From a single rung to the whole plant's data.

Programming and troubleshooting across every MELSEC generation from the A-Series to iQ-R and iQ-F, including multi-CPU racks, motion CPUs, servo systems on SSCNET, and FREQROL inverters, as well as CODESYS and other IEC 61131-3 programming platforms. We prefer Structured Text where it makes the logic clearer and ladder where maintenance staff need to read it.

Where we help

• Machines that stop with no recorded cause, or miss a small percentage of cycles
• Motion SFC and synchronous control problems on servo turrets, indexers and winders
• Drive tuning, special functions and inverter communications
• Modifications to OEM equipment after the OEM is gone

Dale gave Mitsubishi Japan input on its A-Series to Q-Series migration strategy and has carried out migrations for end users, distributors and integrators ever since. Today that extends to discontinued drives, undocumented serial protocols, and non-Mitsubishi legacy PLCs.

How a migration runs

• Decode the running program, even without source or comments, and write the English documentation the machine never had
• Convert it with our own tools: from another vendor's PLC to Mitsubishi (we have converted Sharp JW programs to MELSEC), or from ladder or SFC to Structured Text
• Map I/O, parameters and communications; identify what can be reused
• Plan staged replacement so production keeps running section by section
• Convert, simulate, then commission with a rollback path

Platforms seen recently

MELSEC A/AnS, QnA, Q, Q Motion; Sharp JW; Fuji MICREX-F; obsolete Mitsubishi drive families.

Program conversion

Sharp JW to Mitsubishi MELSEC. Mitsubishi ladder to Structured Text, and SFC to Structured Text. Each conversion is simulated against the original and compiled clean in the target software before it's handed over.

From 2007 Dale was Mitsubishi Electric Automation's MES and manufacturing-data engineer, working with Mitsubishi's development teams on MES interface hardware. AIS continues that work: getting reliable data out of controllers and into the systems that use it.

What we build

• OPC UA / DA servers and connectivity, including TAKEBISHI DeviceXPlorer and MX OPC
• SCADA and HMI experience on both ICONICS GENESIS64 and Ignition, including migrations from one to the other
• Database connectivity: traceability, recipes, OEE and production records in SQL
• High-speed bridging of the PLC network directly into a PC for sub-millisecond data collection
• Edge gateways with store-and-forward so a network outage doesn't become a data gap
• Alarm management to ISA-18.2, and the network design to make it all dependable

Intermittent faults are a data problem, and AI has changed how fast they can be solved. Using AI tools on large machine captures, we can examine every cycle rather than a sample, find the patterns that come before a fault, and test them against a model of the machine. We start with a discovery report that lists every plausible cause and how likely it is, design the capture that will separate them, then analyze the results and report what the data proves, and what it doesn't.

• High-speed data loggers and PLC-side capture code, configured and verified in the vendor tools
• Machine simulators built from the real program to test hypotheses before touching hardware
• Torque trending: on VFDs for predictive maintenance, and on servo motors to detect part-quality problems
• AI-assisted analysis of all the collected data, guided by decades of knowing how these machines fail; an engineer makes every call on what to change
• Clear written reports for engineering and management

PC-based control has been a thread through Dale's whole career: SteepleChase in 1996, Mitsubishi's MC2 PC control (with its first customer), the Q-Series PC CPU and C Controllers, and input to Mitsubishi on later PC controllers. We set up industrial PCs to behave like controls hardware.

• IPC selection and hardening; Windows and real-time Linux (PREEMPT_RT)
• Mitsubishi C Controller applications
• Soft-PLC and simulation environments for testing and training
• Keeping legacy engineering software alive on virtual machines