Home / Factory I/O / Getting Started
Description
How to get started with Factory I/O in the PLC lab. Open Factory I/O, choose the scene, and then configure the Micro820 controller.
Transcript
(00:02) in this video I want to take a minute to walk through the factory iOS software that we have available in the lab the factory idea of software is a way to emulate real world automation type devices and allow you to interface that with your actual real program launcher controller such as the micro H20 so to do this we’re going to Simply start by opening Factory io on the lab computer when you do that you’ll come to this screen so for these first Little Couple Labs we’re going to use the standard seams or pre-built scenes that come with Factor
(00:39) audio by default so we’re going to choose scenes and there are uh several pre-built scenes that have been created for us but we’re going to use the very very first one which is from A to B it’s a very simple conveyor belt with a box so we’re going to click on that from A to B and that’ll open this up now once you’re in Factory IO in the scene we can navigate and kind of zoom and and tilt around and see like top view and stuff I would kind of recommend um not changing too much but if you do um if you do move the scene around the
(01:22) best thing to do to kind of get it back to a view that you like is to go to view and then do camera navigation and this will pull up a much easier to follow menu some buttons to uh to navigate the screen but before we can begin the lab we have to configure the driver for factory IO basically we have the tail Factor IO what are you going to connect to and in this case we’re going to connect to the micro H20 PLC so we’re going to file and we’re going to choose drivers so by default there is no driver assigned if we choose this pull down
(02:05) menu you’ll see there there are numerous uh automation devices or controllers that we connect to such as advantec several different Allen Bradley options modbus OPC and Siemens so the nice thing about Factor audio software is all the controllers that we have available to us in our in our classroom we’ll be able to interface with such as the Siemens S7 1200 or the Allen Bradley control objects or our umbrella micro 800.
(02:39) so I’m going to choose micro 800. when I do that we get a device shows up now in the middle so before we talk about what this is the next step we need to do is we can we need to configure the the IP address that we will be of the controller so we’re going to go to configuration over here in the upper right when we go to configuration there will be a box to type in the IP address of your micro H20 controller on your host so that’ll be of course 10
(03:16) .10.1.11 since that’s what’s pre-programmed in your controllers the other thing you could do here if you want to choose if you want to is you can change the default prefix of the i o points so a factorio is going to look for tags in the microwave 20 controller that start with these prefixes to interface with so we will have to create a tag in the microwave 20 controller that starts with b-o-o-l or Bool underscore in underscore and then the number such as zero or one or two depending on how many and the offset basically is where you’re going to start with so we’re going to
(04:00) start with zero and then the count is how many so we’re going to create two tags starting at zero so basically zero and one for Boolean inputs and then Boolean outputs in this lab we don’t have any floats or integers floats meaning a real number basically an like an analog value with a decimal point precision and an integer would be an analog value but with no decimal points behind it I want to meet these default just to kind of show you how this works you are free to change this if you want um but uh even by default is perfectly
(04:37) fine you could choose the auto connect I’m going to keep it on unchecked um auto connect but basically uh factorio would try to automatically connect to the micro 820 control or whenever it opens up the project we will hit the back arrow to go back to the previous screen so what we see now is a box kind of representing the kind of shall we say the inputs into the PLC and the outputs from the PLC factorio calls them sensors and actuators so sensors are things that we’re sensing therefore there are inputs actuators are things that we’re going to
(05:19) turn on such as in this case the conveyor belt itself so by default it puts these um the sensor to Bool underscore in underscore zero so this tag in the controller will be linked to the sensor that is in this simulated environment and Bool underscore out underscore zero is then linked to the conveyor so if I wanted to turn on the conveyor belt in the program I’m going to turn on this tag in the actual micro 820 plc now if for some reason if this was not here I would basically could take it and drag it to the spot
(06:12) so there could be some additional in some scenes there could be some additional um points here that aren’t assigned I could simply take the uh the tag over here and drag it and assign it to an open spot but in this case there are no additional open spots because back here in configuration we said that there was only going to be one Boolean output tag and only two Boolean input tags and that’s what I have two inputs and one output so once this is configured if I am in the lab and if I do have my micro H20 PLC turned on I could press the connect
(06:54) button and that will make factorio connect to that micro reach 20 control it’ll use this IP address and we have to make sure that our computer in the lab is on the same domain as the IP address of the plc when I’m ready to actually run the lab I’m going to hit the back arrow one more time and that brings me back to the scene so if you look at this a little closer now we see that the we have a conveyor and kind of hiding underneath the conveyor is a motor and if I were to kind of tilt this down you’ll see I have a motor
(07:32) down here that’s an actuator so I’m going to turn this motor on and when I turn the motor on this belt will actually start to turn and this box will actually move and then off on the end of the conveyor is a sensor basically a photo on a sensor so when the Box comes and it triggers the sensor the the sensor status bit will change its status it’s a discrete sensor so it’s either on or off and when the Box triggers the or breaks the light beam and triggers a sensor it’ll change its state so at this point that’s all we got to do
(08:17) um when we’re ready to we’re ready to run this program we would choose the Run button here to switch between the edit and the Run mode now the only thing you have to do in the micro 820 controller is when you go to your when you create your project you would um you go to your Global variables and if you scroll to the bottom we need to create tags that basically use the same format or the same name as what’s used in Factory i o so I’m going to create a tag that’s actually called bull underscore in underscore zero now I can
(08:58) give it an alias which is basically would give us a you know a better representation of what this is but my actual tag has to match what is here in the driver configuration Bull in zero pool underscore n underscore one full underscore out underscore zero it has the match so I’ve created three tags n0 N1 and out zero and I created the aliases for them now also for this lab we’ll use a uh a push button to start and a push button to stop because we need to tell the belt when do we want to tell the conveyor to start we’re going to use a push button
(09:42) to uh to tell it to start so I want to create a couple of other tags that we’ll use in our logic as well but these three tags here must are very important if these don’t exist when you go to run the project it’s not going to work.