Transforming Thread Production: How Logical Advantage Integrated IoT for 130+ Machines

A year ago, the team at Logical Advantage was contracted to implement an IoT solution on the shop floor of Service Thread, an engineered yarn and thread manufacturer.

Specifically, Service Thread (the company) wanted a way to record utilization data for more than 130 machines on their factory floor in North Carolina.

Now, while this might seem like a fairly straightforward request, it was anything but. That’s because being able to monitor uptime and downtime can be a bit laborious, what with Service Thread having 24 different types of machines with more than 3,000 individual spindles.

To make matters worse, each of these machines has its own proprietary programmable logic controller (PLC), and they were programmed nearly two decades years ago using some obscure computer language that no one knows anymore.

The folks at Logical Advantage determined that a hardware solution would be much easier to implement than a software-based one. Fortunately, these machines already had the sensors necessary to monitor the utilization and spindle speed metrics we wanted. Logical Advantage only needed a flexible, easy-to-implement piece of hardware which could be used to retrofit all 24 different machine types.

Dan Thyler, co-founder and CTO of Logical Advantage, explains:

Thyler goes on to say that while the final product was successful, the implementation wasn’t without its sticking points. For example, going into this project the team thought the plant only used one type of sensor across all its machines. They soon discovered that there were two other types of sensors in use that we hadn’t known about – one that works like an optical mouse to detect thread motion, and another that works as a simple switch.

Read the full story on our sister site EETimes.com
https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1332884