I do not understand the slow acceptance of functional safety over the bus in North America. PROFIsafe has been around for more than 10 years. It covers functional safety for discrete, process, and motion control applications in the same system. It works on PROFIBUS and PROFINET. It works via wire or wireless. It accepts AS-I Safe inputs. It’s allowed by code in the US and Canada. It enables improved uptime by reducing maintenance actions and pinpointing faults. It saves wiring costs, installation time, and commissioning time. Isn’t lower cost upfront and reduced downtime worth something to North American manufacturers? European manufacturers have an advantage over those in North America since they have adopted PROFIsafe.
Ok, that’s the end of the rant, here’s a view of the wrap-around PROFIsafe wall in the PI booth with 50 different PROFIsafe devices:
PTO member Stahl was displaying PROFIsafe products in their booth:
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The PROFIsafe news the surprised me a bit was in the WAGO booth. They were showing their PROFIsafe IO for PROFIBUS and PROFINET. That’s not unusual and has been around a while. What was new was WAGO’s use of the iPar Server to save and restore configuration without requiring a configuration tool. For more on the iPar Server, visit here. Here’s the display in the WAGO booth:
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Please feel free to comment on my rant.
–Carl Henning