Welcome back to Automation Nations!

Welcome back to Automation Nations! Today we're continuing to build out our industrial control panel. And now that we've got a PLC in our panel, we're going to add some IO points, some inputs and outputs. So we're going to do this with some push buttons, some hand switches, and a few various colors of indicator lights. You've probably noticed I start basically every video in this series by taking the sub panel out of the main control panel. And that's because it's much easier to add components to the panel with it out here. But for today's video, that's going to be essential because we're going to mount these buttons and switches to the door of the panel. This is very common for things like, uh, transmitters, pumps, valves that are in the field and just the wires come back to the control panel. So, uh, I'm going to start by laying out where these make sense to put them. And then I'll drill and cut it. And while I'm doing this, uh, my sweet voice over is going to tell you about the main type of IO. And, uh, the next voice over I'll tell you about them. So after vacuuming up my metal shavings, you can see I've got my four indicator light holes drilled out and my four push button and two hand switch holes punched out. And to prove out the functionality, I'm actually not going to use the PLC just yet. I've just got 24-volt power jumpered into one side of each of these terminals. And they're each going to directly control one indicator light. So I can prove out that I wired everything up correctly. So if I go ahead and power up my cabinet and close the door, we should now have one hand switch per green and yellow, and the green button turns on the red light. And the red button turns on the white light. This is proving out that our cabinet works and the layout works. What we need to do is actually wire these into the PLC as inputs and then wire those lights back into the PLC as outputs. But we need to write some logic to do anything useful with that. So I'm going to save tying these into the PLC and writing some basic logic to test them for a future video.