Rootbeer PLC was designed to provide a more affordable way to run Cheesy Arena for offseason events. The AB electronics alone can set you back $17,000. The components of the Rootbeer PLC system are available for approx. $7000.
Features
Integration with Cheesy Arena “An FMS that just works”
E Stops + A Stops
Official team sign support
Support for all scoring sensors and game piece indexers
Arena light triggers.
Powered by a Productivity 1000 PLC
Standardized on Stride IO Link Masters for all remote IO.
Free PLC programming environment.
99% Automation Direct Hardware
We want to thank Automation Direct for partnering with us and sponsoring this project. Automation Direct provides a 15% discount to qualifying educational institutions.
A shout out to Pat Fairbank and Ed Jordan for working through the integration details with me.
Here is the BOM for anyone interested replicating this. Rootbeer PLC BOM
The PLC project, switch configs, and additional documentation will be posted at Frc2481/rootbeer-plc · GitHub at a later date.
Main PLC Cabinet
Core components: Productivity 1000, Digital I/O Module, Power Supply, Stack Light, and Field E-Stop
Smart IO Cabinet Under Construction ACC (Aux Control Cabinet) Under Construction
Disclaimer: Rootbeer PLC has not been used at an event. Testing is limited to bench top testing and what can be done with a limited number of robots. We will be using at Roboteer Rumble and we will have a backup plan if practice day isn’t going well. Due to multiple requests for the BOM I’ve decided to post this sooner than originally planned.
Thank you so much for providing this! Excited to see how this performs at Rootbeer Rumble.
I did want to ask, for teams that only want to just have a basic system to connect all 6 driver stations together and have E/A Stops, is the Main PLC Cabinet, Station Control Cabinet, and the E / A Stops all teams will need? Is it possible, when you have the time, to provide a BOM for a basic system that I mentioned?
Yes. Initially I had suggested replacing the managed switches with un managed switches to reduce the cost but others pointed out this causes issues if teams are relying on mDNS. You could still eliminate the managed switch in the SCC if you ran 3 Ethernet cables per SCC back to the scoring table’s main managed switch.
It needs to support Ethernet/IP (Industrial Protocol) for remote IO. My understanding is that the Click series does not but the Click Plus does. The cost between the Click and the P1000 are comparable.
Click Plus is only and Ethernet/IP Adapter or what is consider a “slave” to a “master” PLC controller. It is usually not able to be a master for Ethernet/IP.
Typically when wanting to use Ethernet/IP with Automation Direct hardware, I would recommend the Productivity series PLCs support implicit Ethernet/IP typically used in Rockwell (Allen Bradley) world as CIP messaging.
In the terms of CIP implicit the master is often called the I/O Scanner and the slave devices are called I/O adapters.
Typically any Allen Bradley 5000 series PLC is an implicit type ethernet/IP. It can also message explicit message blocks as well.
Once again a huge thank you to Automation Direct for partnering with us and sponsoring this project.
We have a complete system for this years game.
1 PLC Cabinet + Stack Light + EStop
2 SCC + 6 A / EStops
2 Smart IO
4 Amp Stack Lights
4 Amp Boost + Coop Buttons
2 Indexer Motor Power Supplies.
2 120V Relay Boxes.
The ACCs are on hold. They aren’t needed for this years game so there is little urgency. The are similar to the Smart IO boxes with the key differences being they have 4 channels of 12V output instead of 24V and they don’t have an unmanaged switch.
The Motor Power Supplies
Core components: 30 AMP and 16 AMP power supply, 2 relays, snap action breakers.
Not shown are some 120V relays boxes for switching on and off the lights in the speaker.
All the ladder logic in the PLC has been tested in isolation. Network hardware has been tested with a single robot taking turns in each driver station.
For anyone looking to build out a full system you may have noticed that the scope creeped to include, motor power supplies, amp buttons, amp stack lights, speaker lights and relay boxes. I had initially planned to reuses official components from the FIRST electronics but FIRST engineering denied my request. The only “electronics” from the official field they will allow custom FMS’s to attach to are the beam break sensors. So keep that in mind if you plan to build out your own system.
Configured in what sense? There is Cheesy Arena config and Ladder Logic for the Productivity 1000 PLC. I’m working on getting that polished and then I’ll share it via the GitHub link in the first post.
I much dislike those inline over molded fuse holders. The terminals tend to stretch and make high resistance contact after only one insertion and tend to build up heat and not wick it away.
