LEON

As you may have recognized before, there is an entry called “Leonpedia” in our left handed navigation bar. Until now it might not have been very useful to you.
But as we get on with our work, there are many things we want to explain to you.

Today we start with some multilingual information about VLANs (German / English) as the first part of our technical section.

Please feel free to comment, we appreciate any suggestions!

First we wish you a happy new year. After having a few days of vacation, we are back again today.

In our absence we got our ordered LED-lamps to light our facility at night. For operating by remote control there must be a possibility to see what happens, even if it’s dark in the room. So the lamps are a basic element of our project. You see a first night picture on the right hand. The illumination have to be aligned, but for this first test we hold the lights in our hands. So finally it will be a good possibility to see the facility at night.

The next step is to build a website which allows the user to steer the facility. It have to include the control for the camera, the electrical cabinet and the LEON power box. And this is the problem, because the camera does not give access to any page from outside it’s own webserver. We contacted the company about this problem, but didn’t receive any answer yet.

Here you have some more pictures of the lights:

After having the essential function we make now the additional features which makes this project to LEON: Low Energy Open Netlab.

Today I will give you a little update. It’s a pity we don’t have a camera here today, so we can’t give you any new visual impressions.

The LEON powerbox is completely mounted and wired. The first run was successful, now it has to be programmed to switch between main power supply and battery automatically depending on its loading status. Now we only have to wait for the solar panel to look if our power management works.

The second floor of our electrical actuators is fully installed and works fine. The drawer principle was changed a little bit and now it works fine without too much crunching. Our colleques at Volkswagen are building a second one as a blueprint for professional production.

Our pick and place device works fine, too. It takes the cap of the box during the filling steps.

We worked on cycle times the last hours. If we set maximum speed, the cycle time is five seconds now. Our 400 boxes are filled in half an our if we want… High speed production

We will have a break the next five weeks, so you have to wait a little bit for new information.

Today i have to tell you some good news: the main control cabinet is checked and now ready to be programmed.

First i assembled the powercable with a red CEE-connector, if we want to use the system with three phases. After that i did a functional check. It´s result was I.O.

Here you can see the actual appearance:

Since last friday we’re ready to put our main control cabinet into operation. The main components are wired and ready to check them. The check will be likely on next Monday, after that we’re able to continue with the development of the software for the ILC 350 PN from Phoenix Contact.

The circuit diagram has been completely redrawn in E-Plan P8, because the one we used as a blueprint was done in Caddy++, which is not an industrial standard.

Our next steps will be to install a network cable between the ILC 350 PN and the connector on the left side of the control cabinet, furthermore we have to install new banana jacks to preserve the demanded degree of protection. As soon as the shipment with the missing motor contactor is comming, the control cabinet is completed.

Here are some pics of our desktop…



doing the “paper work”, …



and some soldering.

A few days before we showed you our drawer principle. Today we get the result. That’s how it looks like:

Some little problems are to solve before it works really fine, but we are looking forward to have a working version in near future.

We give you some new impressions of our project today. See the pictures to get up to date:

In this picture you see our 2nd floor. We buildt it to put our box-filling equipment on it. The assembly line transports the box. We stop the box, remove the cap, fill the M&M’s over the slide and put the cap back. The complete second floor can be removed by solving two bolts. The power supply can be easy removed too. Therefor we put two connectors (red and black) on the first floor.

This pictures show you a detailed shot of the box-filling.

And a last picture to show you the working progress of building our control cabinet. Inserting parts is nearly complete. Now the parts must be wired.