PI has released a new animated video showing PROFIsafe in action over PROFINET. (PROFIsafe works over PROFIBUS, too.)
It presents the iPar Server for storing safety (and other) parameters. And it presents it more succinctly than I did in a blog post a couple years ago: iPar Server. It also shows a brief look at drive safety.
In the old days, drive safety consisted in removing power from the drive. This was hard on the drive electronics, prevented access to onboard diagnostics, required additional hardware, and may not have been the safest action to take!
These days (and dating back quite some years now), there are many more possible safe states to put a drive into. One example: perhaps it is safer for the drive to move to a safe position. For more examples, and more background view our latest webcast on Drive Safety (16 minutes).
With 3,000,000 PROFIsafe nodes installed through the end of 2013, PROFIsafe is the most installed functional safety technology. Started in 1999, PROFIsafe pioneered the “black channel” concept used by all functional safety networks. Safety over the network is no longer on the bleeding edge; it’s mature and widely adopted. Furthermore, as ARC said, “Safety has evolved from being a cost burden to a strategy for improving productivity and reducing downtime.”
–Carl Henning