Company Announcement - Gauteng Department of Education receives 4000 Siemens LOGO! PLCs
Investment by Siemens and Gauteng Department of Education valued at R7 million to develop LOGO! Training kits.
The initiative is aimed at Grade 11 and 12 learners studying Power Systems

As part of an ongoing commitment to advancing interest in Science and Technology, global engineering firm Siemens, together with the Gauteng Department of Education have initiated a program with 55 high schools to provide learners with a practical introduction to automation.
The program launched at a knowledge transfer day hosted by the Gauteng Department of Education at the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Johannesburg. Training was provided by the Vaal University of Technology with product and technical assistance provided by Siemens. Training was conducted on purpose built LOGO! Training kits developed by Coral-I for the Gauteng Department of Education.

Dan Moodley, Vice President for Siemens Digital Factory says that, “this program is geared towards early engagement with students interested in electrical engineering and automation. Each school is now equipped to train learners on simple automation tasks, giving them a basic understanding of the electrical environment whilst promoting engineered innovation.

Today, we see more and more South African companies beginning to invest in making industries and processes more efficient through intelligent automation.This initiative alongside our technology partners and government bodes well in developing the skills we need today to create the jobs of tomorrow.” The training, developed by Vaal University of Technology included setting up and connecting the LOGO! controllers to demo boards, connecting the controllers to a PC via the USB programming cable, installation of drivers and setting up COM ports, creating programs and installing the supporting LogoSoft Comfort software on the trainers‘ computers. Siemens product specialist, Hayden Bielby added that „LOGO!, is an entry level PLC whereby simple automated logic decisions can be made by software rather than the older manual method of hardwired switchgear. The product really comes into its own within the world of household automation. Applications such as access control, garage doors, pedestrian doors, as well as lighting control, automatic irrigation systems, pool pumps and geyser control can be automated efficiently using LOGO!. Perfectly suited to saving energy as well!“

The benefits of introducing this technology into the school syllabus of these technical high school is that it becomes an excellent “foot in the door” to PLC programming for Industry. At an advanced level, manufacturing and process industries make use of our S7 range of PLC’s which is a more powerful controller used from Low Machine Level right up to Plant Wide Control. The beauty of the LOGO! is that it is developed on the same basis as the bigger PLC, but optimized for simpler tasks which are easier to perform and, as a result, easier to program. This makes it an excellent starter device for educating students and even qualified engineers alike on the possibilities of efficiency through engineering.