Industruino

The project that I've created clearly depicts a cost effective and efficient way to use Arduino family products in the manufacturing and industrial world. The components I've used are in use already in companies in many different sectors.

The industrial components I've used are the following:

Siemens LZX:PT570730 (230v Relay)

METASOL MC-12b (Contactor)

Tele E121E10 (Timer)

The reason I've used the above components is that I want to show that it's possible to use any Arduino board to control industrial scale components without the need of an expensive PLC. This solution, combination of already in use industrial parts (relays, contactors, etc.) clearly shows that Arduino is more than capable of taking the place of any PLC or other automation board.

Step 1:

First, we have to set up the Arduino YUN. The following site describes step by step how to set up the YUN. Setting up Arduino YUN.

Step 2:

Next, we will wire the components with the four-channel relay and of course the Arduino with the four chnnel relay. The picture below shows the end product.

First, we bring a 230v or 110v line (depending where you live) to the first channel of the relay, we connect one part of the "Hot" wire or "V+" (brown in the picture) with the "normally open" contact. We take another wire and connect the "commen" with the A1 contact on the Siemens relay which is the black component in the picture. Our neutral wire "V-" (blue in the picture) is connected directly to the A2 contact on the Siemens relay. From here on essentially the concept is the same, the A1 contact coil of every component is connected with the normally open channel of the 5v relay and the "neutral wire" or "V-" using a jumper wire is connected with every component. For the Arduino YUN the connections are the following:

DO 13 - Channel 1

DO 12 - Channel 2

DO 11 - Channel 3

Step 3:

The third step is to download Blynk on our smartphone. Using Blynk we will to control the Arduino YUN and in essence control all our components. First need to download the Blynk Library for Arduino IDE. Once download upload the zip folder to the Arduino IDE. To upload a library to Arduino you follow these steps. When were finished uploading the library we copy and paste the code I've provided for the program.

Step 4:

Finally, we create a simple button app on Blynk to control our 4 channel relay. Its very easy to create a program on Blynk, first you create an account, after that create a new project on Blynk, you choose the board that your going to use and a the app opens a GUI for you so that you can drag and drop different components that your going to use in your app. In this project were just going to use three buttons, drag and drop three buttons on the interface and then click on each button to define the pins that each button will be using. The user interface looks like the following.

The following video depicts the project in action: