It doesn’t get any simpler than this
Applications for control and regulations can easily be created with the graphical developing environment LavVIEW. This way, the user is spared text-based programming. IEF-Werner has now developed new graphical functional blocks that are able to control, also from a software platform, components of the producer such as linear axes or decentral E/A modules, which are connected to a plant. The IEF-Control PA-CONTROL serves as interface.
Furtwangen, 10.04.2019 –The graphical developing environment LabVIEW stands for “Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench” and is practically the industry standard for measuring, control and regulation applications, industrial image processing and process automation. Generally, the user does not have to enter any text for programming. This facilitates the work significantly. Now, IEF-Werner has developed special elements for the software platform, the so-called virtual instruments (VIs). With those, the user is able to control the complete periphery of a plant such as linear drives, E/A-modules or valve terminals directly from LabVIEW – without complex programming. The IEF-control PA-CONTROL combined with the protocol Modbus/TCP serves as interface between the components and the software environment.
The user can choose between two modes: auto and slave mode. The auto mode could be used for plants, that have a separate testing process controlled via LabVIEW, which is supposed to communicate with the machine control. Thereby, PA-CONTROL controls the machine operations and assumes the communication with the periphery. Only defined variables of the IEF-control are described and read out via LabVIEW. The user is able to start processes or adapt parameters with that.
When in slave mode, the PA-CONTROL is just the interface to the connected automation components. Machine operations as well as communication is assumed by LabVIEW. The IEF-control only converts the commands of the software platform to understandable orders for the periphery components and forwards those. No additional programmes are necessary for the PA-CONTROL.
Next to the VIs, different programming examples for LabVIEW are available for the implementation of customer projects. Those can be copied and adapted by the user.