RickN
Newbie level 1
Hi,
I need to implement a control system for regulating ventilation, lights and a thermostat for a fabric. The regulation system itself is pretty simple, but its my first time. So I was wondering if someone could give some advice about what kind of hardware to use.
The user interface is straight forward. A little screen with a couple of buttons for the user (eventually a touchscreen) is good enough. We don't need advanced regulation or complex sensors/actuators either. However, logging seems to be a problem since most of the hardware I've seen so far are very limited in that part. The design software either doesn't support logging, or its limited to just a small region of memory.
In our situation I'd like to log a "data packet" (mainly the current sensor readings, + time) each 10 or 15 minutes, for a long period. After logging, for example 1 year, we should be able to upload the data and read it on a normal PC (make a Excel sheet from it or something). And if possible, it also would be nice if the monitor could plot a graph.
Another feature we want to implement is an adjustable time schedule. For example, after 17:00, the ventilation should run at 100% for 30 minutes. This schedule also requires space to store it somewhere of course, and the program needs to read back that data pretty fast since its used all the time.
So far I've seen solutions such as a HMI and PLC in one (Unitronics Vision 570), industrial PC's, or just using a normal PC with a data aqcuisition card. Performance is not very important in this case. But the price, ease to program it, and data logging capabilities are. The Vision 570 comes close to what I want, although the logging capalibities are still somewhat limited. A normal PC might be a solution as well, since its very simple to write a program that does all the logging, exporting and adjusting variables easily. But I'm not sure if the I/O (data aqcuisition cards right?) are going to be cheap. We have ~10 analog inputs and also ~10 analog outputs. And... is a normal PC stabile enough? We don't want to restart it every week of course.
Regards,
Rick
I need to implement a control system for regulating ventilation, lights and a thermostat for a fabric. The regulation system itself is pretty simple, but its my first time. So I was wondering if someone could give some advice about what kind of hardware to use.
The user interface is straight forward. A little screen with a couple of buttons for the user (eventually a touchscreen) is good enough. We don't need advanced regulation or complex sensors/actuators either. However, logging seems to be a problem since most of the hardware I've seen so far are very limited in that part. The design software either doesn't support logging, or its limited to just a small region of memory.
In our situation I'd like to log a "data packet" (mainly the current sensor readings, + time) each 10 or 15 minutes, for a long period. After logging, for example 1 year, we should be able to upload the data and read it on a normal PC (make a Excel sheet from it or something). And if possible, it also would be nice if the monitor could plot a graph.
Another feature we want to implement is an adjustable time schedule. For example, after 17:00, the ventilation should run at 100% for 30 minutes. This schedule also requires space to store it somewhere of course, and the program needs to read back that data pretty fast since its used all the time.
So far I've seen solutions such as a HMI and PLC in one (Unitronics Vision 570), industrial PC's, or just using a normal PC with a data aqcuisition card. Performance is not very important in this case. But the price, ease to program it, and data logging capabilities are. The Vision 570 comes close to what I want, although the logging capalibities are still somewhat limited. A normal PC might be a solution as well, since its very simple to write a program that does all the logging, exporting and adjusting variables easily. But I'm not sure if the I/O (data aqcuisition cards right?) are going to be cheap. We have ~10 analog inputs and also ~10 analog outputs. And... is a normal PC stabile enough? We don't want to restart it every week of course.
Regards,
Rick
