Michael Aksen
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1. Planning & Integration

I began the project by completing the AutomationDirect PLC course during the Summer of 2021 when I was an intern at TFA. I realized because of the age of the machine that the documentation for it was deteriorated and as a result practically illegible and unusable. I spent the next school year systematically documenting the electrical connections of every part of the machine and revising the corresponding logic and layout diagrams for the machine. I decided to commit the following summer to continue the project despite my uncertainty about the potential results. The first couple weeks of the summer of 2022 I spent completing documentation on the saw so that I could be sure the ladder logic I would code into the PLC would reflect the logic the machine actually used.


Once I was confident in my understanding of the machine’s inner electrical workings, I developed a plan to implement the PLC and ensure it was feasible given the limitations of the machine itself and the project’s budget. The findings of the plan can be broken down into two central axioms. The first is to ensure that most signals passed through a central junction for seamless rewiring to the PLC. Of course, there were a few electrical components that had no presence in the control panel, and those required some creative rewiring, namely by hijacking other wires in their local junctions to receive the desired signals. However, the more localized control there was, the more difficult this type of project would have been, and if there had been a few more localized components the whole project could have been compromised.

The second axiom is budgeting the entire project and laying out how the PLC would be designed to ensure it would meet the demands of the project. Since my project was running on a tight budget, I worked with the AutomationDirect PLC configuration tool that showed the limitations of the CPU I would choose and how power from the PLC CPU would be allocated to the different components. This tool allowed me to plan out the input and output modules I would need for my project as well as check PLC characteristics I was interested in to fulfill my project deliverables. A price range of $3000 was established to set project constraints. The C2-03 CLICK PLUS CPU was chosen as a suitable PLC system with sufficient I/O ports with the appropriate signal types (AC/DC), adequate power output, and with technical attributes such as Wi-Fi and retentive memory. A preliminary networking architecture compatible with the PLC and the chosen cloud-based data historian was also designed. Afterwards, a Bill of Materials (BoM) and Work Plan were created to justify the project's timeline and financial investment. The BoM included PLC modules, necessary tools, and relevant equipment such as a NEMA certified electrical box and the protocol gateway that would be used for networking.