[H-GEN] Remote process monitoring & control

[Doug Young]

(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs "Doug Young" <dougy at gargoyle.apana.org.au>)


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Anthon <mca at tams.com.au>
To: 'general at lists.humbug.org.au' <general at lists.humbug.org.au>
Date: 15 July 1999 10:00
Subject: RE: [H-GEN] Remote process monitoring & control


>(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Michael Anthon
<mca at tams.com.au>)
>
>This is a pretty broad subject.  There are many, many, many types of PLCs
>and factory automation equipment out there.  Unfortunately, because it is a
>fairly competitive industry, there was never a defined standard for
>inter-communication between these devices.  Each manufacturer tended to
come
>up with their own protocol.  Some used RS232, some RS422, some optical
>fibre, some a parallel interface.. etc etc.
>
>That said, the Gould MODBUS protocol has become somewhat of an industry
>standard and when I was last involved in this sort of thing (about 3-4
years
>ago) there were moves afoot to produce a standard protocol (I think it was
>called FieldBUS or something, F-BUS perhaps).
>
>At what level do you need to interface to these devices?

ummmmmm .... would you re-phrase that in words of less than two syllables ??
The situation involves a bunch of (mostly) plastic extrusion moulders with
PLC's already and I want to be able to monitor simple functions like has an
alarm tripped / is something running or not  etc. There are heaps of Windows
boxes around the place including spare 486's that could be switched to
whatever flavour of unix, a LAN between the actual factory and the office,
and a dialup WAN to another office location. Ideally the status of various
machines will be monitored from anywhere with dialup access to the LAN, and
hopefully also from the net.

If you are going
>to have to write serial protocol drivers for them, then I would suggest
that
>VBA would not be the tool of choice.....


OK .... so is there a reasonably straightforward solution ?? ..... I notice
both Jaycar and Dick Smith have cheap I/O interface kits available that
apparently use QBasic programming and which appear to do what I need,
however I don't know whether or not I can monitor and control stuff remotely
if I use QBasic.



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