New IoT-Enabled Controllers For Harsh Environments

Divelbiss Corp. has introduced a new family of IoT-enabled controllers designed to offer powerful control capability in harsh operating environments.

Programmed using the free Divelbiss EZ Ladder Toolkit in Ladder Diagram, Function Block, and Structured Text, and based on P-Series PLC on a Chip technology, the HEC-P2000 control family provides maximum flexibility for controlling mobile equipment, communicating with various serial bus protocols, logging system data, or adding Internet of Things (IoT) capability to existing systems, the Fredericktown, Ohio, company said.

Incorporating a sealed NEMA 4 enclosure that is designed for the harsh duty commonly found in mobile environments, the HEC-P2000 family of controllers have an I/O count with eight digital inputs, three high-speed counter inputs, a quadrature encoder interface and eight digital outputs rated for 2 amps each, of which all are PWM capable. If additional I/O is required, the CAN and serial ports may be utilized to communicate to expansion I/O, the company said.

The controllers feature two serial ports — one RS232 and one RS485 — which supports MODBUS RTU/ASCII protocols as either a master or slave device.
The serial ports are also directly programmable via the Structured Text programming language, allowing the implementation of custom protocols, which makes them ideal for communicating to bar code scanners, RFID readers, or other serial devices, Divelbiss said.

The CAN port fully supports the SAE J1939 and NMEA2000 protocols and the controller line also has cellular capable models for communicating with the Cloud Portal Solutions. A plug-in GPS module is available for connection to the serial port (R232) for global positioning and time syncing of the onboard real time clock
For applications that require data logging, the HEC-P2000 family supports an internal SD card, which enables data logging with time stamps to the SD Card.

When utilized with the Cloud Portal Solutions, the HEC-P2000 family can communicate data to the cloud, where it is date/time stamped and stored in the Cloud database for later viewing, analysis and export.

The HEC-P2000 family controllers support supply voltages from 9 to 32 V dc and have a wide operating temperature range of -40º to 176º F (-40ºC to +80ºC), making it suitable for use in applications with extreme environmental requirements.