How to Connect Older Machines to IoT (Without Replacing Them)

You do not need the “latest and greatest” machinery for Glassdome to connect and monitor. We have a variety of ways to interface with your “Big Bertha”, a name we commonly give to older machinery made before East and West Germany existed. Why replace a perfectly functional shear machine or band-saw just because it remembers ‘Trickle down theory’? At Glassdome, we can bring virtually any machine online within our platform, regardless of age or economic strategy. So you can monitor live status, uptime/downtime, parts produced, alarm events, and more. We rely on current transducers (CTs), photo-eyes, wet contacts, and dry contacts to bring your machine into the 21st century. If your machine is like this Haas CNC, you have a lot more options and data available. The explainer will highlight just some of the methods Glassdome can use to bring Industry 4.0 to your older machines. We wanted to show you real-world examples of this process.

We use a few different styles of IoT devices, “gateways”, to funnel shop-floor machine data into Glassdome. For our older machines, we often use a gateway that allows for a hard-wired or hardware-based solution — introducing the EDATEC CM4 Industrial with built-in proprietary Glassdome software. This unit is perfect for the shop floor and can switch between cellular/ethernet/wifi connections to always maintain contact with our platform. It is a wonderful solution as it allows for digital input signals and analog input signals to tell us what is going on. It also supports newer protocols like Allen-Bradley’s EIP, Modbus, MTConnect, OPC-UA, Siemens S7, TCP, and more. We have you covered at Glassdome.

Let’s get into it.

This unit was fairly modern in design and in the control system with an EtherCat-based Beckhoff system. Normally, we would target the Beckhoff computer to draw out the variables such as ‘Is-Running’, ‘Part Complete’, ‘Fault’, etc., but this requires direct access to the programming of the machine; something the OEM was unwilling to allow. After reviewing the schematics of the machine, we determined that we could use the ‘Active Light’ on the I/O board. It was a basic 24vdc signal, which means when 24vdc is active or flowing through the light, we know that the machine is running. With this, we can also count the number of cycles the machine is completing.

The client wanted to be able to monitor the uptime and be alerted if any downtime events took place on a few of their saw band machines. These machines were ‘low-tech’ with no controller or “brain” to monitor. We needed a hardwired solution. We decided to monitor the machine by using current transducers to monitor the power flowing into the sawband motor. If power is flowing into this motor, we consider the machine active.

The client requested that we monitor this bender for uptime, downtime, and part counts. Similar to the other machine, we had no way to directly interact with the computer within this machine. After reviewing the schematics, we found that relay KA4 will close or allow voltage to flow once the machine starts a cycle or begins to produce a part. A limit switch controls KA4. When the machine begins a cycle, it will strike the limit switch, energizing it, before committing to a part. Utilizing the motor that powers the system would have been easier, but it is a hydraulic-based system, meaning the motor is always running, but that does not mean the machine is actually producing parts. By wiring the Vout into the input side of the relay and wiring the output side of the relay to DIN1+ we can see when the limit switch is activated, thus being able to know when a cycle has started and the total number of cycles.

This metal shear does exactly that: it shears. The problem is that the owner had no idea how often this unit was running or how many cycles the machine had completed daily. The easiest solution was to attach a diffused photo-eye to the machine. We determined that when the machine was making a cut to metal the shaft of the shear would drop within a range that the photo eye could capture. As long as the photo eye changed states (ON/OFF) within 5 minutes, we considered the machine as active.

Your equipment doesn’t need a LinkedIn profile to be part of Industry 4.0. Whether your machine predates the internet, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or disco, if it moves, cycles, or consumes power, we can monitor it.

Ready to bring your legacy equipment online? Reach out to our team for a shop floor assessment. We’ll identify the best connection strategy for each machine, no forklift to the scrapyard required.