How to Add IO Expansion Modules to the Arduino Opta PLC!

Welcome back to the Master Tech. And in today's video, we are going to continue our series on industrial automation and controls tutorials with a quick but super important and useful concept, which is adding IO expansion modules. So, with pretty much any PLC manufacturer, Allen, Bradley, Rockwell, Seammens, Arduino, um you're going to run out of input and output channels with whatever came on board the PLC module itself. In fact, some of the high-end Seammens and Allen Bradley PLC's are just CPU modules. They're just brains and they don't have any IO on board. So, you design a project, an automation system for a certain number of inputs and outputs, and you need to be able to add IO modules to those PLC's. So, the Arduino Opta line is a pretty new line. They only have three uh expansion modules that they offer right now, but it covers all of the basics. They have two different versions of input and output digital input and output cards. One that has electromagnetic relays and one that has solid state relays. And then they have a little bit of a grabag card that has pulse with modulation outputs, analog inputs, analog outputs, as well as a few conventional input and output channels as well. Um, but the important thing is you design an overall system. You make like an IO list of the total inputs and outputs that you're going to have. and you need to be able to add these modules to your PLC. So, we've been doing this tutorial series with the Arduino Opta PLC, so we're going to continue using that in today's video. Whatever PLC and system you have, just know that your manufacturer should provide all sorts of recommendations for cards that support digital inputs, digital outputs, analog in, analog out, OLink, uh, Profet, high-speed counter. There's so many different variations on inputs and outputs, RTDs and thermouples. You just need to look up the card that's compatible with your PLC or you're following along with this Arduino Opta series. Um, and I'll leave all of the cards that I'm using linked in the description below this video if you want to follow along exactly that we start from exactly the same spot. I'm going to just make a new project for this tutorial and I'll call it IO add-ons. Um, and I'll just make a brand new project. Um, and then in terms of my physical setup right now, all I have is the Arduino Opta PLC uh plugged in via USBC cable to my laptop and then plugged in uh to a 12volt power supply um for DC power. So, that is the total physical wiring. There's no cards clamped on there yet. I have them uh just sitting here waiting to be hooked up. Um but so we have a brand new project, nothing going on. I'm going to go ahead and onboard the file system just like you do first time with any PLC. So we can really start from scratch together. And that takes a little time, but it looks like it works. So if we just go into our LED outputs real quick, and we just give ourselves uh like L1, L2, L3, and L4 variables uh real quick, as well as let's just say, you know, red, green, and blue. And then let's grab that user uh button input and let's call it user. So we can program with those variables. Now, hopefully you've been following this series and that's all pretty familiar to you. Um, and we have this count program. Let's just go ahead and say that we want green to be on and we want blue to be equal to the user. This is just kind of like a great one two line to uh make sure the PLC is actually working when you connect to it and then download to it. So, we connect. It says no code. That's good because it's the first boot up. Um, so there is no code running on there. And we're going to go ahead and just send this. And hopefully it compiles, okay? Downloads, okay, and then we'll get the green light turning on. And then the blue light will turn on and off as we push the user push button in. That means our PLC is all rocked and uh rolling and ready to go. It'll ask you to restart. Go ahead and hit yes. Target reboot. Shouldn't take too long. Okay. And it does look like it worked. The bottom right says source okay and connected. If I come in here and uh turn on live debug mode, I can see the count counting up, which is good. I'll grab a video real quick here of the front of the Opta. So, the green light's on, and as I push the user push button in, I get the blue light. So, that's great. It's online and we're communicating with it. Um, we've been in this point a few times before. That's not really the new content for the video. Um, but this is where we're going to start from because now it's time to uh now it's time to add those IO expansion modules. Um, and the wiring and the IDE, the PLC software side of things are both really simple, but it's easiest to just do them one at a time. So, let's go ahead and take a look at the wiring really quickly, and then we'll look at the IDE side really quickly. Now, the wiring required to get one of these expansion modules. Again, there are three and they all look very similar to the body of the PLC. Uh because they all clip into the same chassis. Um it's very simple for wiring. They just need their own power feed which you can daisy chain off of the PLC or the card right next to it or you can give it dedicated 12 to 24volt power. Um but then they have these little slots in the side. The