seph

i want to build a plc based tea maker and i was checking if i could get any circuit diagram about it

Have you thought of the circuit design yourself? Maybe you could post your ideas about how the tea maker should function and what functions you want to execute.

It'd be better if you could post your basic designs so that CEans here can help you build on it and make your perfect tea maker.

PLC may be overdoing it. Tea infusion is just a time-temperature programme. Unless addition of other ingredients (herbs and such), sugar and milk are added to it. May be interesting as a project. However, can such a personal thing as a cup of tea be programmed to sell as a mass consumer durable?

A.V.Ramani

PLC may be overdoing it. Tea infusion is just a time-temperature programme. Unless addition of other ingredients (herbs and such), sugar and milk are added to it. May be interesting as a project. However, can such a personal thing as a cup of tea be programmed to sell as a mass consumer durable?

If coffee can be delivered via vending machine, why not tea?

Anand Tamariya

If coffee can be delivered via vending machine, why not tea?

Already there.

A.V.Ramani

Already there.

You mentioned earlier that "However, can such a personal thing as a cup of tea be programmed to sell as a mass consumer durable?". What was that about?

i was thinking of having a machine that will be doing all the actions i.e. heating up water,pouring of tea leaves,addition of milk and sugar.
there will be a circular disc that rotates the cup around each nozzle so that the different ingredients can be poured in.the motion of the disc will be contolled by a dc motor.the plc is supposed to read in the signal from the various types of automatic sensing and manual input devices and hence contoll the whole operation.as the cup goes round,for detection of it and checking the liquid and contents level,the plc will be tapping the signal from the specific automatic sensing devices like proximity sensors,level sensors,motion sensors,limit switch..timers will state the period the cup is allowed at each stage..thats my basic idea

Instead of searching for a readymade circuit design, we can first build a simple logic, test it and then add more inputs and outputs as per our requirements.

I agree that designing a tea maker using PLC seems like complicating simple matters.
But there is no harm in doing it till one wants to understand the working, logic diagrams, programming concepts, interfacing of inputs and outputs using PLC.

What i suggest:

1. Design a simple logic using flowchart.
-Breaking your end to end process into sub processes might help. Decide basic input and output parameters.
Eg: Add water, then add tea, then add sugar, , then add milk, boil for y minutes.
-This will make it easy to divide everything into A number of inputs and B number of outputs and make sure you didn't miss anything.
- Also helps to get you an idea what kind of PLC you will be needing (no of I/Os, digital or analog,etc)

2. Decide the PLC you will be using.
- Do not go after PLCs having too many I/Os. This may be unnecessarily complex.
- Study its product sheet to know the number of inputs and outputs it offers and what "You want" .
- Understand the input output signal levels for voltages and currents, both digital and analog.

3. Test the I/Os with simple logics (using LEDs, DC motors, level sensors, solenoid valves, etc).
- Experiment with Ladder logic diagrams for different basic circuits.
- You may need to amplify your input data voltage/current levels or reduce noise.

4. Try for minimizing the I/Os. It will help you to reduce the wiring complexities and troubleshooting efforts.

5. Post your queries here. CEans would be delighted to answer them.

Hope this helps 😀

This video explains very basic things about Ladder programming: