Podcasts about hmis

las vegas sharing setup plc schneider electric scada innovation summit hmi hmis

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 3, 2025 39:47 Transcription Available

Shawn Tierney recaps his trip to Schneider Electric’s Innovation Summit Las Vegas in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video. Watch The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 254 Show Notes: Special thanks to Schneider Electric and their Marketing Partners for sponsoring my trip to this year’s Innovation Summit! Below are all the links I mentioned in this episode: Innovation Summit 2025 – All Videos and Images Modicon Edge I/O NTS: Unbox, Setup & Use with Logix First Time Programming a Modicon M262 PLC Schneider's Altivar Solar ATV320 VSD (P218) Pro-face HMIs & IPCs by Schneider Electric (P195) Schneider Altivar Machine Drives (P187) Harmony HMIs and iPCs from Schneider Electric (P176) TeSys Island: Smart Motor Starters from Schneider Electric (P170) Modicon Machine Level PLC Product Line Update (P161) Next Generation Automation with Schneider Electric (P96) Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): coming Until next time, Peace ✌️ If you enjoyed this content, please give it a Like, and consider Sharing a link to it as that is the best way for us to grow our audience, which in turn allows us to produce more content

Die drei großen HMI Challenges

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 27, 2025 42:18

Die drei großen Herausforderungen, die das Automotive HMI in den nächsten Jahren radikal verändern werden: 1. Automatisierung - Wie verändert sich das HMI, wenn Fahraufgaben geteilt werden? - Wie gelingt Situation Awareness bei Level 3 und wie kompensieren wir Kompetenzverluste bei Level 4? - Warum ist Level 2 aus HMI-Sicht der gefährlichste und am schlechtesten gelöste Bereich? 2. Künstliche Intelligenz - Wie macht KI das HMI adaptiver, fluider und kontextsensitiver? - Welche Funktionen sind nur durch KI erstmals überhaupt möglich? - Wie verändert KI die Art, wie wir HMIs entwickeln – von generativem Design bis Predictive Testing? 3. Chinesische HMIs in Europa - Warum sind chinesische Cockpit-Designs beeindruckend, aber nur bedingt europatauglich? - Wie übersetzen wir nicht nur Sprache und Farben, sondern Geschmack, Ästhetik und kulturelle Technikwahrnehmung? - Warum braucht Europa kein lokalisiertes chinesisches HMI, sondern ein neu gedachtes? Ich stelle viele Fragen, von denen wir einige heute beantworten können. Die meisten aber lassen sich nur gemeinsam lösen, in konkreten Projekten, mit echten Nutzern, realen Fahrzeugen und validen Daten. Die Zukunft des HMI wird nicht beobachtet. Sie wird gestaltet. Gemeinsam.

Siemens Sirius Act with Profinet (P253)

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2025 40:33 Transcription Available

Shawn Tierney meets up with Mark Berger of Siemens to learn how Siemens integrates SIRIUS ACT devices (push buttons, selector switches, pilot lights) with PROFINET in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video. Watch The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 253 Show Notes: Special thanks to Mark Berger of Siemens for coming on the show and sending us a sample! Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Thank you for tuning back in to the automation podcast. My name is Shawn Tierney from Insights. And today on the show, we have a special treat. We have Mark Berger back on from Siemens to bring us up to speed on serious act. He’s gonna tell us all about the product, and then we’re even gonna do a small demo and take a look at it working live. So with that said, let’s go ahead and jump into this episode with Mark Burger from Siemens and learn all about their push buttons on PROFINET. Mark, it’s been a while since you’ve been on the show. Thank you for coming back on and agreeing to talk about this. Mark Berger (Siemens): Oh, thank you so much. I truly appreciate you letting me be on. I appreciate your channel, and I enjoy watching it. And I’m excited to show you some of this great technology. So I’ve got, the PowerPoint up here. We’ll just do a simple PowerPoint to kinda give you an overview, and then we’ll dive into the hardware. Shawn Tierney (Host): Appreciate it. Thank you. Mark Berger (Siemens): No problem. So as we stated, the Sirius X over PROFINET, let me emphasize that, the, actuators, the push buttons, the estops, the selector switches, they are all standard, when you use these. So if you have those on the shelf, the only thing that PROFINET does is that it adds, removes the normal contact blocks and adds the PROFINET, terminal blocks on the back. So every all the actuators that we’re showing are just standard actuators for the 22 millimeter push button line. So easy to use, modern design, performance and action, and extremely rugged and flexible. The, 22 millimeter is out of the box IP 69 k, which for those who are maybe in the food and beverage, verticals would understand what that is. And that’s for direct hose down, wash down, able to handle a high pressure washing and not able to leak past the actuator into the panel. So IP 69 k is a a great place for dust and wash down and hosing and where you’re having rain and so forth, to be able to protect for a keep of any, water passing into the panel. So introduction wise, it’s, the PROFINET push buttons for us. It it is, again, the same actuators, the same, connections, and so forth, but what we’re going to exchange is the terminal blocks, for it. So on there, I stated it’s, IP 69 k is standard. You don’t need any, extra covers forward or anything to fulfill that requirement, But it’s, it’s insensitive to dust and oil and caustic solutions, you know, like citric acid where you’re hosing down some stainless steel parts and so forth. Now what we have here is, changing out the terminal blocks that have wiring. So usually on a push button, you have two wires coming in, and then you have, for illuminated, you have two wires coming in and so forth and going out. And after you have 20 or 30 push buttons or 10 or 15 push buttons, you’ve got a substantial little bit of wiring or cabling that will be passing from the door over into the main cabinet of your control cabinet. What we’re going to do with PROFINET push buttons is we’re going to eliminate all that wiring. And then in addition, eliminate the input and output cards that you will need for your PLC and take it down to a pro, Ethernet cable, an r j r j 45 cable, and then down to a 24 volts. And that’s all that will pass from the cabinet onto the door where you’re mounting your push buttons. So, huge, safe and cost of wires. We’re reducing all the wire outlay. And, you know, back in the day when I build panels, it was an art how you got all the wires all nice and pretty and got them laid out and wire tied them down and so forth and just made the a piece of art on the backside. And then, it it was all done. You got it all wired. And then, of course, there was somebody that said, hey. We forgot to add another selector switch. So you had to go back and cut all that stuff and redo the whole layout and so forth. So with PROFINET, it’s extremely flexible and easily, to adapt to if you need something, more because you’re not taking all that wiring back to the panel, passing it across the hinge of the door and so forth. It is also with a safety PLC. You do have PROFIsafe, so we can do estops on the door as you can see here in the picture, but then we can do non safe applications also. So today, we’ll be just doing some non safe applications. And then the communications again is PROFINET. But then also just to touch real quick, we do have it on IO Link and on Aussie with our push buttons. So what is SiriusACT with PROFINET? There we go. So what you have is the first, block or interface module that you put on the back of your push button, that’s where the, Ethernet is plugged into and your 24 volts is plugged into. And then after that, subsequently, then the push buttons that you have is that you have what we call a terminal module. And in between the, the interface module to a terminal module or from terminal module to terminal module, you can go up to one meter of cabling, and it’s a ribbon cable. And we’ll show that here shortly. And then if you have up to we can do up to 20 push buttons, terminal modules, with a total of 21 push buttons. And then so from the first interface module all the way to the last push button, you can go up to 10 meters. And then it gives, again, 24 volt power supply for it. And we have, again, as I stated, as nonsafe, talking just PROFINET, and then the safety version, talking PROFISAFE on PROFINET. So serious act, we can go up on the the safety up to seal three and performance level e as an echo. We have, again, the the standard interface module without safety. You have the PLC, the interface module, and then the subsequent terminal modules for it. And then the cabling that goes from the interface module to out to the terminal modules is a simple ribbon cable that comes into the back of the terminal modules. The only tool that you need is simply it’s just a screwdriver, and, you, push it into the terminal module, push down. It uses, vampire connections, insulation displacement, vampire connections, and you push it down in. There’s no stripping of the wires. There’s no mix up. The indicator you can see on the wires here in a minute will show you that there’s a little red line that shows you, which way it, enters into the terminal, and then that’s it. It’s very straightforward. It’s, very simple with tools. And, as I stated, it’s, just like a normal push button that you’d put on, but then we’re gonna add, remove the contact block and add the terminal module or the interface module in the place of the contact block. Just to emphasize again, we can do PROFISAFE on, with a safety PLC and a safety controller, and we can give you all the safety, requirements for the either the ISO or the IEC specifications for safety out there in the field. Here’s some of the part numbers. First one, of course, is the interface module, and that has the ability to do PROFIsafe. It has also, additionally, four digital inputs, one digital output, and then one analog input. And we’ll talk about that a little bit more just in a few minutes. And then the non safe version, 24 volts. You have a, two versions of this one, one with just with just a standard, 24 volts input, but then there’s an additional one that has the four digital in, one digital out, and one analog in. So there’s two different part numbers. One where you don’t need the additional, digital inputs and outputs and analog, and then the and then the part number with the the additional inputs and outputs. But the safety one comes there’s no other version, just the one. Then you have what we call the terminal modules, and there’s three versions. One terminal module is just the command module only. It’s mounted with two mechanical signaling blocks to signal. So you have two contact blocks built in. Then you have one that’s a terminal module with the command, the terminal blocks, and then also an integrated LED. And then you can put what color you want the LED to be, and you can see there the the part number changed for red, blue, amber, so on. And then you have a just an LED module to where it’s no contactors. It’s just LED. And, I think with our demo we’re gonna show today, we’re just gonna show the contact block and LED module and only the LED module today. There’s some other, accessories with the safety. There’s a memory module to where that you, is all the configurations are put into the memory module, and something happens to that interface module. Everything’s put in there, the IP address, the configuration, and everything. If something gets broke and so forth or you have to replace it, you pull the memory module out, put the new terminal or interface module in, plug in the memory module, cycle the power, and it’s up and running. All the configurations, the IP address, everything’s already there. And then on the interface module, it does not come with an LED, so you’re required to buy this this, LED right here if you need it for it, and that’s what you use for the interface module. And then, of course, the ribbon cable that goes between the interface module to the terminal block or terminal module and terminal module and so forth come in five meter length and 10 meter length. K. So what’s it provide for you? Well, the benefits are, I’ll I’ll be very blunt. If it’s just one or two buttons on a panel, it won’t be that cost effective. Yes. We’re reducing the IO, the IO inputs and outputs, but for the savings, it’s not the best. Now when you get up to about three or four push buttons, then that cost saving is, very realized. Now when you go up to 20 push buttons, yes, you’re saving a lot of money, especially in the IO cards that you’re not gonna be required to have. And then, of course, all the wiring and the labor, getting it all wired up and doing all the loop checks to make sure that when you push this button, it’s wired into the right terminal block on the IO card, so on and so forth. So about, the break is about two to three push buttons to where it will become very cost effective for you to use it. But like I said yesterday, without PROFINET push buttons, it was all the wiring you brought across and putting them into all your IO cards and so forth. And now with PROFINET push buttons, all that goes away, and all you’re bringing across is an Ethernet cable and 24 volts positive and 24 volts negative across that hinge into the door. And that’s it. K. And then emphasizing again, we can do PROFIsafe and those, push buttons and estops. The estop can be part of your safety circuit and give you the, safety levels that you’re required from either sill and or performance level safeties depending on the specification, IEC, or ISO that you’re following within your plant. K? And then hardware configuration. Now this is where we step into reduction of engineering and helping you guys get going, quicker and making sure engineering is done properly. You know, back in the day, we’d wire up all the wires, coming from the push buttons, you know, a selector switch, a start button, stop button, indicator lights, and so forth. And and all those wires sometimes just, you know, the what we’re working with, all the wires look the same. You’ve put labels on them. You may have labeled it wrong, and you wired into an input card or an output card. So there’s some time where you’re over there doing some loop checks where you’re trying to say, yes. That’s coming into input byte dot bit, and that should be the selector switch. Well, with the PROFINET push buttons, we’re able to not have to worry about that, and we’re gonna demonstrate that just here in a minute. But you also have a full lineup of the push buttons coming into portal so that you can see the lineup and verify that it is the parts that you want. In TI portal, you can see that, of course, the first, button is the interface module, and then sequentially is the terminal modules that have either just contactors, LED and contactors, or just LEDs. And we’ll we’ll show that just here momentarily. But it’s all integrated into TIA portal. It has a visual representation of all the push buttons, and it’s simple and fast, to, configure. We’ll show you that here in just a moment. And there’s no addressing, for it. So some of the stuff that you have out there, you have addressing, making sure what the address is right, and so on. This is a standardized data management, and it’s extremely time saving and engineering saving for, the user. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, let me ask you a question about that. If the snow addressing, do the items show up, in the order that they’re wired? In other words, you know, you’re daisy chasing the you’re you’re going cable to cable from device to device. Is that the order that they show up? Mark Berger (Siemens): That’s exactly right. Shawn Tierney (Host): Okay. Mark Berger (Siemens): So if you don’t know which ones are what, you just literally put run your hand from the interface module, follow that cable, and the next one that will be visually saw in portal will be the one that it lands on first. Perfect. And then there’s a cable that leaves that one and goes into the next one, daisy chained, and then that’s what’ll be represented in that lineup. And here in just a minute, we’ll we’ll show that. Alright. Thank you for that question. Okay. Now once I got it wired up, how do I know that I got it wired properly? And we’re gonna show that here in just a minute. But just graphically wise, you have the ability to see if it is all wired up. You do not need to plug it into the PLC. This all it needs is 24 volts. The PLC can come later and plugging it in later and so forth. There’s no programming. This all comes out of the box. So once you plug it in, if all on the backside looking at the terminal blocks and the daisy chain ribbon cable, if it’s all green, you wired it up properly, and it’s working properly. But then if you see a red light flashing either at the terminal module because that will that will bubble up to the terminal module. So if you have a problem somewhere pardon me, the interface module. If you have some problem with the terminal modules, a push button like number two or three or four, it will bubble up into the, interface module to let it know, hey. We got a problem. Can you look to see where it’s at? And as you see here, we have maybe a device that’s defective. And so it bubbles up into the interface module to let you know, and a red light lets you know that we have maybe a defective module. You know, something hammered it pretty hard, or, it may have been miswired. Then the second one down below, we’ve got a wiring error to where you don’t have the green lights on the back and everybody else’s there’s no green light shown. That means you have a wiring error. Or if everything works great, it’s green lights across, but then the next level of this is is my push button working? So then we you’ll push or actuate the push button or actuate the selector switch, and the green light will flash to let you know that that terminal module or interface module is working properly. And we’ve done our our, loop checks right there before we’ve even plugged it into the PLC or your programmer has come out and sat down and worked with it. We can prove that that panel is ready to roll and ready to go, and you can set it aside. And if you got four or five of the same panel, you can build them all up, power it up, verify that it’s all green lights across the board. It is. Great. Set it down. Build up another one and go on from there. So it shows you fast fault detection without any additional equipment or additional people to come in and help you show you that. When we used to do loop checks, usually had somebody push the button, then yell at the programmer, hey. Is this coming in at I zero dot zero? Yeah. I see it. Okay. Or then he pushed another one. Hey. Is this coming in on I 0.one? No. It’s coming in on i0. Three. So there was that two people and then more time to do that loop check or the ring out as some people have called it. So in this case, you don’t need to do that, and you’ll see why here in just a minute. And then, again, if we do have an interface module that, maybe it got short circuited or something hit it, it you just pull the ePROM out, plug it into the new one, bring in the ribbon cable, and cycle the power, and you’re up and running. Alright. And then this is just some of the handling options of how it handles the data, with the projects and so forth, with basic setups, options that you can be handling with this, filling bottles. What we wanna make sure to understand is that if maybe push buttons, you can pick push buttons to work with whatever project you want it to do. So if you have six push buttons out there, two of them are working on one, bottle filling, and then the rest of them are working on the labeling, you can separate those push buttons. Even though that they’re all tied together via PROFINET, you can use them in different applications across your machine. Shawn Tierney (Host): You’re saying if I have multiple CPUs, I could have some buttons in light work with CPU one, PLC one, and some work with PLC two? Mark Berger (Siemens): Yep. There’s handling there. There’s programming in the backside that needs to be done, but, yes, that can happen. Yep. Oh, alright. So conclusion, integrated into TI portal. We’re gonna show that here in a minute. So universal system, high flexibility with your digital in, digital outs, analogs, quick and easy installation, one man, one hand, no special tooling, and then substantially reducing the wiring and labor to get it going. And then, again, integrated safety if, required for the your time. So with that, let’s, switch over to TI portal. So I’ve already got a project started. I just called it project three. I’ve already got a PLC. I’ve got our, new g, s seven twelve hundred g two already in. And then what I’m gonna do is I’ve, already built up the panel. And, Shawn, if you wanna show your panel right here. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. Let me go ahead and switch the camera over to mine. And so now everybody’s seeing my overhead. Now do you want me to turn it on at this point? It’s off. Yeah. Yeah. Mark Berger (Siemens): Let’s do it. Shawn Tierney (Host): Gonna turn it on, and all the lights came on. So we have some push buttons and pilot lights here, but the push buttons are illuminated, and now they’ve all gone off. Do you want me to show the back now? Mark Berger (Siemens): Yep. So what we did there is that we just showed that the LEDs are all working, and that’s at the initial powering up of the 24 volts. Now we’re gonna switch over and, you know, open up the cabinet and look inside, and now we’re looking on the backside. And if you remember in the PowerPoint, I said that we’d have all green lights, the everything’s wired properly. And as you look, all the terminal modules all have green lights, and so that means that’s all been wired properly. If you notice, you see a little red stripe on the ribbon cable. That’s a indication. Yep. To show you that. And then if you look on the on the out on the, the interface module, Shawn, there’s it says out right there at the bottom. Yeah. There’s a little dot, and that dot means that’s where the red stripe goes, coming out. So that little dot means that’s where the red stripe comes. Yep. Right there. And that’s how it comes out. And then if you look just to the left a little bit, there’s another, in, and there’d be a red dot underneath that ribbon cable showing you how the red the the red goes into it. Notice that everything’s clear, so you can see that the wire gets engaged properly all the way in. And then all you do is take a screwdriver and push down, and then the vent, comes in. The insulation displacement comes in and, and, makes the connections for you. So there’s no strip tie cable stripping tools or anything special for doing that. Another item, just while we’re looking, if you look in the bottom left hand corner of that terminal module, you see kind of a a t and then a circle and then another t. That’s an indicator to let you know that that’s two contactors and an LED that you have on the backside. Shawn Tierney (Host): We’re talking about right here? Mark Berger (Siemens): Yep. Yep. Right there. Shawn Tierney (Host): Okay. Mark Berger (Siemens): So that’s an indicator to tell you what type of terminal block it is a terminal, block that it is. That’s two contactors and LED. And then if you look at one in the bottom left hand corner, there’s just a circle. That means you just have an LED. So you have some indicators to show you what you’re looking at and so forth. So today, we’re just using the two, LED only, and then we’re doing the contactor and LED combination. I I don’t have one there on your demo that’s just the contactor. So Shawn Tierney (Host): Now you were telling me about these earlier. Yeah. Mark Berger (Siemens): So yeah. The so if you look there on that second row of the terminal blocks, you have a UV and an AI, and I’ll show that in the schematic here in just a little bit, but there, that is a 10 volt output. If you put a 250 ohm or 250 k ohm, potentiometer and then bring that signal back into AI, you have an analog set point that comes in for it that will automatically be scaled zero to 1,000 count or zero to 10 volts. Mhmm. And then you can use that for a speed reference for a VFD. And it’s already there. All you have to do, you don’t have to scale it or anything. You can put it towards, you know, okay. Zero to 1,000 count means zero to 500 PSI or or zero to 100 feet per second on a conveyor belt, and I’m I’m just pulling numbers out. But that’s the only real scalability scaling you have to do. So it’ll be a zero to 1,000 count is what you’ll see instead of, like, yep. Then you got four digital ins that you can use and then a one digital out. Now the four, I, kinda inquired wife just four, but let’s say that you have a four position joystick. You could wire all four positions into that interface module, and then the output could be something else for a local horn that you want or something to that case with it. So you in addition to the, push buttons, you also have a small, distribution IO block right there in the in your panel. Shawn Tierney (Host): Which is cool. Yeah. I mean, maybe yeah. Like you said, maybe you have something else on the panel that doesn’t fit in with, you know, this line of push buttons and pilot lights like a joystick. Right? And that makes a lot of sense. You were saying too, if I push the button, I can test to see if it’s working. Mark Berger (Siemens): Correct. So if you yep. Go right ahead. Shawn Tierney (Host): I’m pushing that middle one right there. You can see it blinking now. Mark Berger (Siemens): And that tells you that the contacts have been made, and it’s telling you that the contacts work properly. Shawn Tierney (Host): And now I’m pushing the one below it. So that shows me that everything’s working. The contacts are working, and we’re good to go. Mark Berger (Siemens): Yep. Everything’s done. We’ve done the loop checks. We know that this is ready to be plugged into the PLC and handed off to whomever is going to be, programming the PLC and bring it in, in which means that we’ll go to the next step in the TI portal. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. Let me switch back to you, and we’re seeing your TI portal now. Mark Berger (Siemens): Awesome. Okay. So I’ve got the PLC. I’ve plugged it in to if if I needed an Ethernet switch or I’ve plugged it directly into the PLC. Now I have just built up that panel. I haven’t had anything, done with it for an IP address because it is a TCP IP protocol. So we need to do a IP address, but it’s on PROFINET. And then I’m gonna come here to online access, and I wanna see that I can see it out there that I’m talking to it. So I’m gonna do update accessible devices. It’s gonna reach out via my, Ethernet port on my laptop. And then there’s our g two PLC and its IP address. So that’s that guy right here. Mhmm. And then I have something out there called accessible devices, and then this is its MAC address. So what I and I just have those two items on the network, but, you know, you could have multiples as, you know, with GI portal. We can put an entire machine in one project. So I come here and drop that down, and I go to online diagnostics. I I go online with it, but I don’t have really a lot here to tell me what’s going on or anything yet. But I come here, and I say assign IP address. And I call one ninety two, one sixty eight, zero zero zero, and zero ten zero, and then our usual 255, two fifty five, two fifty five, and then I say assign IP address. Give it a second. It’s gonna go out and tell it, okay. You’re it. Now I wanna see if it took, and you look right there, it took. And I’m I’m kinda anal, so I kinda do it again just to verify. Yep. Everything’s done. It’s got an IP address. Now I’m gonna come up, and I’m going to go to my project, and I’m gonna switch this to new network view. Here’s my PLC. I’m gonna highlight my project. Now there’s two ways I can go about it, and I’m sure, Shawn, you’ve learned that Siemens allows you to kinda do it multiple ways. I could come in here and go into my field devices, and I could come into my commanding and interface modules, and I’d start building my push button station. But we’re gonna be a little oh and ah today. We’re gonna highlight the project. I’m gonna go to online, and I’m gonna come down here to hardware detection and do PROFINET devices from network. Brings up the screen to say, hey. I want you to go out and search for PROFINET industrial Ethernet. Come out via my, NIC card from my laptop, and I want you to start search. Shawn Tierney (Host): For those of you who watched my previous episodes doing the e t 200 I o, this is exactly the same process we used for that. Mark Berger (Siemens): Yep. And I found something out there that I know I gave the IP address, but it doesn’t have a PROFINET name yet. So that’s okay. I’ve I got the IP address. We’ll worry about the PROFINET name. So we’ll hide check mark this, and this could be multiple items. Shawn Tierney (Host): Mhmm. Mark Berger (Siemens): K. So now add device. Shawn Tierney (Host): And this is the sweet part. Mark Berger (Siemens): And right here, it’s done. It went out, interrogated the interface module, and said, okay. Are you there? Yep. I’m here. Here’s my IP address. And it also shared with it all of come in here, double click on it now. Shawn Tierney (Host): The real time saver. Yep. Mark Berger (Siemens): Yep. And then now here’s all the push buttons in your thing. And let me zoom that out. It’s at 200%. Let’s go out to a 100. And now it already interrogated the interface module and all the terminal modules to tell me what’s in my demo. Yep. And again, as you stated in your questions, how do I know which one’s the next one? You just saw the ribbon cable Mhmm. And then it brings you so forth and so on. So that’s done. We’re good. I’m gonna go back to my network view, and I’m gonna say, hey. I want you to communicate via PROFINET to there, which I’m done. And then it also gives you here’s the PLC that you’re gonna do because, you know, if we have a big project, we may have four or five of these stations, and you wanna know which PLC is the primary PLC on it. And then we’ve done that. I’m going to quickly just do a quick compile. And next, I’m gonna come here. I’m gonna click here. Now I could just do download and and let the PROFINET name, which is here, go into it. But I’m gonna right click, and I’m gonna say assign device name and say update list. It’s gonna go interrogate the network. Takes a second. No device name assigned. No PROFINET name. So this is how we do that time determinism with PROFINET. So I’m gonna highlight it, and I say assign the name, and it’s done. Close. So now it has a PROFINET name and IP address. So now I’m able to go in here and hit download and load. And we’re going to stop because we are adding hardware, so we are putting the CPU in stop and hit finish. Now I always make sure I’m starting the CPU back up and then hit finish. And then I’m gonna go online, go over here and show network view, and go online. And I got green balls and green check marks all over the board, so I’m excited. This works out. Everything’s done. But now what about the IO? So now your programmer is already talking to it, but now I need to know what the inputs and outputs are. So go back offline, double click here, and then I’m gonna just quickly look at a couple things. The interface modules IO tags are in a different spot than the terminal modules. So just a little note. It’s right here. If you double click on integrated I LED, you click here and then go to properties and say IO tags. There it lists all of the inputs and outputs. So it comes here. But if I do a terminal module, click here, then once you just click on it in general oops. Sorry. In general, it’s right here in the IO addressing. There’s where it starts start the bytes, but then I come here to tags, and then here’s the listing. So the the the programs automatically already allocated the byte and the bit for each of these guys. So if I click there, there, click there, there’s it there, onward and upward. Now notice that the byte so if I click on position four, it is three. So it’s one one less because the base zero versus here, it’s five. Just give me a little bit of a so if you look in here, all that starts at I four dot zero. I four dot zero. So k. So that’s there. So I’m gonna come here. I’m gonna go to the selector switch for this, and I’ve called it s s one, and that’s input two dot zero. Then I’m gonna click here, and I’m gonna call this green push button. Notice there’s two inputs because I have one contactor here, one contactor there, and 30 and 31. So then what I’m gonna do is that I’m going to go over here to the PLC, and I’m gonna go to and it’s updated my PLC tag table. There you go. It’s in there. So then I’m gonna grab that guy. I’m gonna because portal pushes you to use two monitors. I’m gonna come here, go to the main OB, and then I’m gonna just grab a normally open contact, drag it on, drop it, put it in there we go. And then I’m gonna grab selector switch and drop that right there, and grab green LED and drop that right there, and then close that out and compile. And everybody’s happy. I’m gonna download and say yes. Okay. And then I’m gonna go online. Alright. So it’s waiting in for me to switch that, and there you go. And if you wanna see my screen there, Shawn, that’s the green light is turned on. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. Let me switch over to Okay. Bring up your, alright. And could you switch it back off now? Mark Berger (Siemens): Yeah. No problem. Yep. So there we go. We switch it off. We switch it on. Now I wanna show you something kinda cool. If I turn that off and I come back here and I go offline Mhmm. I have a indicator light that needs to flash to let the operator know that there’s something here I need you to attend to. So we used to put in some type of timer. Right? Mhmm. Shawn Tierney (Host): Mhmm. Mark Berger (Siemens): And so what we would do here instead of that, I’m gonna come back down here to my tab and go to the hardware config. I’m gonna double click here. I’m gonna go to module parameters, and I’m gonna drop this down, and I’m gonna put it at two hertz. Also, just to point out, I can also do a normally open contact and a normally closed contact and switch them. You see right here. Cool. And I can control the brightness of the LED if it has an LED, and it’s all hard coded into it. So once I’ve done that, do a quick compile. I’m I mean, you know, I’ve always compile and then do download. Mhmm. Mhmm. So we’re gonna download that and hit load and finish. K. Here we go. Turn that on, and now it’s flashing. Shawn Tierney (Host): That’s great. So you have a timer built in. If you need to flash, you don’t have to go get a clock bit or create your own timer. Plus, if it’s a button, you can change the contacts from normally open to normally closed. That is very cool. Mark Berger (Siemens): Yep. And that is PROFINET push buttons. As I stated let me quickly pull that up. Remember, you pointed out just a few minutes ago, here is the wiring diagram for that. So here’s the back of that with the terminal blocks. And you come down here, and it shows you that you just wire in that, variable resistor or a potentiometer. And you see m and you there’s the 10 volts, and then the signal comes into a. And then that guy is right here. Excellent. So if you come here, you go to properties and IO tags, and it comes in on I 60 fours and input and IO tags, and then I could call that a pot. Yeah. And now you have a potentiometer that you can use as a a speed reference for your VFD. That is very cool. Engineering efficiency, we reduced wiring. We don’t have all the IO cards that is required, and we have the diagnostics. Emphasize that each of these here, their names, you can change those if you would like because this is your diagnostic string. So if something goes wrong here, then it would come up and say commanding. So you double click here, and we go here to general, and it’ll say commanding and underscore LED module two, or you can you can call that start conveyor p b. And then that would change this. Now see this changed it. This would be your diagnostic string to let you know if if that button got damaged or is not working properly. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I wanted to ask you too. If I had, let’s say I needed two potentiometers on the front of the enclosure, could I put another interface module in the system? Even if it didn’t have any push buttons on it or pilots on it, could I just put it in there to grab, some more IO? Mark Berger (Siemens): Yep. Yes, sir. I have a customer that he uses these as small little IO blocks. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. I mean, if you just needed a second pot, it might make sense to buy another interface module and bring it into that than buying an analog card. Right? Assuming the resolution and everything was app you know, correct for your application, but that’s very cool. I you know, it it really goes in line with all the videos we’ve done recently looking at e t 200 I o, all the different flavors and types. And when you walk through here, you know, I’m just so especially, thankful that it reads in all the push buttons and their positions and pilot lights. Because if you have this on your desk, you’re doing your first project, you can save a lot of dragging and dropping and searching through the hardware catalog just by reading it in just like we can read in a rack of, like, e t 200 SPIO. Mark Berger (Siemens): Yep. Engineering efficiency, reducing wiring, reducing time in front of the PC to get things up and running. You saw how quickly just a simple push button and a and, you know, again, a simple start and turn that on and off the races we went. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, Mark, I really wanna thank you. Was there anything else that we wanted to cover before we close out the show? Mark Berger (Siemens): Nope. That’s just about it. I think, we got a little bit to have your your viewers, think about for it. So I appreciate the time, and I really appreciate you allowing me to show this. I think this is a a really engineering efficiency way of going about using our push buttons and and, making everybody’s projects in a timely manner and getting everything done and having cost savings with it. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, and I wanna thank you for taking the time out of your busy day, not only to put together a little demo like you have for me to use here in the school, but also to come on and show our audience how to use this. And I wanna thank our audience. This was actually prompted from one of you guys out there at calling in or writing in. I think it was on YouTube somewhere and saying, hey. Could you cover the PROFINET push buttons from Siemens? I didn’t even know they had them. So thanks to the viewers out there for your feedback that helps guide me on what you wanna see. And, Mark, this would not be possible if it wasn’t for your expertise. Thank you for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. Mark Berger (Siemens): Thank you, Shawn. All the best. Thank you. Shawn Tierney (Host): I hope you enjoyed that episode. And I wanna thank Mark for taking time out of his busy schedule to put together that demo and presentation for us and really bring us up to speed on Sirius X. And I wanna thank the user out there who put a comment on one of my previous videos that said, hey. Did you know Siemens has this? Because I wouldn’t have known that unless you said that. So thank you to all you. I try to read the comments every day or at least every two days, and so I appreciate you all wherever you are, whether you’re on YouTube, the automation blog, Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and wherever you’re listening to this, I just wanna thank you for tuning in. And now with next week being Thanksgiving, we’ll have a pause in the automation show, then we have some more shows in December, and we’re already filming episodes for next year. So I’m looking forward to, releasing all those for you. And if you didn’t know, I also do another podcast called the History of Automation. Right now, it’s only available on video platforms, so YouTube, LinkedIn, and the automation blog. Hopefully, someday we’ll also do it on, audio as well. But, we’re meeting with some of the really legends in automation who worked on some of the really, you know, just really original PLCs, original HMIs, up and through, like, more modern day systems. So it’s just been a blast having these folks on to talk about the history of automation. And so if you need something to listen to during Thanksgiving week or maybe during the holidays, check out the history of automation. Again, right now, it’s only available on YouTube, the automation blog, and LinkedIn, but I think you guys will enjoy that. And I wanna wish you guys, since I won’t be back next week, a very happy Thanksgiving. I wanna thank you always for tuning in and listening, and I also wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. Until next time, Peace ✌️ If you enjoyed this content, please give it a Like, and consider Sharing a link to it as that is the best way for us to grow our audience, which in turn allows us to produce more content

