r/IndustrialAutomation

As part of our routine facility upgrades heading into the next quarter, our maintenance team is auditing our utility rooms and drainage systems to prevent unexpected downtime or water management issues on the warehouse floor. Having reliable fluid transfer and drainage backup systems in place is critical for keeping our operations running smoothly.

We’ve been looking at commercial-grade hardware options from suppliers, Global Industrial, among others for facility maintenance supplies. What preventative plumbing and pump setups do you go on for heavy-duty utility management?

Hi all, I have been in the controls programming for over 8 years worked on multiple platforms such as Rockwell, Siemens, B&R, Sick safety including structured text and ladder logic primarily. Worked on robot programming and integration with Abb and fanuc currently with integrators supplying custom solutions to different industries. However I am at a point of starting a family but job requires travel to commission/integrate on customers sites for prolonged periods in North America and Europe. I am not sure what career progression will be out of this. Haven't got any project management experience, tried looking for applications engineering positions but I get screened out for an open controls position. Any advice on someone went through similar situation.

Working on a machine with 8 servo axes and trying to decide how much of the motion architecture should live in the PLC.

4 of the axes need pretty tight synchronization, the others are mostly independent point-to-point moves. Everything will be EtherCAT, absolute encoders, and we’ll probably need some safe motion functions like SLS/SS1 as well. My first thought was to have the PLC coordinate everything, but once you start adding synchronized axes, faster update rates, diagnostics and safety I’m wondering if a dedicated motion controller makes more sense.

I’ve been looking at a few architectures but haven’t committed to anything yet.

Where’s the point where you stop treating motion as another PLC task and move it to a dedicated controller?

Been thinking about this with robotic cells that have already been commissioned.

You can build a pretty accurate simulation of the cell initially, but the real environment obviously doesn’t stay frozen forever. Fixtures move, tooling changes, new equipment gets added, layouts shift, different parts start running through the line, etc.

How are people actually dealing with that over time?
Do you actively keep the simulation/digital twin updated as the physical cell changes, or does it mostly get updated when something breaks or a major change is made?

And for anyone maintaining them regularly, what’s the most painful part of keeping the virtual and physical environments in sync?

Curious how this works in practice rather than how it’s supposed to work on paper.

I've been building an open-source alternative to the usual vendor HMI software, mainly for machine builders who put a Linux-based panel on their equipment.

You design the screens on your laptop, either drag-and-drop or by describing the screen in plain English and letting an AI model do the first layout. You get gauges, value tiles, trend charts, alarm tables, buttons and so on. Then you push it to the panel over SSH with one click. There's no runtime license and no per-tag pricing.

What matters for plant use:

• Alarms: priorities 1 to 4, latching until acknowledged, on-delay, deadband, shelving, and an alarm journal on the panel.
• History: tags you choose are logged to SQLite on the panel, trend charts fill from it, and you can pull a CSV off the panel.
• I/O: a separate daemon handles GPIO, analog inputs, serial and Modbus. On shutdown it drives outputs to configured safe states. The screens never talk to hardware directly, only to tags.
• Operator input: a range-checked numeric keypad, an on-screen keyboard, confirm dialogs on buttons, a "No connection to controller" banner, and screen dimming after inactivity.
• Safe deploys: if a new screen version doesn't come up within 25 seconds, the panel goes back to the previous one by itself. You can't leave a machine with a dead display from a remote update.
• Testing without the machine: every tag can be driven with simulated signals, so you can check alarms and interlocks on screen before the panel is even wired.

On the panel it's a small C program built on LVGL, drawing directly to the display. It runs on 64-bit ARM Linux boards, and I've been running it on a Toradex i.MX8M Plus with a 10" panel.

What it doesn't do yet: no OPC UA, EtherNet/IP or Profinet. Right now it's Modbus and direct I/O. It's early, MIT licensed and free.

I'd really like to hear from people who build HMIs day to day. What would it need before you'd consider it over what you use now? And which protocols should come first?

2 min video: https://youtu.be/h-ITQebSflg
Repo: https://github.com/Hitheshkaranth/EmbeddedDisplayStudio

https://preview.redd.it/e3hy1k5ctvth1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=901d76b0cd87e8d810898b603cb5c459ee3ef11e