Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | Yes, very nice and neat with all the wires the correct length, tie banded etc. This looks quite similar to the one the neighbor and his son built for our grain setup with a PLC. In our case, the PLC is used to control feeding wet corn to the dryer from two different wet bins. The neighbor has set up the programming so there are different scenarios.
This involves sensors in both bins. One is on the bottom of Bin A and another at the top of Bin B. All corn enters the system with a top fill auger driven by a tractor PTO into Wet Bin A.
The usual program choice has an auger running constantly out of Wet Bin A to feed a wet leg. The wet leg drops the corn into the top of the dryer with any excess going to Wet Bin B. When Both bins are full we need to stop filling. Then the auger starts/stops the auger from Wet Bin A based on dryer call. Once Wet Bin A is empty, it switches to controlling Wet BinB based on dryer call. When they are both empty everything shuts down since the dryer runs out of corn.
There are other programs for other situations to allow emptying just Wet Bin A or B if desired. It works well now. The first year or so it wouldn't reliably switch from Bin A to Bin B when A got empty. The original thought was that the sensor in the bottom of Bin A was not reliably reporting that the bin was empty. Turns out it was a slight programming error. If both Bins A and B were completely filled, it worked as desired. If Bin A were filled but Bin B only partially filled, the PLC would empty Bin A fine but not switch over to Bin B. A small change in the program cured that problem. |
Home Brew Bin Controller 7