spotify history thanksgiving ai sharing pc engineering mac google podcasts ob ip led automation aussie gi nic powerpoint io takes uv iso assuming siemens tia sirius cpu psi leds emphasize plc ethernet cpus tcp ip iec scada plcs hmi vfd eprom hmis spio mark berger

Industrial Cybersecurity: The Gap Between Investment and Cyber Event Prevention

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2025 33:54

Podcast: Industrial Cybersecurity InsiderEpisode: Industrial Cybersecurity: The Gap Between Investment and Cyber Event PreventionPub date: 2025-10-14Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationIn this episode, Craig and Dino address why manufacturers still suffer incidents after spending millions on OT security tools. They discuss how to convert those investments into measurable risk reduction. You'll learn why buying tools isn't a strategy. Get insights into how to validate asset visibility on the floor (not just the network map), practical ways to reduce alert fatigue and assign ownership, how to close the OT incident response gap by connecting SOC to operators, the realities of flat Layer 2 networks and undocumented zones, how to handle technical debt at scale (EOL firmware, unpatched HMIs, safe upgrade paths), and why "everyone is responsible" often means no one is. Expect candid discussion on alert fatigue, flat networks, and the human constraints driving today's gaps, plus a concrete checklist for building a coalition that actually works to protect production environments.Chapters00:00:00 – Why incidents still happen after major OT cyber spend00:02:30 – Tools vs. outcomes: underusing capabilities and alert fatigue00:05:50 – Who owns plant‑floor cyber? Why CISOs, CIOs, OEMs, and SIs talk past each other00:08:10 – Define the use case before tuning sensors and policies00:10:00 – OT IR is missing: operators are the first responders00:11:20 – Network reality check: flat L2, VLAN gaps, and unmanaged switches00:13:30 – Change management and patching in OT: risk, downtime, and technical debt00:15:20 – Skills and staffing: the silver tsunami and "jack of all trades" constraints00:18:00 – What outside partners can and cannot do in plants00:21:00 – Visibility blind spots: validating coverage with floor‑level walkthroughs00:24:00 – It won't stick without a coalition: getting plant managers, engineering, OEMs, and SOC alignedLinks And Resources:Want to Sponsor an episode or be a Guest? Reach out here.Industrial Cybersecurity Insider on LinkedInCybersecurity & Digital Safety on LinkedInBW Design Group CybersecurityDino Busalachi on LinkedInCraig Duckworth on LinkedInThanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Industrial Cybersecurity Insider? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube to leave us a review!The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Industrial Cybersecurity Insider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Human-machine interfaces begin at the electrical cabinet

Control Intelligence

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 13, 2025 9:08

Industrial enclosures and human-machine interfaces (HMIs) represent a pivotal advancement in automation and control. These integrated systems enable seamless interaction between operators and complex machinery, offering robust protection for sensitive electronics and user-friendly access to real-time data. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Charles Palmer, editor in chief Mike Bacidore talks about the relationship between enclosures and HMIs.

industrial cabinet electrical interfaces human machine hmis charles palmer

Software Toolbox: OPC Server, Router, DataHub and more (P248)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 8, 2025 57:48 Transcription Available

