Many small and medium-sized injection molding factories in the Yangtze River Delta will encounter the same problem: the old injection molding machines that have been in service for many years in the workshop do not support standard communication protocols and do not have ready-made data interfaces. Relying on manual paper and pen to record production parameters, crop duration and bad quantity, the data lag is serious and the statistical error is large. If you want to promote the digitization of the workshop, you are also worried about the dilemma of high investment and long downtime for the transformation of the whole machine.

Traditional retrofit ideas generally have shortcomings. The first option is to directly eliminate old equipment and purchase new intelligent injection molding machines. The cost of a single machine is high, and most factories are difficult to replace it at one time. The second scheme is a large-scale disassembly and modification of the electronic control system of the injection molding machine, which has a long construction period, the loss of shutdown can not be ignored, and the complexity of maintenance in the later period increases. For small and medium-volume orders-based injection molding enterprises, both methods are low cost-effective.

Lightweight industrial IoT gateway acquisition scheme is more suitable for digital upgrading of old injection molding machines. The core of this scheme relies on the edge acquisition gateway, which can obtain equipment operation information through pulse, external sensor, external signal terminal and other ways, without changing the original control system of the injection molding machine. Whether it is Haitian, Zhenxiong, Yizimi and other mainstream brands of old models, can be quickly docked.

The landing level has three major advantages. First of all, the implementation speed is fast, the debugging time of a single equipment is short, and it can be put on line in batches without simultaneous shutdown of the whole factory. Secondly, the investment is flexible, planning the budget according to the number of devices that need to be connected, lightweight deployment, and reducing the cost of digital trial and error. Finally, the expansion is strong, the later factory new equipment, on-line mold management, energy consumption monitoring module, the gateway can be compatible expansion.

Many injection molding companies are prone to the mistake of blindly pursuing all parameters. In fact, initial digitization prioritizes capturing core data that affects productivity and yield. First get through the underlying data link of the equipment, and then gradually expand the upper-level applications such as quality management and scheduling management, and gradually promote digital construction.