PROFIBUS PA – a Proven Technology
What follows is an excerpt from the recently released White Paper entitled 6 Reasons to Give PROFIBUS PA Another Look. Fieldbus systems have a proven track record that goes back to the early 1990’s, and PROFIBUS has been at the forefront. These systems are deployed throughout the industrial automation landscape in the automotive, machinery manufacturing,…
PROFINET: 6 Little Known Facts and Why They Matter
There are some well-known facts about PROFINET. Most people know them: PROFINET is suitable in the three major application spaces: factory, process, and motion control. PROFINET is fast. PROFINET is complete. Part of what makes PROFINET complete is “the little known things.” Here are six features (“little things”) of PROFINET that you probably were unaware…
6 Reasons to Give PROFIBUS PA Another Look
Fieldbus systems have a proven track record that goes back to the early 1990’s, and PROFIBUS has been at the forefront. With over 50 million nodes installed, thousands of applications, and over a decade’s worth of experience, users are installing PROFIBUS as the network of choice in the chemical, pharmaceutical, food processing, bio-gas, offshore oil production, and mining industries.
Managed Ethernet Switches as PROFINET IO
You can use either a managed or an unmanaged Ethernet switch for PROFINET. Of course, if downtime is expensive for you, you will easily justify using a managed switch. (See past post.) You can use an OPC-SNMP server to read information from a managed switch and display it and alarm it in an HMI. It’s…
Managed or Unmanaged Switch for PROFINET
Should I use a managed switch or an unmanaged switch with PROFINET? Yes. Yes, you should use either a managed or an unmanaged Ethernet switch with PROFINET. An unmanaged switch has no built-in intelligence except to send incoming Ethernet frames out the right port – the port that the destination device is connected to. And…
Five Things You Should Tell Your Boss about PROFINET
What should you tell your boss about PROFINET? Here’s the list, but the five things all come back to saving money. Maybe that’s why we often see PROFINET “accidentally” spelled PROFITNET. Legacy protection: you can update a system without doing a rip-and-replace of the existing fieldbus. Just use a PROFINET proxy to seamlessly integrate the…
Why use an IP-Address?
Did you catch the new White Paper we posted? If not, here it is: PROFINET for network geeks (and those who want to be). Done yet? TL;DR (it’s only four pages!): The White Paper discusses the seven-layer ISO/OSI Reference Model, as well as how in the Ethernet world, these seven layers collapse down into four. It…
PROFINET is Coffee
As part of our PROFINET one-day training classes, we wanted to provide an easy way to remember some of the benefits of PROFINET. We created a mnemonic device so you can remember the benefits. A mnemonic provides an easy way to remember something; I used one in a previous post, PROFINET for Network Geeks (and…
Drive it Safe with PROFINET
PI has released a new animated video showing PROFIsafe in action over PROFINET. (PROFIsafe works over PROFIBUS, too.) It presents the iPar Server for storing safety (and other) parameters. And it presents it more succinctly than I did in a blog post a couple years ago: iPar Server. It also shows a brief look at…
Hanover Fair, News on Condition Monitoring
With the PROFINET specification complete and stable, work continues on application profiles. An application profile standardizes the way data is sent and received to simplify user interaction; the underlying communications protocol is not impacted. As one example, PI is the only organization that has created standards for taking information from the plant floor to production…