Shawn Tierney meets up with Connor Mason of Software Toolbox to learn their company, products, as well as see a demo of their products in action in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video. Watch The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 248 Show Notes: Special thanks to Software Toolbox for sponsoring this episode so we could release it “ad free!” To learn about Software Toolbox please checkout the below links: TOP Server Cogent DataHub Industries Case studies Technical blogs Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Welcome back to the automation podcast. My name is Shawn Tierney with Insights and Automation, and I wanna thank you for tuning back in this week. Now this week on the show, I meet up with Connor Mason from Software Toolbox, who gives us an overview of their product suite, and then he gives us a demo at the end. And even if you’re listening, I think you’re gonna find the demo interesting because Connor does a great job of talking through what he’s doing on the screen. With that said, let’s go ahead and jump into this week’s episode with Connor Mason from Software Toolbox. I wanna welcome Connor from Software Toolbox to the show. Connor, it’s really exciting to have you. It’s just a lot of fun talking to your team as we prepared for this, and, I’m really looking forward to because I just know in your company over the years, you guys have so many great solutions that I really just wanna thank you for coming on the show. And before you jump into talking about products and technologies Yeah. Could you first tell us just a little bit about yourself? Connor Mason (Guest): Absolutely. Thanks, Shawn, for having us on. Definitely a pleasure to be a part of this environment. So my name is Connor Mason. Again, I’m with Software Toolbox. We’ve been around for quite a while. So we’ll get into some of that history as well before we get into all the the fun technical things. But, you know, I’ve worked a lot with the variety of OT and IT projects that are ongoing at this point. I’ve come up through our support side. It’s definitely where we grow a lot of our technical skills. It’s a big portion of our company. We’ll get that into that a little more. Currently a technical application consultant lead. So like I said, I I help run our support team, help with these large solutions based projects and consultations, to find what’s what’s best for you guys out there. There’s a lot of different things that in our in our industry is new, exciting. It’s fast paced. Definitely keeps me busy. My background was actually in data analytics. I did not come through engineering, did not come through the automation, trainings at all. So this is a whole new world for me about five years ago, and I’ve learned a lot, and I really enjoyed it. So, I really appreciate your time having us on here, Shawn Tierney (Host): Shawn. Well, I appreciate you coming on. I’m looking forward to what you’re gonna show us today. I had a the audience should know I had a little preview of what they were gonna show, so I’m looking forward to it. Connor Mason (Guest): Awesome. Well, let’s jump right into it then. So like I said, we’re here at Software Toolbox, kinda have this ongoing logo and and just word map of connect everything, and that’s really where we lie. Some people have called us data plumbers in the past. It’s all these different connections where you have something, maybe legacy or something new, you need to get into another system. Well, how do you connect all those different points to it? And, you know, throughout all these projects we worked on, there’s always something unique in those different projects. And we try to work in between those unique areas and in between all these different integrations and be something that people can come to as an expert, have those high level discussions, find something that works for them at a cost effective solution. So outside of just, you know, products that we offer, we also have a lot of just knowledge in the industry, and we wanna share that. You’ll kinda see along here, there are some product names as well that you might recognize. Our top server and OmniServer, we’ll be talking about LOPA as well. It’s been around in the industry for, you know, decades at this point. And also our symbol factory might be something you you may have heard in other products, that they actually utilize themselves for HMI and and SCADA graphics. That is that is our product. So you may have interacted it with us without even knowing it, and I hope we get to kind of talk more about things that we do. So before we jump into all the fun technical things as well, I kind of want to talk about just the overall software toolbox experience as we call it. We’re we’re more than just someone that wants to sell you a product. We we really do work with, the idea of solutions. How do we provide you value and solve the problems that you are facing as the person that’s actually working out there on the field, on those operation lines, and making things as well. And that’s really our big priority is providing a high level of knowledge, variety of the things we can work with, and then also the support. It’s very dear to me coming through the the support team is still working, you know, day to day throughout that software toolbox, and it’s something that has been ingrained into our heritage. Next year will be thirty years of software toolbox in 2026. So we’re established in 1996. Through those thirty years, we have committed to supporting the people that we work with. And I I I can just tell you that that entire motto lives throughout everyone that’s here. So from that, over 97% of the customers that we interact with through support say they had an awesome or great experience. Having someone that you can call that understands the products you’re working with, understands the environment you’re working in, understands the priority of certain things. If you ever have a plant shut down, we know how stressful that is. Those are things that we work through and help people throughout. So this really is the core pillars of Software Toolbox and who we are, beyond just the products, and and I really think this is something unique that we have continued to grow and stand upon for those thirty years. So jumping right into some of the industry challenges we’ve been seeing over the past few years. This is also a fun one for me, talking about data analytics and tying these things together. In my prior life and education, I worked with just tons of data, and I never fully knew where it might have come from, why it was such a mess, who structured it that way, but it’s my job to get some insights out of that. And knowing what the data actually was and why it matters is a big part of actually getting value. So if you have dirty data, if you have data that’s just clustered, it’s in silos, it’s very often you’re not gonna get much value out of it. This was a study that we found in 2024, from Garner Research, And it said that, based on the question that business were asked, were there any top strategic priorities for your data analytics functions in 2024? And almost 50%, it’s right at ’49, said that they wanted to improve data quality, and that was a strategic priority. This is about half the industry is just talking about data quality, and it’s exactly because of those reasons I said in my prior life gave me a headache, to look at all these different things that I don’t even know where they became from or or why they were so different. And the person that made that may have been gone may not have the contacts, and making that from the person that implemented things to the people that are making decisions, is a very big task sometimes. So if we can create a better pipeline of data quality at the beginning, makes those people’s lives a lot easier up front and allows them to get value out of that data a lot quicker. And that’s what businesses need. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I wanna just data quality. Right? Mhmm. I think a lot of us, when we think of that, we think of, you know, error error detection. We think of lost connections. We think of, you know, just garbage data coming through. But I I think from an analytical side, there’s a different view on that, you know, in line with what you were just saying. So how do you when you’re talking to somebody about data quality, how do you get them to shift gears and focus in on what you’re talking about and not like a quality connection to the device itself? Connor Mason (Guest): Absolutely. Yeah. We I kinda live in both those worlds now. You know, I I get to see that that connection state. And when you’re operating in real time, that quality is also very important to you. Mhmm. And I kind of use that at the same realm. Think of that when you’re thinking in real time, if you know what’s going on in the operation and where things are running, that’s important to you. That’s the quality that you’re looking for. You have to think beyond just real time. We’re talking about historical data. We’re talking about data that’s been stored for months and years. Think about the quality of that data once it’s made up to that level. Are they gonna understand what was happening around those periods? Are they gonna understand what those tags even are? Are they gonna understand what those conventions that you’ve implemented, to give them insights into this operation. Is that a clear picture? So, yeah, you’re absolutely right. There are two levels to this, and and that is a big part of it. The the real time data and historical, and we’re gonna get some of that into into our demo as well. It it’s a it’s a big area for the business, and the people working in the operations. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. I think quality too. Think, you know, you may have data. It’s good data. It was collected correctly. You had a good connection to the device. You got it. You got it as often as you want. But that data could really be useless. It could tell you nothing. Connor Mason (Guest): Right. Exactly. Shawn Tierney (Host): Right? It could be a flow rate on part of the process that irrelevant to monitoring the actual production of the product or or whatever you’re making. And, you know, I’ve known a lot of people who filled up their databases, their historians, with they just they just logged everything. And it’s like a lot of that data was what I would call low quality because it’s low information value. Right? Absolutely. I’m sure you run into that too. Connor Mason (Guest): Yeah. We we run into a lot of people that, you know, I’ve got x amount of data points in my historian and, you know, then we start digging into, well, I wanna do something with it or wanna migrate. Okay. Like, well, what do you wanna achieve at the end of this? Right? And and asking those questions, you know, it’s great that you have all these things historized. Are you using it? Do you have the right things historized? Are they even set up to be, you know, worked upon once they are historized by someone outside of this this landscape? And I think OT plays such a big role in this, and that’s why we start to see the convergence of the IT and OT teams just because that communication needs to occur sooner. So we’re not just passing along, you know, low quality data, bad quality data as well. And we’ll get into some of that later on. So to jump into some of our products and solutions, I kinda wanna give this overview of the automation pyramid. This is where we work from things like the field device communications. And you you have certain sensors, meters, actuators along the actual lines, wherever you’re working. We work across all the industries, so this can vary between those. Through there, you work up kind of your control area. A lot of control engineers are working. This is where I think a lot of the audience is very familiar with PLCs. Your your typical name, Siemens, Rockwell, your Schneiders that are creating, these hardware products. They’re interacting with things on the operation level, and they’re generating data. That that was kind of our bread and butter for a very long time and still is that communication level of getting data from there, but now getting it up the stack further into the pyramid of your supervisory, MES connections, and it’ll also now open to these ERP. We have a lot of large corporations that have data across variety of different solutions and also want to integrate directly down into their operation levels. There’s a lot of value to doing that, but there’s also a lot of watch outs, and a lot of security concerns. So that’ll be a topic that we’ll be getting into. We also all know that the cloud is here. It’s been here, and it’s it’s gonna continue to push its way into, these cloud providers into OT as well. There there’s a lot of benefit to it, but there there’s also some watch outs as this kind of realm, changes in the landscape that we’ve been used to. So there’s a lot of times that we wanna get data out there. There’s value into AI agents. It’s a hot it’s a hot commodity right now. Analytics as well. How do we get those things directly from shop floor, up into the cloud directly, and how do we do that securely? It’s things that we’ve been working on. We’ve had successful projects, continues to be an interest area and I don’t see it slowing down at all. Now, when we kind of begin this level at the bottom of connectivity, people mostly know us for our top server. This is our platform for industrial device connectivity. It’s a thing that’s talking to all those different PLCs in your plant, whether that’s brownfield or greenfield. We pretty much know that there’s never gonna be a plant that’s a single PLC manufacturer, that exists in one plant. There’s always gonna be something that’s slightly different. Definitely from Brownfield, things different engineers made different choices, things have been eminent, and you gotta keep running them. TopServe provides this single platform to connect to a long laundry list of different PLCs. And if this sounds very familiar to Kepserver, well, you’re not wrong. Kepserver is the same exact technology that TopServer is. What’s the difference then is probably the biggest question we usually get. The difference technology wise is nothing. The difference in the back end is that actually it’s all the same product, same product releases, same price, but we have been the biggest single source of Kepserver or Topsyra implementation into the market, for almost two plus decades at this point. So the single biggest purchase that we own this own labeled version of Kepserver to provide to our customers. They interact with our support team, our solutions teams as well, and we sell it along the stack of other things because it it fits so well. And we’ve been doing this since the early two thousands when, Kepware was a a much smaller company than it is now, and we’ve had a really great relationship with them. So if you’ve enjoyed the technology of of Kepserver, maybe there’s some users out there. If you ever heard of TopServer and that has been unclear, I hope this clear clarifies it. But it it is a great technology stack that that we build upon and we’ll get into some of that in our demo. Now the other question is, what if you don’t have a standard communication protocol, like a modbus, like an Allen Bradley PLC as well? We see this a lot with, you know, testing areas, pharmaceuticals, maybe also in packaging, barcode scanners, weigh scales, printers online as well. They they may have some form of basic communications that talks over just TCP or or serial. And how do you get that information that’s really valuable still, but it’s not going through a PLC. It’s not going into your typical agent mind SCADA. It might be very manual process for a lot of these test systems as well, how they’re collecting and analyzing the data. Well, you may have heard of our Arm server as well. It’s been around, like I said, for a couple decades and just a proven solution that without coding, you can go in and build a custom protocol that expects a format from that device, translates it, puts it into standard tags, and now that those tags can be accessible through the open standards of OPC, or to it was a a Veeva user suite link as well. And that really provides a nice combination of your standard communications and also these more custom communications may have been done through scripting in the past. Well, you know, put this onto, an actual server that can communicate through those protocols natively, and just get that data into those SCADA systems, HMIs, where you need it. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I used that. Many years ago, I had an integrator who came to me. He’s like, Shawn, I wanna this is back in the RSVUE days. He’s like, Shawn, I I got, like, 20 Euotherm devices on a four eighty five, and they speak ASCII, and I gotta I gotta get into RSVUE 32. And, you know, OmniSIR, I love that you could you could basically developing and we did Omega and some other devices too. You’re developing your own protocol, but it’s beautiful. And and the fact that when you’re testing it, it color codes everything. So you know, hey. That part worked. The header worked. The data worked. Oh, the trailing didn’t work, or the terminated didn’t work, or the data’s not in the right format. Or I just it was a joy to work with back then, and I can imagine it’s only gotten better since. Connor Mason (Guest): Yeah. I think it’s like a little engineer playground where you get in there. It started really decoding and seeing how these devices communicate. And then once you’ve got it running, it it’s one of those things that it it just performs and, is saved by many people from developing custom code, having to manage that custom code and integrations, you know, for for many years. So it it’s one of those things that’s kinda tried, tested, and, it it’s kind of a staple still our our base level communications. Alright. So moving along kind of our automation pyramid as well. Another part of our large offering is the Cogent data hub. Some people may have heard from this as well. It’s been around for a good while. It’s been part of our portfolio for for a while as well. This starts building upon where we had the communication now up to those higher echelons of the pyramid. This is gonna bring in a lot of different connectivities. You if you’re not if you’re listening, it it’s kind of this cog and spoke type of concept for real time data. We also have historical implementations. You can connect through a variety of different things. OPC, both the profiles for alarms and events, and even OPC UA’s alarming conditions, which is still getting adoption across the, across the industry, but it is growing. As part of the OPC UA standard, we have integrations to MQTT. It can be its own MQTT broker, and it can also be an MQTT client. That has grown a lot. It’s one of those things that lives be besides OPC UA, not exactly a replacement. If you ever have any questions about that, it’s definitely a topic I love to talk about. There’s space for for this to combine the benefits of both of these, and it’s so versatile and flexible for these different type of implementations. On top of that, it it’s it’s a really strong tool for conversion and aggregation. You kind of add this, like, its name says, it’s a it’s a data hub. You send all the different information to this. It stores it into, a hierarchy with a variety of different modeling that you can do within it. That’s gonna store these values across a standard data format. Once I had data into this, any of those different connections, I can then send data back out. So if I have anything that I know is coming in through a certain plug in like OPC, bring that in, send it out to on these other ones, OPC, DA over to MQTT. It could even do DDA if I’m still using that, which I probably wouldn’t suggest. But overall, there’s a lot of good benefits from having something that can also be a standardization, between all your different connections. I have a lot of different things, maybe variety of OPC servers, legacy or newer. Bring that into a data hub, and then all your other connections, your historians, your MAS, your SCADAs, it can connect to that single point. So it’s all getting the same data model and values from a single source rather than going out and making many to many connections. A a large thing that it was originally, used for was getting around DCOM. That word is, you know, it might send some shivers down people’s spines still, to this day, but it’s it’s not a fun thing to deal with DCOM and also with the security hardening. It’s just not something that you really want to do. I’m sure there’s a lot of security professionals would advise against EPRA doing it. This tunneling will allow you to have a data hub that locally talks to any of the DA server client, communicate between two data hubs over a tunnel that pushes the data just over TCP, takes away all the comm wrappers, and now you just have values that get streamed in between. Now you don’t have to configure any DCOM at all, and it’s all local. So a lot of people went transitioning, between products where maybe the server only supports OPC DA, and then the client is now supporting OPC UA. They can’t change it yet. This has allowed them to implement a solution quickly and cost and at a cost effective price, without ripping everything out. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I wanna ask you too. I can see because this thing is it’s a data hub. So if you’re watching and you’re if you’re listening and not watching, you you’re not gonna see, you know, server, client, UAD, a broker, server, client. You know, just all these different things up here on the site. Do you what how does somebody find out if it does what they need? I mean, do you guys have a line they can call to say, I wanna do this to this. Is that something Data Hub can do, or is there a demo? What would you recommend to somebody? Connor Mason (Guest): Absolutely. Reach out to us. We we have a a lot of content outline, and it’s not behind any paywall or sign in links even. You you can always go to our website. It’s just softwaretoolbox.com. Mhmm. And that’s gonna get you to our product pages. You can download any product directly from there. They have demo timers. So typically with, with coaching data hub, after an hour, it will stop. You can just rerun it. And then call our team. Yeah. We have a solutions team that can work with you on, hey. What do I need as well? Then our support team, if you run into any issues, can help you troubleshoot that as well. So, I’ll have some contact information at the end, that’ll get some people to, you know, where they need to go. But you’re absolutely right, Shawn. Because this is so versatile, everyone’s use case of it is usually something a little bit different. And the best people to come talk to that is us because we’ve we’ve seen all those differences. So Shawn Tierney (Host): I think a lot of people run into the fact, like, they have a problem. Maybe it’s the one you said where they have the OPC UA and it needs to connect to an OPC DA client. And, you know, and a lot of times, they’re they’re a little gunshot to buy a license because they wanna make sure it’s gonna do exactly what they need first. And I think that’s where having your people can, you know, answer their questions saying, yes. We can do that or, no. We can’t do that. Or, you know, a a demo that they could download and run for an hour at a time to actually do a proof of concept for the boss who’s gonna sign off on purchasing this. And then the other thing is too, a lot of products like this have options. And you wanna make sure you’re buying the ticking the right boxes when you buy your license because you don’t wanna buy something you’re not gonna use. You wanna buy the exact pieces you need. So I highly recommend I mean, this product just does like, I have, in my mind, like, five things I wanna ask right now, but not gonna. But, yeah, def definitely, when it when it comes to a product like this, great to touch base with these folks. They’re super friendly and helpful, and, they’ll they’ll put you in the right direction. Connor Mason (Guest): Yeah. I I can tell you that’s working someone to support. Selling someone a solution that doesn’t work is not something I’ve been doing. Bad day. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And we work very closely, between anyone that’s looking at products. You know, me being as technical product managers, well, I I’m engaged in those conversations. And Mhmm. Yeah. If you need a demo license, reach out to us to extend that. We wanna make sure that you are buying something that provides you value. Now kind of moving on into a similar realm. This is one of our still somewhat newer offerings, I say, but we’ve been around five five plus years, and it’s really grown. And I kinda said here, it’s called OPC router, and and it’s not it’s not a networking tool. A lot of people may may kinda get that. It’s more of a, kind of a term about, again, all these different type of connections. How do you route them to different ways? It it kind of it it separates itself from the Cogent data hub, and and acting at this base level of being like a visual workflow that you can assign various tasks to. So if I have certain events that occur, I may wanna do some processing on that before I just send data along, where the data hub is really working in between converting, streaming data, real time connections. This gives you a a kind of a playground to work around of if I have certain tasks that are occurring, maybe through a database that I wanna trigger off of a certain value, based on my SCADA system, well, you can build that in in these different workflows to execute exactly what you need. Very, very flexible. Again, it has all these different type of connections. The very unique ones that have also grown into kind of that OT IT convergence, is it can be a REST API server and client as well. So I can be sending out requests to, RESTful servers where we’re seeing that hosted in a lot of new applications. I wanna get data out of them. Or once I have consumed a variety of data, I can become the REST server in OPC router and offer that to other applications to request data from itself. So, again, it can kind of be that centralized area of information. The other thing as we talked about in the automation pyramid is it has connections directly into SAP and ERP systems. So if you have work orders, if you have materials, that you wanna continue to track and maybe trigger things based off information from your your operation floors via PLCs tracking, how they’re using things along the line, and that needs to match up with what the SAP system has for, the amount of materials you have. This can be that bridge. It’s really is built off the mindset of the OT world as well. So we kinda say this helps empower the OT level because we’re now giving them the tools to that they understand what what’s occurring in their operations. And what could you do by having a tool like this to allow you to kind of create automated workflows based off certain values and certain events and automate some of these things that you may be doing manually or doing very convoluted through a variety of solutions. So this is one of those prod, products as well that’s very advanced in the things that supports. Linux and Docker containers is, is definitely could be a hot topic, rightly fleet rightfully so. And this can run on a on a Docker container deployed as well. So we we’ve seen that with the I IT folks that really enjoy being able to control and to higher deployment, allows you to update easily, allows you to control and spin up new containers as well. This gives you a lot of flexibility to to deploy and manage these systems. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I may wanna have you back on to talk about this. I used to there’s an old product called Rascal that I used to use. It was a transaction manager, and it would based on data changing or on a time that as a trigger, it could take data either from the PLC to the database or from the database to the PLC, and it would work with stored procedures. And and this seems like it hits all those points, And it sounds like it’s a visual like you said, right there on the slide, visual workflow builder. Connor Mason (Guest): Yep. Shawn Tierney (Host): So you really piqued my interest with this one, and and it may be something we wanna come back to and and revisit in the future, because, it just it’s just I know that that older product was very useful and, you know, it really solved a lot of old applications back in the day. Connor Mason (Guest): Yeah. Absolutely. And this this just takes that on and builds even more. If you if anyone was, kind of listening at the beginning of this year or two, a conference called Prove It that was very big in the industry, we were there to and we presented on stage a solution that we had. Highly recommend going searching for that. It’s on our web pages. It’s also on their YouTube links, and it’s it’s called Prove It. And OPC router was a big part of that in the back end. I would love to dive in and show you the really unique things. Kind of as a quick overview, we’re able to use Google AI vision to take camera data and detect if someone was wearing a hard hat. All that logic and behind of getting that information to Google AI vision, was through REST with OPC router. Then we were parsing that information back through that, connection and then providing it back to the PLCs. So we go all the way from a camera to a PLC controlling a light stack, up to Google AI vision through OPC router, all on hotel Wi Fi. It’s very imp it’s very, very fun presentation, and, our I think our team did a really great job. So a a a pretty new offering I have I wanna highlight, is our is our data caster. This is a an actual piece of hardware. You know, our software toolbox is we we do have some hardware as well. It’s just, part of the nature of this environment of how we mesh in between things. But the the idea is that, there’s a lot of different use cases for HMI and SCADA. They have grown so much from what they used to be, and they’re very core part of the automation stack. Now a lot of times, these are doing so many things beyond that as well. What we found is that in different areas of operations, you may not need all that different control. You may not even have the space to make up a whole workstation for that as well. What this does, the data caster, is, just simply plug it plugs it into any network and into an HDMI compatible display, and it gives you a very easy configure workplace to put a few key metrics onto a screen. So if I have different things from you can connect directly to PLCs like Allen Bradley. You can connect to SQL databases. You can also connect to rest APIs to gather the data from these different sources and build a a a kind of easy to to view, KPI dashboard in a way. So if you’re on a operation line and you wanna look at your current run rate, maybe you have certain things in the POC tags, you know, flow and pressure that’s very important for those operators to see. They may not be, even the capacity to be interacting with anything. They just need visualizations of what’s going on. This product can just be installed, you know, industrial areas with, with any type of display that you can easily access and and give them something that they can easily look at. It’s configured all through a web browser to display what you want. You can put on different colors based on levels of values as well. And it’s just I feel like a very simple thing that sometimes it seems so simple, but those might be the things that provide value on the actual operation floor. This is, for anyone that’s watching, kind of a quick view of a very simple screen. What we’re showing here is what it would look like from all the different data sources. So talking directly to ControlLogs PLC, talking to SQL databases, micro eight eight hundreds, an arrest client, and and what’s coming very soon, definitely by the end of this year, is OPC UA support. So any OPC UA server that’s out there that’s already having your PLC data or etcetera, this could also connect to that and get values from there. Shawn Tierney (Host): Can I can you make it I’m I’m here I go? Can you make it so it, like, changes, like, pages every few seconds? Connor Mason (Guest): Right now, it is a single page, but this is, like I said, very new product, so we’re taking any feedback. If, yeah, if there’s this type of slideshow cycle that would be, you know, valuable to anyone out there, let us know. We’re definitely always interested to see the people that are actually working out at these operation sites, what what’s valuable to them. Yeah. Shawn Tierney (Host): A lot of kiosks you see when when you’re traveling, it’ll say, like, line one well, I’ll just throw out there. Line one, and that’ll be on there for five seconds, and then it’ll go line two. That’ll be on there for five seconds, and then line you know, I and that’s why I just mentioned that because I can see that being a question that, that that I would get from somebody who is asking me about it. Connor Mason (Guest): Oh, great question. Appreciate it. Alright. So now we’re gonna set time for a little hands on demo. For anyone that’s just listening, we’re gonna I’m gonna talk about this at at a high level and walk through everything. But the idea is that, we have a few different POCs, very common in Allen Bradley and just a a Siemens seven, s seven fifteen hundred that’s in our office, pretty close to me on the other side of the wall wall, actually. We’re gonna first start by connecting that to our top server like we talked about. This is our industrial communication server, that offers both OCDA, OC UA, SweetLink connectivity as well. And then we’re gonna bring this into our Cogent data hub. This we talked about is getting those values up to these higher levels. What we’ll be doing is also tunneling the data. We talked about being able to share data through the data hubs themselves. Kinda explain why we’re doing that here and the value you can add. And then we’re also gonna showcase adding on MQTT to this level. Taking beta now just from these two PLCs that are sitting on a rack, and I can automatically make all that information available in the MQTT broker. So any MQTT client that’s out there that wants to subscribe to that data, now has that accessible. And I’ve created this all through a a really simple workflow. We also have some databases connected. Influx, we install with Code and DataHub, has a free visualization tool that kinda just helps you see what’s going on in your processes. I wanna showcase a little bit of that as well. Alright. So now jumping into our demo, when we first start off here is the our top server. Like I mentioned before, if anyone has worked with KEP server in the past, this is gonna look very similar. Like it because it is. The same technology and all the things here. The the first things that I wanted to establish in our demo, was our connection to our POCs. I have a few here. We’re only gonna use the Allen Bradley and the Siemens, for the the time that we have on our demo here. But how this builds out as a platform is you create these different channels and the devices connections between them. This is gonna be your your physical connections to them. It’s either, IP TCPIP connection or maybe your serial connection as well. We have support for all of them. It really is a long list. Anyone watching out there, you can kind of see all the different drivers that that we offer. So allowing this into a single platform, you can have all your connectivity based here. All those different connections that you now have that up the stack, your SCADA, your historians, MAS even as well, they can all go to a single source. Makes that management, troubleshooting, all those a bit easier as well. So one of the first things I did here, I have this built out, but I’ll kinda walk through what you would typically do. You have your Allen Bradley ControlLogix Ethernet driver here first. You know, I have some IPs in here I won’t show, but, regardless, we have our our our drivers here, and then we have a set of tags. These are all the global tags in the programming of the PLC. How I got these to to kind of map automatically is in our in our driver, we’re able to create tags automatically. So you’re able to send a command to that device and ask for its entire tag database. They can come back, provide all that, map it out for you, create those tags as well. This saves a lot of time from, you know, an engineer have to go in and, addressing all the individual items themselves. So once it’s defined in the program project, you’re able to bring this all in automatically. I’ll show now how easy that makes it connecting to something like the Cogent data hub. In a very similar fashion, we have a connection over here to the Siemens, PLC that I also have. You can see beneath it all these different tag structures, and this was created the exact same way. While those those PLC support it, you can do an automatic tag generation, bring in all the structure that you’ve already built out your PLC programming, and and make this available on this OPC server now as well. So that’s really the basis. We first need to establish communications to these PLCs, get that tag data, and now what do we wanna do with it? So in this demo, what I wanted to bring up was, the code in DataHub next. So here, I see a very similar kind of layout. We have a different set set of plugins on the left side. So for anyone listening, the Cogent Data Hub again is kind of our aggregation and conversion tool. All these different type of protocols like OPC UA, OPC DA, and OPC A and E for alarms and events. We also support OPC alarms and conditions, which is the newer profile for alarms in OPC UA. We have all a variety of different ways that you can get data out of things and data’s into the data hub. We can also do bridging. This concept is, how you share data in between different points. So let’s say I had a connection to one OPC server, and it was communicating to a certain PLC, and there were certain registers I was getting data from. Well, now I also wanna connect to a different OPC server that has, entirely different brand of PLCs. And then maybe I wanna share data in between them directly. Well, with this software, I can just bridge those points between them. Once they’re in the data hub, I can do kind of whatever I want with them. I can then allow them to write between those PLCs and share data that way, and you’re not now having to do any type of hardwiring directly in between them, and then I’m compatible to communicate to each other. Through the standards of OPC and these variety of different communication levels, I can integrate them together. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, you bring up a good point. When you do something like that, is there any heartbeat? Like, is there on the general or under under, one of these, topics? Is there are there tags we can use that are from DataHub itself that can be sent to the destination, like a heartbeat or, you know, the merge transactions? Or Connor Mason (Guest): Yeah. Absolutely. So with this as well, there’s pretty strong scripting engine, and I have done that in the past where you can make internal tags. And that that could be a a timer. It could be a counter. And and just kind of allows you to create your own tags as well that you could do the same thing, could share that, through bridge connection to a PLC. So, yeah, there there are definitely some people that had those cert and, you know, use cases where they wanna get something to just track, on this software side and get it out to those hardware PLCs. Absolutely. Shawn Tierney (Host): I mean, when you send out the data out of the PLC, the PLC doesn’t care to take my data. But when you’re getting data into the PLC, you wanna make sure it’s updating and it’s fresh. And so, you know, they throw a counter in there, the script thing, and be able to have that. As as long as you see that incrementing, you know, you got good data coming in. That’s that’s a good feature. Connor Mason (Guest): Absolutely. You know, another big one is the the redundancy. So what this does is beyond just the OPC, we can make redundancy to basically anything that has two things running of it. So any of these different connections. How it’s unique is what it does is it just looks at the buckets of data that you create. So for an example, if I do have two different OPC servers and I put them into two areas of, let’s say, OPC server one and OPC server two, I can what now create an OPC redundancy data bucket. And now any client that connects externally to that and wants that data, it’s gonna go talk to that bucket of data. And that bucket of data is going to automatically change in between sources as things go down, things come back up, and the client would never know what’s hap what that happened unless you wanted to. There are internal tasks to show what’s the current source and things, but the idea is to make this trans kind of hidden that regardless of what’s going on in the operations, if I have this set up, I can have my external applications just reading from a single source without knowing that there’s two things behind it that are actually controlling that. Very important for, you know, historian connections where you wanna have a full complete picture of that data that’s coming in. If you’re able to make a redundant connection to two different, servers and then allow that historian to talk to a single point where it doesn’t have to control that switching back and forth. It it will just see that data flow streamlessly as as either one is up at that time. Kinda beyond that as well, there’s quite a few other different things in here. I don’t think we have time to cover all of them. But for for our demo, what I wanna focus on first is our OPC UA connection. This allows us both to act as a OPC UA client to get data from any servers out there, like our top server. And also we can act as an OPC UA server itself. So if anything’s coming in from maybe you have multiple connections to different servers, multiple connections to other things that aren’t OPC as well, I can now provide all this data automatically in my own namespace to allow things to connect to me as well. And that’s part of that aggregation feature, and kind of topic I was mentioning before. So with that, I have a connection here. It’s pulling data all from my top server. I have a few different tags from my Alec Bradley and and my Siemens PLC selected. The next part of this, while I was meshing, was the tunneling. Like I said, this is very popular to get around DCOM issues, but there’s a lot of reasons why you still may use this beyond just the headache of DCOM and what it was. What this runs on is a a TCP stream that takes all the data points as a value, a quality, and a timestamp, and it can mirror those in between another DataHub instance. So if I wanna get things across a network, like my OT side, where NASH previously, I would have to come in and allow a, open port onto my network for any OPC UA clients, across the network to access that, I can now actually change the direction of this and allow me to tunnel data out of my network without opening up any ports. This is really big for security. If anyone out there, security professional or working as an engineer, you have to work with your IT and security a lot, they don’t you don’t wanna have an open port, especially to your operations and OT side. So this allows you to change that direction of flow and push data out of this direction into another area like a DMZ computer or up to a business level computer as well. The other things as well that I have configured in this demo, the benefit of having that tunneling streaming data across this connection is I can also store this data locally in a, influx database. The purpose of that then is that I can actually historize this, provide then if this connection ever goes down to backfill any information that was lost during that tunnel connection going down. So with this added layer on and real time data scenarios like OPC UA, unless you have historical access, you would lose a lot of data if that connection ever went down. But with this, I can actually use the back end of this InfluxDB, buffer any values. When my connection comes back up, pass them along that stream again. And if I have anything that’s historically connected, like, another InfluxDB, maybe a PI historian, Vue historian, any historian offering out there that can allow that connection. I can then provide all those records that were originally missed and backfill that into those systems. So I switched over to a second machine. It’s gonna look very similar here as well. This also has an instance of the Cogent Data Hub running here. For anyone not watching, what we’ve actually have on this side is the the portion of the tunneler that’s sitting here and listening for any data requests coming in. So on my first machine, I was able to connect my PLCs, gather that information into Cogent DataHub, and now I’m pushing that information, across the network into a separate machine that’s sitting here and listening to gather information. So what I can quickly do is just make sure I have all my data here. So I have these different points, both from my Allen Bradley PLCs. I have a few, different simulation demo points, like temperature, pressure, tank level, a few statuses, and all this is updating directly through that stream as the PLC is updating it as well. I also have my scenes controller. I have some, current values and a few different counters tags as well. All of this again is being directly streamed through that tunnel. I’m not connecting to an OPC server at all on this side. I can show you that here. There’s no connections configured. I’m not talking to the PLCs directly on this machine as well. But maybe we’ll pass all the information through without opening up any ports on my OT demo machine per se. So what’s the benefit of that? Well, again, security. Also, the ability to do the store and forward mechanisms. On the other side, I was logging directly to a InfluxDB. This could be my d- my buffer, and then I was able to configure it where if any values were lost, to store that across the network. So now with this side, if I pull up Chronic Graph, which is a free visualization tool that installs with the DataHub as well, I can see some very nice, visual workflows and and visual diagrams of what is going on with this data. So I have a pressure that is just a simulator in this, Allen Bradley PLC that ramps up and and comes back down. It’s not actually connected to anything that’s reading a real pressure, but you can see over time, I can kind of change through these different layers of time. And I might go back a little far, but I have a lot of data that’s been stored in here. For a while during my test, I turned this off and, made it fail, but then I came back in and I was able to recreate all the data and backfill it as well. So through through these views, I can see that as data disconnects, as it comes back on, I have a very cyclical view of the data because it was able to recover and store and forward from that source. Like I said, Shawn, data quality is a big thing in this industry. It’s a big thing for people both at the operations side, and both people making decision in the business layer. So being able to have a full picture, without gaps, it is definitely something that, you should be prioritizing, when you can. Shawn Tierney (Host): Now what we’re seeing here is you’re using InfluxDB on this, destination PC or IT side PC and chronograph, which was that utility or that package that comes, gets installed. It’s free. But you don’t actually have to use that. You could have sent this in to an OSI pi or Exactly. Somebody else’s historian. Right? Can you name some of the historians you work with? I know OSI pie. Connor Mason (Guest): Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So there’s quite a few different ones. As far as what we support in the Data Hub natively, Amazon Kinesis, the cloud hosted historian that we can also do the same things from here as well. Aviva Historian, Aviva Insight, Apache Kafka. This is a a kind of a a newer one as well that used to be a very IT oriented solution, now getting into OT. It’s kind of a similar database structure where things are stored in different topics that we can stream to. On top of that, just regular old ODBC connections. That opens up a lot of different ways you can do it, or even, the old classic OPC, HDA. So if you have any, historians that that can act as an OPC HDA, connection, we we can also stream it through there. Shawn Tierney (Host): Excellent. That’s a great list. Connor Mason (Guest): The other thing I wanna show while we still have some time here is that MQTT component. This is really growing and, it’s gonna continue to be a part of the industrial automation technology stack and conversations moving forward, for streaming data, you know, from devices, edge devices, up into different layers, both now into the OT, and then maybe out to, IT, in our business levels as well, and definitely into the cloud as we’re seeing a lot of growth into it. Like I mentioned with Data Hub, the big benefit is I have all these different connections. I can consume all this data. Well, I can also act as an MQTT broker. And what what a broker typically does in MQTT is just route data and share data. It’s kind of that central point where things come to it to either say, hey. I’m giving you some new values. Share it with someone else. Or, hey. I need these values. Can you give me that? It really fits in super well with what this product is at its core. So all I have to do here is just enable it. What that now allows is I have an example, MQTT Explorer. If anyone has worked with MQTT, you’re probably familiar with this. There’s nothing else I configured beyond just enabling the broker. And you can see within this structure, I have all the same data that was in my Data Hub already. The same things I were collecting from my PLCs and top server. Now I’ve embedded these as MPPT points and now I have them in JSON format with the value, their timestamp. You can even see, like, a little trend here kind of matching what we saw in Influx. And and now this enables all those different cloud connectors that wanna speak this language to do it seamlessly. Shawn Tierney (Host): So you didn’t have to set up the PLCs a second time to do this? Nope. Connor Mason (Guest): Not at all. Shawn Tierney (Host): You just enabled this, and now the data’s going this way as well. Exactly. Connor Mason (Guest): Yeah. That’s a really strong point of the Cogent Data Hub is once you have everything into its structure and model, you just enable it to use any of these different connections. You can get really, really creative with these different things. Like we talked about with the the bridging aspect and getting into different systems, even writing down the PLCs. You can make crust, custom notifications and email alerts, based on any of these values. You could even take something like this MTT connection, tunnel it across to another data hub as well, maybe then convert it to OPC DA. And now you’ve made a a a new connection over to something that’s very legacy as well. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. That, I mean, the options here are just pretty amazing, all the different things that can be done. Connor Mason (Guest): Absolutely. Well, I, you know, I wanna jump back into some of our presentation here while we still got the time. And now after we’re kinda done with our demo, there’s so many different ways that you can use these different tools. This is just a really simple, kind of view of the, something that used to be very simple, just connecting OpenSea servers to a variety of different connections, kind of expanding onto with that that’s store and forward, the local influx usage, getting out to things like MTT as well. But there’s a lot more you can do with these solutions. So like Shawn said, reach out to us. We’re happy to engage and see what we can help you with. I have a few other things before we wrap up. Just overall, it we’ve worked across nearly every industry. We have installations across the globe on all continents. And like I said, we’ve been around for pushing thirty years next year. So we’ve seen a lot of different things, and we really wanna talk to anyone out there that maybe has some struggles that are going on with just connectivity, or you have any ongoing projects. If you work in these different industries or if there’s nothing marked here and you have anything going on that you need help with, we’re very happy to sit down and let you know if there’s there’s something we can do there. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. For those who are, listening, I mean, we see most of the big energy and consumer product, companies on that slide. So I’m not gonna read them off, but, it’s just a lot of car manufacturers. You know, these are these are these, the household name brands that everybody knows and loves. Connor Mason (Guest): So kind of wrap some things up here. We talked about all the different ways that we’ve kind of helped solve things in the past, but I wanna highlight some of the unique ones, that we’ve also gone do some, case studies on and and success stories. So this one I actually got to work on, within the last few years that, a plastic packaging, manufacturer was looking to track uptime and downtime across multiple different lines, and they had a new cloud solution that they were already evaluating. They’re really excited to get into play. They they had a lot of upside to, getting things connected to this and start using it. Well, what they had was a lot of different PLCs, a lot of different brands, different areas, different, you know, areas of operation that they need to connect to. So what they used was to first get that into our top server, kind of similar to how they showed them use in their in our demo. We just need to get all the data into a centralized platform first, get that data accessible. Then from there, once they had all that information into a centralized area, they used the Cogent Data Hub as well to help aggregate that information and transform it to be sent to the cloud through MQTT. So very similar to the demo here, this is actually a real use case of that. Getting information from PLCs, structuring it into that how that cloud system needed it for MQTT, and streamlining that data connection to now where it’s just running in operation. They constantly have updates about where their lines are in operation, tracking their downtime, tracking their uptime as well, and then being able to do some predictive analytics in that cloud solution based on their history. So this really enabled them to kind of build from what they had existing. It was doing a lot of manual tracking, into an entirely automated system with management able to see real views of what’s going on at this operation level. Another one I wanna talk about was we we were able to do this success story with, Ace Automation. They worked with a pharmaceutical company. Ace Automation is a SI and they were brought in and doing a lot of work with some some old DDE connections, doing some custom Excel macros, and we’re just having a hard time maintaining some legacy systems that were just a pain to deal with. They were working with these older files, from some old InTouch histor HMIs, and what they needed to do was get something that was not just based on Excel and doing custom macros. So one product we didn’t get to talk about yet, but we also carry is our LGH file inspector. It’s able to take these files, put them out into a standardized format like CSV, and also do a lot of that automation of when when should these files be queried? Should they be, queried for different lengths? Should they be output to different areas? Can I set these up in a scheduled task so it can be done automatically rather than someone having to sit down and do it manually in Excel? So they will able to, recover over fifty hours of engineering time with the solution from having to do late night calls to troubleshoot a, Excel macro that stopped working, from crashing machines, because they were running a legacy systems to still support some of the DDE servers, into saving them, you know, almost two hundred plus hours of productivity. Another example, if we’re able to work with a renewable, energy customer that’s doing a lot of innovative things across North America, They had a very ambitious plan to double their footprint in the next two years. And with that, they had to really look back at their assets and see where they currently stand, how do we make new standards to support us growing into what we want to be. So with this, they had a lot of different data sources currently. They’re all kind of siloed at the specific areas. Nothing was really connected commonly to a corporate level area of historization, or control and security. So again, they they were able to use our top server and put out a standard connectivity platform, bring in the DataHub as an aggregation tool. So each of these sites would have a top server that was individually collecting data from different devices, and then that was able to send it into a single DataHub. So now their corporate level had an entire view of all the information from these different plants in one single application. That then enabled them to connect their historian applications to that data hub and have a perfect view and make visualizations off of their entire operations. What this allowed them to do was grow without replacing everything. And that’s a big thing that we try to strive on is replacing and ripping out all your existing technologies. It’s not something you can do overnight. But how do we provide value and gain efficiency with what’s in place and providing newer technologies on top of that without disrupting the actual operation as well? So this was really, really successful. And at the end, I just wanna kind of provide some other contacts and information people can learn more. We have a blog that goes out every week on Thursdays. A lot of good technical content out there. A lot of recast of the the awesome things we get to do here, the success stories as well, and you can always find that at justblog.softwaretoolbox.com. And again, our main website is justsoftwaretoolbox.com. You can get product information, downloads, reach out to anyone on our team. Let’s discuss what what issues you have going on, any new projects, we’ll be happy to listen. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, Connor, I wanna thank you very much for coming on the show and bringing us up to speed on not only software toolbox, but also to, you know, bring us up to speed on top server and doing that demo with top server and data hub. Really appreciate that. And, I think, you know, like you just said, if anybody, has any projects that you think these solutions may be able to solve, please give them a give them a call. And if you’ve already done something with them, leave a comment. You know? To leave a comment, no matter where you’re watching or listening to this, let us know what you did. What did you use? Like me, I used OmniServer all those many years ago, and, of course, Top Server as an OPC server. But if you guys have already used Software Toolbox and, of course, Symbol Factory, I use that all the time. But if you guys are using it, let us know in the comments. It’s always great to hear from people out there. I know, you know, with thousands of you guys listening every week, but I’d love to hear, you know, are you using these products? Or if you have questions, I’ll funnel them over to Connor if you put them in the comments. So with that, Connor, did you have anything else you wanted to cover before we close out today’s show? Connor Mason (Guest): I think that was it, Shawn. Thanks again for having us on. It was really fun. Shawn Tierney (Host): I hope you enjoyed that episode, and I wanna thank Connor for taking time out of his busy schedule to come on the show and bring us up to speed on software toolbox and their suite of products. Really appreciated that demo at the end too, so we actually got a look at if you’re watching. Gotta look at their products and how they work. And, just really appreciate them taking all of my questions. I also appreciate the fact that Software Toolbox sponsored this episode, meaning we were able to release it to you without any ads. So I really appreciate them. If you’re doing any business with Software Toolbox, please thank them for sponsoring this episode. And with that, I just wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. Until next time, Peace ✌️ If you enjoyed this content, please give it a Like, and consider Sharing a link to it as that is the best way for us to grow our audience, which in turn allows us to produce more content

