SPS 2016: PI Booth
The PI Booth covered 3,500 sq. ft. and was themed “PROFINET – the Backbone for Industrie 4.0.” More details and a photo gallery will be presented in next Tuesday’s PROFINEWS. Last month’s PROFINEWS showed a 3D rendering of the booth that provides an overview. Here are some photos not included in the upcoming PROFINEWS, including…
SPS 2016: The Show
I’m just back from the SPS/IPC/Drives Show in Nuremberg, Germany. The show attendance and exhibitors were off just a little from last year, but still quite busy. There were 1,601 exhibitors, down from 1,668. Exhibiting companies numbered 523 from 45 countries. The exhibition space totaled 1,315,350 sq. ft. Visitors numbered 63,291. Industrie 4.0 was highlighted…
Low-lying Clouds
I once took visitors to see the Grand Canyon only to find it filled with clouds. Now we find low-lying data clouds, too. The recent ARC post The Power of the Industrial Edge reminds us that with increasing numbers of sensors there will be increasing amounts of data. Transmitted over PROFINET, of course, I would…
MinutePROFINET, the Backstory
Have you seen some of our MinutePROFINET videos? Maybe you should subscribe to the MinutePROFINET Channel; almost 1,000 people have. If you had you would have been alerted to the latest video- MinutePROFINET: Adding PROFINET to Devices: This one is, of course, of special interest to makers of automation devices like PLCs, DCSs, I/O, drives,…
PROFINET Classes in New Cities in 2017
We’ve started selecting cities to visit in 2017 with our free PROFINET one-day training classes. (For insight into how we choose, see our rules in Picking PROFINET Cities.) We plan to visit 16 cities in the US and one in Canada in 2017. We bounce back and forth in the country to stay in southern…
Switched Ethernet Networks for PROFINET Determinism
When you’ve been around industry as long as I have, you expect some knowledge in others as a given. Then you teach a PROFINET one-day training class and the questions remind you that not everyone is starting from the same knowledge base. That was the case in Nashville when someone was puzzled by my comment…
QoS
Sometimes I’m surprised by the questions at our PROFINET one-day training classes. In Detroit students stumbled over QoS (Quality of Service – a standard feature of Ethernet). This means we need to clarify that topic and how PROFINET uses it; here’s is that attempted clarification: QoS uses a field in the Ethernet frame to identify…
Who Ya Gonna Call?
I hear the Ghostbusters song in my head when I read the title (the song from the original movie, not the new one). Anyway… Technology is cool, but it’s the people who Create it Support it Teach it Design with it Install it Commission it Fix it From my vantage point in PI North America…
What Do You Mean by Analytics?
I’ve been on an analytics kick lately with PROFIblog posts Statistics or Engineering which concludes: I think there is a huge opportunity for OEMs and SIs with deep vertical knowledge. They can leverage IIoT, PROFINET, and remote monitoring (and maybe even some magic statistics package) to add value for their customers and income for themselves.…
Is That a Protocol?
Are these protocols: RS-232, Ethernet, OPC UA, PROFINET, MQTT? What is a protocol, specifically a network protocol? Merriam Webster says “a set of conventions governing the treatment and especially the formatting of data in an electronic communications system <network protocols>” This seems incomplete to me, so here’s Techopedia’s definition: “Network protocols are formal standards and…