About Caterpillar
Caterpillar is the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives. It was established in California in the year 1925. Services throughout the product life cycle, cutting-edge technology and decades of product expertise set Caterpillar apart, providing exceptional value to help our customers succeed. The company principally operates through three primary segments – Construction Industries, Resource Industries and Energy & Transportation – and provides financing and related services through its Financial Products segment.
What we did together?
P-Scanner:
We developed a highly customized solution called P-SCANNER that provided a highly skilled machinist with the ability to scan a barcode from a manufacturing order (MO) or a Traveler and load the associated part program automatically either from local machine folder or from the network. When the barcode is successfully scanned, the associated program details are populated on the screen in color codes and ready for the operator to hit the cycle start. This gold standard in the Aerospace industry is now in demand for other industries such as Auto-Industry as in this case with Caterpillar, Inc.
dataZen OPC Server:
We developed a software program which converts the communication protocol used by a PLC into the OPC protocol. OPC is implemented in client/server pairs. The OPC client software is any program that needs to connect to the OPC Server. The OPC client uses the OPC server to get data from or send commands to the control. The goal of the OPC specification is to provide an open, flexible, plug-and-play software standard for software interoperability. This is a custom-engineered dataZen OPC Server application that allows communication with modern CNC machines to get data from or send commands to the control. Additionally, data collection with high baud rates were achieved for things like machine chuck open or chuck closed and measuring metal temperatures for the machining operations.