ai sharing reach north america selling code pc software gotta wifi automation ot analytics pi omega excel arm makes mes sap poc kpi linux server apis toolbox siemens erp ips sql rockwell docker google ai vue opensea hdmi dmz plc router influx iit restful json rascal osi pocs opc tcp csv dcom in touch ascii rest apis brownfield scada prove it plcs hmi dda apache kafka mtt cogent mqtt kep lopa schneiders dde veeva influxdb hda uad alec bradley hmis datahub opc ua odbc ot it allen bradley amazon kinesis lgh mppt connor mason

Weißwurst oder Currywurst: IFA 2025 und IAA 2025 - Teil 1

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2025 34:05

Ich habe noch keinen Urlaub gehabt, dafür intensiv gearbeitet: an meinem nächsten Buch, an spannenden Projekten – und mit der Ernennung zum Honorarprofessor an der FH Aachen auch ein echtes Highlight erlebt. In dieser Episode dreht sich alles um die IFA 2025 in Berlin. Ich war vor Ort, habe Eindrücke gesammelt und ordne ein, was wirklich wichtig war: von Smart Glasses und Ringen als neue HMIs über Roboter in allen Formen bis hin zu Smart Home-Lösungen, die zwischen Gimmick und echtem Nutzen pendeln. Außerdem gibt's spannende Zahlen, Trends und ein Blick darauf, wie sich die IFA im Vergleich zur CES in Las Vegas schlägt. - Ist die IFA die deutsche CES oder bleibt sie näher am Endkunden? - Welche Trends sind nur Show, welche verändern wirklich unseren Alltag? - Und welche Rolle spielen Wearables im Automotive-Kontext? Zum Schluss gibt's wie immer eine persönliche Einordnung: Was bleibt hängen, was ist überbewertet – und wo sehe ich die wirklichen Chancen. Nächste Woche geht's dann weiter mit der IAA 2025 – Autos, Mobilität, deutsche und chinesische Mobilitätsindustrie im Vergleich.

IO-Link: What Is It, When To Use It, and How It Works (P246)

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2025 72:59 Transcription Available

