We, here at Altus, believe in education as a factor of change. Therefore, we are involved in different initiatives to encourage technical training for students and young professionals, a means for them to have the opportunity to change their reality. One of the educational institutions with which we have a long and important relationship is SENAI – National Industrial Learning Service. Many of the group's schools and colleges have technical laboratories equipped with PLCs, HMIs and other high-tech equipment provided by Altus.
CLP Nexto Xpress on benches and teaching panels
Among the most recent projects are the supply of products for the manufacture of workbenches and teaching panels produced by Connect4 Automation, a company specializing in the development of kits and solutions for training and technical qualification. Located in the ABC Paulista region, the company has been using Altus technology in its products since 2018, when it made the first supply to SENAI de São Paulo. The two pneumatic benches developed for the automation and mechatronics courses were designed with the XP325 controller as their main parts, one of the most advanced models in the IoT ready PLCs Nexto Xpress, and HMI X2-BASE-7.
Another project where the XP325 PLC was also used as a central piece was in the assembly of 23 teaching benches developed for SENAI-RS and installed in technical laboratories of 17 schools in different cities in Rio Grande do Sul. With a wide variety of communication interfaces and support for the most used protocols on the market, Nexto Xpress controllers have a high level of connectivity, which allows them to fully interact with the simulation software used on the benches. This feature was essential to the success of the project, as the equipment has been used for online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The compact PLCs from Altus' most advanced product family were also applied in another supply to SENAI-SP, this time in the production of educational industrial panels. For this project, the controller chosen was XP340, model from the Nexto Xpress family with a high density of I/O points and support development of web pages. In total, 13 sets formed by the XP340 PLC and the X2-BASE-7 HMI were used. The panels were installed in two SENAI schools, one in the city of Taubaté and the other at the Volkswagen training center, located inside the Volks factory in São Bernardo do Campo, in ABC São Paulo.
The future of partnership
Marcelo Pereira, one of the partners at Connect4 Automation highlights the technological alignment of Nexto Xpress products as the essential factor that made our compact PLCs chosen for these projects. “Altus perfectly captured the market’s needs, the acceptance of Xpress is very good”, he states. Marcelo also lists the equipment's differentiators as: the availability of integrated analog and digital I/O, the wide variety of communication protocols available, the embedded webserver (available on the XP340 model) and the CODESYS programming environment with free license – feature that makes Altus controllers “extremely competitive”.
In addition to the aforementioned projects with schools in São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul, the partnership between Altus and Connect4 is already working on optimizing the technical laboratories of other educational institutions in the Brazilian Southeast and Northeast. Soon, SENAI Jacareí, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, will receive new hydraulic benches with the CLP XP325 for proportional control and monitoring. SENAI Pernambuco commissioned the production of SENAI Pernambuco u>10 new double benches equipped with 10 XP340 PLCs, five for developing projects in pneumatic automation and five for the hydraulics laboratory, both in a WEB environment allowing access to experiments digitally, as well as monitoring of digital and analog variables via mobile devices.
