Posts Tagged ‘simple control system’

Simplicty Economical as we call it is the little brother to Simplicity. It is a more basic control system, with inbuilt limitations, but with some astute programming, you can do a surprising amount with it. As the units only accept the older style voltage inputs there are a limited number of sensors available.

The heart  of the system are mini PLC’s which are quite economical. They will accept some analogue inputs and some digital inputs. There are several models to chose from, with either 10 or 20 I/O’s.

10MR-D 10 IO 100 The smaller of the two units with 6 inputs and 4 relay (10 amp) outputs 20MR-D 20 IO 100 The larger unit with 20 I/O’s including 12 analogue and digital inputs and 8 switched relay outputs.
Programming is by means of function blocks, which are very easy to learn, especially when you already have a program done for you, and you learn by editing and changing that program. It is as easy as drag and drop. This means you can create exactly the program that fits your application, instead of using something off the shelf that is never exactly right for what you want to do.
We stock a couple of common environmental sensors such as temperature and humidity, as well as light. These have voltage outputs accepted by the mini PLC’s
tempandhumidpic100

Temperature and humidity sensor with 0-10 volts DC output.

lightsens100

Light sensor with the cover removed, again with 0-10 volts DC output. Quite a neat unit for the price.

These PLC’s can be networked together using a 485 bus system, which can be set up to give you remote access and some control, but it is mainly for monitoring. Unfortunately each unit cannot “talk” to other units directly, so an output from one unit can be used as an input to another to achieve much the same result. However, for the outlay they are quite good and we have found them extremely reliable so far.