Industrial Truck Dumper

Sisk Consulting Moves Big Loads with their Stamp-based PLC
Appeared in the 2006 Product Catalog.

Tom Sisk reports about his Industrial Truck Dumper project in use at a pulp mill in Eastern Canada:

“The BASIC Stamp 2sx performs a critical role in my project. When a driver comes into the booth, he has a load slip that has been generated by the automated truck scales located just out of view to the right. The load slip bar codes contain his ID number, time of day, the species of wood and whether or not a sample of chips has to be taken from this load. It also confirms that this particular truck should be dumped here and not at one of the other dumpers on the mill site.



Next, the driver scans his load slip and the BASIC Stamp 2sx retrieves the data and prints a form identifying sampling requirements. Then the BASIC Stamp issues a command to the PLC that controls the dumper and the hydraulic system to open the bin floor and start raising the truck. When the truck reaches a certain angle, both trailers empty with a tremendous whoosh. The two-trailer B-train shown brings in about 110,000 lbs of softwood chips in a single load.

The BASIC Stamp circuit board as shown is located in the grey “phone booth” near the back end of truck (above). It was chosen for this job because of the simplicity of serial interfacing to the barcode scanner and the printer. As well, the circuit board I used gave digital I/O to talk to the PLC and to provide the other control functions needed.”