Water flow alarm system

This is a community-service project built by Instrumentation students at BTC. We are using an Automation Direct "Click" PLC to measure municipal water flow to a housing association which has experienced problems with pipe leaks. When a pipe leaks underground, they don't know about it until they get a huge bill from the city at the end of the month. This system will receive pulse signals from a flowmeter (1 pulse per gallon of water consumed) and calculate flow rate, signaling an alarm if the flow rate exceeds a pre-set value.

The PLC communicates to a touch-screen "HMI" panel over a radio link, about 1000 feet of distance separating the flowmeter/PLC assembly from the maintenance shop where the touch-screen unit will be located. The radios are spread-spectrum 900 MHz units, communicating serial Modbus data between the PLC and HMI panel at 9600 bps. The PLC unit has a battery back-up unit connected, so it will continue to run for hours in the event of a power outage.

At the time of this video, the unit is being "burn-in" tested in our lab, to detect any potential problems prior to the installation. This is why the assembly looks so messy: everything is patched together on a rolling workbench for the test, using a signal generator and a small relay to simulate the pulse output of the flowmeter.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• instrumentation
• PLC
• water
• flow
• alarm
• HMI
• Automation
• Direct
• Click
• Modbus

[BTCInstrumentation]

@zacharywm Not off hand, however the communication protocol for the CLICK PLCs is standard Modbus RTU, and there are free programming libraries available for Modbus communication. If one were so inclined and had the programming expertise, it would should not be terribly difficult to "roll your own" HMI, even if it was something simple like a text-based interface.

[zacharywm]

very nice! are you aware of any pc based HMI solutions that are cheap or open source for the click family PLC's?