrial Applications

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Thread Starter

Michael Sullivan

The front page of Control Engineering this month featured "Wireless
Communications". Interesting. Has anyone on the list used wireless communications for an industrial control application? Cellular phones have brought the cost of this technology down. Can you imagine the wiring savings cost with wireless I/O. What applications would you consider using wireless I/O system?

Michael Sullivan
 
Actually, I used a lot of wireless industrial I/O to control overhead cranes. The crane are all moving across the plant field. The PLc on the floor needs to get some signal (interlock) from the crane. It's not possible to get any I/O signal before the crane PLC start running. These interlock I/O has to go thru wireless RF module independently to enable the crane PLC. Also, the wireless I/O is good for small amount of I/O point to be represented on the SCADA/MMI application.
 
I happened to be looking at this post, and thought I would comment briefly that this application for wireless control is something we have been doing for 20+ years now. Cranes, Locomotives and other industrial machines are our specialty. Check us out at Cattron.com or email me if you have a specific need.
We build our own encoding, decoding and RF transceivers as well as all our own control software. These applications have critical safety requirements and often need high speed response times.
 
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