Safety Discussion
If you are not following some of the discussion groups on LinkedIn, you are missing out on some excellent advice. One in the Automation & Control Engineering group posed the question “Is Modbus suitable for emergency shutdown?” The short answer is no, of course not. But the discussion was interesting anyway. Naturally the topic of…
Read MorePROFINET – Not Pregnant Enough in San Diego
Last week marked the kickoff of our 2014 one-day training classes with the San Diego class. Everything went pretty smoothly considering we have a new approach this year. We jump right into the “How do I” sections after a short introduction. Some of those sections include a behind the scenes look at how PROFINET does…
Read MoreWireless – It’s More Prevalent than You Thought
PROFINET can be connected wirelessly as easily as it can be connected with wires. Of the four kinds of wireless (see previous post), this post is about wireless in discrete automation. Moreover, it’s about places where wireless has already been used. Here are a half dozen application stories that rely on wireless: Fori Automation Story…
Read MoreTwo Points for Safety
Two points for safety – not two points for A safety. The latter might be a Super Bowl prognostication. (It’s not. But I always thought of safeties in American football as rare, but according to Wikipedia: since 1932, a safety has occurred about once a week.) The former (and the blog post title) is a…
Read MoreHappy Birthday to Us
PI North America is celebrating our 20th year. Founded in 1994 as PROFIBUS Trade Organization we shortened our name to PTO when PROFINET came along. Then a couple years ago we changed our name to PI North America to more closely identify with our sister organizations around the world. PI is the international organization and…
Read MorePROFINET for Network Geeks (and Those Who Want to Be)
Networks are usually represented by a seven-layer model, the ISO/OSI Reference Model. In the Ethernet world, the seven layers collapse to four. PROFINET uses all four, but not all the time. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; let’s start at the beginning: the seven layer model. Here’s the seven-layer model with the layers labeled and…
Read MorePROFINET Executive Leadership Forum at ARC Forum
PI North America will be sponsoring a track at the ARC Forum in Orlando in February. This follows our successful PROFINET Executive Leadership Forum in 2012. (See news and blog posts.) In 2012, we corralled an impressive array of speakers on topics of general interest to manufacturers. We followed this with PROFINET-specific user stories. This…
Read MoreSPS/IPC/Drives Show 2013: News Roundup
A look at news from SPS/IPC/Drives Show 2013 around the Internet. PROFIblog posts News Press Conference PI Booth PI Booth 2 Around the Show PI Booth (Behind the Scenes) Sightseeing From PI, a video look around the PI Booth: PROFInews North American Edition From the Industrial Ethernet Book: “sps ipc drives 2013 Show Report: Welcome…
Read MoreSPS/IPC/Drives Show 2013: Sightseeing
Off topic: to get a great price on roundtrip airfare to Germany, I had to stay a Saturday night. So after the show I had time to kill. Carl’s sightseeing photo album: –Carl Henning
Read MoreSPS/IPC/Drives Show 2013: PI Booth (Behind the scenes)
You should watch for Monday’s PROFInews North American Edition to see “official” stories from the PI Booth and the show, but only here on the PROFIblog will you find the story behind the story! So here is a peek behind the scenes: First, to answer the question you’ve been wondering about since my last post:…
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