Creating a Homebrew Industrial Process Monitor? 97
pionzypherm asks: "I work at a glass plant for a major beer company. My job entails monitoring the furnaces that melt the glass. I have been working on a project on the side, collecting data from various sources and compiling it into an easily used form for the higher ups. I've finished two of our three furnaces, but one remains. This furnace uses technology from the early nineties. There is no networking, the hardware is completely closed and unavailable for any screen scraping. Two of the items I'm looking to monitor (and would appear to be the easiest starting point) are two valves for a gas and oxygen line which will provide data on a portion of our energy usage. I was thinking of a microcontroller board or something similar tied in to monitor the positions of the valves. I'm unsure where to begin though. What books, microcontroller boards or alternatives would you recommend for someone new to this? What suggestions would you have for such a project, and what pitfalls might I run into?"
Open resources (Score:4, Informative)
People that make their own CNC machines know a LOT about monitoring position of things etc. This might be your best bet for initial and longer term answers and help about how to accomplish what you wish to do.
One piece of advice though is think through what you want to ask. When you ask, explain the system in some detail, your thoughts on what might be monitored, how, and what your end goal is with your monitoring. They may have suggestions that go beyond your knowledge scope if you explain more about the system so they can think about the problem with all the requisite information.
Re:Open resources (Score:4, Insightful)
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For a working example of a PID controller, try the OpenServo project: http://www.openservo.com/ [openservo.com] There are a few revisions to the board, each with a different Atmel chip powering them. The best part is, it's written in WinAVR GCC C/C++.
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Easy (Score:3, Interesting)
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You could also dismantle a mechanical mouse for this task, or use the sensor from an optical mouse to read the movement of a disc like the one you described in your solution. Another option is to mechanically tie a pot to the valve movement, and read the wiper pos
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It's hard to know what to suggest without knowing what form the valve takes. Does it have a round handle, like an outdoor faucet, or a lever, like many natural gas connections have? How m
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Instead, I suggest going with a professional product like a mass flow meter for the gas supply connected before the control valve. Ac [flowmeterdirectory.com]
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I'm not sure if he is attempting to show when the furnace is on or how much fuel each unit is using and when.
I got the impression all he was looking for was some way to measure the natural gas and oxygen flows to the furnace, to get an idea (or maybe a better one) of furnace efficiency and to provide some operation cost figures to the bean-counters. He seemed pretty aware that process control was something he didn't want to get in to.
There are ultrasonic meters that don't require fitting pipes and such.
That would probably be ideal, as a later response indicated that these furnaces were intended to run continuously until they were EOL'd. That would make fitting an in-line sensor
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I'm pretty sure they work for gases as well a liquids. I think the air going in would be forced air and it probably be more efficient to check the air pressure and calculate the size of the ducting asuming it is a forced air intake.
I'm not in that field either. I used to be in the enviro
Re:Easy(er?) (Score:1)
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Look into GE Fanuc or Allen Bradly (Score:3, Informative)
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1) Where is your data going? Who might use it and how.
2) What instrumentation are you going to use and how will it interfere with the process?
3) What are the safety and reliability issues?
4) Are there any legal ramifications?
These systems may be independent for a very good reason. I can't tell you how many data geeks have salivated over the SCADA and plant c
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(ISA is the Instrument Society of America, CSE is Control Systems Engineers)
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Registered Control Systems Engineer (Score:2)
For those who are clueless about the whys and wherefores of registration of professional engineers: All states in the US offer tests for which you can become a registered professional engineer. It's basically a way to put your name on the line. You stamp the drawings and documents with a seal
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So, if I am understanding correctly, it is a focus or discipline of the PE accreditation. (IE, the whole testing/mentoring process).
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Might be looking at this wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
You might be making this too complicated.
Let's say you misjudge the tolerances and your fancy little project gets turned into cinders/melts inside the furnace?
Why can't you monitor the volume of gas flow and then calculate the energy? I assume these gases are stored in a tank or something like that. It should be comparatively easy to attatch some type of flow sensor upstream of the furnace.
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How about putting a capture unit in between the controller and the monitor?
That'd allow you to do all kinds of manipulations to the data you get, without altering the controller, and without affecting the direct output to the monitors.
You'd be working on graphics, but you already know where all the interesting numbers are, so you "simply" do OCR on the interesting parts of the picture. Then dump the numbers into an appropriate database and do your
Too easy (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.parallax.com/ [parallax.com]
are in the business of making small microcontroller projects easy, quick and fun. Something like a member of their Basic-stamp family would be pleasantly overkill for your needs. They can convert your temperature readings, valve closures, infra-red readings and such to a time-stamped serial data stream that your computers can collect. There's a large number of good books on how to make the Basic Stamps do all sorts of cool stuff. So if you spend the money there, you'll
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Don't want to be done on the cheap (Score:4, Informative)
Spending the money up front for a reliable, standard solution will save a ton later when your homebrew breaks or some other poor bastard has to support it. There's been too many times I've opened a a panel where my first words are "WTF?".
Especially if you're working with oxygen. Get yourself a nice little flow meter (micromotion makes a good one). Then you can get both volume, and (presumably) valve position. If the valve is electrically actuated, you can use the information for a host of alarms.
Either way, if the information is valuable enough to record, its worth the money up front.
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HAHAHAHA! Oh, if you only knew how most factories operate. I work with several leading edge semiconductor fabs and you'd be amazed at the amount of homebrew/seat-of-the-pants solutions abound.
I am currently working on a system to track production on about $300 MILLION dollars worth of equipment. My equipment budget? I was lucky to get $30,000 and mo
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However, I'm sure you've seen factories that are best un-documented and at worst death traps because someone didn't put the $$ or effort up front when doing something.
Using your example, $30k sucks ass for process data collection. You can do it cheap as hell, say an old dell box with fix32 sending OBDC data to
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Well, I thought that way too, until I re-read his requirements. It really depends. If it's automation to control stuff, I'd go with off-the-shelf professional type things. One, there's a lot of CYA - if anything goes wrong, you can blame the hardware, rather than it being your fault (even if it really isn't). Secondly, it's control - things go wrong, and unless there are tons of failsafes and alarms redundantly connected, well... (an
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Depends on why he wants to monitor this machine.
Working in a similar environment myself, I've found that "management wants to know how often we go out-of-spec" means a whole world of difference from "one mistake will halt production ".
"Real" hardware to do these tasks, if even available, costs a bundle. The homebrew solution, if just a matter of someone having accidentally uttered a meaningful phrase at a meeting, usually com
Use nature (Score:3, Funny)
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If a whole dragon seems overkill, remember that hypercontiguating two minus-dragons produces 0.6 dragon.
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This is Diskworld, inn't it?
where to begin (Score:1)
Not asking Slashdot... (Score:3, Informative)
If you just want the position of two discrete valves I would suggest finding a used PLC on Ebay. Single box types (like an Allen Bradley SLC 150) that work with discrete IO only can be had for a little bit of nothing. Your biggest concern with costs would be the programming software so I would stick with brands offer it free of charge.
Without knowing what kind of budgetary firgure you are working with to implement this it is hard to get much more specific.
heres some links (Score:1)
http://www.lemis.com/grog/brewing/temperature-con
and
http://www.hoppie.nl/tempsens/#hardware [hoppie.nl]
will def help there
Industrial automation is a business (Score:4, Informative)
If you're asking this on Slashdot, you're looking in the wrong place.
Do it like a professional would do it. It's a furnace. Stuff can go wrong. Monitoring it with a half-assed homebrew approach is probably worse than simply observing it carefully and worrying about it all the time.
Re:Industrial automation is a business (Score:4, Insightful)
Look dumbass, how do you think the "professionals" do it ? They just "homebrew" it and slap some fancy decals on it.
Amen, brother! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I realize that professionals are sometimes necessary, especially in situations where life is clearly at stake (pilots, medical, law, etc.) I'm sure some jackass will show up to tell me how this is an industrial furnace and that clearly means that a professional is warranted, but we have no idea what the particulars of this situation are. Just stick to the freakin' question, people.
