February 2018 (Arlington, Texas)
Early on this year we started a Cortinouvis Fiber Optic Line. On arrival I met with the installation crew. The lead electrician told me he would be ready to supply the cabinet in a couple of days. This machine was moved from another plant and needed to be re-connected, 100’s of wires all tagged but where did they go…. As I inspected the 800 Amp supply the onsite electrician told me he would get a breaker kit that would fit the breaker housing. I told him you cannot and this will need to be replaced to a 1200 Amp housing. A day later he smiled at me and told me I was right. Once power was connected we started up the machine and started our trials. After two days of running we were done.
In 2018 we had an opportunity to rewrite another Lesmo 1250 DT Strander program, we found it full of locked controls that were sealed by Lesmo and the client was told he would never have to open the program block’s as the machine is perfect. After 4 weeks of rewriting the control software the machine is finally no longer stopping and long uninterrupted runs are now possible.
Brockvile, Ontario (Spring 2018)
The Lesmo Engineers had written the drive control code in Function blocks and sealed these blocks so that one could ever see clearly what the Italian abbreviations on the block were doing and what they stood for. We also used wireless encoders on the AC drives, this eliminated the Capstan and Takeup feedback loop that ran through the Sliprings. The machine is now an open book, with no more hidden proprietary logic functions.
St.Jerome, Quebec (Summer 2018)
In the Summer we worked on a CV line that was dated with older SSD LINK drives and dated Allen Bradley 1400e Touchscreens. We replaced that 1400e with with a Factorytalk 15″ Touchscreen. The customer purchased there own Touchscreen, we offered a 19″ touchscreen with a Thin client computer running Factorytalk. The customer opted to purchase a Non-Enhanced Touchscreen from Allen Bradley and we found out the hard way that this setup only works with one PLC. (EZ-Automation touchscreens will communicate to 5 PLC’s for 1/10th cost). This upgrade was necessary as in 2018 we found out that Allen Bradley Remote I/O and DH+ is no longer available. So all those installed systems with 1794-R-I/O’s will need to be changed out to Ethernet I/P.
Fall (2018)
We also added a Allen Bradley L36 Controllogix Processor to the CV line and this is the replacement for the Parker SSD LINK Controllers. In December of 2018 we de-activated 3 of the 4 Eurotherm LINK Controllers and rewrote the LINK program into a Controllogix program. This required almost a month of pre-work, 2 weeks of on-site work and one week of after commissioning time. The control rewiring was done during a two week plant closure.
