Industrial Engineer · phase 1 of 16
Remote I/O / Expansion
I/O installed away from the controller and connected through an industrial network or expansion bus.
The Explain card
- Plain English
- Remote I/O lives away from the controller, out on the machine, and connects back over an industrial network or an expansion cable. The program reads it the same way, only later.
- Example
- A packaging line puts a small I/O block at each station. One Ethernet cable runs back to the panel instead of two hundred sensor wires.
- Why it matters
- Remote points cut wiring cost and let the panel stay small, and they add a network to the list of things that can fail. A lost connection puts every point on that block into its fail state at once.
- Hook
- One cable instead of two hundred, and one cable to lose.
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 1: PLC Controller Hardware
The box itself, from processor and rack to the modules that plug into it, because nothing else in the deck lands until you know what a PLC physically is.
