PROFIblog

Dec 4 2012

SPS 2012: Member Booths

loading… I was able to visit the booths of many of our members, but also found many of them right in the PI booth: Tomorrow’s post: PROFINET! –Carl Henning

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Dec 3 2012

SPS 2012: The PI booth

loading… As usual the PI booth was well done and well attended.  In addition to the reception stand, the presentation theater, and the lounge, the booth sported functional areas for PROFINET PROFIenergy PROFIdrive PROFIsafe Process including PROFIBUS and PROFINET (and others!) IO-Link I’ll cover each of those in individual, subsequent posts, but here is an…

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Nov 30 2012

SPS 2012: The Show

loading… This year I am thankful that I got to spend Thanksgiving in the States and have turkey instead of turkey schnitzel.   Usually for Thanksgiving I’m in Nuremberg, but this year the SPS/IPC/Drives Show was the week after Turkey Day. This is the first in a series of posts on the show.  There is lots…

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Nov 26 2012

Fieldbuses – it’s a competition, not a war

loading… Fieldbuses – it’s a competition, not a war – I said back in 2006 in The Great Thing about Standards is… in defense of competing fieldbus and Industrial Ethernet standards. Now my friend James Powell weighs in with a similar conclusion in Selecting an open digital protocol in process automation. He begins: “If you…

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Nov 19 2012

Four kinds of wireless

loading… PROFIBUS and PROFINET are involved in three of the four kinds of wireless. (Yes, wireless is not one monolithic thing: Wireless or Wireless.) My take on the four kinds: Long-distance like to RTUs Process instrument networks like WirelessHART (PI cooperated with HART Communication Foundation and Fieldbus Foundation to standardize this: Simplified Wireless Communication) Discrete…

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Nov 13 2012

Happy New Year

loading… I know January 1st is a ways off, but we’re looking forward to the 2013 free one-day training class schedule now. We’ve selected the cities we’d like to teach in next year and are working diligently on finding venues. We haven’t announced these anywhere else yet, so here is your “sneak peak” at where…

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Nov 8 2012

PROFINET Project Webinar

loading… If you’ve attended a PROFIBUS one-day training class, you’ve watched as we walked you through a PROFIBUS DP project and then a PROFIBUS PA project. Now we have scheduled a webinar to walk you through PROFINET in the same way. Drawing on my old OEM and System Integrator experience, I’ve created a PROFINET project…

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Nov 6 2012

IT and Automation Synergies

loading… “The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language,” George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said. I said something similar in my first year of blogging: IT and engineering – two organizations separated by common technology. One of my pet peeves then, as it is now, is the…

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Nov 1 2012

The future of PROFINET

loading… To finish up comments from the Minneapolis PROFINET one-day training class, in addition: “Future of PROFINET. What are they working on now?” Good question. PROFINET is stable; the specification has been at version 2.3 for a couple years now. But that does not mean there is not more to do – just not at…

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Oct 30 2012

A chip off the old PROFINET

loading… I’m just back from Minneapolis and a very full PROFINET one-day training class there.  I really enjoy reviewing the Course Evaluations – not because they’re always positive (although there’s a lot of that), but because there is always food for thought.  The comment that caught my eye from Minneapolis: “Talk about the PROFINET chips,…

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