Blue Tooth

[Lorne Van Dusen]

Is there any way to connect to the PLC via Blue Tooth.
I have been asked by a couple of customers if there is such a think as a Blue Tooth connection and app for the Super PLC.

[support]

Thank you for your feedback.

The current Super PLCs do not have built-in Blue-Tooth radio. So in order to use Blue Tooth one may need a RS232 to Blue-tooth converter. But that may not be what you want to use.

Our engineering has been evaluating some new generation of MCU with BT radio built-in and some time in future there is a plan to deploy a PLC with built-in BT or 802.15.4 radio. It could be a generic PLC or it could also be deployed in the form of a purpose-built PLC (such as the ALEC - http://alec.triplc.com).

At this point there is no firm plan for a release date yet unless there are confirmed volume requirement that can help accelerate the plan to release such a product.

[Lorne Van Dusen]

I have used both industrial Ethernet as well as Blue Tool modules that connect to the RS485 ports of a PLC
Omron has such modules.
I will look into a adapter as you suggested.

At the same time I was quite disappointed to find out that you have not included things like Can Buss as this seems to be the most widely used two wire protocol used today    

[support]

Thanks again for the feedback. There is CAN bus hardware on the SmartTILE but no firmware support was developed for it. We are aware that CAN bus is widely used in car industry (as in in car entertainment, power windows etc) In Europe CANopen and CiA are widely used, but protocols that runs on CAN bus appear not too often mentioned for industrial automation in North America.

In any case today Ethernet support has become the most important communication interface, for which all our Super PLCs can handle very well. Unlike some PLCs that deploy Ethernet to serial interface that convert high performance Ethernet into low performance serial interface and therefore inherently limited, the Ethernet port on the TRi Super PLCs is tightly integrated into the hardware and firmware and therefore it is able to handle connections by multiple clients at the same time and support both Modbus TCP and Ethernet Hostlink command protocols simultaneously. It can even connect to a remote server to upload data to the cloud while simultaneously handle communication requests from all the connected clients.

[Lorne Van Dusen]

You are correct in stating that Ethernet is becoming the most widely used interface on PLC'S nowadays.
Everyone is trying o find a low cost high speed and reliable 2 to 4 wire protocol to add external devices to a PLC
Like I mentioned earlier I never did use Mod-buss but I did use the Siemens Profi-buss many times as well as the Omron Hostlink on what they called industrial Ethernet which by the way worked quite well and was quite easy to set up in the PLC buy setting up how many words to send and how many to receive and the addresses of the words. I must include the I installed the units in what is clased as very noisy environment with very large VFD drives as well as gasoline engines running near by and everthing works great.  
So I guess I should look into using the Ethernet Port on the Super PLC.
However I am a little vague on how can I use the PLC as a master talking to a remote PLC as a slave and use the Web App at the same time when there is only one Ethernet Port.      
So I think my next project should be a master slave setup to use as remote I/O

Lorne

[support]

The SmartTILE, FMD and Nano-10 PLCs are all able to handle up to 10 incoming Ethernet connection simultaneously. Up to 5 Modbus TCP and up to 8 Hostlink connections are possible. The beauty of Ethernet is that you don't need 10 connectors to handle 10 incoming connection because the connections are virtual.

To understand how it works, you can try to open up a few i-TRiLOGI programs on your PC and connect all the i-TRiLOGI to the PLC simultaneously. Now if you change an I/O on one window you will see the same changes showing up on the other i-TRiLOGI instances. You can also connect a Modbus client software (e.g. the Modbus Poll program) to the PLC and you will see the Modbus register that are mapped to the I/O that you have changed showing the new values.

The PLC handles connection from client software automatically. So even if you have just transferred a blank program into the PLC and you can still use i-TRiLOGI clients and Modbus TCP clients to connect, monitor and change data on the PLC.  Give it a try and you will understand how it works.

[davidg]

A while back I made a Modbus to Bluetooth converter board.  I have successfully used it with the Tri PLCs.

The board is a small external board that connects over Modbus RTU on a RS485 network.  Currently there is not a generic app that connects to my Bluetooth board.  I have used the board on various projects and I write custom phone apps that communicate with it over Bluetooth.

If this is something you are interested in send me a message for more info.

www.sparrow-design.com