I always enjoy visiting PI North America members’ booths to see what’s new and talk to folks from the US and from headquarters. There is always news about PROFINET and PROFIBUS.
At the Phoenix Contact booth, PI North America Board of Directors member Mike Rothwell ensured that I got a look at new PROFINET products. PROFI Cloud was being shown. It moves PROFINET messages over the Internet to remote devices. Not real-time or deterministic, but fine for slowly changing variables like ambient weather, logs, and recipes. (Click an image to enlarge.)
I was greeted by name when I walked into the Cisco booth; Albert Mitchell had been in our PROFINET one-day training class in Santa Clara. They were showing their architectural approach.
As expected, there were many PROFINET devices in the Siemens booth (Click an image to enlarge and start slide show.).
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- Siemens Simocode
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- Siemens Power Supply
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- Siemens Motion Control
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- Siemens Network Infrastructure
Our friend Wolfgang Schroeder used the number of PROFINET nodes in an auto plant (10,000) to underscore the need for simplifying network setup.
Turck continues to include their multi-protocol approach in new products, like the compact I/O shown here (their multi-protocol devices recognize which protocol is connected and use it from then on):
New PI North America member Nexcom was also on the Industry 4.0 bandwagon with their IoT devices:
ABB has standardized on PROFINET (and PROFIBUS) in several areas. Here are ABB drives with PROFIsafe built-in.
And here is a collaborative robot called YuMi. I would show you this video anyway because it’s just too cool not to, but there’s purple cable under the covers too.
Next up: IO-Link news and a visit to the Balluff booth.
–Carl Henning