Shawn Tierney meets up with Michael Bowne of PI to learn what IO-Link is, how it works, and when to use it in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video. Watch The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 246 Show Notes: To learn about our online and in-person training courses please visit TheAutomationSchool.com. Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Thank you for tuning back in to the automation podcast. My name is Shawn Tierney from Insights in Automation. And this week on the show, we have a special guest, somebody who hasn’t been on in four years. We have Michael Bone from PI. They’re the folks who manage technologies like PROFINET and IO Link. And Michael’s come on this week to talk specifically about IO Link. We’re gonna talk about what it is. We’re gonna talk about when you should use it, and we’re gonna talk about the technical details of IO Link, like, all the things, like, engineering minds like to know about. So I think you guys are gonna enjoy this. It took about two to three hours to edit this one, and I really enjoyed going back through it. You know, we recorded it, I think, four weeks ago. So I hadn’t seen it in four weeks, but I really did enjoy it. I really think you guys will enjoy it too. And that brings up another point. Organizations like PI and ISA and other organizations, they’re not vendors. They don’t sell stuff. Right? And so this episode is not sponsored by a vendor. And, you know, as I was going through it yesterday, I was like, you know, there’s a lot of great slides in here. I wanna share it with the public. So I’ve decided to sponsor this episode myself, and I’ll use this as an opportunity to tell you a little bit about my company and the automation blog, the automation school, and the content I have planned to release this fall, including content on these products right here, all focused on IO Link. And I just actually did a live stream with these, products in front of me. I’ll be doing more tomorrow, and I’ll be adding lessons to my, courses as well on these products. So in any case, but before we get to that, let’s go ahead and jump right into the show and hear from Michael and learn all about IO Link. I wanna welcome back Michael to the show. It has been four years. He was last on in podcast 76, back in September 2021. So just going on four years. Michael, thank you for coming back on the show. If you could, a lot of people may not remember four years ago. Mhmm. So before we jump into your presentation, which which I am so excited about talking about IO Link again. But before we jump into that, could you please tell me a little bit about yourself and a little Michael Bowne (PI): bit about PI? Yeah. Sure. First of all, my pleasure, to be back on on the podcast. It was a lot, a lot of fun. I remember that back in in 2021, and, I’m glad to be be back doing it again. I started with PI North America in 2011 as the technical marketing director. And since 2016, I’ve been the executive director running the show and chairman of the board since last year. I, have the, let’s say, pleasure to serve as the deputy chairman of PI on a global scale since 2015, and I come from a prior to working for PI, I worked for a sensor manufacturer who had some interfaces on there that that brought me an introduct to to Profibus and Profinet. And before that, I studied, physics and and math at at Penn State University. Just, really quick for those. I’m I’m sure many of you are familiar with with PI, but, it was started in the late eighties. Half a dozen companies and universities got together, and they wrote the PROFIBUS spec, and that evolved into the into into PROFIBUS DP and PROFIBUS PA for process automation in the early two thousands. PROFINET came under the umbrella. And the reason I bring all this up is because there are some newer technologies under our umbrella that I I think the audience might wanna know about. Of course, EyeLink is is the one that we’ll talk about today, and that was in 02/2009. But there are some others like Umlocks, which is a location tracking standard. There’s one called MTP, module type package, NOAA, NAMR open architecture, also under our umbrella. And, basically, what we do is promote, maintain, write the specs, turn them into standards, and the work on those specs is done in working groups, which are staffed by volunteers, engineers from member companies. They donate their time to to develop the specs, for these technologies we have under our umbrella. And we’re a little bit unique in that we’re decentralized. So we have competence centers and test labs and training centers located throughout the world. It’s not all just in one headquarter kind of place, and they’re all independent. But they have a contract or quality of services agreement with PI that says, hey. If you have a question about the technologies, go to a competent center. If you want further training, go to a training center. If you want to to test the device, go to a test lab. And then they are all working with regional PI associations of which we PI North America is one of them. We were founded in 1994 by a guy by the name of Mike Bryant. At that time, we were called Probibus Trade Organization. And we are the and now I didn’t come up with this this name. We are the North American Rio League. This is a an IO Link designation, a regional IO Link interest group, which means that we have a a separate contract and and quality of services agreement with the IO Link community to to promote and and work with members, specifically for IO Link here in in North America. And we’re nonprofit, member supported. I got nothing. So you’re talking about products and and and stuff at the beginning. I got nothing to sell today. We’re we’re working solely on on technology. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I do wanna throw out there, though, you have a great update every month about all the new products that fall in the buckets of IO Link, PROFINET, PROFIBUS, and a lot of those new products across our IO Link. So while they may not have products of their own, they do keep the, industry up to date on who’s joining up and signing up, for these new these you know, the jump on board and release new products that, that, you know, meet these specifications. And you know what? Maybe you’re not using PROFINET because you’re using brand x or y. You still probably use an IO Link. So Oh, that’s for sure. Very interesting very interesting updates that you publish every month and, as a blog. And, I know when I was doing the news for a couple years, I would always, go to your site to look for new updates. Michael Bowne (PI): Cool. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, I got a slide on that at the end, but the the you’re referring to the, the PROFINews. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yes. The PROFINews. Yeah. Michael Bowne (PI): Yeah. That’s a that’s that’s been a baby and a labor of love, for a while now. And and, oh, man, it’s it’s it’s incredible because every month, the most when we track this kind of stuff, obviously, the most popular article is the new products. Well, because that’s what, right, that’s what people want is the stuff they can buy, the stuff they can use. Yeah. Yeah. That’s and we got another one coming out next week, and every month, we we push that out, and it’s always half a dozen or a dozen new products, half of which are are IO Link. I mean, it’s just growing like crazy. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And you guys have had some good articles. I think you had a great series, and I’m now I’m stretching it. So stretching the old memory here. I thought you had a great series on on, MTP, which I really enjoyed. Did did I remember that correctly? Michael Bowne (PI): Yeah. We we try and, you know, we try and get some editorial content in there. It’s it calls it falls into, like, three main buckets. What’s new products? What are new trainings and events that are coming up? And then and then some editorial content. I think I think what we’re driving at is I think we need to do maybe an MTP podcast here at some point in the down the road. Shawn Tierney (Host): Probably. Yeah. Down the road. Definitely. Definitely. I I’m still you know, I still have a very casual understanding of it. But, let me throw it back to you because I kinda jumped in and interrupted your your your, update. Michael Bowne (PI): No. It’s good. It saves it saves us at the end when when that slide, we can just just jump over it. Now we’ve we’ve got it covered, and it’s and it’s an and it’s an important one. But you kinda you kinda gave me a nice lead into the to the next one, which talks about, the Ireland community. And I’ll start from the bottom, work my way up as being fieldbus independent. Shawn Tierney (Host): I just wanna break in here for a moment and thank you folks in the audience who’ve signed up for my membership program. Really, really appreciate you all. Eighteen months ago, after reviewing ten plus years of being on YouTube, you know, it was pretty obvious that there’s no real revenue on YouTube. I mean, it comes in at maybe 1% of my monthly expenses. And so that ad revenue there is just not something to rely on going forward because it’s not something that’s been reliable in the past. And so I set up the membership program both on YouTube and at the automationblog.com. And I wanna thank all of you who signed up. I, we have a $5 tier, which I know most people sign up at, and then we have a couple other higher tiers. And so I just wanted to thank you all for doing that. You are actually the membership program’s probably 3% of my monthly, revenue. And so that’s, you know, one or two times more, than, what the YouTube revenue was. So thank you all for that. And I hope that, some of you who are not part of the membership program will consider becoming a member, supporting my work so I can do videos that are not always sponsored videos. Now I love sponsored videos. I love it when a vendor sends me a piece of hardware and then sits down with me and teach me how to use it so I can create a video ad free and share with you on how to use that product, or maybe they just come on the podcast and sponsor it to make it ad free so we can tell their story about their product or service. And I I will continue to do that going forward, but I would really also like to do more audience generated type of, content. So content where you generate the idea and say, Shawn, why don’t you try this? Or, Shawn, why don’t you do this? And a lot of those topics that the audience wants to see, they’re not necessarily topics that the vendor wants to promote with advertising dollars. Okay? And so that’s the whole purpose of the, membership program. Like I said, right now, it’s around 3% of my monthly income comes from and I’m talking about the business income, not my personal income, the business income. 3% of what the business needs to, to move forward and pay its bills every month. But, still, I that that, you know, so many of you have decided to jump in and support me. I just wanted to stop and say thank you very much from the bottom of my heart. And if you’re not part of the membership program and you’re doing financially well, please consider if you enjoy. This is episode two forty six of the automation podcast. Every episode has been free. The audio has been free for all 246 of them. And most of those episodes I funded myself just by well, you can understand how you fund something when you don’t have the income coming in. But in any case, if you enjoy it, please consider becoming a member, and we can branch out and do other things together. And with that, let’s go ahead and jump back into this week’s episode and learn more about IO Link. Michael Bowne (PI): So like you said, yeah. I mean, organizationally, the IO Link community came to PI in 2009 and organizationally under PI because we have the infrastructure for working groups and and IP policies and contracts and things like that. But the IO Link community has their own steering committee, and from the from the outset and from every IO Link event that we do and everything that we do is is independent of, of any Profibus or Profinet stuff. And we try really, really hard to maintain that independence, no matter what vendor you’re using. And there, at this point, we’ve got 500 companies in the IO Link community, and it’s really just growing by by leaps and bounds. So we kinda track this stuff by nodes and all the IO Link companies. They send their node count to an independent auditor, collects the counts, and gives us back an an an anonymous total. So we don’t know where or who is selling them, but we get the total. And you can just see this this hockey stick exponential growth. Particularly in 2023, there was some supply chain over purchasing that that went on. I mean, that’s like we’re looking at a a growth rate of 89% there, which is obviously unsustainable. But still, last year, 9,700,000 nodes were added. Again, because it’s field bus independent, it really has no competitor. And that’s what’s kinda cool about IO Link. I mean, you wanna do and and you don’t need to choose a field bus and therefore get IO Link. You can use any field bus or industrial container protocol, and IO Link works with it. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I wanna just, mention for the audio listeners. If we go back to 2012, it looks like we’re probably at the 1,000,000 mark or below it. And as you go to, you know, 2022, you look like you’re 35,700,000. Is that 2022 or 2023? Michael Bowne (PI): Yeah. That’s the 2022. Exactly. 35,700,000.0. Yeah. Shawn Tierney (Host): And then at, the end of twenty twenty three, we’re at 51.6. So you talked about that, you know, overbuying. And then at the end of 2024, we’re at 61,300,000.0. So you can just see from, you know, 2022 to, 2024, you went from 35 to 61. So the adoption, like you said, it’s a hockey stick. The adoption has really picked up. And I think you you hit the nail on the head because it is fieldbus independent. It’s a way to just get more information out of our devices, like sensors and photo eyes, you know, and it’s just you know? I mean, though, these chipsets that come in these, devices now are just amazing. Michael Bowne (PI): And that’s what, I mean, that’s what the whole point of this is. You’re you’re not gonna put a $5 ethernet chip, like, enter $5 ethernet interface on a $15 proximity sensor. But computing and memory has gotten really, really small and really, really cheap that it’s on just about everything. And so this proximity sensor not only can tell you if, like, for example, let’s say it’s on a conveyor belt. It cannot only tell you if the box is there or not, but it can tell you how many blue boxes would buy or how many red boxes would buy or if the box that’s going by is off kilter or or misaligned or something like that. But how do you get that data out in in inexpensively, and here we are. IO Link is is the way to do it. Shawn Tierney (Host): I’m sad to see a lot of these sensors too come with humidity, temperature, and all these other things should be like, really? I can get that out of my Michael Bowne (PI): photo eye. But yeah. Multivariable. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You know, traditionally, with an analog interface, how did you get that? You couldn’t get it. Mhmm. But now with a digital interface, which is what we’re talking about, digitalization in the last meter, now you can get that informate that data, that information, and do some pretty cool stuff with it. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yes. You can. Yeah. I’ll talk Michael Bowne (PI): a little bit about the architecture a little bit here to kind of get a little bit into the technical side of things about how IO Link works, but it they’re kind of some main devices, and that’s the IO Link masters and the IO Link devices. And these IO Link masters are available for we have here 16 different industrial Ethernet or field bus systems. 21 manufacturers offer central PLC, like an IO Link master built into the backplane of the PLC if you so desired. And the number of devices that so that hockey stick we showed before is just exploding. I mean, we’ve got 60 something million sold, and we have tens of thousands of unique IO Link devices from hundreds of different device manufacturers that have implemented this interface. And for those that if there’s anybody on the podcast that wants to do this and add this to their sensors, there are a number of different companies that help with, product design, either with the chips, the transceivers, the software stacks, and then a number of companies that help provide technical support in order to do that. So an IO Link system kind of is made up of four parts. Like I said, you have the IO Link master. That’s the gateway between the IO Link devices, the IO Link interface, and the higher level communication system, such as the fieldbus or the in industrial Ethernet protocol or backplane. You have the devices. This is the exciting part. Your sensors, your switch gears, your valves, your signal lamps, maybe some simple actuators, whatever the case may be. You’ve got a IO Link cable, just a three wire unshielded, super simple connection between the master and the devices. And then every device has an IODD or IO Link device description file, and I’ll explain how that gets used to engineer and parameterize the IO Link system and the and the devices. And what this kind of enables you know, traditionally, communication only reached the IO level. You had connection between the PLCs and the and the the the IO, and then it kinda stopped there because all those sensors and actuators were not accessible. They were analog, and you got your one process data. You brought process signal, and that’s where it ended. But with IO Link, what we do is we enable that communication bidirectional, cyclic and acyclic, and that’s the cool part, all the way from higher level systems, not only to the PLC or especially from the PLC, but down all the way down to the simple sensors and actuators, which are now accessible. And you kinda touched on this before where these chipsets have gotten really, really smart and really, really powerful. And it’s not that the it’s not that any of these use cases that are that are being solved with IO Link that none of them are new. What’s new is the ease with which they can be solved. So because you can get all this extra data out, things like OEE, showing things like downtime tracking, track and trace, predictive maintenance, for example, remote monitoring, recipe management, SPC, all these things. It’s not that these use cases are now being solved. The you know, we’ve we’ve been doing this for a long, long time. It’s just the ease with which because because it’s a standard and because all this stuff is standardized in how it gets from the the the device to the master and upwards to the controller, it just makes it easier. If you spend all your effort trying to gather and collect and sanitize the data because every device is different and, you know, that’s just that’s just a mess, and the ROI disappears really fast on any kind of project to do that. But if we have a standard on how to do that, then we make it very, very easy to do, and everything can come in, quite nicely. And and and it just and it just works a whole lot easier. You start getting access to that data. And so what we’re starting to see is connections being made. You know, you talk about the the flattening of the traditional automation hierarchy where now not only is that IO block or that sensor connected to a to a PLC, but it’s got some extra data. Like you said, like, this little photo I might have a a a temperature or a a moisture, you know, sensor also in there, just because it’s part of the the chipset. But the PLC don’t care about that. He just wants to know about the, you know, the information from the photo eye. So what do you do with all this extra beautiful information that isn’t necessarily processed data? Well, maybe the MES wants to know about that. So how do you get that? And in a running factory, in a brownfield environment, rule number one is don’t touch the running PLC. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. Michael Bowne (PI): And rule number two is see rule number one. That thing is running, and any minute of downtime costs more than any one thing on the on the factory floor. Shawn Tierney (Host): Before we go on, I did wanna break in here and tell you a little bit about my website, theautomationschool.com, where I do my online training. I also do in person training. And you probably don’t know that that all started back in 2014 with a Kickstarter I ran for my first PLC basics course. At the time, it was called microprogrammable controller basics, and I ended up changing it just the PLC basics. But in any case, since then, I’ve had added a dozen courses on a various number of topics, and you’ll find them all at the automationschool.com. But what I really wanted to talk to you about is why. Why did I do that? Well, I had spent twenty five years as a certified authorized Rockwell Automation distributor specialist covering PLCs, HMIs, SCADA, MES, and other stuff too. Right? And I knew from visiting, customers in the plant every single workday, almost every workday, that there was a real need for affordable training. So the first thing is, you know, large companies have large expensive, large paychecks, and lots of overhead, so they gotta charge a lot. Right? And so that was a problem because a lot of the people I was working with, you know, the controls engineers, automation engineers, high end electricians and technicians, they had to fund their training themselves. Their company was sort of like, no. We trained this guy back in the nineties, and then he will have to get a better job. So we’re not spending money on training. And so all these people were having to train themselves, and it was unaffordable to either, you know, buy the the, vendors courses. Or even if the the company did have training dollars, it was unaffordable to send them away for a week to a $3,000 course somewhere halfway across the country, probably $3,000 worth of travel and hotels too. Right? And then they go where without one of their smartest guys, right, one of their best people, because you you that’s usually who you’re gonna train and and uplift through the through the organization. Either people are doing good on the lower level, you wanna bring them up and train them on automation. And so that’s why I started the the, automationschool.com because of the the try to provide I knew the the courses would never be Hollywood quality. I mean, this isn’t Hollywood quality. Right? But I knew it could be helpful and and, you know, be affordable by just filming them in my garage. Right? And, you know, picking up some used equipment and putting together the episodes. And the site has grown so much. We have thousands of, students from over a 150 countries. We have hundreds of, vendors we work with. But the other thing I did is, is made up by one’s own forever. Right? So more like an ebook or an audiobook or an m p three album. Right? And the reason I did that and I understand why the vendors don’t do that because they’re like, well, they’ll sign up one guy in the I and e shop, and he’ll share his password for everybody. You know, that could happen. Right? People could rob a bank too. But I’m like, you know, most people, when they buy a course and I saw this. I was on an independent platform for a while, and on that platform, they showed you how the progress of every student. Most people buy the course well before they’re ready to take it. And I’m like, I’m not gonna charge people a monthly fee or only give them access to to a short window if, you know, they have good intentions now, but it takes them a while to actually free up their schedule to get into the course and take it. So that’s why my courses are buy one’s own forever. And it can you know, as they grow, the price goes up because I’m adding more and more content, and I do split them out and make cheaper versions over time. But, those people who buy in early, they get the like, my s seven course. Like, I think it originally came out at 40 or $50, and now it’s $200 because I’ve added so much to it over the years. But in any case, same with ControlLogix and CompactLogix. And then the other thing too is I want them to be able to take it more than once. Right? So if you take a let’s say you take a ControlLogix course. Right? You don’t use it for a couple years, you probably gonna have to take it again. And I don’t want you to feel like you have to pay a monthly fee to do that. It’s like an ebook or an m p three album. You bought it. You bought access to it, I guess I should say, and now it’s yours. Right? And the other thing too is I support my students personally. Okay? So I check the website every day for questions, every work day. I should say, you know, I do take Sundays off. So in any case, if you’re if it’s a work day, though, and I’m working, I’m not on vacation or traveling for business, I’m up there. I’m answering questions. And I should say, even when I’m traveling on business, I’m I’m on there answering questions. So although if I don’t have any hardware, there’s some questions you can’t ask. Right? I guess I should have said some questions you can’t answer. But in any case, I just wanted to share that with you. Theautomationschool.com, a high quality online courses, five star rated, buy once, own forever, and guess what? I’m updating all the PLC courses, and if you already own or buy one of the existing PLC courses, you not only get the updated lessons that get added to that course, you get the new course completely free. So I’m not gonna charge you for just an updated version of a class on the same core on the same product. Right? That would be kinda silly in my opinion. So, I hope you guys appreciate that. Again, if you didn’t know any of this, if you have any questions, if you go over to the automationschool.com, at the very top of the site, you’ll see links to contact me, set up a meeting, leave me a voice mail, fill out a form. You know, I have many ways you can get in touch with me. And if you have multiple people you wanna sign up, I do have multiple seat discounts starting at three seats. And, I do actually work with a number of Fortune 500 companies who, you know, enroll maybe 10 people at a time to get that discount. And you know what? Unlike the big vendors, if somebody you sign somebody up and they all take the courses, I’ll let you replace that person for free of charge. You don’t have to pay anything extra. If you sign up Joe and he decides to quit or leave or not to learn, you can put Bob in his place. That’s not a problem. Now I have said some situations where the same spot kept getting replaced or replaced or replaced. At some point, I do charge a maintenance fee to to switch the names out. And then, hey. Look. If Joe leaves and he took, you know, two out of three courses, I’ll prorate refilling that seat with the new person. Right? So whatever percentage of the lessons he took versus the total number of lessons, I’ll prorate it. So, you know, we’ve had number of cases where somebody goes through half of the content then leaves, so we can reset that seat for half price. And I that’s something you won’t find, any major vendors doing as well. So if you have any questions about that, reach out to me over at the automation school dot com. And with that said, let’s jump right back into this week’s episode of the automation podcast. Michael Bowne (PI): In a brownfield installation, what we’re seeing these these cool little edge gateways, And what they’ll do is they’ll grab the bus, they’ll collect some data, and pump it out the other side via, you know, maybe an IT protocol that that the IT guys wanna know about or, you know, like an MQTT or an OPC UA. Of course, in a in a greenfield, in a new installation where you’ve got a brand new PLC, yeah, get the data there. That guy has all the brains, has all the all the information in one ply in all in one place, so get it from the PLC. But in Brownfield, I the edge gateways, even some IO Link masters are being put on the market that have not only an industrial Ethernet interface, you know, just on one port, on the same port, industrial Ethernet interface for control, but that interface will also speak like a higher level IT protocol like an MQTT or an OPC UA, so you can get it even from the IO Link master that data is is accessible. So the different ways to get it, and, and that’s kind of the whole point is is getting that data from the sensors to the to the master and then further upwards. Shawn Tierney (Host): We actually covered a product on the show that had two ports. It had one for your fieldbus Michael Bowne (PI): Yeah. And then it Shawn Tierney (Host): had a separate one for your IT or your IOT or your MQTT, which I thought was so inventive too because now the control system gets its data, and it’s under control. But reporting wise, you know, that’s kind of the best of both both worlds. You don’t have to have two sensors. You can send it to data both ways. And, yeah, just it’s the way you can do with these things and, you know, a lot of the sensors you probably have out there, I’ve noticed that some vendors, every sensor they sell is IO Link. So Yeah. You may already have it installed and not know it because the price difference to add it to some products. Once you get up to the fanciest sensors, of course, not the simplest sensors, but once you get up to the fanciest sensors, it’s it’s, you know, there’s a lot of horsepower in that chipset. So, you know, they can add IO Link for for pennies on the dollar. So very interesting stuff, though. Michael Bowne (PI): Yeah. That’s that’s a good point. And and, you know, of course, we could spend all day talking about IT, OT, and the segmentation of networks and all who’s who owns the IP addresses. And we I mean, that’s a whole separate topic. But in cases like that, yeah, it’s cool. You got a separate port. IT can do what they want on their one port. And if but, hey, don’t touch me in the control realm because Mhmm. This is my this is my realm. And and you bring up another good point, and that’s kind of there’s a I don’t I don’t wanna say that, you know, there’s there isn’t, like, a thick black line between, okay, this sensor is simple, therefore, should have IO link, or this sensor is complex, therefore, should have its own industrial Ethernet, interface. There’s almost a little bit of a gray area, but you’re right. I mean Mhmm. We kinda leave it up to the vendors to decide. Hey. My thing needs the horsepower that and it’s so complex that I need something like, like, an industrial Ethernet protocol. But, oh, you know what? This other central line is tailored for low cost, and so, therefore, I’m gonna put IO Link on it. But that’s, you know, that’s up to them to to decide. So when we talk about IO Link in terms of benefits, we kinda like to make the analogy with USB because everybody knows USB. You got your USB cable. You plug it into your computer on one end. On the other end, you plug it into your you know, you plug your mouse in or you plug your keyboard in, and you plug your key your printer in. Automatically, it it uses the same cable. It’s always the same. Everything everybody’s using that interface, and we kinda see the same thing with IO Link where it’s just a unified, unshielded three wire sensor cable, and it can use be used with all IO Link devices. Up until now, you know, if you had smart devices, right, memory and computing power is smaller and cheaper. Up until now, to get that extra information out, you would need multiple cables. The wiring is time consuming. It’s expensive. They’re large, costly to to install and maintain. But But with iolink, you just you just plug it in. It’s a simple m 12 plug, and then you don’t have all these spare parts of different cable types. It’s just one cable and, easy to maintain, thin, flexible. I’ve got a I’ve got an example here I’d like to highlight, and I’ll try and talk through it for those that are that are listening instead of instead of viewing. This is an example of 256 IOs via 16 fieldbus modules. So, like, fieldbus like remote IOs or whatever the case may be. So we’re connecting them to a PLC out in the field. And to do that, we would need 16 fieldbus modules in order to do that. These are just let’s let’s call them simple DI, you know, digital input proximity sensors. Mhmm. Shawn Tierney (Host): Mhmm. Michael Bowne (PI): With IO Link, we can do that via just one fieldbus module. So that’s just one IP address or one IO Link master. So already you’re cutting out 15 of those more expensive devices. And then we use what are called so called IO Link hubs, which bring those DI signals, put it all on one IO Link connection, put it into IO Link master, and send it out the other side. And with that, we can connect if you imagine these 272 IOs as shown here via just one fieldbus module. So it’s showing just huge, huge, huge savings simply on cost alone, due to the wiring. And, that that one cable, it fits all sensor types. So simple sensors, like a proximity sensor all the way up to complex devices like pressure, temperature, signal lamps, and even simple actuators all use the same IO Link cable. Shawn Tierney (Host): So where an IO Link device would be giving you not just on or off, but a lot of other information and some of that analog information. If all you had was a dumb device, well, now I can put 16 of them or so, you know, some number of them together Mhmm. Bring them into a hub. And each since each device only has an on or off, where a regular IO Link device would have lots of other information, you can now just join them all together and say, okay. Here we go. Here’s inputs one through x. Michael Bowne (PI): It’s, almost like multiplexing, put it all together on one and then Mhmm. Pump it out the other side. Yeah. Shawn Tierney (Host): Perfect. Michael Bowne (PI): The other way we relate IO Link to USB is kind of in the the identification and parameterization. So if we look at how you plug your printer into your computer, you plug it in, and automatically, your computer says, oh, okay. I know that that’s a HP something something desk check printer and and okay. How do you wanna do you wanna do color or black and white? Do you wanna do full duplex? Do you wanna do back and white, back and front on on the printing? And the same is true for for IO Link. So you plug in that IO Link sensor into your IO Link master. It reads it. It says, hey. The dialing says, hey. This is who I am. This is my type. This is my serial number. Every device has a vendor ID and a device ID. And then the IO Link master goes up and gets the IODD file, and I’ll show that here in a little bit, and then you can start that parametrization. And it’s just like it’s just like a USB. It’s it’s, no special knowledge is required. You can format changes very, very easily. You can even do them on the fly, for example, with an HMI on the on the machine. And, the identification methods make sure that you don’t plug in a wrong device into an IO Nialink port, which could stop the machine. It’ll it’ll it’ll recognize that and prevent, incorrect connections. It allows you to exchange devices very easily of the same type or the the same same manufacturer, same same device. So just like USB, it it it kinda works in that way. And then the other way, it’s kind of like USBs in the diagnostics, and this is a really, really powerful part of IO Link. So when your printer says, I’m out of paper or I’m out of toner or there’s a paper jam, it sends that signal, standardized signal to the to the computer, to your computer, your PC, and you know exactly what what to do, how to fix your your printer, why your printer isn’t working the same as true for IO Link. We’ve standardized these diagnostics. So this is a, a photo eye saying, hey, under voltage or over temperature or the the window on the photo eye has gotten dirty, so signal quality is deteriorating. So we standardized all this, so that these diagnostics all come in the same way, and, you can, you know, fix any any problem as fast as possible to to to, minimize downtime. And in the case of things like signal quality, hey. The the the window’s getting dirty. This enables things like preventative maintenance. Oh, I know I’m going into a planned shutdown next week. Now’s the time to go out and clean those sensors kind of thing, because I know that they’re I know that the signal’s going is deteriorating. So some cool things like that, that wouldn’t be possible with a traditional analog signal, which we’re showing here. And it also makes really no sense. I mean, in this example, what we’re showing here is a generic this is a pre pressure sensor. You know, it does its measurement. It then does some amplification, and then to stabilize the signal, it does an a to d, puts it into a micro, which does some temperature compensation linearization. But then, traditionally, prior to IO Link, what you do is then do another data a to send it out via zero to 10 volts or four to 20 milliamps, whatever, into the into a, an a to d card on the backplane of the PLC, I mean, this is just this is just crazy. It’s it’s time consuming. It’s, the the signal is still susceptible to interference. The the analog inputs on the cards on the PLC are expensive. There’s manual calibration of the signal. But with IO Link, it just makes sense. You take that signal right from the micro, pump it out digitally via an IO Link inexpensive interface to your, to your IO. And, we use that unshielded three wire inexpensive cable, Shawn Tierney (Host): and Michael Bowne (PI): then you get all those parameters and diagnostics. And, really, that’s the point of using IO Link is all that extra data, all that extra information that that comes along with the the process data. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And so those of you who are listening, I mean, what we saw there was to to shoot out a four to 20 milliamp signal or zero to 10 volt signal, it had to convert it from the digital value that was inside the device to analog, then I have to pump it out. And, you know, we always have to worry about noise and, you know, shielding and all that, you know, depending on the length of the run. And then in the PLC analog card, it’s converting it from analog back to digital, so you have that zero to 32,000 value or zero to 64,000, whatever your PLC does. And so IO Link does eliminate that. It eliminates the noise of your traditional analog. And I know I’ve met so many customers say we have no noise issues on our analog, and that’s great. But not everybody’s in that same boat. So you’re eliminating that d to a and then a to d, and that’s that’s you’re keeping everything digital. So you’re not only getting a cleaner, more accurate value from your device, you’re also getting all those additional pieces of information and the ability to be maybe configured to products. Some of these products need to be changed based on the type of product they’re sensing, you know, the type of fluid going through, the recipe that’s being drawn, the lighting, the colors. So all those different things, you you know, with a typical analog signal, you’re not gonna be able to send back and do a configuration to it. So, go ahead. Back to you, Michael. Michael Bowne (PI): No. You’re right. Exactly. We we have I I took this line out of this deck for the for, you know, for for brevity, but we show examples of of particularly food and bev, right, where you have batches, different I’m running a different batch. I’m running a different product. I need a different label on the on the bottle or whatever I’m running through the the the machine. You reconfigure that via the HMI. It sends all that stuff down to the sensors. Okay. Now I know I’m looking for I should be sensing this instead of this. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. It could be a clear bottle sensor, the clear bottle detector that the bottles change colors. So it’s has a different setting, or it could be background suppression depending on the color of the product. You need a different setting or a color sensor. Maybe you’re making different products and the different colors, and so, you know, all this is now configurable through your PLC, through your control system, through your HMI, which I just think is so cool. Michael Bowne (PI): Yeah. It’s it’s it’s super cool. Alright. Let’s get a little bit technical here. I think for some of the engineers, that might be nice. The IO Link signal and 24 volt power supply, like like we talked about before, it’s it’s an m 12 connector. So you’ve got five pins. Your pin one is your high, pin three is your low, and then pin four is your CQ line. That’s that’s where the IO Link digital signal lives. It’s serial. It’s bidirectional. It’s point to point. And then we also have on that same pin four, if you so desired, you could also parameterize your device via IO Link, set it all up, and then put it in what’s known as a CO mode or simple IO mode. And I’ll show that on the next slide too if maybe you’ve just got a digital IO, that you want a fast switching interface. So pins one and three are our power. Pins two and five are freely assignable. So for example, if you wanted to use that pin four for your IO Link signal and then separately have your own DI or DQ line, you could do that using a three wire, four wire, five wire cable. And then what’s cool also in IO Link and we’re starting to see this more and more is we call this port class b, same m 12 connector, same five pins, but pins two and five provide a separate power supply for additional power because and this is cool. We’re starting to see more and more IO link just, like, simple actuators Mhmm. On the market. And that’s really neat. So let’s say you’ve got some simple linear actuator, not not a complex, you know, driver, you know, or motor or something like that, but a a simple linear actuator. You can drive that via IO Link if you just gotta move something really, you know, maybe maybe even within connected to the same ports, on the master as some other sensors, and so you can do that logic in the master itself, you know, simple simple stuff like that. But that’s also possible with IO Link where you can drive it, not just sense it, but also actuate it with with IO Link. So that’s that’s some cool stuff that’s coming down the line. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, and I found that all the IO Link devices I had here, they came with the SIO mode already set up. So I was able to use the photo eyes and the proxies and all the other devices just as simple IO devices and without even touching the IO Link side of it, which I think is cool because, you know, in in many cases, you just need a photo eye to get up and running. Right? Michael Bowne (PI): Yeah. And that’s and that’s how they come out of the box. So out of the box, it’s in that CO mode. And I think you you kinda touched on this before. Maybe many customers have IO Link devices Yeah. On their machine. They don’t even know it Mhmm. Shawn Tierney (Host): Because they Michael Bowne (PI): took it out of the box. They needed that photo. They plugged it in and away they went. But there’s also that all all that extra stuff. If they wanted to, they could get down into the IO Link part of it. Mhmm. Maybe to reparameterize it, or what if you got to change, you still wanna use the CO mode. You just want that digital input. What if you wanna change the switching distance, for example, something like that? I don’t want it to switch at one meter. I want it to switch at two meters or whatever. So all that all that can be configured via IO Link. So on the if we if we talk about the the IO Link communication itself, there are three transmission speeds, comms one, two, and three. Comm one is 4.8 kilobits per second. COM two is 38.4 kilobits per second, and COM three is 230.4 kilobits per second. IO Link masters support all three comm modes, but devices are free to choose based on what they’re sending. If it’s temperature, maybe you don’t need COM three because that’s changing more slowly than something like like like we’re talking about a proximity sensor, which may want to send that a little bit more quickly and uses that that COM three mode. Many, many devices use COM three mode because still two hundred two hundred thirty kilobits per second, that’s, you know, that’s not gonna that’s not gonna kill you. And then a typical cycle time, because this is the question we get all the time, is what kind of cycle time can be achieved? It’s about a millisecond at at com three. So if you’re, you know, trying to go submillisecond, you know, maybe IO Link is not is not the solution at that point. But for many, many applications, that one millisecond cycle time can can, can accomplish whatever they need to. And then what’s cool is that from the EyeLink master’s perspective, it’ll have eight or 16 sensors connected to it. Each device can be set independently. So on this port this device, I’m talking at this comm rate and this cycle time. This other port number two, I’m speaking at a different transmission speed and a different cycle time and so on and so forth, you know, so that you’re not sending data unnecessarily that is simply just being sent for the purposes of being sent. And that’s and that’s pretty cool. Shawn Tierney (Host): And a lot of times, you don’t because you’re not reading a digital on off, you don’t the speed, you’re you’re actually getting a value, and that value a lot of times your PLC is not gonna be running faster than a millisecond scan time. So if you’re getting your value updated, you know, faster than the PLC, then that’s a then then that’s really what you need. Do you know how fast is your PLC running? How fast can your program controller use that value? And, you know, I’d be hard pressed to see a lot of applications where they’re breaking that one millisecond update rate. The other thing too is just because we’re talking at the speed doesn’t mean the actual calculation is even possible in a millisecond. So, you know, temperature changes, things that that sensors there’s limit limitations to the physical world. You know? And, you know, I I don’t know if anybody’s ever said this to you before, Michael, but when I first saw the whole comm thing, I thought that was confusing because having grown up with PCs, I always thought of comp one, comp two, comp one group. Right? And these are really just bought what I would call from the old days, sewer rates. Right? Michael Bowne (PI): Yeah. Exactly. Shawn Tierney (Host): Exactly. Insight why why they is it just maybe because it was the standard started overseas or any idea why they went with CALM? Michael Bowne (PI): I’m not gonna lie to you. That’s the first time I’ve gotten that question. Shawn Tierney (Host): Really? Okay. Michael Bowne (PI): Why they’re called that yeah. Let’s just let’s just rewrite this. They call it BOD one, BOD two, BOD three. Shawn Tierney (Host): I know. It’s just so weird. But, anyways, sorry sorry, audience. I just have Michael Bowne (PI): That’s a good one. That’s a good one. Nope. I’ll take that one back. Alright. So IO Link data comes in a couple different flavors. You have your process data. That’s your bread and butter, what you’re using to run the run the factory. Transmitted cyclically in a Telegram, the the data size is defined by the device, and it can be up to 32 bytes for each device, both input and output. Along with that comes a value bit indicating whether the process data is valid or invalid, and this can be transmitted is transmitted cyclically with the the process data. And then you have things that happen acyclically. These would be device data like parameters, identification data, diagnostic information, and these happen on request of the IO Link master. Obviously, a lot of that happens during startup, but also can happen during runtime if, as shown here on the slide with the with the last case, events can be error messages. So the the, the device will set a flag. Hey. There’s a short circuit or so, and then the the master can pull that device for more information, more diagnostic information, based on that event flag that’s that’s set by the set by the device. And so, the the question we always get at this point is, how do I make this all work? How do I integrate this stuff into my into my plant? Shawn Tierney (Host): Before we go any further, I did wanna jump back and tell you about a service I’m doing that I don’t think I’ve talked about very much, and it’s comes in two different flavors. First of all, I’ve actually had some vendors and companies reach out to me and say, Shawn, I know you don’t wanna travel all around the country with all your equipment. Right? That’s not what you do, but we want you to come out and teach us something. Would you come out and do a lecture? We’ll set up our own equipment. And, can you come out and just run us through some of the products and teach us some of your knowledge, and you don’t have to worry about bringing all the equipment with you. And so that’s something I really don’t talk about much, but I do wanna tell you that if you’re looking for training and you need it on-site, of course, you do have to pay for my travel time. But if you do want me to come out for a day or two days or for a week and do training on any of the products I train online now. Now if you want me to come out and do training on a product I don’t already have a curriculum on, I can’t do it. The building the curriculum is where all of my costs is on the training. Right? I shouldn’t say that. The web service in in in the back end does cost something every month as well, but most of the time it goes into and that’s really what being self employed is it’s time. Right? Most of the time goes into build building the curriculum. So if you have a need for somebody like Shawn, we can’t do a webinar. We can’t do a Teams meeting. We we can’t do online training. We want you to come out. And, again, I just got a call on this yesterday. Yes. I can do that. As long as the curriculum I’m gonna teach you is something I already have existing. And, I’m not gonna hand out lab books. We can buy you lab books if you want. People sell great lab books for $80.90 dollars a pop. If you want lab books, I’d be more than happy to include that in the quote. But in any case, I that’s one thing I do. The other thing I’ve been doing with vendors is they’ve hired me to come out and interview them at their trade show. So, usually, what happens is somebody will sponsor a podcast for $5.99. They’ll come on. We’ll do the interview. I’ll edit it all up. I’ll put their links in. We’ll talk about the thumbnail, and then we’ll release it ad free. Right? And so that covers my cost of producing that episode roughly. Right? We just raised it from $4.99 to $5.99 because most of the shows were were actually upside down on, so we need to raise it a little bit to make sure we’re covering our cost. But in any case, sometimes vendors have, you know, they have their own trade show, and they may have all of their product specialists there. And they’re like, hey, Shawn. We would like to do six or seven interviews at the trade show. Would you come out and actually record them there? We’ll pay your flight. We’ll pay your hotel and your expenses to get there and back. And so that’s another thing I haven’t talked about much that I’m doing. I’m working with some, you know, top five vendors to do that, and I’ve done it in the past. And so I did wanna explain it to you if you’re a vendor listening or if you are, talking to your vendor, like, you should have Shawn come out and interview all your people. You have them all in one place. Let them know that they can contact me about doing that. Again, you can contact me at theautomationblog.com, LinkedIn, YouTube, theautomationschool.com, pretty much any way you want. You can write me snail mail if you want. But in any case, I do wanna share that, and we also have in person training. I think I’ve talked to you guys about this quite a bit. We do custom in person training for as little as two people, $900 a day up to four people. And so if you wanna get some people in here, we can actually do Allen Bradley and Siemens in two days back to back. One day Allen Bradley, one day Siemens. So if you wanna learn two PLCs in two days back to back now I do have somebody ask me, hey, Shawn. Where’s your schedule of upcoming courses? And back in my previous life of twenty five years, we were always trying to sign people up and then canceling, you know, events and classes because, we wouldn’t get enough people to meet the vendors minimum. So I don’t wanna do that. So I don’t have actually any dates now. I have been talking with doing a intensive POC boot camp, but, you know, I just got so much things going on in my life right now that I don’t think I could pull that together this fall. But in any case, if you need some training, you wanna send your people here, we can even start at, like, noontime and then end the final day at noontime so you can get your flights and travel and all that. We’re one hour away from Albany, New York, and that’s a great little airport to fly in and out of. Actually, I’m flying out of it in November. They’ll go to a trade show, to interview vendors, vendors, product people. But in any case, I just wanna break in. There’s something about my company. I don’t think I ever talked to you guys about much, and so I just wanted to insert it here since I’m sponsoring this episode and eating the cost to produce it. I wanted to share that with you. And now, I won’t be back until the end of the show, so please enjoy the rest of this episode. Send any feedback you have to me, and, we’ll talk to you at the end of the show. Michael Bowne (PI): And it kinda works like this. So you have your IO Link device, which has an IODD file, which we mentioned earlier, that gets ingested by a parameterization tool. The parameterization tool comes with the IO Link master. Could be a separate piece of software. In some cases, could be a web page built into the IO Link master itself. Depends on depends on the vendor. But then what happens after that, how that data goes from the IO Link master to the controller, the PLC, is fieldbus specific. So you have your own, fieldbus file, you know, GSD or EDS or ESI, whatever the case may be, which is ingested by the engineering tool of the of the PLC and kind of outside way outside the scope of of of IO Link. And so the EDS file, the GSD file, and and that is the that data then gets sent via fieldbus, and that’s the sum of all the IO Link device data from all the ports on the IO Link master, where that IO Link communication as as defined by the IODD file, configures the port for the master and for the devices. And so an IODD file is provided by the devices, and every device manufacturer must provide an IODD for their device. It can be downloaded from the IODD finder, which is a website, and, it it describes what the entire device does. It describes the process data length, the process data structure, the parameter the name of the parameters, what range to expect, the data types, the addresses of the parameters in the in the in the indexes and subindexes. It can talk about GUI information, pages on which a parameter shall be displayed, names of parameter pages, all this kind of stuff is in an IODD file. It’s a it’s a zip file where you have that IODD as an XML. So that’s how we format the file. So it’s it’s both and this is the key part, both machine readable and and human readable. It’s got a little picture of the device, picture of the manufacturer logo. And with your permission, maybe I can show the IODD finder. It’s, ioddfinder.io-link.com. Mhmm. Looks simple enough. Let’s say we wanna look at a I’m gonna type in something here. Max ref. Let’s pick this. So this is just a this is a reference design, not an actual product that that, an end user would employ in their in their factory, but a reference design of something that maybe a device manufacturer would use. And it’s shows the manufacturer name, the article name number, the product name, the device ID. All that stuff is ingested by the parameterization tool, which then uses that information to go up to this IODD finder and grab the IODD file shown here, which can be downloaded if you wanted to look at it yourself. But in the past few years, we implemented what’s called an IODD viewer, which is pretty cool, which takes that nice XML file and parses it. So in human readable form, if you wanted to compare quickly, hey. I’m an end user. I wanna compare the IODD file from device vendor a to device vendor b to kinda see what kind of features they have. You could do that all very easily, and that’s shown here in the IODD viewer. What’s really what’s really neat about this IODD finder is that it has two ways it it it gets accessed. That’s this website that I just showed here. So as in humans are are accessing it, but it’s also accessible via API. And we we track the the traffic to the Audi divider, and the vast, vast majority of the traffic comes via API. So these are IO Link masters that just had a device connected to them. Parameter is I’m sorry. Parameterization tool that has a you know, or connected to the IO Link master that had device connected them. They go up to the AudiD finder, and they pull down that IODD file for the device that was just connected so that now they they can be, configured. And that’s really, really cool stuff. So all these IODD files are in one spot, in one database up there for for viewing or via the IODD viewer or for access from any number of IO Link tools out there. Shawn Tierney (Host): So when we’re talking about API access, we’re talking about the tool we’re using to configure the master. So it could be a web page built into the master, or it could be a separate software program. Do I have that correct? Michael Bowne (PI): Yeah. Right. So the parameterization tool, yeah, is usually is usually a software package that’ll run on your computer connecting to your, IO Link master that parameterizes the IO Link master. Yeah. Shawn Tierney (Host): Excellent. Or Michael Bowne (PI): through the network somehow. Maybe through the network. Yeah. Goes out and grabs that IODD file from the IODD finder to, you know, to parameterize that port in that device. Shawn Tierney (Host): Which is excellent because in previous iterations of smart networks and smart devices, you always have to go searching a vendor’s website, and then people would get the wrong file, and then I would be in the field saying this is never gonna work because you get the wrong device file. If they can’t give you the right device file, you’ll never get it to work. You know? And so this is much better having the organization have everybody require everybody who has IO Link to put their IODD files in the one place so everybody can always find it. And so the software tools can find it automatically for you, which is just a huge a huge change versus what we went through in the nineties. Michael Bowne (PI): Exactly. We came on a CD or something or what I mean, God only knows. I’m gonna switch gears a little bit here, talk about two topics subtopics within the IO Link domain, and one of them is IO Link wireless. This is, what we call is bridging the gap. So it’s an IEC standard, six eleven thirty nine as of November 2023, Shawn Tierney (Host): and Michael Bowne (PI): it’s enabling connections that simply weren’t possible before for IO Link. And in an example here, we’re showing a a smart machine tool where the IO Link sensor is integrated into the chuck of the lathe. Now that guy is spinning at 6,000 RPMs. That connection simply couldn’t be possible couldn’t be done any other way than with IO Link wireless or, let’s say, independent movers. So you’ve seen these moving systems where you’ve got the either floating or on a on a rail the other track systems exactly. If you integrate the smarts of IO Link onto the movers themselves instead of using, SCARA or Delta robots to do the to I mean, that’s you’re saving huge amounts of cost Mhmm. That way if the if those guys can move on their own, and they use IO Link wireless to do that. Slip rings where certainly sending power, is is well known, but sometimes communication can be tricky via slip ring. Mhmm. Yeah. End of arm tooling, like robot robot end of arms where you have a you’re gonna change the tool at the end of the arm. It’s more lightweight, saving on on robot cost that way. Less fewer lighter robots can be used, but it’s it’s, it’s cool. It the architecture looks pretty much the same, where you have your field level, your IO, and instead of wired connections, it’s it’s simply a wireless connection. Is that wired? It’s it’s wireless. And and what’s different about IO Link Wireless is that it was built for industry. So I think in the past, people have been burned by wireless technologies that made some promises that didn’t maybe you know, they they couldn’t meet the the the the the rigorous environment and and requirements of of industry, but that was different. It was built for industry from the start. So it uses the two point two point four gig license free ISM band. And what we do is a is this frequency hopping so that we use the same IO link, you know, data structure. We do this frequency hopping, and it’s it’s a cycle of five milliseconds. So you’re not going to get that one millisecond time that you get via wired IO link. We do a five millisecond cycle time, and then it’s using this frequency hopping method. It’s basically cable grade, connection, 10 to the minus nine error probability. You can have hundreds of wireless devices in a machine, and it’s deterministic. It’s designed it is designed from the outside for both for control, of course, but, of course, also for for monitoring and maybe, like, a brownfield. You wanna you can’t get IO Link to a sensor or something that you can maybe use IO Link wireless to get access to some some hard to reach sensor. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, you know, I thought that I think this is so

