ICS Adventures, Part II

I have been extremely lucky to get a bunch of really exiting brand new parts donated to me for my project, these include:

This is basically one of Siemens’ starter kits which go for quite a bit of money even when buying it used, so I am deeply grateful to get all of this.

You can absolutely get PLCs and other equipment for cheap if you want to start your own project. Ebay, buy2sell.dk and AliExpress are really good places to look – but you can get really far with Facebook marketplace too! I regularly get surprised at what shows up for sale there. I am sure there are even more good places to look – please reach out and share if you got something 🙂

Another option is something like an Arduino board or Raspberry Pi running OpenPLC – or to even go fully virtualised with LabShock. I looked a both of these options, and even started installing and poking around a bit. But in the end, I knew I really wanted real hardware so that’s the direction I went with.

Now, since my goal is to make this very visual demo I need a lot of things than the PLC and HMI themselves, which includes:

In all about €120 (about 900DKK). The idea is to connect the extra PSU to the pump and valve, so in the case I make a mistake I don’t accidentally burn out the expensive Siemens PSU. Same with the relays, I’ll be putting those between the PLC and the pump and valve, as an extra layer of security. Also according people with more experience than me, this is “the right way to do it”.

First step is to actually make the demo work as intended, which in it self will require a ton of time and a steep learning curve. But at some point I want to make the whole setup portable, perhaps in something like a Peli Case.

Next post, things will be getting technical…

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