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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!" |