Corrugated Box Industry SHARC Success Story Pt1

In the early days of Mr. IIoT we were initially brought into the corrugated box industry on a pilot to implement Banner Engineering's new wireless edge and Snap devices. We thought this was the most innovative idea in Industry 4.0 then.

It was "simple"... add some wireless DX80 nodes (an edge device for connecting IO) at the edge, install part count sensors, wire your sensor into the DX80, connect the node back to the wireless DXM hub over 900 MHz, then connect to the DXM over ethernet and communicate with it over Modbus. We never did get the Snap devices to work. Turns out they were early models, but Banner Engineering is a $400+ million dollar company. Come on...

There was a lot of wiring. Stripping wires, wiring field connectors, reading schematics, and so-on. The skill and complexity that goes into an Industrial Control Engineer's day-to-day was starting to become apparent, and we weren't even in an electrical cabinet. We ran into one issue after another due to our inexperience with PNP and NPN sensors and not understanding the difference. To this day I still can't find anything that says what the inputs on the DXM support. I can tell you from personal experience that the device did not support both PNP and NPN inputs. So if the installed sensor didn't match... "no worky". We spent a massive amount of hours installing all of the hardware for six machines and a fair amount of time on the software development.

The thing is, we aren't industrial controls engineers. We were software developers and business systems engineers who came up in the manufacturing industry. We loved being on the shop floor and solving problems.

Over the years we found that troubleshooting these additional layers was cumbersome. It could only be done remotely up to the DXM hub. Anything past that was more complicated. Even then, we discovered that the DXM was dropping some signals, so we were missing part counts occasionally. Other issues arose as well. Not all were hardware-related. Sometimes the operators were also unplugging the nodes so they could charge their phones. Operators will be operators.

Enter the SHARC

Our installation efforts of the SHARC and data ingestion made us feel like David slaying Goliath. We bought a 1000' box of CAT5e network cable and gave it to the maintenance guy. He ran the network lines to three machines with one box and called us when he was done.

We arrived on site and terminated the ends of the network cables (added the RJ45 ends). These went into a POE switch on one end and a SHARC at the other end. We used a factory-terminated M12 5 Pin cable to plug the SHARC into the Banner Q4X sensors. We connected to the SHARC devices from our iPhone app and configured it to the appropriate polarity of the sensor (PNP or NPN), set the sensor detection to "leading edge", and pointed it to the on-site MQTT broker.

Once the SHARC was rebooted we got a green light letting us know it was connected to the broker. We confirmed our connection through our subscription to the topic through Node-Red. We spent 15 minutes updating our Node-Red backend into our database and then the part counts were coming into our dashboard just as they were before. We're also deriving uptime from the part counts so the SHARC and the sensor are giving us two metrics from one data point. All in less than half a day.

It was the most plug-and-play process I have ever experienced in the industry. Months later the SHARCs are still running without issue.

We have installed SHARCs on four of the six machines. I will try to capture video for replacing the remaining two machines with SHARCs.

Devil's Advocate

OK... You could say that we did most of the hard parts in our initial installation of the original Banner equipment. We learned from our experiences and knew the ins and outs of the equipment and sensors by then. Sure... that's why we created the SHARC.

My Two Cents

From my perspective, I can't understand how Modbus, serial communications, and 900 MHz RF are industry standards for Industry 4.0 edge and acquisition of sensor signals. Using existing physical networking and wireless networking infrastructure with additional or existing sensors seems like a no-brainer to me. Keeping things simple helps adoption.