It used to be the case that "professional" implied not only a degree of competence, but also a certain amount of integrity and experience. But that's just not true any more. All it means now is that someone gets a paycheck for doing something. Often it means that they're experts in nothing more than doing something as cheaply as possible.
For what it's worth, I'm personally fond of the Atmel AVR [atmel.com] microcontrollers. Many, many people are also fond of Microchip [microchip.com]'s offerings in the PIC line [microchip.com]. But for rapid development, something like the Parallax BASIC Stamp [parallax.com] is probably the way to go. They're cheap and easy (like a good woman) and let you focus on the task at hand rather than the bit-level details of how to read sensors, etc.
Re:Amen, brother! (Score:5, Insightful)
What the original poster is trying to do is not innovative in the least. In fact, it's pretty well-worn territory (which he may have been unaware of by no fault of his own).
If he had said "I've looked at all of the commerical options, and nothing fits quite right", I'd be in agreement with you that he should go out and try to create his own solution. However, this is not the case, and a lot of time and experience has gone into developing products that fit his needs very well.
And even at that, there will likely be a good deal of 'hacking' involved in getting these valves to do what he wants them to, given that they're industrial components. Any EE on the planet knows that it's preferable to use a commercially-available IC instead of constructing an equivalent circuit out of components as long as the IC fits the job. The same goes for industrial components.
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I can't speak for other posters, but when I see stories like this I can't help but think "this could be done by an experienced amateur, but if you're posting on slashdot asking how to go about it, you probably aren't an experienced amateur".
To put it another way,
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Dear Slashdot:
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Also, OOg live in North America. OOg only have acorns, and no coconuts. Can anyone tell OOg h
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They spend the money to buy the pieces of equipment that are designed to do the job. They hook them up the way they are designed to be hooked up. They put fail-safes into the system. It's (somewhat) expensive and time-consuming. It's not a hack.
It can't really be considered "homebrew" any more than buying a Cisco Router is a "homebrew" routing solution.
Asking programmers and PC hardware hackers how to do industrial automation is like asking a plumber how t
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Suggested way to do this (Score:3, Informative)
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Installing any kind of inline valve/sensor into a process system almost always requires a shutdown. Shutdowns tend to be very expensive. That's why he wants to do "non-invasive" monitoring and data collection. It may be possible to install valve positioners while the facility is still operating, but be careful.
There is a way to d
In Industry Avoid Homebrew If Possible (Score:3, Informative)
There are plenty of professional solutions out there, from gas flow monitors to automated valve systems to integrated industrial process monitoring and control systems. If you are looking to control fuel and oxygen supplies then you need to get stuff that is blastproof so that a stray spark can't set anything off.
Start off with a major supplier like Grainger Industrial Supply [grainger.com]. There are tons of components there that might suit your situation. Particularly look at their process monitoring [grainger.com] section.
use gas flow monitors instead. (Score:1, Interesting)
Judging from your question, you sound like a programmer thrust into a hardware problem or a plant engineer thrust into an IT problem. In either case, check with your contacts, suppliers or company engineering group to get suggesti
PicBasic Pro (Score:2)
They even make blank prototyping boards that are already silkscreened for what components to use.
You'll need a pic programmer (I use this one [melabs.com], some blank PIC chips (a few dollars each at mouser.com), and some software to program them in.
Another approach is to use Paralla
Reading without integrating sensors (Score:3, Interesting)
Check out this project: http://www.eissq.com/DialADC.html [eissq.com] It describes software that uses a webcam pointed at an anologue needle gauge to recognize the position of the needle. Why not, as much as possible, set up passive sensors that don't touch or interact with the equipment in any way, feed them into a cheap multi-gigahertz computer, and process everything that way ? If the furance has a big accident, it would be hard to blame your apparatus.
