university studying mechatronic engineering question and response

Posted by Simon Banks on Mar 07, 2025

Hello,

For my final year at university studying mechatronic engineering i would like to work on a PLC system for my final year project as it is not covered in my course and i think some exposure to PLC operation will be a valuable skill to have within my degree and future.

The project i have in mind would be a scaled down Reverse Vending Machine (RVM) for 10c recyclable containers, where several belts, kickers, a rolling mechanism and a camera would sort objects based on color and process them accordingly into storage bins. Very similarly to how the recycling RVM's work with some simplifications to make the project achievable in the time window (1 year).

My current thinking would be to run the camera off a Rasberry Pi and run all other signals through a PLC to gain experience. Initial researching has resulted in my conclusion that PLC's and PLC hardware are quite expensive (shocking i know). Could you advise if there are any options for budget based PLC learning / small project implementation i could look at?

My current alternative would be to run a Rasberry Pi running CodeSys, however i feel this isn't a great representation of industry hardware or best practices.

Thank you for the time

Regards

Hi,

Running both the Raspberry Pi and PLC would be a good exposure as there is a lot of different technologies out in industry , while Codesys is not as common it is being used more with vendors like Beckhoff, Bosch Rexroth, Wago

A Good Starter PLC I would recommend is the Micro 800 Series of PLC, 820, or 850 models depending on how much IO is needed, so PLC would handle all the low level stuff (Sensors, Gates, Outputs etc) and Codesys could handle the higher level vision logic like you have suggested, While Raspberry Pi is not used for real world applications in industry I have been looking at this idea as a low cost training tool (Can now get some PLCs based on Raspberry Pi, not sure how reliable they are but for training and Uni projects they would be great)

The Micro800 programming software is free called Connected Components Workbench (CCW)

Find Downloads

Download guide here

https://theautomationblog.com/connected-components-workbench-download-in-2023/

Siemens S7-1200 are also good (Siemens Logo is ok but more like a smart relay)

If you know roughly how many inputs & outputs you need we can recommend a plc that would be suitable

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