A municipal centre shall be equipped with modern building technology. The energy costs of the control unit and of the facility shall thereby be reduced. Various actuators, the room temperature, humidity and the central fire alarm system shall be regulated with the help of acquisition and control of different signals.

The importance of energy efficiency is continuously growing in the sector of measurement and automation. The MSX-Box helps you improve the energy balance.

The programs of the MSX-Box are mainly written in C or C++. However, not every end user is able to work with these programming languages. Therefore, the MSX-Box offers the opportunity to use low- level programming languages. Thus people who are not software engineers can also use the MSX-Box.

A data logger is used for avalanche warning in the mountains. It captures different signals: Temperature (ambient temperature and snow temperature in different snow layer depths), vibration sensors (standardised on +/- 10V) and serial sensors (humidity of the different snow layer depths). A local power supply exists but no network connection is available. Thus only a stand-alone data logger can be used for the long-term acquisition and data processing.

For quality control, the surface roughness of a test item is to be tested and its contour recorded.

The installation consists of four surface roughness gauges which are connected via four serial interfaces (RS232), a laser micrometer and a glass scale.

For the acquisition, the compact real-time PAC system MSX-Box is used, which includes PC boards with the following functions: counter, analog I/O, serial interfaces. In this case, the version of the MSX-box with PCI backplane is used.

For extremely harsh environments, it is also possible to use the compact PCI version with the corresponding CompactPCI boards.

Learn how to quickly and simply install a control of the MSX-Box with a Simatic® S7 via Ethernet.
In this case we will give you a special explanation how a S7 controls the 16 digital inputs and outputs of the MSX-Box. The digital I/O come from the PCI board APCI-1500 by ADDI-DATA which is mounted on the PCI backplane of the MSX-Box.

Several MSX-Boxes can be synchronised with the Network Time Protocol (NTP) service in order to coordinate the distributed MSR tasks as regards time.

More information about Network Time Protocol

Network Time Protocol practical knowledge