Sortation - PLC Programming & Automation

Gapping Cartons Before a Scanner: Speed Ratio, Gap Length and the Eye That Measures It

Side view of zone 12 at 0.280 m/s, the metering belt at 0.513 m/s and the scanner belt, two 300 mm totes nose to tail before the step and 250 mm apart after it, the gap eye PE_G 2 m past the step, and the gap arithmetic for three product lengths

Gapping cartons before a scanner is arithmetic: the speed ratio from the shortest product and the minimum gap, one eye to measure it, and the trim.

Two Zones That Disagree About Who Owns the Box: The Handshake That Restarts a Stuck Conveyor

by PLC

Zones 4, 5 and 6 in side view with the 900 mm blind length between PE4 and PE5 marked, a 600 mm carton standing 30 mm short of PE5 with every ownership bit clear, and the next carton on PE4 about to be released into it

Why an accumulation zone stops with nothing on it: how the zone ownership handshake half-completes, the one-state fix, and the run that restarts it.

Restarting a Fully Accumulated Conveyor After an E-Stop Without Stalling the Line

by PLC

Plan of the twelve full zones after the E-stop, a carton on every eye and two coasted past theirs, the seconds until each zone first moves, and the five things that have to be true before Line_Running

A conveyor restart after an E-stop with twelve zones full: clear F059, give each PowerFlex 525 its start edge, stagger the drives, let the wave run.

Sortation Verification: Proving the Carton Went Where the Logic Sent It

by PLC

plc programming sortation verification confirm eye mis sort counter 1 plc

Sortation verification with a confirm eye past each divert: open a window per commanded divert, then count confirmed, missed and stray per lane.

Tracking a Carton Through Four Zones Without Losing It: A Shift Register the Encoder Drives

by PLC

The 8 m takeaway belt with the encoder on the tail roller, the induct eye and four boundary eyes, the four zones with their cell ranges and count ranges, and the encoder arithmetic from roller circumference to counts per cell

Carton tracking with a shift register the encoder drives, not a timer: cell size, the counter module, re-seeding at each eye, and where drift comes from.

PLC Indirect Addressing

by PLC

How PLC indirect addressing uses an index tag to select array elements, shown with a barcode history example storing the last 10 scans.