PIC in industrial development?

i want to use a

Hi everybody!

Just got a job to copy the coin-acceptor pcb used in bally slot-machines.

mmm... it uses a pic16c54.

cheers
Raticus

Yes, PIC does have industrial usage like this PLC.... However, many industrial control (esp chemical plants where I worked for a bit of time) people are quite conservative and do not want to take any risk. While the environment for many automobile accessories (or vendoring machine) may be tougher than typical industrial environment, the consequence of failure is uncomparable. I have seen 10 tons of sugar syrup dump to the harbour due to a simple failure of overflow alarm (+ long tea break of the operator). It is about $40000, more expensive than most cars.... even if we don't count the cleanup cost, penalty from the city council etc....

Also, there is a "cultural" factor: many chemical and mechanical engineers know how to play around with ladder logic, but the C/assembly programs are out of their control....

**broken link removed**

some times you find a bug on compiler routine and change some parametres on hex file that mean the assembler programming is more better than c or basic compiler

What are your opinions on AVRs in the same context?

nothing about silicium bugs...??
MRM

Dear All,

In my region, there are many user uses PIC for many applications. Crash system in Automobile, PLC, CNC machine and many others. PIC is very reliable in many case. My friend once work on z80 in one of his inductrial project as a simple timer and the unit fails to perform correctly in a noisy environment, then switch to PIC with min changes make to the hardware and no problems occurs since then. I think in many cases, the debugging techniques is very important. For example if safety is the main issue, use an ICE to debug your program, many ICE comes with code coverage tools and trace features to help programmer to view where does the firmware not use and might cause program. However Compiler might also give programs if the user is not familiar what are the correct optimizations to set. The more important in choosing the the right MCU is to know your application in detail. Most importantly tools is very important. Please kindly comment, you will be most welcome. Thank you

Regards

Dear All,

Just one more thing, I am not a fan of any MCUs but which ever manufacter can support free or very low cost tools for beginners, I will be glad to step in and learn to use it.

Regards

Hi,

We use PIC16F877 for a winder. The only problem it's EEPROM corrupted as the system is powered down, but We solve it with a supervisory circuit.

i design a controller for a plastic shrink machine using pic 16f877 and had to try using its spi in I/O but it faild , later i found an errate from pic that they can't gurantii thier spi in pic 16fxx family

msadek_eng,

interesting to hear your problem because I also use a 16F877 (not 16F877A which has a lot of problems) and an Atmel dataflash connected via spi without any problems.

The system generates voice messages via telefone (voice is stored ADPCM compressed in my dataflash).

The only pity is that spi has problems in noisy environments.

I can only restart communication after an emi problem if I reset the dataflash otherwise my communication hangs.

best regards

i in web see ,he use pic=plc

I experienced once, back in year 2000, my sensing system encountered the transient which was emitted from motors in the conveyor area, may be from inverter near by. At that time, I did know much about this industrial hazard environment, the design lack off filter, photo coupler. Since then I opted for Atmel’s MCU.

However, Recently, I had made a decision to come back to PIC mcu again, wanted to take the challenge to what I had done in the past and also because of the improvement of PIC development environment such as ICD feature together with low cost CSS’s C

Hi C-Man,

Could you please post the source for DataFlash interface with PIC?

Thanks.

hill,

I use a more or less 1:1 conversion of this AVR appnote:
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc1456.pdf
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/avr335.zip

best regards

Hi C-Man,

I follow the links that you provided. It works with my PIC18F452 to AT45D041A.

Thanks a lot.

monty_burns_007 said:

I used it once in AGV (automatic guided vehicales) in an automated plant. Because they where very compact. I once made a ladder logic to microchip asm converter which we used the to make PLC like programs. They (the pic's of all agv's) where also in communication with the mainfraim PLC's (S5 135u's).
The only drawback was the work to make a PLC in hardware. The 8bits ports from the pic where first multiplexed on a bus with driver ic's to create more digitale I/O's, then there was also the convertion from the TTL level to the industrial 24VDC range.
But they were quite fast analog steerings and digital timing steerings.

The only big work was making the plates + electronics which was luckily not for me

Monty 8)

Click to expand...

i'm very interesting in a ladder logic to microchip asm converter , can you share it ?

Hi,
I'm getting this interesting thread back to life again.
I am developing an automated packaging station, i need to control the speed of a 3 phase AC motor (that means I'll use 6 PWM signals to generate a sine wave, and an ADC port to set the speed with a potentiometer ) and also turning on and off another 2 single phase motors depending on the values gotten from 4 pressure cells at the end of the station, and the rest is reading signals from sensors ant etc...

I have a pretty good idea how to accomplish each one of this tasks, but I am not sure if it is a good idea to use a single PIC. I am planning to use the PIC18F4431 because it has everything I need to control the 3 phase motor but I cant picture how to put the whole thing together in a single program and microcontroller, will I interrupt the PWM routine if I stuck in the code for reading the pressure cells? whats the best way to do this? any ideas?

This is my first "big" project,the other things I have developed didn't take that much from the me, right now my only way out is to build two units; one with a master pic for the pressure cells, sensors and the two little motors and the other with a slave pic controlling the 3 phase motor and a 16 x 2 LCD .

By the way... I program in C and I have found some difficulties when it comes to programming the PMW module, i'm thinking to learn assembly to get out of these cases but I'll stick with C, you can use assembly in a C program anyway.

Thanks for your help.

I think I found the answer...
https://www.edaboard.com/threads/195266/
An option will be RTOS programing (which CCS supports) but I'm Afraid that it will be a real headache controlling precisely the pwm timing (or maybe not, but I'm getting closer to this project's dead line).
I'll get in to this type of programming for future projects, I were actually wondering how single cores processors can handle multiple tasks, now I have a clue how to achieve something similar with PICS!
In assembler this could be done by dealing with the stack pointer along with other registers, but as I said, I'm no expert in assembler.
Here is another thread with more information and links.
https://www.edaboard.com/threads/74431/
Now, what kind of programmable devices are commonly used in the industry,let's say in systems like printers, keyboads, digital signal processing like DVDs, audio FX processors, etc??
Please excuse my bad english.