Hi All,

Please excuse my ignorance as im a PI newby essentially. I have been pulling my hair out on this one. Im hoping someone can give me some guidance or atleast point me in the right direction.

I have a furnace with a conveyor that travels its entire length. this furnace has an electric eye at the entry door.

With PI i capture both the electric eye status ( 0 - no metal present - 1 - metal present ) and the conveyor speed.

So essentially, as the metal enters the furnace it breaks the electric eye and updates PI with a value of 1, when there is no metal entering the furnace the eye reports a 0.

Based on these 2 tags I should be able to calculate piece lentgh and distance between pieces.

My problem is How can I trap the timestamp of when the electric eye value changes state from 1 to 0 or vice versa.

I essentially would like to have 2 tags updated in relative realtime. One with the current piece spacing (time between "1's" * Conveyor speed IPM) and Current Piece length (time between "0's" * Conveyor speed IPM)

I appreciate any help you can give.

Thanks,
Mike

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Mike,

Just a hint, you can use the pipetest utility to verify your PE but also Datalink or ProcBook.

Start teaching yourself using a very basic example, the syntax of PE is not so easy. In the beginning it is maybe a little frustrating, but PI-PE is a real powerful tool.

Michael