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Creating a Homebrew Industrial Process Monitor?
pionzypherm asks: "I work at a glass plant for a major beer company. My job entails monitoring the furnaces that melt the glass. I have been working on a project on the side, collecting data from various sources and compiling it into an easily used form for the higher ups. I've finished two of our three furnaces, but one remains. This furnace uses technology from the early nineties. There is no networking, the hardware is completely closed and unavailable for any screen scraping. Two of the items I'm looking to monitor (and would appear to be the easiest starting point) are two valves for a gas and oxygen line which will provide data on a portion of our energy usage. I was thinking of a microcontroller board or something similar tied in to monitor the positions of the valves. I'm unsure where to begin though. What books, microcontroller boards or alternatives would you recommend for someone new to this? What suggestions would you have for such a project, and what pitfalls might I run into?"
You might try to ask this question on some of the robotics yahoo groups. They are filled with people that do this kind of thing for a hobby and spend a great deal of time thinking about such things not to mention that they do their work with small home brew or cheap microprocessor systems.
People that make their own CNC machines know a LOT about monitoring position of things etc. This might be your best bet for initial and longer term answers and help about how to accomplish what you wish to do.
One piece of advice though is think through what you want to ask. When you ask, explain the system in some detail, your thoughts on what might be monitored, how, and what your end goal is with your monitoring. They may have suggestions that go beyond your knowledge scope if you explain more about the system so they can think about the problem with all the requisite information.
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There are tons of options out there (I havent worked in the field for ~ 10 years). Assuming you can access something to get the readings off you could get a 90-30 PLC to pull the data points. The Cimplicity MMI is a great software package for monitoring, alerting, reporting etc. Try calling GE Fanuc and just tell them what you are trying to do and the can give you plenty of options.
Spending the money up front for a reliable, standard solution will save a ton later when your homebrew breaks or some other poor bastard has to support it. There's been too many times I've opened a a panel where my first words are "WTF?".
Especially if you're working with oxygen. Get yourself a nice little flow meter (micromotion makes a good one). Then you can get both volume, and (presumably) valve position. If the valve is electrically actuated, you can use the information for a host of alarms.
Either way, if the information is valuable enough to record, its worth the money up front.
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There are people that do industrial automation. There are large companies that make every type of sensor you can imagine to monitor anything you want. There are industrial controllers to control automatic assembly lines. This stuff is all off-the-shelf. It's not "homebrew".
If you're asking this on Slashdot, you're looking in the wrong place.
Do it like a professional would do it. It's a furnace. Stuff can go wrong. Monitoring it with a half-assed homebrew approach is probably worse than simply observing it carefully and worrying about it all the time.
You should probably install an electronic flow control valve with a flow sensor. Use a microcontroller, PLC, or some such thing to monitor your sensor & control your valve. Monitoring it visually (via camera hooked to an embedded computer) is doable, but way harder than what I just described above. You also run into problems with high temperatures getting to your camera. Take a look at some of the solutions Freescale has to offer. You can order a development board, so you can breadboard something together. Should cost around $200. http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage. jsp?nodeId=02430Z
For a SR Design project for Electrical & Computer engineering, we were tasked to do exactly this with a freescale microcontroller. We needed to precisely monitor the amount of certain gasses put into an oven we use to bake chips.
Hardest part about all of this is getting to know the specific PLC or microcontroller you're using. PLC's are easier (generally) to program than most microcontrollers, but not quite as versatile in number/type of interfaces.
You need to have a very good understanding of Assembly, C, & how sensors work.
You also need to be able to read & understand the mind numbing manuals & technical documents describing the sensors & microcontrollers you choose to use.
-Steve