Safety Road Report

We interrupt this series on the General Assembly Meeting, to talk about the one-day training classes.  Seems I haven’t had a chance to talk about recent PROFINET classes in San Jose and Kansas City and I’m headed out to Cleveland now for another one. We continually tweak the classes based on attendee feedback.  Few people…

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Register Early for Classes

For the second time this year we’ve had to close registration for our free one-day training classes.  Philly filled up with 140 registrations and the hotel had no more space available.  Our apologies if you could not get in.  We do have a PROFIBUS class on June 3 in the Hartford, CT area.  I hope…

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IO-Link, a natural complement to PROFINET

I thought I would be reporting this week from Hanover Fair, but… well, the transportation to Europe was disrupted.  It’s not the first time my travel has been disrupted; in fact, not even the worst disruption.  At least I’m stuck at home instead of halfway to somewhere like I was on 9/11/2001.  So, I’ll get…

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You Can’t Say “Free” Training

If you use the word “free” in the subject line of an email, it will probably get flagged as spam.  So we have to get creative to let folks know about our free training classes via email.  “No-fee” usually works. I’m headed to St. Louis tomorrow for Wednesday’s PROFINET one-day training class (seats still available). …

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Wireless Distance to Nashville

In Nashville, I did not answer a question adequately about the ranges for various wireless technologies according to a comment on one Course Evaluation.  Let me remedy that here: The expected distance for the various IEEE802.11 variants (a, b, g, and n) is 100 meters but that will vary based on the antenna used and…

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Training Class Sneak Preview

Our one-day training class schedule for 2010 continues to firm up.  We are revamping the material based on feedback from attendees in 2009.  Here’s a sneak peek at some of the content for 2010: PROFIBUS classes are relatively unchanged, but we’re going to shorten the introduction.  People don’t come to hear about the organization.  We…

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PROFI classes for 2010

Each year at this time, we at PTO scramble to find cities and times for the free PROFIBUS and PROFINET classes we offer throughout North America.  We’ve narrowed all of them down to cities and months.  Now we’re working to get final dates and confirmed venues (we have that for the first couple).  We have…

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Looking Back to Look Ahead

With the PROFINET class in Seattle and the PROFIBUS class in Silicon Valley we concluded our one-day training classes for 2009 this past week.  This provided a good opportunity to consider the feedback we’ve had throughout 2009 in preparation for planning 2010. Almost everyone who attended in 2009 was already using a fieldbus, so the…

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Developer Resources

Again in Minneapolis last week, there were a large number of automation device manufacturers.  It’s clear that more manufacturers are adding PROFINET to their products.  On the Course Evaluations there were a number of requests to provide additional information specific to them in our free PROFINET one-day training classes.  Alas, there is little time available…

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Industrial Ethernet in Motion Control

Today I viewed the Automation World webcast “Deterministic Ethernet for Distributed Motion Control” (sponsored by National Instruments).  It’s now available for viewing. It covers EtherCAT, Ethernet/IP, and PROFINET for motion control.  Irene Bearly of NI handled the PROFINET portion very well.  (She learned at one of our free training classes – you should attend one.) …

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