IO-Link also featured prominently in the PI Booth. Our relationship with IO-Link is a bit peculiar. The consortium responsible for IO-Link relies on the PI infrastructure.
If you have not encountered IO-Link before, I call it HART for discrete because it superimposes the digital communications over the three-wire DI/DO cable. IO-link is therefore not a bus, but it integrates into all fieldbuses and Industrial Ethernets. You can find much more about IO-Link in past blog posts or at www.IO-Link.com.
I think the message at the PI Booth about IO-Link was “Wow! Look at all those products!”
Balluff has long been an ardent supporter of IO-Link and that was evident in a visit to their booth at SPS:
At the show they were showing this clever video about IO-Link:
–Carl Henning