The second morning, before the show started, was the PI Press Conference. Even though it is conducted mostly in German, the PI North America staff was in attendance. (Maybe you followed my Tweets live from the press conference: @AllThingsPROFI.)
Karsten Schneider, PI Chairman, introduced the event with a reminder of the global strength of the organization, its Regional PI Associations, PI Competence Centers, PI Training Centers, and PI Test Labs.
Rebecca Boll of GE Intelligent Platforms presented PROFINET’s key role in their strategy. Redundancy is a key benefit in the GE architecture. This is a sub-2-minute excerpt from her presentation on PROFINET benefits:
Her point about the ecosystem tied in with Karsten’s opening.
Next up, Ernst Jäger of Emerson and a member of the PI Advisory Board. He presented Emerson’s DeltaV Virtual Interface Module (VIM) for PROFINET. (See also, the first SPS post.) Because the new module is a drop-in replacement for previous VIMs, existing DeltaV installations can add PROFINET.
There had been a gap in our development tool solutions that I had not realized. We had chips that included onboard CPUs, software stacks, and modules. Innovasic introduced an Ethernet Switch that was PROFINET-IRT-capable. So a vendor that already has their own CPU can add just an Ethernet Switch with PROFINET capabilities included. We shot a 1.5-minute video of Innovasic at their kiosk in the PI Booth:
Karsten went on to explain the importance of the PROFIdrive application profile. This is an often overlooked benefit of PROFINET. So take the 5 minutes it takes to view his presentation:
You can download the slides he talked about here.
The PROFINEWS App was introduced, but blog readers already knew about that!
Here are links to the press releases from the press conference:
- FDI Specification completed – optimal support of PROFIBUS devices
- PROFINET IRT in Ethernet Switch
- Drive technology with PROFIBUS and PROFINET is ideally positioned
- Opening up new fields of application for PROFINET
- PI focuses on apps
If you had already downloaded the PROFINEWS App, you would have already have seen the Emerson story! Check out the story here, then download the app for iPad, iPhone, or Android.
–Carl Henning