[The text of this article is taken directly from Peder's own website, www.hoejer.net with his kind permission. - Ed.]
Since 1983 I have been working with repairs and maintenance of machinery at Orlik Tobacco Company A/S in Holstebro, Denmark. My job is, besides repairs, troubleshooting and so on, programming and installation of new controllers, primarily Mitsubishi PLC's. (PLC = Programmable Logic Controller - a device used to automate monitoring and control of industrial plant. Thanks, once again, to FOLDOC - Ed.)
Since 1989-90 I've worked a lot in UniComal. During this time I've worked a lot with communication from a PC-program to Mitsubishi PLC's. For this purpose I have written a module, which makes it possible to read data from the PLC and, vice versa write data to the PLC. By means of the module it's possible, for example, to write:
sr("m200",true)
- that sets the intermediate relay M200 in the PLC, to ON.
The command:
sr("m200",false)
will likewise reset the same relay.
The module makes it likewise possible to read from and write to the data-registers in the PLC. In the same manner, you will be able to control timers and counters. The computer (PC) works perfectly as a 'man to machine interface' and to control recipes and so on and afterwards lets the PLC control the real process.
I would like to get in contact with other folks, who are working in UniComal, and who are interested in communication with other sorts of machinery, like PLC's and so on. I'm willing to share my module with others, who are seriously working with these things. As something new I've started learning to write programmes in DELPHI, to make programs working in a Windows environment. But all start is difficult. Nothing venture, nothing win.