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What is a Do-more PLC?
By Sammy Natsui
PLC Product Manger,
AutomationDirect
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At 9:14AM on September 6,
2012, AutomationDirect
released the new Do-more
PLC. Many customers already knew
that Host Engineering, the developer of
the Do-more PLC, had been working
on this next-generation CPU for several
years. Here are some observations from
a personal perspective.
What is Do-more?
If you have ever used a
DirectLOGIC PLC, you probably know
Host Engineering - they developed the
programming software DirectSOFT,
and also specialty modules such as the
Ethernet communication modules and
the high-speed I/O modules.
DirectSOFT was the first Windowsbased
programming software for PLCs,
and has served its purpose well over
many years. However, the engineers at
Host had a dream - to develop a
completely new control engine that
could take advantage of current
technology. The Do-more PLC is
their accomplishment.
We named it "Do-more"
To tell the truth, it was not an easy
job for us to come up with a name. The
naming process was fun in the
beginning, and we came up with more
than 100 possible names. However, it
eventually became a daunting job –
some people like a name, and of course,
others don't. In the end, we came up
with this simple name that conveys a
message. "Do-more" is what you can
expect with this new PLC.
Do-more Designer
I have been using the programming
software Do-more Designer daily
during the development and through
the release. And as the DirectLOGIC
product manager, I also use DirectSOFT almost daily. I have to
admit I feel more comfortable using
Do-more Designer. This is because of
features that help the processes of
creating, editing and troubleshooting
the ladder program, such as the Project
Browser and the Trend View. The
software Help file covers all the information
you need to write your program.
I refer to the Do-more PLC user
manual only when I need to set up the
jumper switches in the analog I/O
modules or wire the H2-CTRIO(2)
modules. If you spend some time with
Do-more Designer, you'll see what
I mean.
Do-more instruction set
The Do-more instruction set was
newly designed for the Do-more PLC.
We understand it can often be time
consuming and painful to learn a new
instruction set. We could have just
added some new functions to the
DirectLOGIC instruction set to extend
its capability, but that would ultimately
have been limiting. Do-more has 172
instructions, many of which can replace
dozens of lines of
DirectLOGIC code
for a similar task. I use the Instruction
Palette to find what I need.
Figure 1: Instruction Palette
Spend less, Do-more
Have you watched the overview
video of the Do-more PLC?
(The link is
available at: www.do-moreplcs.com.) Because the Do-more PLC has more
features and better performance in
comparison to the current DL205
CPUs, we could have positioned it as
such price-wise. However, the engineers
at Host Engineering had low cost as a
design goal, and as a result,
AutomationDirect can offer the
modules at very attractive prices.
Future of Do-more PLC
The reason Host Engineering
chose the DL205 hardware as the
platform for the first Do-more PLC is
because it was faster to release by using
readily available and time-tested I/O
and base units. However, we know that
using the existing DirectLOGIC
hardware limits the performance of the
Do-more PLC for the future; we are
developing ideas to create new hardware
platforms that will maximize
performance that the Do-more PLC
can provide.
Conclusion
You don't need to replace your
existing DL205 PLC system with this
Do-more PLC. We will keep selling the
DL205 PLC as long as we can; after all,
we are still selling the DL305 PLC after
almost 30 years on the
market. What we hope
is that you will try the
Do-more PLC for
applications that you
have never been able to
do with our other PLC
products because of
missing features and/
or performance. With
this new PLC, you will
find you can Do-more.
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If you are interested in linking to this article please use the following permanent link:
Product Management Corner, Issue 24, 2012
