Multinail Aust. is one of Australia's leading suppliers of building product manufacturing equipment. Dickinson became associated with the company when Multinail required a control system for their automatic truss-cutting saws (MasterSaw IV). For the first generation of these saws, a Telemecanique TSX 47-30 PLC was used with a dual-line operator interface. While it provided considerable time savings for the saw operator, the limitation of the system was that every angle and length had to be entered one by one.
The logical extension of this system was to provide an advanced interface to the PLC which allowed saw data to be downloaded automatically from Multinail's truss positioning software, TrussSource.
Dickinson engineers designed the Multiview software to read the data from TrussSource, organize the information for maximum efficiency, display the trusses to be cut in graphical form, and then download the data to the PLC and control the saw operation. For the initial saw, the Telemecanique PLC was retained and a communications driver was written in order to communicate via the Unitelway bus.Multiview has now been successfully installed on a number of saws, the latest generation of which have been updated to use the Telemecanique Premium PLC. Other versions of the Multiview software have been written for other types of saws, and there are plans to further extend the concept in the near future.