AutomationDirect's REER Mosaic Safety Controller: Quick Start Part 1 (workflow)

Let’s configure a stand-alone Mosaic safety controller to monitor a single digital input and just send that to a status output so we can quickly walk through the basic workflow without having to mess with all the usual safety stuff. Open Mosaic Safety Designer. New Project. Fill in the blanks. This is where you identify all the modules you will be using. Just select them from the list. We’re just using the stand-alone M1 controller for this demo, but because I also have a ModBus module – we need to specify it’s a TCP version - and a MOS8 digital output module connected we have to add those in too. This is just a relay module – it doesn’t communicate with the controller, so we don’t put that in the configuration. Be sure to select the correct firmware version for your controller. I don’t know what mine is so I’ll select an M1 controller with a recent firmware version. Again, I’m just guessing right now, we’ll fix it later. Don’t accidentally select this M1S module – that’s a different animal. Ours is the regular M1. Hit OK and you see an image of your system down here. Great, we’re ready to wire this thing up. Let’s go to inputs and grab a generic non-safety pushbutton switch and drop it on the screen. Notice it’s gray – that tells us it is NOT a safety device. If I drop an estop on the screen, we see it is yellow – which reminds us it is a safety device. We don’t need that for this demo. If I click on the input terminal, my options appear over here. We have 8 inputs to choose from on the M1 controller, so I’ll pick this one, and it assigns it to the input terminal. And we can see that is pin 17 on the controller. We want to drive a status output so open the outputs menu and drag a status output onto the screen. Again, notice that it is gray not yellow – it’s not a safety output. Hold the mouse button down on this terminal and drag to wire the two together. You can move everything around to your liking. Click on the output pin, and now I see my output options over here. Click on Status Output 1 to assign it to the terminal. We now have a simple status circuit. You would then wire pin 8 to an indicator of some kind, like this. Click the check mark to check for errors. Result was OK, so we are good to go. Click this to connect to the controller. Hmm, it won’t do anything, and it’s grayed out. What’s going on here? Well, the software automatically recognizes when there is a controller connected to your PC. I haven’t turned the power on yet. I’ll reach over and flip the power switch to ON, and sure enough, the connect button turns blue and I can click on it to connect. This will also happen if you haven’t connected the USB programming cable yet. We can connect at Level 1 to do monitoring only –just hit return for that – or we can connect at level 2 which allows changes to the controller - which is what we want. The default password for level 2 is SAFEPASS - page 79 of user manual I’m using has everything you would want to know about passwords. This button sends the configuration to the controller. If you get a dialog that looks like this, it means your controller’s firmware isn’t what the software expected. Looks like we have version 3.1, but the software was expecting this. We have two options. Update the firmware in the controller to match what we specified the configuration – there is a separate video that shows you how to do that – OR – So we just change the configuration and choose the controller with the firmware version we have. Our firmware version was 3.1 which is between 3.0 and 4.0 so we select this one. And hit OK. Now if we try to send the configuration it asks us if we are sure – we are – so we hit OK. Even for a simple circuit like this it takes a good 40 seconds to upload … so be patient. OK, Our configuration got there without issue so let’s try it. This is important – The RUN LED isn’t lit, is it? The controller isn’t running yet. Before you can use the controller, you have to disconnect the programming environment. We don’t want folks making changes to our safety system while it’s running, do we? Of course not. So, to disconnect the software, you can power cycle the controller, hit this disconnect restart button, or go into monitor mode where you can actually see on this screen what your program is doing in real time. Let’s do that one. Monitor Mode is a level 1 thing so it doesn’t require a password. Wait a second … and now the controller is running in monitor mode. I’ll reach over and press the switch several times and sure enough, the input LED, the Status LED and the indicator light all light up each time I press the button. And we see the result here on the screen which is a little silly for this simple project, but … when you have lots of logic and multiple I/O’s it’s a life saver. We’ll use that quite a bit in other videos. That’s the basic workflow. Configure the hardware, drop inputs and outputs on the screen. Assign I/O and wire them together. Verify the program, connect to the controller as a Level 2 user, upload the program, and restart the controller. Not bad at all. Is this example of a simple ESTOP circuit something you would normally use? No, of course not. It doesn’t have redundancy, short circuit protection, Feedback, an option for manual reset and we haven’t even connected to a proper load yet. The good news is the Mosaic Safety Controller makes it super easy to change so we’ll do all of that and a lot more in part 2 where we’ll build a proper ESTOP safety circuit. Then you will start to see just how powerful this Mosaic Safety Controller is AND how it makes your safety control system design easier and cost less. Click here to learn more about the Mosaic Safety Controller. 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