Dear All,

I was searching on the internet for a solution of steering a stepper motor with the Siemens Logo SPS. Which i understand is not possible or difficult.

Let me explain you what i want to achieve:

I want a simple photoelectric switch (Sensor) to detect a product on a conveyor belt. This will be the (first) input to the PLC, (the conveyor belt is running at a constant speed) after which a preset delay counts down and starts the (stepper)motor which turns till another sensor detects the end of a label (blank space between labels on paper) and then stops (on the spot) and then the proces starts again.

I have made some idea in the Siemens software which is probably to simple to be true (i am new to this) which i couldpost hereif needed.

The first question i have is if a stepper motor is the way to go with here and second if my idea of programming is somewhat in the right direction.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

HI William,

First of all thanks for your reply.

I am completely new to the materia of programming, PLC etc. however i know this is the way i want to go in improving our processes. At the moment we have a labelling machine that works completely without PLC. what it does is as following: A can is detected by a sensor which triggers the countdown of a delay after which the motor powering the label reel dispenses one label. It is stopped by another sensor which detects the open space between 2 labels on the reel.

What is "problematic" with this machine... all settings are set by potentiometers. The delay, the speed of the conveyor and the speed of the label being dispensed. It may take as much as 100 cans before settings are optimal. We are a small startup company, sometimes we have product runs that are smaller than that. Further we currently have 3 different can/label sizes.

So our idea is to try to convert/build a labelling machine to be programmable. We would try setting changes such as speeds and delays etc. till we have a working one and then save that setting. After doing this 3 times we should have 3 programs that would allow us to switch more easy between different products.

At this moment i am orientating on which components to buy and to learn about the setup and programming. We have more processes that we want to change to programmable in the short term future, however the labelling is most important as it currently is the bottleneck in our work.

I would very much like to learn from the people here and hope that you have the patience for my questions. As this subject is somewhat pressing i would not mind to pay some "fees" for helping us onto the right way with this project and in the same time learn for future projects.

Thank you for reading along.