Ep. 229 - Manufacturing Architecture Explained Every Engineer and Plant Manager Needs to Know Today

Manufacturing Hub

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 29, 2025 78:25

In this episode of Manufacturing Hub, Vlad and Dave take a deep dive into one of the most critical yet often overlooked aspects of modern manufacturing: network and systems architecture. Too often manufacturers focus on SCADA, MES, and control layers without recognizing that the architecture beneath them is the foundation that determines whether a facility can scale, connect new equipment, and maintain reliability. Architecture touches everything from plant floor PLCs and HMIs to edge devices, managed switches, firewalls, historians, and enterprise-level systems.We begin the conversation by unpacking what “architecture” actually means in manufacturing environments. Is it the hardware, switches, and cables? Is it the way new machines are integrated into existing plants? Or is it the broader strategy of ensuring that data, safety, and scalability are protected? The answer, as both Vlad and Dave explain, is that it is all of these at once.Throughout the discussion, we explore real-world stories where poor architectural decisions led to unplanned downtime, cybersecurity risks, or expensive rework. Vlad shares an example of a palletizer brought online with unmanaged switches and insecure remote access hardware that nearly crippled production until it was properly segmented. Dave recalls his own field experiences, including unusual setups where integrators resorted to improvised remote troubleshooting, highlighting just how creative but fragile some solutions can be.The episode also looks at the evolution of remote access. From the early days of Ewon boxes to modern expectations of secure VPNs, jump boxes, and approved engineering workstations, we discuss what role remote connectivity should play in today's manufacturing environment. While these solutions can reduce travel time and speed up support, they can just as easily introduce vulnerabilities and trust issues if not carefully managed.From there we move into the technical tradeoffs of device level ring versus star topologies. Vlad explains why he often prefers device level ring to save costs and simplify troubleshooting, while Dave weighs in on the importance of pre-molded cables, managed switches, and long-term maintainability. We also analyze example architectures from Rockwell white papers, pointing out where diagrams align with field best practices and where they differ from what engineers often see in real facilities.Finally, we broaden the perspective by comparing greenfield and brownfield deployments. Greenfield projects allow prime contractors and consultants to design standards up front, but most facilities live in brownfield reality where years of technical debt, unmanaged switches, and ad hoc networks make improvements harder. We also touch on how architecture differs by industry, whether in food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, or distributed environments such as trains or pipelines.The conversation closes with predictions, career advice, and resource recommendations. Vlad stresses that CCNA is still one of the best starting points for engineers who want to understand industrial networking fundamentals, and Dave emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions and learning from experienced peers. Both agree that demand for data, combined with the rise of AI, will continue to stress legacy networks until companies recognize the need for robust, standards-driven architectures.If you work in automation, engineering, IT, or plant management, this episode will give you perspective on why network architecture is not just a technical afterthought but a strategic enabler of digital transformation.Timestamps 00:00 Introduction and community updates 02:30 Defining architecture in manufacturing 05:00 Why networks are the backbone of manufacturing systems 08:00 A real-world palletizer story and the risks of unmanaged switches 14:00 The rise and pitfalls of remote access devices 18:30 Field story of unconventional remote troubleshooting setups 23:00 Who is responsible for network design: end users, integrators, or OEMs 28:00 Analyzing Rockwell's reference architecture diagrams 36:00 Device level ring versus star topologies in practice 49:00 Brownfield versus greenfield considerations 56:00 Industry-specific architectures from food and beverage to oil and gas 01:04:00 The role of standards and corporate versus local decision making 01:08:30 Predictions, career advice, and recommended resourcesReferences Mentioned in this Episode Ignition Community Conference: https://icc.inductiveautomation.com/ Siemens SPS Atlanta Event: https://new.siemens.com/us/en/company/fairs-events/sps.html Rockwell Automation Architectures and Design White Papers: https://literature.rockwellautomation.com CISSP Official Study Guide: https://www.isc2.org/Certifications/CISSP Winning by Tim Grover: https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Unforgiving-Race-Greatness/dp/1982168862 Cisco CCNA Certification: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/training-events/training-certifications/exams/current-list/ccna.htmlAbout the HostsVlad Romanov is an electrical engineer and consultant with over a decade of experience in manufacturing and industrial automation. His background spans global companies such as Procter & Gamble, Kraft Heinz, and Post Holdings, where he has led modernization projects, SCADA and MES deployments, and digital transformation initiatives. He is the founder of Joltek, a consulting firm helping manufacturers align people, process, and technology to improve operations, and he also leads SolisPLC, an education platform for automation professionals. Connect with Vlad on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanovDave Griffith is a manufacturing consultant and co-host of Manufacturing Hub. With extensive experience in controls, systems integration, and business development, Dave has helped manufacturers across industries adopt SCADA, MES, and digital transformation solutions. He frequently shares insights on IT-OT convergence, operational strategy, and leadership in the automation space. Connect with Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffithJoltek is a consulting and integration firm that helps manufacturers modernize with clarity, strategy, and execution. Built on decades of hands-on experience in engineering, automation, and plant leadership, Joltek bridges the gap between technical complexity and business value. The team is known for uncovering hidden risks in outdated systems, designing scalable IT and OT architectures, and guiding digital transformation initiatives that actually deliver measurable results. Whether it is upgrading control systems, deploying SCADA and MES platforms, or advising on strategic investments, Joltek consistently brings deep expertise and practical solutions that make manufacturing operations more resilient, efficient, and future ready.Listen and Subscribe Catch every episode of Manufacturing Hub on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms. Subscribe to stay up to date with weekly conversations on automation, digital transformation, and the future of manufacturing.

First Look: Samos Pro Safety Controller (S2E15)

moving digital north unlock manufacturing lab digital twins registering hmis

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2025 52:59 Transcription Available

