IntelliSuc
What it is
IntelliSuc is an intelligent control system for the suction zones of a CNC cutting table.
A CNC cutting table holds wood panels in place with a vacuum table divided into several suction zones. Activating zones that no panel covers wastes suction. IntelliSuc automates and optimizes that control. It detects which zones are covered by the panels on the table, activates only the useful ones, and recommends panel placements that minimize suction loss.
Context
This was a team project of five, built for the Lab-Usine at Université Laval as part of the GLO-3002 software engineering course. We worked with a real client in two-week agile iterations with weekly meetings, and the goal was to reduce human intervention on the cutting cell and to make recommendations when a human intervention is unavoidable.
Stack & decisions
The system is built on the OpenFactory industrial IoT framework.
A PLC written in C++ physically drives the suction valves and connects to OpenFactory through an OPC UA connector. The application logic lives in a set of Python OpenFactory apps communicating over Kafka: a WebSocket server that streams live state to the dashboard and receives its commands, a controller that sends commands to the PLC, an app that computes which zones to activate in automatic mode, and an app that computes the best panel placements to minimize suction loss.
The dashboard is a Vue and TypeScript application, built as a progressive web app (PWA) and designed to be used both on a desktop and on a mobile tablet on the shop floor. It is compiled to a static site and served by nginx. The whole stack runs in containers and is developed inside a dev container for a reproducible environment.
My role
I focused on the backend. I worked mainly on the WebSocket server, the automatic-mode app, and the suggestions app. I also worked on the development environment and wrote scripts to improve the developer experience.