Project - Machine Downtime

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watson118
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Project - Machine Downtime

Post by watson118 »

Hello Guys

I hoping to get some advice and possible your feedback (and even get on board) on a project I'm currently working on.
I have a little bit of an electrical background but not on this side of things. I am working with a sheet metal work factory at the moment the manager is looking to set up a data logger to log the machine/user performance (mainly monitor downtime). He mentioned he had done this a few years back with a bit of pico kit at a previous site he worked at but he's not 100% sure how it was done as he had an electrician on site who done most of the work.

He bought me the PicoLog 1000 Series (12 channel, 1012). So I've wired all the machines on the factory floor into a relay bay. So when the machine is running (ie, the operator presses the pedal for the machine to run, at the same time the corresponding relay activates. The plan is to have the datalogger see this as in input and start an adjustable timmer on the channel.

The way I understand the manager had this running at the last place with some software he could open and see a timeline (24hour window with x amount of days of history). On any giving day, he would see a table/graph with different colours (each channel).

When a channel is activated the line would go up (to show its live, this would then start a timer on that channel and stay at the hight until it times out unless it receives another input on the same channel the timer will just restart and not drop the line). Then if the same channel doesn't activate again within the time set the line would drop back to 0. This would allow us to visually see the downtime of the machines.

Can this all be done with this kit and the datalogger software? or do I need to custom code a kit of software?

thanks
Mike
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bennog
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Re: Project - Machine Downtime

Post by bennog »

When a channel is activated the line would go up (to show its live, this would then start a timer on that channel and stay at the hight until it times out unless it receives another input on the same channel the timer will just restart and not drop the line). Then if the same channel doesn't activate again within the time set the line would drop back to 0. This would allow us to visually see the downtime of the machines.
Can you explain this a little more clear.
Is this to prevent the worker is putting a stone on the pedal ?

Benno

watson118
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Re: Project - Machine Downtime

Post by watson118 »

Hello Benno

Sorry for the long delay in replying.
Is this to prevent the worker is putting a stone on the pedal ?
in a lot of ways yes, it's mostly to see when a machine not running with an operator.

So in a little more detail:
Channel 1, is wired to a relay, That relay is wired to a press brake machine on the factory floor. The relay turns ON when the Press Brake is on a cycle (the operator has inserted a metal sheet, presses the foot pedal to bend it).

If the operator has 300 sheets to bend we want to be able to track the operator is doing them. so lets say its take 30 seconds to reload and press the pedal, we would set the timer on channel ONE to 40 seconds.
The operator will only press the pedal for around 5 seconds, this is why we need to set a timer so it looks like it been pressed from a set time, in this case, 40 seconds.

If the operator starts his / her shift at 9:00:00AM and starts to bend all 300 sheets. we should see something like this:

09:03:10 Start (ON) - First time the pedal is pressed
09:11:30 End (OFF) - This shows they have stopped
This shows that the operator was bending continually in under 40 seconds for the 7 odd minutes.

09:14:10 Start (ON)
09:14:50 End (OFF)
I can see that he/she has only pressed the pedal once for some reason.

09:22:20 Start (ON)
10:43:40 End (OFF)

From this short sample, I can see it was not running between
9:11:30 - 9:14:10 = 2 minutes and 40 seconds
9:14:50 - 09:22:20 = 7 minutes and 30 seconds.
This is what we would class as downtime totalling to 10 minutes and 10 seconds from 9AM till 10AM.

The plan would be to do the same on all channels but with the option to change the timer time as each Manchin might be different. We would love to store 12 weeks of data at a time.


I hope this makes some sense?

Thanks
Mike

bennog
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Re: Project - Machine Downtime

Post by bennog »

Ok if I need to program this I would save all changes (up flank and down flank) timestamps in some database.
SQLite is an option MySQL or PostgreSQL.
So you can request from the database all kinds of information, and if you change some thresholds get the info you want with the new thresholds.

When the data is in a database you can even look over longer periods (1 year for example)

Benno

watson118
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Re: Project - Machine Downtime

Post by watson118 »

Hi Benno
Thats sounds just like what I am after, So can I just check, is this something that the PicoLog 1000 Series can do?
I wasn't sure this will work as a simple On / Off on each channel?

Thanks

bennog
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Re: Project - Machine Downtime

Post by bennog »

I suppose it would but someone from Pico has to confirm this because I don't have a PicoLog unit to confirm this for you.

Benno

Gerry
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Re: Project - Machine Downtime

Post by Gerry »

Hi watson118,

What you appear to need is a watchdog timer application. So, when (and only when) the timer times-out, the logged level goes to zero. You can do this fairly easily using our Software Development Kit (SDK), and a time delay function (e.g. set to 1 second) used to create a pseudo watchdog timer function, by capturing all of the pedal up events to start, or restart the count, and ending the count if the specified number of seconds have been counted. You can download the SDK from here: https://www.picotech.com/downloads, and you can download example code showing how to perform basic capture from here: https://github.com/picotech.

The limit of how much data you can capture to a file is 1 million lines for txt and CSV, which means that with 1 second resolution you would be capturing a total of 12x60x60x24x7x12=87 Million pieces of data. However, you would not need to write all of the data to a file, you would only need to write the start and end times of the counts. So, for instance, if they were on average starting and stopping every hour and a half, then you could have a row of 12 data values (one for each operator), and only need to write (with 1 stop and 1 start time every 90 minutes) 2x16x7x12=2,688 lines of data. So, you wouldn't necessarily need a database (which would otherwise give you more than 1 million lines of storage).

And yes the PicoLog 1000 series can capture simple on-off events, on each channel, using a voltage and pull-up resistor to provide 0 volts for off and X volts for on (using the Small Terminal Board see here: https://www.picotech.com/accessories/miscellaneous/small-terminal-board) .

Regards,

Gerry
Gerry
Technical Specialist

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