Customer – Ho Chi Minh Vocational College of Technology
Country – Vietnam
The Industrial Communication Laboratory was developed to help students learn the basics of the most popular industrial protocols, such as Profibus, Modbus, CAN, and Ethernet. Through the laboratory, students study programming basics of the controllers from the most popular vendors – National Instruments and Siemens.
The laboratory stand is based on NI CompactRIO (cRIO) platform.
The laboratory stand represents a belt conveyor, which is controlled by a Siemens S7-300 controller. The S7-300 PLC controls the conveyor motor and acquires signals from infrared (IR) sensors, which are used to detect the presence and count number of items on the belt conveyor. The stand also includes a robot arm, which is controlled by the cRIO controller. All control settings of the PLC are being sent from the NI cRIO controller via the Profibus network.
The stand also includes a power meter, which measures the power consumption of the conveyor system. The meter communicates with the cRIO using the Modbus protocol.
Developed in the LabVIEW graphical programming environment, the software provides an interactive communication interface for data transmission between hardware modules.
The application comprises of a list of exercises which help students to easily understand the working principles of the data transmission protocols, data encoding, and error detection methods, programming of the controllers, etc.
Main features of the system are:
- Stand includes CompactRIO chassis with separate modules for each of the protocols
- Belt conveyor with Robot Arm and IR sensors
- Conveyor control with Siemens S7-300 PLC
- User-friendly interface allows easy study and understanding of the protocols
- Exercises for each of the protocols
- User Manual with short courses for each of the protocols and exercise instructions
- Report creation in PDF format