PLC has that same slot right there. And they need these little 10prong I squared C communicators. Oh, I dropped that one. Okay. Well, there's one right here. Um, they need these little communicators and they just clip in right next to each other and that's how they communicate card to card. And we'll see in the IDE once we get these clipped in um that the PLC actually knows what cards it's plugged into because of those little communication tabs. So, that's all we have to do is get the power hooked up and then get these clipped in together. So, I'll go ahead and do that now and we'll go back to the software side. Okay. So, I've got them uh powered up. I've got them hooked up to power and I've got them uh communicating uh down the line, which is great. But you can see the lights are kind of doing their own thing. Um green for power is good. Definitely means they're connected. But the PLC is throwing an error because it doesn't know what to do with these cards because we haven't told it what to do from the software yet. So the physical wiring very simple to connect them. Um now we have to look at what to do in the PLC IDE to connect them. So, if we come back into the PLC IDE and we try to connect to it, um, well, we'll see that because I unplugged it. Now that we're plugged in, if I just try to connect to it again, I'm going to get errors um because it's not in a running state because the IO configuration has changed. So, the PLC has thrown an error. If I go to IO expansions and I hit scan, this is really cool. It's going to say, "Hey, the configuration's not matching." And it's going to say, "Hey, I have these cards here. Do you want to add them?" and I can just hit apply detect config. If you hit scan and they're not detected, you should double check your wiring because something is probably wrong with the physical wiring. But if you're sure the wiring is correct or if you're trying to set one of these up ahead of time, you can always add a card just by right-clicking on IO expansions and hit add. And you can select the cards and you can add them to your project manually, but it's a lot easier to scan and then say, okay, apply the detected config. And then it adds the cards as well as all the programmable inputs and outputs that you can use for those cards. So if we take two of the LED channels um on the uh first card and we just say that'll be light one one, that'll be light one, two. Um and then I take the relay outputs on the second card and I say that'll be output 2 one and that'll be output 22. We'll use those two lights uh on those two cards to do um a little bit of programming with. Okay. So, I'm going to go ahead and hit save. And then I'm going to try to download this now that it has these cards on it. Um, well, first let's go to the program and let's do something. Um, let's say that uh we also want we just want light one to be on all the time and we want light one two to be on when the user push button is pressed as well. And then let's say uh the opposite for the second card. Let's say we want output two on all the time and then the light for one to come on when the user push button is pressed. Okay. So this should compile unless I missed something which is possible. Build looks fine. Now let's go ahead and download. Download. Yes, it's okay that it's going to want to restart. restarted pretty quick, but there's no lights on because the PLC is not running. That's an important clue. You can go ahead and hit cold restart here, the blue circle there. Um, and hit yes. And that's cool. Um, that's uh best case scenario for sure. It's normal to need to power cycle at this point. Um, stuff goes sometimes. Uh, but I have now um one LED on both of the expansion modules. And if I push the uh push button in, you can see the other LED on both cards turns on with the blue LED on the Opta itself. So that is proof that the cards are talking to each other and that I can program any input or output channels uh for any of these cards from the PLC now and I've got all the communication. Okay, so uh at this point you should understand how to get expansion modules added to your PLC. Like I said in the beginning, they're not all this straightforward for all PLC manufacturers uh out there, but Arduino has made it really easy to add their expansion modules. And it is generally the same steps of set the network parameters, connect them to your network, and then discover them in your PLC IDE or related software like with Seammens, they have TIA portal, but they also have a software called Pretto where you can discover and set up network parameters for Proet devices. uh RS Logix, they have Studio 5000, which is this integrated software, but they've always had this RX RS links software where you can see network uh devices and you can see remote IO and things like that. So, um there's definitely some industry knowledge. It's hard to become an expert in every type of remote IO, but now you understand the basics of adding IO expansion modules to your projects, especially for the Arduino Opta PLC. I'll have all the hardware I used uh in this tutorial linked in the description below this video. Let me know with any questions or snags that you ran into uh on this video and let me know what you want to see more of next on the channel. Thanks so much for watching and see you next time. Thanks. Bye.