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APPLICATIONS
Factory
Automation Relies on Ability to Communicate
From
a remote room, observers monitor the fabrication of gear boxes.
The conveyor brings pallets of raw materials to the robots. The
robots load and unload mills and lathes and assemble the fabricated
parts. They screw the boxes together and deposit them back on
the conveyor. The conveyor routes the gear boxes to the finished
goods station. The observers break out in applause.
The
factory is a commercial teaching facility in the Midwest. The
observers are university graduates and factory workers who are
getting their first lesson in automation. The facility's director
is responsible for making all the devices talk to each other.
"We've
been at this for years," says the director. "So when
somebody asks me about how we fit onto the 'Information Super
Highway,' I just have to tell them we've been commuting for quite
a while. It doesn't matter if the students are in Michigan or
Alaska -- they still keep track of material-on-hand and finished
goods and they still learn how to put one of these (factories)
together."
 The firm wanted to use standard equipment so their
students could immediately apply what they learn to the real
world. That's why they picked PCs and Quadron cards for communications.
"The young ones just want to see what it does, but the older
students want to know how it works, so we have to use equipment
that's current and readily available."
The
director will tell you that they didn't stop with the basics.
"Making PCs talk to robots and send instructions to lathes
and collect production data all at once can be tricky, so we
show them how to use advanced programming tools as well."
With more than ten years of experience programming processors
in assembler, the director was glad to come across programming
tools from Quadron Corporation.
"From
a programmer's perspective, the best thing about using Quadron's
qCF is the time it saves and the mistakes you don't make. qCF
provides a full C application program interface to the ARTIC
operating system. When I write one command in qCF, I don't have
to write ten or twelve low-level commands. So, I can write a
lot more a lot faster and my chances of introducing bugs goes
way, way down."
Not
only is the firm increasing programmer productivity using Quadron
products, they're boosting communications hardware productivity
as well. Where they used to use serial cards to talk to shop
floor devices one at a time, they now use cards with Quadron's
port expander software, qCOM. The additional CPU on the card
and the ability to access additional ports simultaneously has
a big impact on what they teach.
"We've
added features we just didn't have enough ports for. We used
to just monitor the flow of goods through the factory and we'd
have to program the mills and lathes off-line. Now we can change
their instructions on the fly. We've also added gauging stations
so we can measure the parts before they go to finished goods.
So now we have active controls, full data acquisition for better
quality control and the students can review summary reports on
the same PC all at the same time."
What's
on the horizon for factory automation? The director is careful
about revealing trade secrets and future plans as the training
business is very competitive. But he did give us one glimpse
into the future, "Our next class will be manufacturing chess
sets!"
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