Wireless Handheld HMI

[Paul Miller]

I'm trying to find a wireless, hand held, battery powered HMI. I'm at the design stage at the moment, so any ideas considered. It would however have to access data in a Mitsubishi PLC via wireless ethernet. Does anyone have any experience / suggestions in this area ?

[kaare_t]

I doubt you'll find any industrial tablet with wireless, but you could use a windows based tablet and make an application with MX Components.... I was thinking about this some time ago but couldn't find anything interesting,so I did this in a different way: I already had an SQL server with MX OPC so I put the PLC data into a temp table. Then I made a small webpage that read data from the SQL server. Basically I now have a standard web page that shows my desired content. At this point you can basically use any tablet (iPad, Galaxy Tab ++++) and browse to the webpage on the intranet. Let is know what you do, and how you did it...

[JRoss]

I looked into doing something like that about four years ago. I left the company before the final implementation, so I don't know all the ins and outs, but here are the essentials of what we came up with. Hopefully you can extrapolate. The key was the Indusoft SCADA package, which has a runtime version for Windows Mobile. We were going to install a PC runtime on a server attached to the plant network, then put wireless access points in the plant. Next, we wanted to connect the PLC wirelessly to the network using a Comtrol Wireless Access Point (p/n 99004-8), which is essentially an Ethernet to Serial protocol converter with a WAP slapped on the side. The Mitsu PLC was to be connected by the serial port to the Comtrol unit. Finally, the HMI was to be a Windows Mobile based PDA with wireless running a mobile runtime of the Indusoft package. There may be other SCADA choices, and there are certainly tons of options for the HMI, with all the tablets and PDAs out there. If you don't need the PLC connection to the network to be wireless, that will simplify that aspect. Good luck! Let us know how things work out.

[rdsboy]

I use an Ipad2 set up as remote.Run application on pc and run remote to pc.For debug this works.