When the vision, the feeder, and the robot each connect to the upstream PLC separately, the PLC program grows by that many pieces. AimFactoryCore stands in front of the PLC as a single device.
Every cell connects differently
Some cells have a DIO board with contacts to spare; some have no board at all. Some lines want the upstream PLC to send down the model number; for others, start and stop signals are all that is needed.
The problem is that this is decided when the cell is built. Changing it later meant rebuilding both the sending side and the receiving side.
Choose one of three
AimFactoryCore lets you choose one of three ways to connect to the upstream PLC.
- Hard-wired DIO — the conventional way, over contacts
- TCP socket commands — string commands over a socket
- Modbus TCP slave — the PLC is the master, AimFactoryCore is the slave
A cell without a DIO board can run on a single Ethernet cable. And all three channels share the same execution core. Switch the connection method later and the line behaves the same. What changes is how you connect, not what the cell does.
On Modbus, the PLC is the master
Trigger, OK, NG, hopper, and feeder signals are exposed as coils for up to 4 cameras and 4 feeders. The PLC reads and writes coils the way it always has.
A recipe change is not handed over in one step. It is a two-step handshake: enter with the change signal and write the target slot, then confirm. And it is only accepted in the Ready state. A wrong model number arriving mid-run and being applied as-is is blocked by sequence.
If communication with the PLC is lost, command coils are cleared, so there is no window where the line keeps running on a latched signal.
What is connected right now is at the bottom of the screen
The status bar at the bottom of the screen shows the live state of the PLC, the robot, and IO. You do not go elsewhere to check whether something is connected, waiting, or dropped.
Where this matters
- Cells with no DIO board or not enough spare contacts
- Lines that want the upstream PLC to drive model changeover as well
- Cells wired over contacts today that may move to communication later