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"Homebrewing" for your application is OK - BUT! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you really want meaningful data from those process streams, you're much better off installing calibratable (calibrable?) flowmeters on those lines that cover the performance range of the process fluids you're working with. If you've got the flow, you don't need the valve position, unless it's for a secondary indication to validate the valve's performance (e.g., position vs. Cv vs. measured flowrate). The flowmeters can be hooked up to provide data for remote collection, or more simply, display data for periodic local reading. Here's a mess [omega.com] to start with. Whomever you buy from, you'll need to develop specifications defining the operating range, operating conditions (pressure, temperature, humidity), power requirements, tolerances, calibration frequency, etc.
Need sleep (Score:3, Funny)
Really wouldn't know where to begin with that one.
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Homebrew industrial tool control, eh? (Score:3, Informative)
There are a whole lot of things that go into handling an industrial system. If you're really going to try to do this on your own, you've got a lot of reading ahead of you; the cost of faults in an industrial system is typically prohibitively high. You're going to need a deep familiarity with modern methods. You're going to need to be familiar with direct hardware control, realtime coding (which is harder than most people think,) constant test polling, and all sorts of stuff most programmers never, ever have to deal with.
This is not something you can take lightly. If you're going to do this, you have to get it right, the first time, and that means your test cases and regression tests have to be diamond-hard, your specification has to be absolute, and you have to know your timing will not fail. These are difficult issues, but with the appropriate know-how, this can be done.
Here are some places to start:
Embedded Control:
Realtime:
Integration:
Testing:
A few suggestions from a CNC guy... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would just ask someone who does do this for a living out for lunch, it'll take them ten minutes. I do this when I need coding done. The price of a few beers to get the occasional patch or script written is a lot more efficient than many years learning coding to do it myself the one time a year the need comes up.
The learning curve on automation hardware is at least as steep as learning Linux, and with crappier documentation. Coding guys usually seem to underestimate the complexity of the physical engineering and design side, and think they are always bright enough to just pick it up and do our jobs. There is more to hardware engineering than the butt-crack guy with a monkeywrench, just like there is more to coding than script kiddies.
In short - unless you want to go into this as a hobby or career change, just treat a hungry engineer to lunch and call it good. Even if you paid him it'd be less than the books you'd need.
Another way to monitor the valves (Score:1)
Simple (Score:2)
Attach a small disk to the valve. Put aluminum foil on one side, and earth the foil. Cut a series of holes around the disk (before attaching the foil, and the disc should be a non-conductive material). Put a sensing whisker so that the whisker is in contact with the foil, or disc. Now when the valve turns, the microcontroller will get pulses.
Of course, this doesn't tell y
Direct measurement. (Score:1)
If
Don't... (Score:1)
What is your fail-safe strategy? Do the valves fail open or closed if something short circuits in your setup? Does your home-grade micro controller survive the heat & vibration of the environment?
Buy something of the shelve from a "standard" industrial automation firm. You can get anythin
I have thought of a solution for you... (Score:2)
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For those that are bottled, I would have to say that you need to give the following a try: Monkey Face Porter from Cascade Lakes Brewing and Mocha Porter from Rogue. Second place are Black Butte Porter from Deschutes Brewery (which has suffered in quality as it has gotten bigger, IMHO) and offerings from McMenamins.
I don't know why you'd want to drink a pils from any brewery (
Get pro devices (Score:1)
Standard industrial solutions (Score:2)
There's standard hardware for this sort of thing. You can get little industrial I/O units with Ethernet interfaces. [industrialethernet.com] They're little boxes with an Ethernet connector on one side, and digital, analog, or thermocouple inputs on the other side. They're built to hold up in a factory floor environment, and easily replaced if damaged. You can even get wireless ones. [sensource.biz]
If you're going to send signals around a plant, 100baseT is actually quite noise-resistant. More so than TTL signals or even RS-232, because it'
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Allen Bradley (Score:2)
Have them send a representative out to you and help tell you what product line will fit you best. That's what vendors are for.
If there is a possibility of becoming one of your suppliers, any good vendor will bend over backwards when you need help like this.
Just the info you need (Score:2)
National Instruments (Score:2)
Just buy the parts and do it yourself (Score:1)
Homebrew? (Score:1)
(note to morons: this is a joke)