Hot Guillotine Project

[ADuff]

I am working on making a machine called a hot guillotine. It is what it sounds like. A heated guillotine blade is used to cut extruded plastic. A few features I am wanting it to have are a 4x4 key pad, for entering the length of the pieces being cut off, and a readout, to tell the operator what the current input cutting size is. I would like the kflop to be standalone as this process is relatively simple. I am assuming this would be all accomplishmented with a custom C+ program that would run on start up or after the press of a on button. 2 axis, gantry back and forth, and blade down and up. There is also going to be an encoder on the feed side to determine length and speed of the extrusion. I wanted to mention I also have planned a Kanalog and a Konnect to be used, so when I say 'connect to kflop' I am speaking generally. I want to make the connections in the best way using any of the three devices.

My question is on the communication of the key pad and the 1602 LCD readout to the kflop. I can get the 4x4 keypad in either I2C or direct wiring, but most of the displays I am finding are only I2C. I see the kflop is capable of UART communication. I was not sure if I got an UART to I2C adapter, like a Mikroe RS232 to I2C or something similar and not being phased out, would make this possible.

So ultimately I guess my first question should be, am I going about this wrong and should just use a PLC since I don't need complex trajectory planning? I chose Kflop because I am slightly familiar with it. I have used PLCs quite a bit, but not for controlling servos. I imagine I can easily figure that out. Then, the next question would be if I can use Kflop, am I correct in my thinking of how to communicate to the I2C devices? Please feel free to ask any questions as I know I have not given all the information I have available.

[TomKerekes]

Hi ADUFF,

That all seems possible. KFLOP doesn’t have hardware I2C and I2C is difficult to do in software unlike SPI. I not familiar with UART to I2C converters.

Consider using our Kogna Controller which has hardware I2C. It would also likely eliminate the need for a Kanalog.

This shows a simple Kogna I2C example. The example C Program for it is included in the Release. ‘Test I2C PCF8575 16 IOExpander.c’. See also this Post