PLC training kit design decides whether students learn what the plant floor actually looks like. A Mitsubishi trainer and a student capstone panel show where good intentions fall short: banana plugs, a single channel E-stop, and a missing ground.
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The longest segment is a teardown of a PLC trainer built for an engineering university and sponsored by Mitsubishi Electric. The ingredients are right: a Mitsubishi PLC and HMI, a D800 series VFD, a stack light, a potentiometer, relays and a proximity sensor. The problem is how the I/O reaches the student. Every point breaks out to banana plugs, so nobody lands a wire in a terminal block, the first thing they will do in a real panel. 24 VDC is yellow and 0 VDC is blue, the faceplate diagrams never say whether a push button is normally open or normally closed, and the E-stop is a single channel push button in an E-stop housing. ISO 13850 treats the emergency stop as a complementary protective measure that stays latched until someone deliberately resets it, and in practice that function runs on dual channels through a safety relay or safety controller. A trainer that teaches the shape of an E-stop without the circuit behind it teaches the wrong lesson. I prefer a compact core kit with everything else brought in through terminals.
The capstone panel is a two tank transfer system built on an Arduino Opta with an ESP32 on a breadboard, and the wire trays and crimped terminations are genuinely good. The design choice worth questioning is the relay stack. The Opta already has four relay outputs rated for 10 A each, and they drive a hobbyist relay board also rated for 10 A, so switching is doubled without adding capacity. The power supply ground is not landed, and the E-stop does not remove power from the panel the way it is wired.
The episode opens with the meme every Rockwell user knows: a laptop choking on a Logix Designer project. Rockwell Automation lists 8 GB of RAM and 4 logical cores as the minimum for Studio 5000 Logix Designer version 38, with 16 GB and 8 cores recommended. The 4 GB laptop IT hands out saves a little on hardware and loses far more in engineering hours. The workaround is a virtualized engineering workstation on Windows Server or Proxmox that engineers reach from thin machines.
The last two questions are about the job. Do PLC and DCS engineers need electrical knowledge? In most cases yes, because whoever specifies the I/O on a Siemens S7-1200 G2 or an AutomationDirect Productivity controller usually commissions it too. At Procter & Gamble and Kraft Heinz, where I worked earlier in my career, technicians carried routine maintenance and engineers were the last line of defense, with support like Rockwell TechConnect behind them. And what does a control systems engineer at a mine do all day? Field troubleshooting, long term projects, RCA review on day shift, and coordination with IT, vendors and contractors.
Timestamps
0:00 Intro and the most upvoted questions this month
0:56 Logix Designer laptop meme: why engineering software needs real RAM
4:24 Thin laptops vs a virtualized engineering workstation on Proxmox
5:40 Mitsubishi PLC trainer review for an engineering university
8:15 Banana plugs, color codes, and why terminals matter
11:48 A single channel E-stop is not an E-stop
14:43 How I would design a PLC training kit
16:05 Capstone panel review: PLC and ESP32 two tank system
18:28 Arduino Opta and doubled up relays
23:38 Land the ground and research dual channel safety
24:13 Do PLC programmers need electrical wiring knowledge?
28:05 Engineers vs technicians at large manufacturing plants
30:12 What a control systems engineer at a mine does day to day
32:38 When everything runs normally: projects, shifts, and team structure
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