Conveyor Stand for Research of Industrial Communications

The stand is intended for research of the most popular industrial protocols, such as Profi­bus, CAN, Modbus, Ethernet, as well as for studying basics of the controllers programming from the most popular vendors – National Instruments and Sie­mens.

The stand represents belt conveyor, which is controlled by Siemens S7-300 controller. S7-300 PLC controls conveyor motor and acquires signals from infrared (IR) sensors that used to detect presence and count number of items on the belt conveyor. Stand includes also Robot Arm, which is controlled by NI cRIO controller. All control settings of the PLC are being sent from the NI cRIO controller via Profibus network. Stand includes also power meter, which is intend­ed to measure power consumption of the conveyor system. Meter communicates with the NI cRIO using Modbus protocol.

The stand is based on NI cRIO platform. The software application is developed in the Lab­VIEW graphical programming environment and provides an interactive communication interface for data transmission between hardware modules. Software includes list of exercises, which help stu­dents to easily understand working principles of the data transmission protocols, data encoding and error detection methods, programming of the controllers, etc.