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Industrial Automation

As my part-time job, I work on privately-held russian company that designs automated manufacturing lines for metall-polypropelene tubes production. I have developed and now supporting software and hardware for one of the installations which has been successfully used at some startup business since 2010.

Below are some photos of the manufacturing line.

Copyright (c) Sergey B. Voinov.
Industrial Automation.

There is an extruder, control panel and water-cooling bath.
This line is intended to superimpose a layer of plastic insulation onto an electric cable wire:
Copyright (c) Sergey B. Voinov.
Industrial Automation.

The cable itself is armed with metal cord wire.

The extruder:
Copyright (c) Sergey B. Voinov.
Industrial Automation.

The control panel:
Copyright (c) Sergey B. Voinov.
Industrial Automation.

Control panel graphical user interface:
Copyright (c) Sergey B. Voinov.
Industrial Automation.

Inside the control panel:
Copyright (c) Sergey B. Voinov.
Industrial Automation.

There is WAGO industrial automation controller, power supplies, a couple of relays and a lot of connectors.

Based on the previous line developer's schematics, I have designed my own:
Copyright (c) Sergey B. Voinov.
Industrial Automation.

The main technical issue with this design was that the extruder controller didn't respond to control interface commands. So I had to design an adapter for translating MODBUS (over RS-485 interface) commands into analog controlling voltage for extruder's analog input which resolved the problem:
Copyright (c) Sergey B. Voinov.
Industrial Automation.

Inside the device:
Copyright (c) Sergey B. Voinov.
Industrial Automation.

There are two fully galvanically-insulated parts: a microcontroller part which receives control interface (RS-485) commands and a digital-to-analog converter which produces analog controlling voltage for the extruder. The link between these two parts is made by 4N25 optotransistor optocouplers.