There were not many of us from the US at the SPS/IPC/Drives Show in Nuremberg. So for the benefit of US blog readers who enjoyed Thanksgiving at home, here is the first of several reports about the show. There is no longer a comparable show in the US. Here there are many halls filled with automation suppliers and organizations. (SPS, by the way, is German for PLC.) SPS seems to be on the increase while the Hanover Fair in April is rumored to be headed the other direction. PI, the international umbrella organization for PROFIBUS and PROFINET technologies, has a large booth in both fairs – more on that in the next report.
I tweeted throughout the show at http://twitter.com/CHenning. A tweet is like a 140-character blog posting, so even though I tweeted some pictures, the blog postings will have a “little” more content than the tweets. Watch for another three or four reports.
For more on the non-PROFI aspects of the show start at the Read-out Signpost Blog. (I did eventually visit the booths of some PTO members, so watch for those reports and photos.) In the meantime, here is a very short video clip as I tried to walk the aisle on Wednesday of the show. I fully believe their count of 48,595 visitors.
Composed on the train from Nuremberg to Frankfurt.
–Carl Henning