Maguire blender machine

[neviemaky]

Hi,

In the company I am working in, there is a bunch of older machines (made in 1996 - 2007), with controller able to print out the cycle data, and the setup parameters...

It is a gravimetric blender, brand Maguire, with controller version 6811, with a parallel printer port. In the past we were printing reports to the paper, but it was hundreds of papers a day....then another option arrived - developed somewhere in Germany...a small box with the centronics port, but also the 2x USB and also RJ45. It is nice, and it worked...for 1 machine at the time, we are able to catch everything to USB stick into a TXT file....piece of cake to analyse data...problem is, that this box costs more than 700€, so we have it only in 1 branch, and the rest branches does not want to buy due to high price.


How is it with this box ? Any experiences how this Retro-printer works for such machine ?

I am not expert in this field, maybe my questions may sound like dumb.....I do not have idea, what is the shape of data coming from that controller, and if it is the convertor, who is shaping them to readable format with all those spaces and new lines etc....


usually from that 700€ box we get this :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* 02/13/15 * * 14:19:37 * * ID# 001 ** * WO 000000 * RECIPE 00000 OP 000

**1 A 00.0** **2 N 100** **3 A 00.0** **4 A 01.0** TOTAL

FINAL: DISP,% 0.0 .00 990.8 100.0 0.0 .00 10.2 1.03 1001.0

RATE: GR/TIME 00 00 29713 976 00 00 10101 19520 - 19.9

1ST DISP,TIME 0.0 00 990.8 326 0.0 00 10.2 192 4244
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Maybe you can advise.


Thanks.

[RWAP]

Welcome to the forums.

We are are aware of some of the other options to the Retro-Printer which to be honest are more robust but aimed at industries where basically the Raspberry Pi would be seen as too noisy (electrically) or even perceived as too cheap an option and therefore these options are priced accordingly.

We don't know of any users (yet) who have tried the Retro-Printer Module with gravimetric blenders but it has been successfully proven for capturing printed output from a wide range of machines with parallel ports including PLC controllers.

From experience the main issue with PLC controllers is working out whether there are any oddities in the interface - for example, the Siemens S5 PLC only exports 7 bit data (but appears to sometimes also set bit 8); and processes can sometimes range between a 5 minute cycle to a 3 hour cycle, which meant that we had to develop a novel means of determining the start and end of a page (for printing).

In your case, it appears that you only want to extract the ASCII data - logged to a file, which is much simpler. The Retro-Printer basically listens to the data coming over the parallel port and echos the ASCII data as it is received direct to a file, including spaces and new lines. Any printer control codes which may be there (such as bold and italics) are stripped out. There is a configuration option to convert new lines if necessary (ie CR to LF,CR or LF,CR to CR).

We are also available to work with you to resolve any particular issues with the way in which the captured data is processed (albeit it may be chargeable for a modest one off fee).

I guess at the price of a Retro-Printer plus a Raspberry Pi 3B - what have you got to lose?

[neviemaky]

Sounds very reasonable

I attached some example photos of the equipment we are talking about (Maguire WSB series with old 6811 controllers)...and plus 2 example files coming from previously mentioned 700€ box.

Regarding the shape of data....if I understand well, the data are pre-formatted in the source of data - in the controller...the printer just prints whatever is coming

About that "waiting for the start and end of a page"...as you can see in the attached TXT files, there is actually no start / end of page.......
I recall from the past with the printer, that there are few modes actually :
- print page after each blending cycle
- wait with printing and collect data until the page is full
- there is also an option to adjust timing for printout

With the 700€box it worked as you can see in the attached TXT file....I assume the controller sends the data to printer port after each end of cycle, OR in the setup mode - once I will activate manually printing of the internal parameters or some other things...
...the blending cycle sometimes takes longer, depends of availability of material, or if there is a break due to change of material(s).

[RWAP]

There is nothing here which concerns me - it would give you the opportunity to consider how you best want to capture / use the data.

- continuous log to a simple text file on a USB stick or the SD card with access from a PC over the network, or maybe even a log to a network drive somewhere? The last option is probably not ideal for an industrial setting in case the network drive is not available for some reason.
- create a new log file every 66 lines (end of page - not very useful as you might get data split across files)
- create a new log file at the end of each print job from the blender

We normally identify the end of a print job by there being no data received for a specific timeout - so it looks as though that would probably work in this instance if you selected "print page after every blending cycle"

The simple answer is that we won't really know the best way forward until a Retro-Printer module is hooked up to the machine - but we happily work with people to overcome these type of setup anomalies (and then share it on here!)

[neviemaky]

Thank You very much !
I sent you message through the contact form.
I need to push it through the purchasing system...once I will receive all necessary things, we will continue