Videos to Consider

A collection of short industry and training videos covering the sensing and control topics in this course. They are gathered here for consideration — assigned viewing will be announced in Canvas week by week. Nothing on this page is required unless it appears in a Canvas assignment.

Where these came from

Most were located by Chris Miles, who taught a previous section of this laboratory, and are carried forward here because they are genuinely good. All links go to the original publishers on YouTube.

Temperature sensing

Thermocouples, RTDs, and thermistors — how they differ, and how to tell whether one has failed.

RTD vs Thermocouple: Temperature Sensors AutomationDirect.com Side-by-side comparison — when each is the right choice.

What is a Thermocouple? AutomationDirect.com The operating principle, junction types, and why cold-junction compensation exists.

How to Check if an RTD is Working Using a Multimeter Reotemp A real troubleshooting procedure with a meter — closest to what you will actually do on a bench.

Encoders — speed and position

Incremental encoders, and how direction is recovered from two channels.

Incremental Encoder (Shaft Encoder) — how it works learnchannel Animated walkthrough of the disc, the channels, and pulse counting.

How a Rotary Incremental Encoder Works — Direction and Position Tim Wilborne Covers quadrature specifically — how A and B together tell you which way the shaft turned.

Safety

Safety-related sensing and the standards behind it.

Why Your E-Stop Is NOT Just a Power Switch (ISO 13850) WorkSafetyGuru What the standard actually requires of an emergency stop, and why wiring one as a plain switch is not compliant.

Industrial Ethernet

Getting a controller onto a network and addressing it. Both are Allen-Bradley / Connected Components Workbench specific.

EtherNet/IP Address Commissioning Tool ESECOTV Assigning addresses to devices on an EtherNet/IP network.

Connecting to an Allen-Bradley Micro800 PLC over Ethernet in CCW Tim Wilborne The practical connection procedure, start to finish.

Beyond this course

Closed-loop control and controller-to-controller messaging go past what MECH 2510 covers. They are here because they are the natural next step, and because several of you will meet them in later courses or on the job.

PID Control in a Micro800 PLC programmed in CCW Aaron Schellenberg A worked PID implementation on the same controller family.

Auto Tuning a PID control with the RA PID AUTOTUNE UDFB Aaron Schellenberg Letting the controller find its own gains.

PID demo Voltix Electronics Lab Short demonstration of loop behaviour.

Read Message Data from Micro850 to Micro850 PLC Tim Wilborne Moving data between controllers.

Write CIP Message Instruction from a Micro850 to another Micro800 Tim Wilborne The write side of the same mechanism.

What Does the COP Instruction's Swap Parameter Do? Tim Wilborne A byte-ordering detail that bites people moving data between devices.