IO-Link was once again displayed in many locations, including the PI booth. I especially liked this pictorial explanation of the benefits of IO-Link:
[click for larger image]
The benefits can be summarized as “You don’t have to manually go to each device to configure it, re-configure it, or extract asset management information from it.” In fact, you probably can’t access the asset management information at all without IO-Link.
Here’s the full IO-Link wall in the PI booth (note that integration to buses other than PROFIBUS and PROFINET are included):
IO-Link products were also displayed at the booths of PI North America members Balluff, P+F, Turck, WAGO, and Phoenix Contact. Here’s a sampling of those displays (click for larger images):
Balluff
WAGO
Turck
–Carl Henning