This week Shawn Tierney hosts Michael Warren from Wieland Electric in studio to demonstrate the SAMOS PRO Safety Controller in episode 15 of The Automation Show Season 2: #Automation #IndustrialAutomation #InsightsInAutomation Watch The Automation Show: Samos Pro Safety Controller Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Show Notes: Thanks to Michael for coming out to our office, and to Wieland for sponsoring this episode! For more information about the SAMOS Pro Safety Controller, see the below links: Wieland Electric Safety Products Free Download of Samos Plan6 SAMOS PRO SAFETY CONTROLLER Safety Training Wieland Electric North America Contact info Note: The video edition was originally released on 07-22-25, and re-released with Audio Podcast Edition on 08-21-25. Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Everybody, welcome back to the show. Sean Tierney here from Insights and Automation, and we have a special show for you today. I have Michael here from Wheelan, and we’re gonna talk safety PLCs and all kinds of great stuff. But before we jump into that, you know, I haven’t had Wheeling on the show before. So, Michael, I’m hoping you can give us a well, not only introduce yourself. I got to meet him this morning before we started recording. But, if you could introduce yourself and then maybe tell us a little bit about your company, and then we can jump into why we’re here to talk about these good looking products. So let me turn it over to you. Michael Warren (Wieland): Okay. Great. Well, thank you, Sean. Thank you for having me. I appreciate that. And, yeah, my name is Mike Warren. I’m a business development manager for, Whelan Electric, North America. I’ve been, with Whelan a couple years now, but, I got over twenty years of experience in the industry. I have a couple of TUV certifications under my belt. I have a TUV functional safety engineer and also TUV certified functional safety expert. In addition to that, I do consulting for safety applications. I teach safety classes. I also teach the CFSE class. And, I do things like, review machine safeguarding, standards, CE marking, risk assessments, remediations, lockout tagout, basically everything that, is involved in in the safety world. These are some of the classes that I cover. So, what we’re doing today, Sean, is to talk about, our product. Okay? The the Samuels Pro Compact. And the Samuels Pro Compact is a safety PLC. It’s known, by various names, safety controller, brick PLC, whatnot. But it is a compact, as the name implies, safety controller. And in a safety chain, it really is, the keystone to a safety, system. There’s always, an input device. Okay. We follow the ILO system. Okay. I for input devices. L for logic, in this case, the Samuels Pro Compact. And an output devices could be contactors, which I have here, in the demo itself. Okay. It could be a, OSSD, inputs from a VFD or robots. Okay? So those qualify as output devices. But the input device is for detection. The large device makes a decision, and the output device executes. And the primary purpose of an output device is to remove energy in an emergency or a, an intrusion, situation. So let’s take a look at the product itself. Okay? The Samuels Pro Compact, again, is occupying this spot right here, in the demo itself. It’s 45 millimeters. Okay? Very compact. The base system is set up with 20 inputs. Okay? 20 devices. Okay. 20 inputs, it would be, 10 safety devices. Safety device is always redundant. There’s two points per safety device. So that device is already set up for 10. There’s four safety outputs on it. And the version that I have here in the demo is actually an upgraded version including motion. So not only will it, set up and accept the inputs from some of these safety devices that I have here, for example, like light curtains, I have door switches, I have an e stop, I also have an analog position switch right there that’ll detect the input. Other than those devices, I also have a safety encoder attached to one of the axes, in the demo to do motion detection. Not only are we detecting people, but we’re also detecting shaft movements, okay, with the encoder itself. Shawn Tierney (Host): And that’s optional. So there’s two models, one with motion and one without. Michael Warren (Wieland): That’s absolutely right. Alright. And I wanna point out that the software is free. It can be downloaded easily. It can throw it on your laptop. And the nice thing about it, and we’ll get to the software. We’re gonna show a little bit about it, that you can use the software without any hardware attached to it yet. Okay? You could literally can build your safety system in the virtual sense, test it out, check to see if it’s, working properly. And, again, when we dive into the software, you’ll see a little bit, the nice, additional features you get. Things like a schematic and a report, and also show you the modules that are actually part of the system itself. Okay? Now, we talked about, the communications on this too. Okay? We have three onboard communication, protocols. Okay? Onboard, we can, work with PROFINET, Ethernet IP, and Modbus TCP. Shawn Tierney (Host): Oh, nice. Michael Warren (Wieland): There are additional gateways that you can get to add additional, cons. Okay? That includes CAN open, PROFIBUS, and EtherCAT. So, again, we have a nice way of communicating with other protocols, and let’s face it, other manufacturers. And in the safety world, the manufacturer’s controllers, the actual, automation controllers are not to dictate to the safety system when to remove energy or not. It’s the other way around. The safety always has a a precedence and a priority over the controls. Its purpose with these communication gateways is to inform the control systems of what’s going on in the safety. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. I mean, most of the time, your your master PLC is gonna already have an HMI or SCADA system. Correct. So they’re gonna wanna display that information. So if you have those especially the the three you have built in, I’ll be able to probably the biggest three Yep. You know, according to all the surveys and industry reports and whatnot. Having those built in means I mean, you cover most PLCs standard PLCs. You’re gonna be able to give the data to them. They’re gonna be able to know in their program. They’re They’re gonna be able to let their operators know using the existing equipment. So very cool. Michael Warren (Wieland): Yep. And in this world, we, fully understand that, it’s a it’s a mix and match. Okay? Okay. Rare do we find customers that are using a single brand for everything. You and it’s necessary that, you know, one brand of light curtains works with the controller and another brand of door switch and whatnot. They’re all kinda compatible. And the communications, though, is very, very important, because, again, they’re not, operating, independently and in a silo. Shawn Tierney (Host): So if I understand that correctly, so we’re seeing your products, Ian. I really don’t know much about your company and what products they make, but I can see you make a lot of products here. So you’re saying that you don’t just work with the Whelan products, you work with other people’s safety products as well. Absolutely. Third party light curtain or third party contactor or safety contactor or third parties, safety push button. Michael Warren (Wieland): Absolutely. Okay. Whelan, itself is a, it’s a German company. Okay? Okay? They’re famous for their terminal blocks. Okay? So really we put them on the map, you know, many, many years ago. But, there’s two pillars for the company right now. One is safety products, and the other is distributed power. And, again, this is an important product for it. This is really our keystone and our leading product, as a logic device in a safety system. So a lot of time and energy and development has been put into this, to make it, a world class and, leading with all the features, like you said, including communications. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, I think too the fact that the audience can go out there and grab a copy of the software and actually simulate their system, that gives them a you know, because maybe they maybe they’re like me. Maybe they haven’t used your system before. So they can actually build a system, put it together, test it in the simulator without spending a dime. They’ll be like and, hey. They go to the boss and say, hey. I got a proof of concept here. Let’s let’s call Mike and say, we can’t come to call out and and show us more. Michael Warren (Wieland): Yep. No. No. As a please call. By the way, I appreciate that. No. Like I say, it is a, a wonderful benefit. It helps people try to determine because, let’s face it. Not everybody knows and understands safety unless you do this, day in and day out. Yeah. You’re not up with the latest standards. You don’t understand simple things like an e stop here requires a, a contrasting yellow background to it. Something as simple as that. And, again, the, the the software itself is smart enough where you put these devices together, and if you configure it wrong, it bounces you out. And the reason that it bounces you out or says that you can’t, you’re not permitted to do that particular because it’s always traceable back to standards. Okay? So the standards are embedded in the configuration, and the algorithms that allow you to drag and drop and put particular devices together are based on, on the standards themselves. Okay. So the controller itself, in a safety system, is of the highest rating. Okay? In the PL system, it’s PLE. Okay? That’s, that’s that is the highest, that you can, arrive to in in the PL system. It’s PLE, SIL three, or CAT four. Okay? They’re all being used in in today’s industry. People, communicate, about safety either in cats or seals or PLs. But the latest and greatest, in, going forward really is the, the the performance level, PLE. That’s the highest level. But, again, it follows basic, safety fundamentals that if you attach, devices, in a chain, a safety chain, and you have PLE, PLE, PLE, and you have one device, that’s PLD or PLC, for example, a little lower than the whole system always reverts down to the lowest in the chain. It’s the weakest link basically. The weakest link. Yeah. Okay. So, again, you’re starting out with a a PLE safety controller, and now the weakest link is not the controller. It tends to be something else. Good. Okay? I mentioned also that, the motion control. Okay? And it has a a safe motion, embedded in the software, and we’re gonna take a peek at these a little bit. Six different TUV function blocks. Okay? Certified function blocks. Okay? They are, a safe standstill motion. Okay? Or or basically a zero RPM, determination. Okay? And all of these function blocks in the motion world are designed to detect shaft motion, shaft speed, shaft position, okay, and shaft direction. All the rest of the safety devices we have on here are for human detection. Okay? Hands, like light curtains, hands going in, door switches, gates opening, things like that. To your point, Sean, that, yeah, you say, you know, we have compatibility with lots of other brands and lots of other products. We don’t have all the safety products that are available here in front of us. For example, safety mats. Okay? Okay. Safety mats can be fed into this. Okay? It’s just another input device. Mhmm. Okay? Safety scanners can be fed into this. Okay? The form factor of a safety scanner is a little different than light curtains. Okay? But it’s basic same principle. Okay? Rope pulley stops. Okay? Two hand controls. All of these different devices are available in the library. Okay? And, again, we’re gonna show the software here in a little bit, and you can configure it, as you please with whatever brand, you’d like to use. And, again, some people are are stuck on certain technologies. For example, safety mats are kinda older technology. Mhmm. But they’re still viable and a viable solution in a lot of applications, and we see them all the time. So, obviously, the safety controller, will take those, as a, a viable input. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. A lot of times I’ve seen that the choice there is really I mean, I think most people wanna do the light curtains, but I think the mats, the rope pulls, the the scanners, I mean, they all address applications where the light curtain just doesn’t isn’t the best fit. So it really comes back, and you tell me if I’m wrong, but it seems the the choice there, a lot of times, comes back to, not always. I mean, there’s preferences. They want they all work. Right? Yep. But the scanners usually being the most expensive in my experience. But, yeah, a lot of Michael Warren (Wieland): it there’s there’s some applications you just have to have the rope pull. You something else won’t work. Yep. No. You’re absolutely right. The application typically drives the choice of devices. And, one of the things that, I go through when I do safety, machine safeguarding classes is this should always be be based on risk assessments. Yeah. Really looking at it, holistically, the whole system, the usage, the severity of the potential injuries, the frequency, the chances of these injuries type of happen. And, again, we put the best recommendations going forward, based on when we see applications. But it is by application by application. Rarely do we see, two that are exactly the same. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And the risk assessment, I mean, if you’re an expert, you have the training he has, you you maybe you can do your own. But a a lot of us don’t have that training. And so to pick the right products, you gotta know what the risks are. And you don’t wanna spend thousands and thousands of dollars on something and then find out, oh, like, the biggest risk you didn’t address because it just didn’t come to mind. So the risk assessment by an expert is so huge in these type of applications. Again, some of the people, maybe they went to your training, maybe they got certified, and they can do their own. But, that’s usually a big part of a part of a project. Michael Warren (Wieland): It is. It is. And, it’s important, again, to have at least, you know, some background. Okay? It isn’t really an arbitrary, choice of devices. It’s usually a thoughtful process thinking of the input devices and the risks to people and, considering the the, the collaboration of people and machinery together. This is where we have to try to protect, humans near the equipment. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s gone on the days from a 100 years ago where, you can take those risks. I know a lot of people still do, but, you know, every time somebody gets hurt and there’s a new light current going up or a new god going on something, the go on are the days where a sign says, don’t touch or you may die. That’s not sufficient these days. And a lot of that’s driven by the insurance companies because they don’t wanna have to pay out for people getting all these injuries. Right? And I think we all know people who are missing hands and thumbs and and and body parts because they got they got stuck in a machine. So, I think this is a good trend. And these products, I I I think when you guys see the software, they’re super easy to use as well, so it makes a lot of sense. Michael Warren (Wieland): Yep. And let’s not forget, you mentioned insurance companies, but let’s not forget government oversight. Okay? OTA Yeah. True. Is, here in The United States is, really the watchdog for safety. And, not only are there, costs involved with machine downtime and injuries and insurance payouts, but let’s not forget, fines, levied by, OSHA. Okay? And, once you, unfortunately, once you get into, OSHA’s radar, they keep they can’t they tend to keep an eye on you. And, you don’t again, it’s it’s this kind of scrutiny you really don’t want. Poor publicity, downtime, and, again, that’s reputation. I mean, at some point, it boils down to company reputation. Okay? But, speaking of software, why don’t we take a peek at the software here, and let me show you a couple of details about it. Okay? This is the basic work screen right here. I have the software, called up. Again, it was a free download. I downloaded it online. And, again, I wanna create a basic system. Okay? I’m not gonna replicate this whole system here. There’s a lot of devices here and there could be conditions where I have multiple safety zones, which is something that you could put in the software. But I’m just gonna do a very basic configuration. I I call it the five minutes to safety setup. And what’s the simplest safety device to wire up and set up here? It’s the lonely estop. Okay? What we’re going to do is we’re gonna take an estop, put it into our, our our workspace here, and wire it up, run it, make sure it operates properly. I have the proper, wiring, I have proper configuration, and then we’ll see how the software guides us to, that completion. Okay? So, Sean, we’re gonna grab a device here. Okay? I’m gonna go ahead and grab an e stop. And you’ll notice here, I have a choice either a single channel or a dual channel. We always wanna pick dual channel. Safety is always redundant to contacts per. Okay? So I grab that. Okay? Now as part of a safety system, once I, initiate an emergency stop, I have to be able to reset it. Okay? That’s an important part of the actuation of the, of the estop. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna grab a reset button. Okay? Right out of the library. Now pop it right over here. Now the next thing I wanna do is I have to have the actual contact, the initial initiation of a switch itself. Okay? So I’m going to come over here to the switch, and I’m going to grab a dual channel switch. Just drag it over here. Okay? So I have my emergency stop. I have my reset, and then I have the actual switch, the initiation switch of the system. And what’s missing? My output device. Right? So I’m gonna come over here, and I’m gonna just grab some contactors. Okay? Quite similar to what I have in the demo itself. And again, dual channel. I’m gonna grab that guy right there. Okay? So input device, logic device is the Samuels, controller here, and also the software called Samuels plan is right in front of us. Now we connect. I’m connecting here to there. I connect here to here, and then I connect the output to the contactors. Okay? Boom. I’m all set up. That’s it. Now why don’t we run and initiate, a safety function here? Let’s test it out. That’s how you’re gonna really know now. Right? I turn the simulation on. The background goes green. So I’m in a simulated mode. I’m in a virtual system right now. And as you can see, I have no hardware set up. I’m just using the software and the tools in the software itself. Okay? I’m gonna start the safety. Okay? Start the simulation. You can see the counter go up. This is the the time, okay, that I’m run actually running the, the simulation, and I have to turn things on. Right? I have to initiate them. Okay? I turn that on. You’ll notice here I have this flashing display, display reset request. I turn that one on, and then I actually do a reset. It’s as though I just set up an estop, and I say, okay. Let’s initiate it. Let’s get it started. Okay? Now I want you to notice the lines. Right? From my estop to the reset to the contactors are all green. That means I’m up and live, and I have a living, breathing safety system right now. So how do I know if it’s working properly? Well, let’s just trip the estop. It would be as simple as hitting the mushroom here and depressing it down. Since we’re virtual here, I’m gonna hit the estop right here. My green lines disappear. Okay? I’ve effectively executed a safety function. I, pushed the estop here, and I lost my connection to my contactor. I now have removed energy from that contactor. Okay? But and now if I wanna go through a a reset, sequence, go back on, you’ll see the flashing light. I turn that on, turn that on, and now I have my system back up again. Okay? Very easy. And, again, I I tell people that, this isn’t really a a programming system. This is really a configuration, and you’re just dragging and dropping. Now let’s take a look at some of the other tools that we have here. I’m just gonna pause the simulation for a second here. Okay. Once I actually do this and I know I have a living, breathing, simulation system. Okay? I shut off the simulation for a second and let’s see what the software has shown us or what done for us. Okay? Number one, the module. It actually shows us the module that it’s selected to accomplish the function that we wanted to do. Okay? This particular model, okay, the non motion one, you you mentioned that before. This is a non motion because all we’re doing is an e stop detection here. And if you take a look, you’ll see some very interesting points. Okay? Notice you’re gonna see an e stop symbol right here on I one and I two. It automatically selected, I one and I two to do that connection. The switch, the reset switch itself, I three and I four, and on the output side, I have q 1 and q two. They’re my contactors. It actually shows up right on here. Okay? And, as you can see on the demo itself, we have flash we have lights that are on. We have a communication light on the Ethernet IP port that’s flashing. These would be, your indicators on here telling you the condition whether you have good communications, you have good connections, or in in the event that you have a safety trip. Okay? Some of these indicators will go red. And that’s how your your first visual when you approach a, controller like this and you see that you have a safety trip, you would have the red indication on here. Okay? So that’s the module that that came up automatically in the software. Next is the report. Okay? It’s gonna generate a report on our configuration. Okay? And it’s nice because there’s a lot in the report itself. If we scroll down, we end up with a CRC control number. This is actually a time date stamp that identifies the unique configuration of the, project that we just created here based on the time date, and it’s unique. Okay? And when you go ahead and build a big system and you get a machine commissioned, okay, the CRC number is important to identify the material condition and the safety, the report that is generated, the safety level, and it’ll be identified here in the report itself. Okay? Okay. List of materials. Okay. We have, not only a bill of materials. Okay. Scroll down. There’s our controller again. That is in the report. Again, it’s a replication of what we saw in the software. There’s a bill of materials, the actual devices that are part of the safety system here. Okay. And we scroll down a little bit more. If we ran some diagnostics and more elaborate systems, we can run diagnostics and collect that information and actually have it show up here in the report. Okay? General information, things like CPU cycle time, for example, CPU usage. Okay? Isn’t identified here. Now we go down a little bit further and this is a really really cool part of the system that I like is actually the wiring diagram. We get calls all the time. Hey, how do you wire this? They say, you know, what do I connect? And I said, well, you know, it’s a input device, log device, output device. Yeah. But how do you connect it? When you set it up in the software here and you do the drag and drop like you see and run the report, you get an automatic wiring diagram. That’s all. So you don’t have to, you know, break out a pen and paper and draw up your wiring diagram. It’s already in here. And you can export this and put it into your master, wiring diagram. Okay? So those are on the inputs. Right? Okay? It’s my test policies. Okay? It shows my mercy stop and then also my reset switch. And on the output, I show my contactors. Okay? So, again, as you go through the whole report, it shows all the details or anything we configured. Again, we did something very simple. Just wired up an e stop to, actuate, a safety function, and we had the contactors to actually do something. The logic device makes a decision, and the contactors actually remove the energy. Okay? Now if we had additional things like, IO. Okay? This does have the ability to, have expanded IO. Again, we mentioned there were 20 IO points, resident, on the, controller itself. But if you needed more than 20, okay, we have additional safety inputs. We have additional safety outputs. We you also can attach through the backplane on the DIN rail itself, non safety IO. Okay? Things like the lights that are on here. Okay? Those aren’t really safety functions, but we do need IO points to actually run those. Shawn Tierney (Host): Is that what the gray module is? Michael Warren (Wieland): That’s exactly what that is. Safety. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Good call. And again, it’s, there’s not a really a standard that says that that they shall be yellow, but it’s kind of an industry convention. Yeah. Okay? There’s a difference between a standard convention and, yellow kinda calls out as a safety device and non yellow, for example, would be a, non safety, and that is a non safety function. So again, we have, additional, IO not only for, the safety but non safety. And, again, people tend to think that, the safety itself, can’t do a standard, operations and standard logic. But, I might point out here in the function blocks themselves. Okay? We actually have capabilities like that. Okay? In the software itself, okay, you take a peek here. These are just standard logic symbols. Right? Okay. I have a not, and, or. I mean, I can do a lot of features on here and really create elaborate safety systems. Mhmm. And again, a safety controller can do some non safety functions. It’s you just can’t go the other way around. A a non safety controller cannot be, utilized, for safety. Okay? But that’s all built into the software right there. And again, if we had additional if we wanted EtherCAT, for example. Okay? EtherCAT was not resident on here. We would add a separate, comm gateway, to that system right there, and it would show up in our report here. Additional gateways, extension modules, and any sort of logic that we had associated with the system itself. But, again, this report just gets printed up automatically. It shows, basically what we saw in the software that’s resident in here too. If you have to go back and make modifications, you’re obviously going to change the CRC number because every time you change configuration, you get a new configuration code. But, you do get a chance to basically see, and it’s a copy of, whatever that you had configured there in the report. So you have the report, you have the modules, and then you have your workspace. And, again, all of this was done virtually. All we had was, the free software downloaded, and we ran it, to run, the system for us. Shawn Tierney (Host): I should’ve asked you before you close the report. Do you get a bill of materials, like, the actual part numbers you need to order? Michael Warren (Wieland): Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I’m glad you asked that. Okay. Run the report. Open it up again. And our bill of material, Shawn Tierney (Host): let’s It’s usually a pretty big one too because, you know, you you’re not gonna be an expert like they are on their products or use any data tool to help you select which products you need, especially since you just went through and configured it all. And so there it is. There’s your bill of material. Michael Warren (Wieland): That’s the bill of material there. Okay? We have the controller itself. The card is, an SD card. Okay. Good point. We should mention this now. Yep. The, the SD card itself, okay, is, specially configured to work with the, this it’s not entirely big. It’s only a 512, megabyte, but it is required and this is where all of the, safety programs are actually resident. The nice thing about that is if you’ve had if you have multiple safety controllers in your facility and you have your recipes, resident on the card here, you literally can take this out and pollinate, literally go to each controller, install it, and then load up and have have safety programs. So you go from one controller to the other to the other, but the recipes are resident on the card itself. Shawn Tierney (Host): So what how about duplicating the program? If I if I’m an OEM and I have a bunch of machines. Right? And I just wanna duplicate the program. Can I use the card to do that as well from machine to machine to machine? Michael Warren (Wieland): Absolutely. You could do it card to card or if you did, you know, use your laptop. Okay? And you have the program on there. Shawn Tierney (Host): Okay. You save right to the card? You save it to the card. Yep. Okay. Without having the controller here, you can save right to the card. Michael Warren (Wieland): Save right to the card. Shawn Tierney (Host): Oh, that’s a nice feature. Yep. Some people can’t do that. Yep. I won’t mention any names. Michael Warren (Wieland): So yeah. Like I say, the good news is, it does save to the card. The bad news is you have to have the card, as part of it. Shawn Tierney (Host): It needs to be the company. It needs to be a wheeling card that’s matched for that device. Exactly. The special call it out. Michael Warren (Wieland): Yep. To close it out. And then again, the the rest of, the the bill materials is we have the e stop, the dual channel closer. That’s that’s just the software’s name for the reset switch and a set of contactors inside. But that is, to answer your question, that is the, the bill material there. Did you have any questions? Well, you know, he gave me some Shawn Tierney (Host): of the most popular good. I have not well, I purposely as you guys know, I purposely don’t look at the companies the first time I see them because I wanna try to have a natural reaction like you will the first time you’re watching this episode. Yeah. So, in any case, Mike was kind enough to give me some of the questions that come in. So how about number one? Alright. So I’m gonna read number one here. What makes the Samos I’m sorry. What makes the Samos Pro Compact ideal for space constraint applications? Michael Warren (Wieland): That’s a great question. And, we touched upon this and it has to do with the actual size of it. Okay? As I mentioned, it only occupies, 45 millimeters, on a DIN rail. Okay? Great. And, itself is set up with 20 input points, meaning it’s 10 safety devices. And let’s say I had discrete relays. Discrete relays typically take up 22 and a half millimeters a piece on the DIN rail space. 22 and a half millimeters times 10 devices, okay, would be occupy the whole DIN rail here. Okay? For 10 devices using discrete relays. The beauty and the benefit of having a say a compact like this, it only occupies 45 millimeters. Okay? So you have all this additional space for either expansion modules or other products. For example, the controls themselves. Yeah. K. No one says you have to run the controls, okay, or for safety in a separate cabin. They oftentimes share the same space in in the cabin. Cabinet space is valuable. Very real estate is very valuable. So again, it only occupies 45 millimeters. It saves an awful lot of space, holds a lot of devices just by itself. So, there’s an advantage right there. It makes a quick and easy configuration. Shawn Tierney (Host): Now you talked about something. I always thought this was a little odd. So you have an existing PLC, and then the the word comes in that whatever equipment you’re adding to the line or maybe it’s been reconfigured and you need to add a safety PLC. A lot of times, companies will not they’re like, we’re not gonna mess with the part that works. We’re gonna add in a separate safety PLC. And I think that’s unintuitive for people who you know, if you’re designing a brand new system, you’re gonna wanna design and get to buy a POC that’s a standard POC and a safety POC all in one. But I don’t think that’s that’s the opera. Do can you just share some of your thoughts on applications that you’ve seen over the years where they had an existing control system, but they needed to add a safety POC? And and that’s why they chose your product because it had to be totally separate from the existing system. Michael Warren (Wieland): Exactly. Exactly. You know, it’s it’s often nice to work on projects where you’re in the design, the front end. Okay? And you can have it all integrated and it all works quite nice. Yeah. Whatever you want. But, the the reality is that, you know, we’re called upon to add safety to a lot of older legacy systems. And, the concept that we always adhere to is really it’s a safety layer. Okay? And I really try in my classes, I try to separate control circuits from safety circuits. I call the control circuit the black circuits, and I call the safety circuits the red circuits. And the red circuits always have priority. Okay? And they have overreach, let’s say, of the black circuits to remove energy in an emergency situation. I mean, that’s what we’re that’s what we’re here to do. Right? We’re here the logic device is here to make a decision on an input. It could be either a detection of a hand or door opening or whatnot, or in the case of motion, an encoder signal. Okay? Identifying, over speed, going the wrong direction, has not reached a zero RPM state. Okay? That’s a a dangerous situation and it won’t open a door. It won’t unlock something until it achieves that state. So, to your question, we do a lot of applications where we have to put safety on as an afterthought. Yeah. Okay? And we work again with the controls, but we never integrate the safety directly. It always has a priority over it. And the idea is that the safety system will remove energy Yeah. From, whatever source. And when I say energy, it doesn’t have to be just electricity. Right? There could be kinetic energy. Mhmm. Okay? There could be Okay? There could be hydraulic energy. Okay? Their fluid power safety is just as important as electrical power safety. Okay? Quite honestly. Yeah. So those have a priority. It removes that energy, from the source, and then it turns around and it forms the control circuits. Okay? And this again, it’s it’s a little more painful and a little more complicated sometimes to add it onto a legacy equipment, but, it does get added, all the time. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And, you know, I know a lot of the vendors these days are only supporting the last, maybe, the six or seven years of software. If you have a multimillion dollar system that’s full of racks and racks of standard controls, you know, upgrading that, just even upgrading the CPU to get a safety CPU could be that could be more than than this entire project. Yeah. And I think that’s what I’ve seen is, you know, they don’t wanna update the software. They don’t wanna have to buy new laptops. They don’t wanna have to stock new spares. That control system is standalone and works great. And so they’ll whether they go with the same company or a different company or a wheel in, they they’ll add in the safety, the PLC as as a secondary PLC that controls the safety that’s integrated with the safety because that big expensive system, they can’t touch it, and they can’t afford to upgrade it. Just as a standalone, trying to upgrade that would be would be, really overkill. So and that’s what I’ve seen. And you guys tell let us know in the comments what you’ve seen. Now am I way off? You know, let let us know in the comments, and I’d love to hear what your thoughts are. But let me pitch it back to you, Mike, and, after that interruption. Sorry. No problem. Any other questions by chance? Hey. I have another, often asked question. How does Samos Pro Compact reduce programming and commissioning time? Ah. Michael Warren (Wieland): How does it do that? Well, let’s start off with everybody’s favorite word. It’s free. The software is free. Okay? Truly. Easy to download and, as we just, showed us, easy to configure. And, quite honestly, the complaints for a a lot of system, setups and a lot of software packages is the complexity of using it. And, slowly but surely, software is evolving to the point where it’s very graphical and it’s all drag and drop. Okay? Yeah. And as you saw on the library, all the ingredients are there. Okay? And even if you select the wrong thing and you try to you drag and drop, you know, the output of one thing into the input of another thing, and if it bounces and it won’t accept it, you know you’re violating or you’re not setting it up properly. So slowly but surely, it’ll explain to you. And what you can do in the software too, if you ever have any questions, I should have mentioned this when we were looking at the software, was you can right click on any of the modules themselves, and it automatically goes to a help screen and you get all the details on that device. And if there are variables, if there are variables available to change the features on that. For example, like a a an or device. Okay? Or an and gate. Okay? You can pull it up, drag it into the screen and say, well, it’ll default to, to two. And it said, well, I need, I need three. I have three. Okay? I need this and this and this. Okay? You right click and you have a variable and a drop down and you can add another input to that. Shawn Tierney (Host): Oh, that’s cool. Okay. I love how you’ve combined the configurator with the programmer. Yeah. So now it’s all in one. So you get your bill of materials. You also get to test the program. You get the simulator built in. Very cool. Michael Warren (Wieland): That’s right. And to, cut down on commissioning time, again, a lot of this work can be done prior to actually receiving. So you have a concept, a safety concept. You do a risk assessment. You say, okay. I need the following input devices. I need this logic device. I’m gonna attach to these output devices. And there’s time for that to come in. Okay? And you don’t have to wait for those to come in. Okay? You can actually get the software, start putting all those pieces together and setting up the system prior to the, hardware actually arriving. So, your commissioning time, you don’t start your commissioning time when the hardware shows up. You’re literally done before the hardware is done. It it comes in. That’s awesome. Yep. Yep. Any other questions, Sean? Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey. I got another one right here. How easy is it to connect Samos Pro Compact to existing control systems? I think we know the answer to this one. Go ahead. Michael Warren (Wieland): Gateways. And again, what we don’t have resident, on board, the the Samos Pro Compact itself, we have additional, gateways. Okay? CANopen. We have EtherCAT. That’s quite a popular, gateway protocol these days. We’re able to add just add an additional card to that and have that compatibility. And as you saw on the software, it showed up. Okay? Mhmm. When you add the cards, the card shows up and that protocol shows up. So it’s ready as a, an EtherCAT module, in an EtherCAT based system. Shawn Tierney (Host): So You said that it has PROFINET, ETHANIP, and Modbus TCP built in, which I think is so cool. Yes. I’m such a fan of companies that are doing that. But do you have to do something in the software to tell it which one you’re gonna use? Michael Warren (Wieland): No. You do not. In the software itself, it does especially when you’re using the virtual system, it does a detection, a health detection. Yes. Actually, that’s how it works. And then, again, you can go in and make a a a slight or small adjustments. You can actually get, addresses, through the software itself. So Oh, nice. It’s it’s not again, it’s you’re not, programming, you’re configuring. Shawn Tierney (Host): That’s awesome. Michael Warren (Wieland): It’s it’s a huge time savings, quite honestly. Shawn Tierney (Host): That’s awesome. You want me to go to number four? Michael Warren (Wieland): Sure, please. Shawn Tierney (Host): Let me ask you this. Is it sustainable? I’m sorry. Is it suitable for safety critical applications in demanding environments? Yeah. We haven’t talked about that yet. Michael Warren (Wieland): Yes. The the the device itself, typically has, most electrical devices in the industry typically have, an IP 20, rating themselves. Yeah. So IP 20, it doesn’t keep out, a lot of moisture itself. And quite honestly, these are typically, put in, cabinets, themselves to protect them. Okay? But but, the, the cabinets themselves, can, experience, a lot of temperature variations. Okay? So, these are rated between a minus 25 c to, plus 65 c. Okay? So, again, they are, designed for, harsh, cabinet temperatures, let’s say. Vibration, there are some, values of, it’s, it’s shock resistance. Okay? I had a customer the other day saying that, he was concerned about, the vibration that the cabinet was going to receive in a punch press. Every time the punch press, there was just this huge vibration. And we talked about the, the the shock resistance of the, controller itself and, mounting techniques. I mean, in my job as a safety consultant, as I mentioned, I look at things holistically. I talk about things that again, things like a shock mounting. Okay? We have the safety light curtains mounted here. At the moment, I have some standard, t fittings, okay, on the brackets, your standard ones. But if I was in a shock environment, I would, you know, talk with the customer and I would say, you know what? Based on what I’m seeing here, these obviously will handle a certain amount of shock by themselves. There’s no moving parts. Okay? So it does withstand a certain amount of shock, but, light curtains are notorious for being going out of alignment. And over a long distance, if one, the the transmitter, is, poorly aligned with the receiver, okay, and there’s some shock, then they’re gonna lose alignment with those vibrations and you’re gonna have nuisance stress. Nuisance tripping it. In that situation, I would tell people, I says, look, we have isolation dampeners. Okay? And a little rubber, grommets that you can actually put between the hardware and give a little bit of, a shock resistance to the light curtain themselves to help maintain. These are the kind of, little, advice, nuggets that we, deliver when we talk about a system, a holistically system, because we understand. Like you said, you know, some of these environments are pretty harsh and demanding. And the controller, as we mentioned earlier too, is a PLE. So the controller itself will never be, you know, the, the weak link in a safety system. There are some other devices. For example, in the motion, world, when we use a, a Samus motion and we use, the TUV function blocks for motion themselves. In addition to those is a vibration toolbox in the software itself. Okay? And that helps fine tune and take out nuisance vibrations that you’re trying to detect pulses from an encoder. You’re not trying to detect, other vibrations. Okay? Now the good news is that you can invoke these things in harsh harsh environments. Okay? You will knock down okay? According to the standards, you do knock down your PLE to PLD. Okay. But PLD is quite, is still is quite impressive and and robust. And again, the controller tends not to be the weakest link in a safety system. But great question. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. I’m just seeing something else here too. What is the four amps for? Is that each output’s four amps or Michael Warren (Wieland): No. It’s the high switching power. That way you don’t have to use actuators. Okay? You’re able to have that. So, again, they they tend to be, kind of a high power on the output side of things, and it reduces the need for additional relays or any any sort of additional devices, for that. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. How about question number five? You ready for that one? Sure thing. Encoder types. Does it have to be a Wheatland encoder? Michael Warren (Wieland): I get that all the time. Actually, no. Okay? It’s just looking for a standard HTL incremental encoder, and, it and in in fact, the people are using, non safety encoders too. Okay? There are safety rated encoders and non safety rated encoders and they can use it. The good news is you can use a non safety encoder with it. The bad news is it does degrade the PL level. Okay? You can get a PL level, e by using, safety rated encoders. Again, redundant. You can do two tracks. You do four tracks. However you need. And again, I I gave the example about, shaft, shearing and trying to detect whether or not you have a broken shaft. We mount an encoder on both ends and match and, tune up those two signals together. Because soon as you have a deviation, you know you have a shaft breakage. I think we were pretty successful in showing not only, the fact that it’s it saves a lot of space on the DIN rail for the number of devices it’s able to manage. Okay? It, the input devices, again, can be varied. Some of them are here, some of them are not here. But, a lot of typical devices, that get applied. And again, it’s not brand specific. Okay? It’s quite agnostic. Okay? Most of the safety devices in the industry work with our controller. As I mentioned, the the Wieland Safety Controller is our own product. Okay? So it’s our own design hardware and both software. So when we have upgrades and development, again, the upgrades are free. Okay? We we send out, and anytime the software gets over, there’s a point release, whatnot. Those are free. Okay? And, we know a lot of people in the industry, charge, for software. There’s licensing fees and whatnot, and, that never happens, with, the wheel and controller products. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know, could you wake up the HMI? It it looked like the screen was very well designed. Would you mind tapping the HMI? Yeah. So the HMI is good. So let’s talk a little bit about, like, aside from this, what are the products do you make? I mean, you make a safety POC. It looks like you also make an HMI. Michael Warren (Wieland): Yes. Yes. I’m glad you asked that. By the way, some of the, non safety type products, are actually on here. As you mentioned, the HMI itself. Okay? It’s a touchscreen, and, we have various sizes on it. And what you’re seeing here on this demo is a representation of a CNC machine. Okay. K? It gives a little bit of a story behind the devices that go into this. So for example, I turn it on. I’m running it. Okay. Okay. You hear my CNC running? Yeah. Oh, yeah. There we go. Very robust CNC. Now I go to open one of the doors. Okay? Okay. Not only will it stop the motion, but it’ll also show me on the HMI which particular door I opened up. Okay. Did you see that? Yeah. Yeah. That moved. Okay. And back with that. Shawn Tierney (Host): You see HMI updating as well? Michael Warren (Wieland): That’s right. So the up, the HMI updates itself and again, it continues to tell the situation. And that’s what’s nice about sending the output of this, over this, Ethernet, port here, to the HMI itself that when you have a trip. Okay? Look, I have several safety devices here. I have light curtains. I have three door switches here. I have, a an analog, position switch, a distance switch here. I also have an e stop here. Various devices. If I have a trip, okay, and if this was a real machine in a facility, I’d have a light stack and I’d have a light flashing. You would come up to the machine saying, which device tripped? I don’t know. You can look at the HMI and either have a graphical display of the machine itself or a table. Okay? It would show all the devices and it would have an indicator of which one it is. So you’d come to the machine, you say, oh, I see what it was. It was that door switch. I close the door and then I have to reset it. Okay? A safety system requires a manual reset. You just don’t close the door, the machine starts up automatically like that. Okay? And then I did a reset, and then I also did a machine start. And now And my CNC is back up and running. Shawn Tierney (Host): That’s excellent. That is excellent. So you’re more than just safety PLCs. Michael Warren (Wieland): That’s right. No. We do the safety PLCs. We do the light curtains. We do all these door switches. We have three grades of door switches here. The simplest technology is standard key, door interlock. Okay? Yep. And a standard, fork, key interlock. The switch goes on the frame. The key goes on the door. Open the door, key comes out and it indicates to the system that there’s an intrusion. Now in addition to that, those are contact switches. Okay? We have this version here. We have a secondary version that’s a little bit bigger that has a solver in it, and there’s a locking, guard locking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. K? Therefore, if I have an application where I want to go into the cell, but the cell presents a hazard and the hazard has to either cool off or there has to be a a coast down period, say 60 or whatnot, A timer is used inside the controller and once sixty seconds elapse, it sends a signal of the solenoid to release the door lock and allow you to go into the cell. Okay? Keep it. And then there’s other applications where non contact is preferred. And we have two versions of non contact here. Okay? One is a coated magnetic. Okay? There are several codes available, and so you can’t take another, magnet and fake it out. Shawn Tierney (Host): Big thing. Right? It has to be coded. Yeah. Michael Warren (Wieland): Bypassing. Yeah. Bad bad word in the safety world. I get calls. People say, hey. I have door interlocks. I keep finding the keys in there, but they’re not attached to the, to the door anymore. And I said, okay. And we can improve the robustness of the safety system by switching out keyed interlocks to a coated magnetic switch. And these coated magnetic switches do not work with refrigerator magnets. Okay? It takes a coated actuator to actually close this. But, people that have a lot of these can find another matching actuator and fake these out. And we’ll get a call. Mike, I’m getting my magnetic switches being bypassed. What can we do? The next level of technology up is RFID. Oh. Okay? RFID is high coded. Okay? High coded. And and if you high coded means that you have a thousand or more codes. And if you have a thousand more codes, nobody is gonna find another matching actuator to fake out the switch and try to bypass it. Shawn Tierney (Host): When you buy it, do you get it just random from the shelf or Michael Warren (Wieland): You get it initially random and then there’s a sequence where you, cycle the power to do and change the codes. Oh, okay. So you can actually get multiple codes. Okay? Okay. That and again, so we start out with the basic technology. The next step up is magnetic, and the highest level technology is RFID for door switches. Okay? So, and let me see. Now in addition to all of this, okay, you’re gonna notice that, I have Shawn Tierney (Host): Turn the speed down. So Michael Warren (Wieland): Oh. Oh. I went I went back. Sorry. Reverse the direction. That’s okay. Or we coulda we coulda just, put our hand in the light curtain or whatnot. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But, in addition to the products, the safety products and the HMIs, we sell power supplies. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, we have our own power supplies. As a matter of fact, I always advocate people that when they have a safety system is to have a dedicated power supply. Yes. They’re not really expensive and for the peace of mind. Okay? And for the robustness and integrity of the safety system is to have a separate power supply running the safety system alone as opposed to sharing it from some other things. Okay? Yeah. You don’t have to worry about spikes in the system. You don’t have to worry about, in rush currents or whatnot. And, again, it’s dedicated and it won’t interfere with the functions of the safety because let’s face it, you’re trying to maintain, say PLD or PLE safety system. And, the the best thing that you could do is, it make the power supply independent. Okay? It makes the safety system robust and safer. Okay? You always have an eye towards making, the application as safe as possible. Now, in addition to, the HMIs, the power supplies in here, just within the system here, some of the other products that Whelan offers are distributed power systems. Okay? And as I mentioned in the beginning, Whelan is famous for their terminal blocks. Yes. Okay? And again, our catalog is full of, industrial automation, pieces. We really try to a bridge, from device to device in the automation world, all these filler, and detail type products, gateway switches. We have managed and unmanaged switches too, by the way. Okay? Oh, Shawn Tierney (Host): Yes. You have switches as well. Michael Warren (Wieland): We do. We do. I invite you to, take a look at our website, wheelen,uh,-electric,uh,.com. And, it has a lot of good information, and you’ll see the full catalog of information. Today, really, we were just kinda covering, safety, but it’s really the tip of the iceberg of the, Wheeling portfolio. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And we will conclude not only an end of show slide here so you can see all the important stuff. We’ll also include all these links in the description. So wherever you’re watching, you’ll have links to everything we’re talking about so you don’t have to go and hunt it down and, like, you know, how do I spell wheel end? And all the links are there. We’ll put the slide up on the screen as well so you guys can see all that good information. And, Mike, with that, was there anything else we wanted to cover today? Michael Warren (Wieland): I think we covered it, pretty thoroughly. I wanted to make sure that, I showed you the software because, you know, a lot of manufacturers, create the box and a little the little safety PLC. And, quite honestly, the the magic of the PLC itself isn’t the hardware, isn’t the 45 millimeters resin case itself. It’s the actual software. How easy to use, how comprehensive it is, what information it’ll do for you. Okay? And again, we showed that we have a, workspace, drag and drop, library, pull the devices in. We have motion, we have presses, we have combustion technology, muting. We have a lot of different libraries, function blocks, certified function blocks to drag into the workspace. It creates the report. And, basically, again, it just shows you, the creation of your system short of hardware. Of course, when you hook up your hardware, you do a synchronization. Okay? And now you can make your tweaks. You may find that your virtual system was better than the hardware list that you created, and you may want to upgrade that at some point. Okay? The nice thing about a controller is it’s infinitely repurposable. Okay? You program it one way, one day, and if you add another device, that’s not a problem. That’s easy to go in the software, add another device. Okay? I subtract a device, change out devices, whatnot. It’s easy enough to use. So, yes. Again, the Samos controller, is a leading product for us in the safety, product portfolio for Wieland. And, again, we lead off with, our our software, the Samos plan software. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And I appreciate it. Just that short demo you did really helps. Like, I feel like I could get in there and start doing stuff. You know, when you open something up for the first time, if you’ve never seen a demo of it, it can be like deer in the headlights type of and I’ve been there many times myself. So thank you for not only talking to us about the hardware, talking to us about your company, but also giving us that software demo as well. And I wanna thank you for coming out and driving all the way out here, three hours to get out here to do an in live. He doesn’t Mike doesn’t know this. He’s the first one to come and do a live. I had to clean up all last night. The place was so messy, but he was actually the first vendor to come out and do a live, and I really enjoyed having him here, medium, and the preshow and, and whatnot. But I also wanna thank Wheelan for sponsoring this episode so there’ll be no ads on it. Didn’t you guys enjoy having no ads during the episode? We don’t make a lot of money from those ads. It’s pennies. So thank you to please tell your, people to thank you very much for sponsoring this episode so we can bring all this information to the audience without any nasty ads. And with that, any final words? Michael Warren (Wieland): No. No. Thank you, Sean, for having me. Appreciate your hospitality, and, you did a great cleanup job here. It looks wonderful here. And it’s a it’s a great, for, format here for us to, show off our product here. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, thank you, Michael. I hope you come back sometime. Michael Warren (Wieland): I’m looking forward to it. Thank you. Vendors: Would you like your product featured on the Show, Podcast, and Blog? If you would, please contact me at: https://theautomationblog.com/contact Until next time, Peace ✌️ If you enjoyed this content, please give it a Like, and consider Sharing a link to it as that is the best way for us to grow our audience, which in turn allows us to produce more content

