Panasonic has introduced a compact, general-purpose PLC for small to medium size machine control applications. The FP-X is available in three controller sizes of 14, 30 and 60 I/O, and each of these is expandable using existing I/O combinations from the company's FP0 product range, allowing a maximum I/O count of 366 points. Plug-in modules add functionality to the basic controller, including communications, high-speed counting and analogue processing.