UPDATE: Our stand will be in Hall 26, F05

Last Friday (14th March 2008) we took part in the Final Competition with 30 other nominees in Blomberg at the Phoenix Contact headquarters.

It was a great possibility to get to know all the other teams from all over the world.

Really all projects were fascinating and as we saw our competitors we never thought about any chance to get a prize.

But finally we placed 1st in our category NET against three other strong teams and were invited to the Phoenix Contact exhibition stand at Hannover Fair!

Phoenix Contact main stand: Hall 9, Stand F40

Only the celebration on Wednesday 4.40pm will happen at this main stand.

We really did not expect this to happen, but are very proud to be able to present LEON to the professional visitors in Hannover.

Copy&Paste will fail in nearly all cases, except you know every single variable connection between objects.

Anyway, beside some browser applets for demonstration purpose, the visualization looks like this:

Our project manager Thomas Fuchs gives a short overview about the LEON project within the first minutes.

Because of technical permissions there are some requirements on the user’s site to use the remote control. For example the visualization with WebVisit requires Java with cache disabled. Unfortunately the camera software requires ActiveX, which only is supported by the Internet Explorer. You’ll get such a screen if you visit the page with another browser than Internet Explorer:

If you use the Internet Explorer you will get the login screen. We made three permission levels. In the future the plant is used at school for presentation and programming. Therefore we made a student account, a teacher account and an admin account. If someone uses the plant you get the message, that the plant is used. If you log in with a higher permission level the other person will be disconnected from the remote control. This is the login screen:

The important notices are about preparing your PC for using the plant. We are not proud of the need of preparation, but this are facts which we couldn’t change (see the explanation above). If you have logged in successfully, you get the following screen:

In the main control panel (yes, the headline is written right yet) you can turn the power on for getting the control panel of the control cabinet. It’s reloading itself dynamically at the top right box. Additionally you see the webcam picture on the left bottom. After turning power on this is how it looks like:

After eliminating some little bugs it seems like the remote control is fully functional and ready to use.

We used a little AJAX to get the dynamic feeling we want to have from the control. Furthermore it is used for seeing whether a person is using the remote control or not. If a user with higher permissions takes control over the remote control, AJAX clears the websites content. The user with lower permission only get’s the possibility to try a new login.

We are looking forward to get a new camera firmware to give the possibility for zooming and steering the camera with buttons. Today there is only the possibility with using the mouse and zooming by scrollwheel. Perhaps I make a video for you soon.

Here you get some pictures:

We are looking forward to get the missing parts in the next days.

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!

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.

Now you can see whether someone is working on the facility or not. Often we have to do computer work. We are playing around sometimes with the camera, so excuse ourselves if you get a bad picture.

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.