Not sure if resettable breakers fit but you could check out Metri-Pack 630 terminals and holder as a nice alternative that’s used in OEM like power sports, boat engines, etc…
These are what we use at work for our harnesses on our modules that go on commercial vehicles. I don’t believe we’ve seen any issues, and you could technically use them without the caps if the breakers don’t fit. Only thing I can think of that could be an issue is if you don’t have the appropriate crimper.
Looks awesome… I deal with similar hardware at work; for example, the stride IO-link Masters are rebadged Murr Impact67 modules, which I am using on a work project and can confirm are good units (and play well with non-Rockwell Ethernet/IP masters).
As @Chris_Elston stated, Productivity 1000 is probably the cheapest ethernet/IP compatible (as a master) standalone PLC one is going to find. The only other “cheap” (Not Rockwell or Rockwell-level $$) ladder-logic running Ethernet/IP masters I personally know of are:
Omron: never used their PLCs (hence why I don’t have a series), but I’ve seen references to their PLCs (or at least a series of them) having native support.
Keyence KV7000: not easily obtained if one doesn’t have an account with Keyence. I’ve never used but my coworkers have and seem to love them.
Mitsubishi Q-series: requires a high speed backplane and a $1000 3rd party co-processor card, the rest can often be found used on ebay for cheap. I use this setup a lot and it works, but not something I’d recommend if one wasn’t already very familiar with Mitsubishi (and their quirks). iQ-R PLCs support it natively, but they are on par with Rockwell price-wise, precluding their listing here.
Pro-Face GP4000 (and others): technically a HMI, but can be used as an ethernet/IP master for “light” applications and can run ladder logic programs. I’ve used these “as a PLC” and as the master to one or more Ethernet/IP adapters several times… but they can be overloaded if one tries to move too much information too quickly (or loads/views a CPU-intensive screen)… IMHO not reliable enough for this application unless one moved to a SP5000 panel (which is no longer “cheap”).
I really like your update, and I appreciate your post. I am trying to understand your content and would like to know how to link the counter with the device (smart IO?).
Noted. I’m using these to match what the Poofs did per Ed. The breakers fit tightly and given they are self resetting they should only need to be inserted once. I’ll keep an eye on it.
Once I set appropriate RPI times and changed them from multicast to unicast I’ve had no issues with them. Out of the box it was a little rough and I was losing hope.
Each port on the Stride IO Link Masters (Grey Modules on top of the case) is a 4 pin M12.
Pin assignment:
24V
DIO
0V
DIO / IO Link
The counters in the speaker indexer and the amp consist of 2 beam break sensors each. Most industrial sensors (at least in FIRST) tie their signal to Pin 4. Then you can use splitter cables or couplers that are wired like this.
It reassigns one of the sensors from Pin 4 to Pin 2. The PLC ladder logic uses some latches to ensure that the beam breaks are broken in the correct order and then increase a counter used for scoring.
Note. The official FIRST fields use high speed counter modules and I don’t know the details of those. The official Cheesy PLC and Rootbeer PLC are reading the I/O every 20ms (50hz) which is plenty fast to accurately count game pieces.
Welcome to the world of low cost EIP masters… this what gave me the most trouble. My most recent project pairs the same Impact67 (Stride) IO-link master with a Pro-Face panel (which as previously mentioned, isn’t super powerful)… I needed a decent (enough) RPI for some photoeye sensors (that were being used to see an object pass by) on a IO-link I/O hub but I also had several other IO-link devices on the master, two of which needed 32-byte IO-link data to work. No can do. In an ironic twist of luck though, the two 32-byte devices were too long of a lead time, and I found simpler (still IO-link) equivalents stocked (Automation Direct for the win!) and such allowed me to fall back to the 8-byte instance (which is a much smaller amount of data) which allowed me to run a sufficiently fast RPI yet doesn’t crash the IO-link master every time I change HMI screens.
In order to get everything talking properly I had to deviate from the official CA network config slightly. 10.0.100.x IPs are still used but the management VLAN is now 1 instead of 100. This is due to the managed switches in my SCCs being hard coded to a management VLAN of 1. This change affects the configs of the main scorer’s table switch, the 2 SCC switches and the AP.
I haven’t look at how this will work on the Vivid Hosting AP in the future but with some minor tweaks the Linksys AP can be made to work.
