PROFINET of Things: Uptime

Continuing our examination of PROFINET as THE provider of data to the Industrial Internet of Things, we look at additional features of PROFINET – compared to characteristics needed in the IIoT. Uptime is the answer to the mission critical and professional services characteristics of IIoT. Diagnostics Diagnostics provide a means of preventing downtime and recovering…

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PROFINET of Things: Data Access

In the last post, IoT AND IIoT, I positioned PROFINET as foundational to the Industrial Internet of Things which lies in the overlap of IoT and Industrie 4.0.  In the post before that, IoT vs. IIoT, Michael explored the differences between IoT and IIoT.  This post will start to extend that into the PROFINET of…

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IoT AND IIoT

I once tried to make the case that “IIoT is not IoT.”  And there certainly are differences as Michael pointed out in “IoT vs. IIoT.”  But I have finally accepted that IIoT is a subset of IoT even though our Things are used to make the other Things – the Things in the consumer and…

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On the Road Again

With the arrival of August, the end of summer seems much closer.  For PI North America that means we’ll be back on the road teaching PROFINET one-day training classes again.  We have six to go: Chicago Tampa Louisville Detroit Raleigh Seattle Starting on August 27 in Chicago, we have a completely revamped curriculum.  Granted, the…

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It Works Better If You Plug It In

This is a guest post from Volker Goller, European Manager, Real-Time Ethernet Solutions for PI North America member Innovasic. Many years ago I had the pleasure to work with a British engineer. He loved to add some sentence of wisdom to the credentials of the programs he wrote. One phrase, and to me the best…

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Catching the Process Fieldbus 2nd edition

The second edition of this classic work adds valuable information about PROFINET’s role in process automation, supplementing the widely-used PROFIBUS protocol.  With some theory and a lot of practical experience presented, this book is THE place to start learning about PROFIBUS and PROFINET for process. …so it says on the back cover of Catching the…

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5 Lessons about PROFINET You Can Learn from Superheroes

Sometimes I just have to try to make PROFINET even more fun than usual.  So this is a (DC) comic-relief post.  (Bad pun intended.) Speed.  Faster than Flash. PROFINET can achieve update times of 31.25 microseconds.  Even on busy Ethernet backbones PROFINET can hit 250 microseconds with no special hardware.     Wireless.  Invisible in…

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What’s Your Name?

What’s the MAC address of the device you are viewing this from?  The IP Address?  What’s your name?  (My device is called “Carl” since I’m the only Carl in the office.) Wouldn’t it be great if your automation devices had names that included what they were and where they were located?  And you didn’t have…

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PROFINET and IIoT in the News

There was a time when I was an engineer who engineered. Now I’m an engineer who writes (and edits and teaches).  I edit PROFINEWS and write some articles along with Michael Bowne.  And write for the blog.  And write less than 140 characters at a time for twice-a-weekday Tweets.  But wait, there’s more: Here, with…

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