Do-more PLC Overview PID Temperature Part 1 from AutomationDirect

If you aren’t real comfortable with PID or you want to learn how PID works in a Do-more PLC, or you want to learn how to tune the PID loop in a Do-more controller or just learn about all the cool tools Do-more Designer has to help you with PID, then you are in the right place. And the good news is we’ve broken it up into small bite sized chunks to make it easier for you to consume. This video is just a quick overview of what we will be doing. The next video will review the hardware setup we’ll use for this series of videos and we’ll manually run that hardware through its paces to get familiar with it. Now, I can’t emphasize all this enough – fundamentally understanding your hardware and how it responds to changes is the most important step to getting PID to work. So, we are going to spend an entire video just studying the hardware and pointing out the kinds of things you need to be aware of. In Part 3 we’ll learn how to properly use Auto-Tune to quickly find the PID coefficients and optimum sample time and we’ll run some tests to see how well it works. There’s a lot to cover there, so we broke that up into two parts. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could build and test your PID code on a simulated system, so you don’t have to take your real system off-line while you get it all figured out? Well, guess what? Do-more Designer has a built-in PID process simulator that allows you to do exactly that – build and test your PID system before you take your real system off line. We’ll see how to use the PID process simulator in Part 4. In Part 5 we’ll learn how to manually tune a PID loop using one of my favorite open loop tuning methods. This is a super stable and reliable way to quickly get the PID coefficients without taking your system down for long periods of time and without having to play the PID guessing game where you just you just guess at coefficients until things sorta kinda work. We’ll then compare these manual tuning results to the Do-more’s Closed Loop and Open Loop Auto-Tune results. In all of these videos so far we will manually control the setpoints. In Part 6 we’ll use the Ramp Soak function as our setpoint and we’ll see how well a properly tuned PID loop can track that. We aren’t able to cover every little detail in these short videos, so we have one last video to re-visit the things we glossed over or didn’t get a chance to cover. And remember the end goal – whatever the process is – temperature, flow, speed, pressure, position, etc. - we want PID to get the system up to some setpoint value as quickly and accurately as possible and to have it automatically hold that value until we tell it to go to another setpoint as quickly and accurately as possible. In this series of videos, we’ll be using PID to control the temperature inside this an enclosure which we will pretend is an oven that we want to maintain at 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Head on over to Part 2 to get started with PID in a Do-more enabled controller! Click here to see all the videos in this series. Click here to learn more about AutomationDirect’s Free technical support options and click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you will be notified when we publish new videos.