PLC with in-built HMI displays are very important for cost-effective solutions. Where industrial automation applications demand good and efficient control over the project along with a tight budget, these types of controllers play a very important role.
There is no need to separately buy the HMI and you can use this combination greatly for cost reduction. There are many such controllers available in the market. One such is GOC43 of Mitsubishi Electric make. In this post, we will see an overview of the GOC controller.
Introduction to GOC controllers
GOC controller is an industrial automation device manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric. It is a PLC with an embedded HMI display on it. The display size is around 4.3 inches and supports a wide range of colors, just like a standard HMI. This reduces ordering size for a customer and also helps in building a reliable solution.
The PLC comes with 16 digital inputs, 16 digital outputs, 2 analog inputs, and an Ethernet port. Apart from that, it can be extended into two expansion modules and a communication plug-in module (for RS232, RS422, or RS485). This makes the package very useful to implement in a wide range of applications.
The controller has a facility to insert an SD card for data logging purposes. The HMI has four function keys for easy interfacing with the operators. These keys can also be illuminated for better display and troubleshooting.
One thing to remember is that the in-built analog IO’s support only two options – 0-10 V and 4-20 mA. But, the expansion module supports all the standard types of analog inputs.
GOC controllers Software
Let us now come to the software part. The platform uses Codesys software platform for it’s programming. Codesys is a platform which can be used by any manufacturer for programming. It differs in terms of styling, graphics, coding, libraries, compilation allowances and declaring objects.
The software is compliant with IEC 61131-3 standard of programming. This software embeds both the PLC and HMI coding in it.
Refer to the below image for the PLC program overview. It consists of the following parts
- user-defined data type (DUT),
- global variable list,
- image pool,
- programming object unit (POU),
- recipe manager,
- symbol configuration,
- text list and
- visualization.
The HMI designing is done in visualization, and the PLC programming is done in POU.
Then, in the tabs for IO extension and COM extension, you can add IO expansion modules and a single serial communication module.
In the Keys_LED part, you can configure the four function keys of the module.
The HMI design has many interesting objects in it as follows, apart from standard objects of alarms, trends, and security management –
- Combo box
- Tab control
- Group box
- Table
- Scrollbar
- Slider
- Spin control
- Progress bar
- Checkbox
- Radio button
- Potentiometer
- Analog clock
- Date picker
- Waiting symbol flower
- Cartesian XY chart
With all these objects, you can easily design a user-friendly interface for the operators and also provide them with a great visualization at a low cost.
Apart from all these, the software has all the other standard features of Codesys like running the backup on simulation, managing libraries through library manager, comparing project files in detail, source upload and download, and creating a boot application after every download or online change (for saving the change after power cycle).
In this way, we saw the GOC controller in Mitsubishi Electric.
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