Automation Simplified - Episode 4 - MTS Smart Sensors and TempoLink

Video Transcript:

Hi and welcome to Scott Equipment Company Automation Simplified Video Series. Today, we are going to talk about smart sensors.

Hi, I am Phil Lister one of the Product Specialist at Scott Equipment Company here in Charlotte, North Carolina. Manufacturers of smart sensors claimed that they can assist with predictive maintenance and therefore reduce downtime. And as we know, reducing downtime can save money, in some cases, lots of money. So, let us take a moment to look under the hood of a smart sensor and see what we can find.

So, the cool thing about MTS sensors TempoLink Smart Assistant is there is two ways to connect to it. One is wirelessly. So, you can take a smartphone or a tablet or your laptop and just power up the TempoLink. And you will see a network called a TempoLink, you can connect to that use a serial number off the TempoLink Smart Assistant itself as your password. And then when you pull up a web browser and type in TempoLink.local, you have access to the information that we are going to look at next.

One of the most common types of magnetostrictive sensors offered by Temposonics is when you take a simple sensor, which has a waveguide along the tube, and you can take a north facing magnet, and is that magnets moving up along the sensor, you get constant feedback. But the additional things you can find are this. If we look at the web browser interface, which we access through this TempoLink smart assistant, we see a lot of useful information which I am going to show you next.

So now looking at the web browser, I am using what I have typed in TempoLink.local in the URL, I now see the TempoLink web browser interface. So now as I look at the position of the magnet, which is the most common thing you are going to use for this technology, you will see here that for the sensor I am looking at, I am looking at 2.6 3.2. So anytime I move the magnet I am getting the feedback I want, but I can also look and see things like what they call lifetime statistics in here. As I scroll down, I see additional information such as the odometer, the max temperature, the min temperature, temperature variations, the max and min voltages.

Another thing you can see while we are here is the MTS TempoLink Smart Assistant also lets you look at things such as the actual interface. For example, looking at my analog sensor, if I wanted to do something like change it from four to 20 to 24, I can do this. I type in command, and okay, and now you will see these pencils, which lets you know you can edit or modify these values. So, in the case of the current output, I am going to change it from 20 to four, which is what it is currently set for. I am going to make this one four to 20. And it is truly this simple. I submitted that and it now shows went from 20 to four to four to 20. If I scroll down and click exit command mode, save, and exit, I have now reconfigured this analog sensor from 20 to four to four to 20. It was that simple.

As more customers migrate away from the traditional SSI in analog output sensors which MTS sensors offers, many of them are switching over to an industrial Ethernet sensor. And the most common thing that controls engineers must do about configuring or setting up the sensors is set the IP address for something unique for their application. We will show you how to do that.

We will switch from analog over to my industrial Ethernet sensor. And then when I go back to my sensor screen, I will see now it is set for Ethernet IP. And if I go down to parameters and to interface, you will see the unique IP address set for this sensor. Once again, I am going to enter command mode. You now see the pencil pop up right next to the IP address. So here I am going to modify this it is currently separate 192.168.100.23. And I am going to make that 99 for the last octet. Select submit. Exit command mode; save and exit. And there you see the new IP address 192.168.100.99. It is that simple.

All right, to quickly recap, we showed you several things. We took the MTS sensors, TempoLink Smart Assistant which can be adapted to any of their fifth Gen R Series sensors, and we showed you how to view the Smart Sensor features which they call lifetime statistics. We also showed you how to take a common analog output and invert that output signal. And we also showed you how to take an industrial Ethernet sensor and modify to a unique IP address.

So, hope you enjoy Scott Equipment Company’s Automation Simplified Video, and if you want more information, just click on the link below. Thank you