BACKGROUND

A large Auto-ancillary group has about 30 CNC machine in its entire plant. They had implement Schneider Aveva SCADA software to monitor, track production at all these 30 CNC machines. Their requirement was simple. To keep the Operator at the CNC machine well informed about the Task he/she is performing. If the job is okay, Green Lamp to be on, for error or delayed Job timing Red Lamp to be turned on and lastly for serious error the Hooter to be turned on along with Red lamp. Each CNC machine had 1 Towerlamp installed near it.

CHALLENGES

Primary challenges faced by forging company are:

• Plant was operating in three shifts. Shutdown for installation was out of the question.
• The 30 CNC machines were spread across approximately 30000 sqft area. So physical wiring got ruled out.
• The Schneider Aveva SCADA could give output over Modbus TCP.
• Each job used to get completed within 30-40 seconds so faster turn-around-time from the Schneider Aveva SCADA to each Towerlamp was as must.

SOLUTION

Our Team developed a Modbus TCP to LoRa Gateway module which took input from Schneider Aveva SCADA and converted it to LoRa wireless. ESD had Digital IO as a product which had 4 Digital Outputs. We modified the DIO to act at the Final control element and added in-built LoRa transciever in it. Each Modbus TCP to LoRa Gateway communicated with 10 nos. of LoRA DIO. In this way 3 Gateways communicated with the total 30 Tower Lamps. So with minimal timeout of 1 second and scan-rate of 100 milliseconds 1 Gateway could communicate with all the 10 CNC Towerlamps within max 10 seconds at worst case scenario.