I don’t usually read Design News. But there are a couple articles of interest there lately.
On the plus side, Peter Welander’s excellent article on KA appeared in Design News: “Las Vegas Show KÀ Built on Stage Automation, Motion Control Hardware”. Pete also added some additional details in his blog.
I found a few points to expand on in “Ethernet, High-Speed Bandwidth Lead Evolution of Motion Networks”. When it says “IEEE-1588, which has been referred to as a transparent clock…” note that “transparent clock” refers to the new version of IEEE-1588. The current version uses boundary clocks which are not as jitter-free as transparent clocks. Guess who introduced the concept of “transparent clocks” to improve the jitter? We explain the difference in our PROFINET one-day training classes. The article goes on to say “intelligence in the system is being pushed out toward the end points”. That is one of the reasons PROFINET allows synchronized Device-to-Device and Controller-to-Controller communications, not just Controller-to-Device. (Another reason is that is improves scalability.) “Moving to safety is the next solution step for digital motion networks” is in the right tense (future tense) for most Industrial Ethernet networks, but not for PROFINET. “Moved” is the right tense for PROFINET. We have many safety installations using PROFINET, even PROFINET safety over wireless.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m on a flight for Chicago to change planes and head to Germany. I’ll try to give you news from Hanover Fair throughout next week.