A 40 ft belt conveyor case study — worked drive-motor sizing, a hardwired-outside-the-PLC E-stop circuit, photoeye jam detection with a transit-time-based timer, and the baseline sensor-to-PLC-to-actuator loop the rest of this program builds on.
The project brief: a distribution center needs a 40 ft belt conveyor moving cartons up to 40 lb each at 100 ft/min between an infeed table and a case-taping machine. Deliberately framed as this program's baseline integration project, it is the smallest complete mechatronic system that still touches every discipline the later, more complex projects build on — mechanical assembly, motor sizing, an electrical drive/control circuit, sensor-based fault detection, PLC logic, and an operator HMI.
This module walks the whole build the way a real controls engineer would: a worked gearmotor sizing calculation from belt pull through service factor, the combination motor starter and hardwired E-stop circuit, a jam-detection timer derived from actual belt transit time rather than a guessed timeout, and an HMI scoped to exactly what a one-speed, one-product conveyor actually needs. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.