REMOTE DEMONSTRATION OF PACKAGING

The ability of remotely operating and visually demonstrating a packaging machine is quite attractive to an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer). Currently, the customer needs to come to the OEM development site to see the live demo of the packaging machine. Also the ability of remotely debugging and tuning of a packaging machine is quite advantageous for an OEM. We have developed a relatively inexpensive solution to operate a packaging machine remotely from the HMI (Human Machine Interface) panel (local to the machine) and visually seeing the operation of various parts of the machine through a camera vision system (one or more cameras). Similarly, the process of remote debugging, downloading modified version of programs to remotely located Programmable Logic Controllers, HMI unit are the subject matters of the paper. This paper will discuss specifications of software and hardware tools necessary for the solution and step by step operation of each of these tools for the implementation.