Digital Twins: The Future of Manufacturing

EECO Asks Why Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2025 17:39 Transcription Available

Unlock the transformative power of virtual prototyping in manufacturing with this deep dive into digital twin technology. Moving beyond traditional approaches that rely on costly physical testing and time-consuming troubleshooting, digital twins offer a revolutionary alternative that's changing how industrial facilities design, validate, and optimize their operations.What exactly is a digital twin? Far more than just a marketing animation, these sophisticated virtual models precisely mirror physical systems using actual control code and HMIs to create functional replicas that behave exactly like their real-world counterparts. This allows manufacturers to simulate entire production lines before spending a single dollar on equipment, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies at the design stage rather than after installation when changes become exponentially more expensive.The benefits extend well beyond design validation. Digital twins dramatically reduce risk by eliminating potential material damage or machinery breakdowns during testing. They're particularly valuable in highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals where errors can damage reputations or ruin production batches. They also revolutionize operator training, allowing staff to learn in safe virtual environments using real-world operating screens before encountering potentially dangerous equipment on the plant floor. Though typically achieving 80-90% accuracy (no simulation can perfectly replicate every nuance), this technology delivers enormous time and cost savings compared to traditional methods.Ready to explore how digital twins could transform your operations? Connect with the experts at Electrical Equipment Company through our labs where you can experience this technology firsthand. Schedule a visit through the links in our show notes and discover how the right partnerships can help you leverage virtual prototyping to design, build, and operate with superior efficiency in today's competitive manufacturing landscape.Keep Asking Why...Read our latest article on Industrial Manufacturing herehttps://eecoonline.com/inspire/virtual_prototypeOnline Account Registration:Video Explanation of Registering for an AccountRegister for an AccountOther Resources to help with your journey:Installed Asset Analysis SupportSystem Planning SupportSchedule your Visit to a Lab in North or South CarolinaSchedule your Visit to a Lab in VirginiaSubmit your questions and feedback to: podcast@eecoaskwhy.comFollow EECO on LinkedInHost: Chris Grainger

Emerson Dust Collector Monitoring & Control Solution (P241)

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2025 65:41 Transcription Available

Shawn Tierney meets up with Eugenio Silva of Emerson to learn all about Dust Collection Systems, and Emerson’s Monitoring and Control Solution in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video. Watch The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Note: This episode was not sponsored so the video edition is a “member only” perk. The below audio edition (also available on major podcasting platforms) is available to the public and supported by ads. To learn more about our membership/supporter options and benefits, click here. Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (host): Welcome back to the automation podcast. My name is Shawn from Insights, and I wanna thank you for tuning back in. Now in this episode, I had the pleasure of meeting up with Eugene Silva from Emerson to learn all about the industrial control and monitoring system that comes with their industrial dust collectors. Now I thought it was very interesting. I hope you do as well. But before we jump into this episode, I do wanna thank our members who made the video edition possible. So So when a vendor does a sponsor of the episode, the video becomes a member only perk, and that is just $5 a month to get started. So thank you members for making the video edition possible. With that, I also wanna thank our sponsor for this week’s show, the automationschool.com and the automationblog.com. I have an update later in the show what’s going on on both sites, and I hope you’ll, stick around and listen to that, towards the end of the show. But with that said, let’s go ahead and jump into this week’s episode of the automation podcast. It is my pleasure to welcome Emerson back on the show and Eugene on the show to talk about dust collector monitoring. You guys can see the slide if you’re watching dust collector monitoring and control solutions. I’m excited about this because this is a solution versus, like, a discrete product. So with that said, Eugene, would you please introduce yourself to our audience? Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. Shawn, thank you very much for this opportunity. Hello, everyone. Here’s Eugenio Silva. I’m a product manager, intelligence automation within Emerson, the discrete automation part of Emerson. I’m glad today gonna share some, some of our understanding and learnings with the dust collector monitoring control solution. And, when I talk about that, Emerson is also involved in in others, types of solutions that, our purpose is to drive innovation that makes the world healthier, safer, smart, and more sustainable. And I’m also responsible for continuous emission monitoring, pest collectors is one, utility, energy and compressed air management solutions. So for today, I prepared something that, we go a little bit, into why this type of, test collector solution is important, from understand of our customers and industry point of view. We’re going to look into the fundamentals of a dust collection, from the particle sensors to the dust collector systems, and then dive in into the dust collector solution where I’m going to provide you, some features, also explanation why they are there, and how this kind of capabilities deliver value to our end users and customers, and, hopefully, to have time as well to have a short, recorded demo that, brings us, full scope how the operators look into into that solution when they they use it. Shawn Tierney (host): But before we jump in, I wanna thank the automationschool.com for sponsoring this episode of the show. That’s where you’ll find all of my online courses on Allen Bradley and Siemens PLCs and HMIs. So if you know anybody who needs to get up to speed on those products, please mention the automationschool.com to them. And now let’s jump back into the show. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): In terms of key applications, industries use cases, dust collector is essential for many industries that produce dust, produce any kind of a pounder, any kind of a fume, and typically air pollution control, boundary processing, handling, industrial dust, fume ventilation are covered by one or another way by dust collectors. And, the industries that I put in both, these are the the dirty ones in the sense that they produce a lot of, particle, either in terms of gases or dust. Therefore, the regulations that are in these industries are quite strong. So cement, metals, chemical plus, carbon, black and toner, like lithium battery assembly, disassembly, metal foundry. And what is interesting is the either you produce a waste that you have to manage it properly, can be also recycled, for example, in the industries like plastics in food or wood. All the collected dust that you have, you can also reuse and sometimes recycle. But why? Why this is important? Why is it important to extract dust from these industries? Let’s start on the right side because this is what the the customer is looking for. Because the cost of our pollution, the hazards, this this safe safety accidents that can be caused by this kind of harmful airborne and particles and forms are so substantial, then of course, it’s very much regulated in all these industries. And if you calculate the costs on the public health, Sometimes big accidents in plants where even big fires or hazards to people operating the plant. We talk about billions per year, the cost of that. And one of the consequences of having such issues is that when the dust extraction system is not working properly or you have really a downtime. For example, I’m going to explain that this really depends on components that are very, they use so often that they wear down, like filters, like post files. And each time that we have a downtime is not the cost of the dust collector downtime that’s important. It’s the overall downtime costs that imposes to the operation of the plant because in order to be conformist, they have to stop operating until they fix the issue. And these downtimes, of course, arise in many ways in different aspects. How complex is this dust collector. But I’m I’m going to give you, some insights that, if a dust collector system does not have any solution to monitoring real time or control, the efficiency. Basically, the personnel is managing these assets without any sight, and everything can go wrong. That’s why the TCO and the maintenance aspects are quite important. Because if you’re not aware where is the problem, when you have to plan and this becomes a firefighting or reactive mode, then your costs are going to be quite high. And when you talk about the TCO, it’s about the cost of the equipment, the acquisition, the cost of operation, meaning not only the personnel, but in this case, we use a lot of compressed air. I’m going to explain why. The maintenance costs, as we explained, and the disposal costs. Disposal means, the filter bags that must be replaced and and changed, but also the the dust, the fume, all the elements that must be, properly managed and recycling sometimes. So this is the aspects why it’s important. Now let’s turn us about, the benefits and savings. So if you use the dust collector solutions, of any kind that can monitor in real time all the aspects, of the operation of a dust collector system and, also contributes turning maintenance from reactive to preventative and maybe predictive, then the best thing that you can do is to avoid huge penalties. As you can see on this graph, every decade, let’s say, the fines are getting steeper. And the reason for that is because of the the damage and the result of a big, like, say, issue on the plant regarding to this dust part is is quite heavy. So, therefore, we talk about 100 k’s or even plus in some industries like primary metal and chemical, where one single incident, it’s about a 100 k in average or more. And then, of course, to avoid that and to be completely compliance, you have to operate that systems, in many cases, 24 by seven. And, therefore, any way possible to reduce downtime and, as a plus, reduce the energy costs because for compressed air, you have to use electricity, then, it pays off because you’re going to be full time compliant. And the other thing is if you do properly, monitor and control your dust collector system, you also increase the filtration efficiency. So that means you are far from the high levels, where after that threshold, you would be penalized. You can operate under, conformist, under compliance, but can also expand the equipment life. For example, the life bags, the post valves, you don’t have it to replace as often, which is the case if you don’t do any real time monitoring diagnostics. On the left side, the way that we talk about improving maintenance is the total cost. When we talk about the filter life, at least one unit of a filter, It’s about 18 k, US dollars. And you see that, the tip of a iceberg is just the purchase price. The dust collector system, like, of course, has an acquisition cost. But below that, as a total cost of ownership, you have the energy that you expand utilizing the systems. You have the filter bags. You have to keep parts in your inventory. You have to dispose of that. And, of course, you have the downtime costs and also the labors labor costs. Now I’m going to just to give, a chance to say, okay. Tell me how a dust collector system works. Shawn Tierney (host): Before we get to that, we gotta pay the bills. So I wanna tell you about our sponsor, the automationschool.com. It’s actually the next room over. We have a huge training room. We have, some of the most unique products you’ll be able to work on. You know, I know everybody has a bunch of CompactLogix or s seven twelve hundreds or 15 hundreds and, you know, VFDs and HMIs. But some of the products we have here, you’re not gonna find in anybody else’s training room, not even the factory’s training room because we cover all different products. Right? So if you’re coming over to do training with us, you can actually learn Siemens and Allen Bradley at the same time. You can learn how to get Siemens and Allen Bradley to talk together. You guys know I’ve covered that on the show, but you could do it hands on. And some of the other things is like working with third party products. Right? So, you know, if you go to a vendor’s course, they’re not gonna have third party products. But we have as you remember from the wall in my studio, we have all kinds of third party products. And I’m gonna be taking some more pictures of all the different labs we have, the equipment we use, with these third party products. So if you know anybody looking for training and we can do custom things too. So if you wanna start training at noontime or 01:00 because you’re gonna drive in three or four hours away, I was recently just at a, large vendor’s customer doing some training on their behalf. And, yeah, that was a long drive. So if you want your, students to show up in person at twelve or one and then train and then at the on the last day, leave around twelve or one, we can do that as well. I don’t care. We could actually run into the night if you wanted to go, do evenings. Or, again, some people don’t learn very well in the evenings, but in any case, because I own the company, we can do whatever you want. As long as we have the equipment and the time to put it together, we’ll do it for you. So I just wanted to make you aware of that. We also if you’re, just wanna come yourself, if you go to the automationschool.com forward slash live, you will see a place where you can preregister for an upcoming class. And when I get enough people to sign up, I’ll reach out to you and tell you what date is gonna be held. And by preregistering like that, you will save $50 off the $500 price. And if you’re already a student, you will save the price of your online course off of the in person course. So maybe you bought my $200 Siemens or CompactLogix, ControlLogix cost. They’re gonna get that off of that $500. Right? And if you don’t own the online cost, don’t worry about it. If you come here for in person training, at the end of your training, we’re gonna enroll you, in one of those online courses completely free of charge so you can continue your learning. And you don’t have to worry about trying to blitz all the content while you’re here because whether you’re here for a day or five, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you have left to learn, you’ll be able to do it after hours at home, and there’s no additional charge for that. So with that said, let’s get back into this week’s episode of the automation podcast. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): And these are going to be general principles and basics. In general, a dust collector system looks like this. It’s a unit where the air is pulled in at the bottom of the compartment, and this could be forced or not. And then the air gets out, on the top, the outlet, and the dust is collected on the outside of the bag. So if you see this, in this picture, we have one full bag in kind of light brown color with a specific fabric, could be porosis fabric, a PVC, or some even paper in some cases. And then the cleaner exceeds at the top. And the what happens is that the dust cake builds up on the bags, on the outside part of the bag. And, if you see the number one on top, in that particular, entry point, we have two pulse valves with, compressed air in order to shake a little bit these, post bags, filter bags, and then knocks down the dust out of these bags, and then they are collected by a hopper at the bottom. Okay? So that’s basically, in general, how it works the principle. It’s a bit more complicated. Here is just to show that in order to automate a dust collector system including the filter bags, we use, a combination of, electrical and pneumatic, components. And these are from post valves, the ones that continuously blow air into these pipes, the compressed air tanks that hold the right pressure and the right compressed air capacity in order to keep the filtration efficiency very high. Then you have the filter regulators that, you have to bring, the pressure of this line to higher enough, to to be efficient, but not so high to spend too much compressed air. Then you can use controllers, black boxes that are able to do a time based sequencing, but these are not so so much sometimes efficient because it doesn’t take into consideration all the diagnostics that you can get out of it. And then, basically, the very important element is this, particle sensor that is on the outside of the clean air because that is gonna be your canary in the mind. Right? It’s gonna be the one that indicates if the filter, system is efficient efficient and if the the job is done right. And then the other things. But let’s go back to a very interesting view. You remember this picture here that, you you’re looking at, a cross session of the dust collector. Now you could imagine how it looks like from the top. From the top, it looks like that. There is a compressed air tank, that covers, certain portion of the filters units. For example, it’s very common that a filter, complete filter unit, might have different compartments. And in each of these compartments, you have a series of filter bags. And then imagine that you provide short but very powerful pulses of compressed air that are periodically injected on top of this columns. And below, there’s a filter bag. So, therefore, they are going to to receive to expand a little bit, and the dust cake then, outside of of their surface follows. And by inertial forces, of course, this dust is accumulated at the bottom, which is, extracted into a hopper. Of course, now depending of the number of the filters per line, per roll, these pulse valves needs to pulse a little bit faster or not. And the interval time, if you just follow time based approach, could be three to six minutes. Now if you calculate the average filter units, you may have 12 of these filter bags. You can have about seven to 10 pulse valves per unit. It’s very common that, one large installation would have about, like, 500 pulse valves and four, six times more filters, install it. And imagine that if each of them having boost every three minutes, 24 by seven, during seven days a week. So can you imagine the amount of compressed air that can be spent? That’s why these pulses must be very short and powerful, in hundred milliseconds to avoid it also big waste. I think that, picture on the left side, just to simply say that, it’s a lot of, interesting things to to get the dust removal, but basically is a jet of compressed air on top, that shakes the filter. And then by gravity, the dust cake is removed. Shawn Tierney (host): It’s not just a filter. You know, I think main main people may just think, well, a dust collector is just this bag that catches all the dust. You’re actually, you know, you’re you you do have the bags, but, you’re using compressed air to sequentially, depends depending on how many you have, shake those bags in a sense by blowing air into them, to shake off the dust so it falls into the hopper. And so I can you can definitely see, like you were mentioning, if you have lots of these cylinders or these bags, then the sequencing has to be, you know, pretty pretty precise and and pretty, repeatable to make sure you’re you’re cleaning all of the bags off. And I’m I’m assuming too, you need to know when the hopper is full because everything stops working if if if the hopper gets, over full. So very interesting. I think your diagrams do a great job of explaining it as well. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yeah. If I play a little bit when I mention that, it’s a a little bit the reverse, way of our vacuum cleaner. Right? Because Yeah. We suck the the dust inside of the bags. Mhmm. And when the bags are completely full clogged, the suction, power, it’s far reduced. Right? So then you have to to empty our, let’s say, filter bags. Here is the although the all the dust is accumulated on the outside, the outer surface of the fabric, but the effect is the same. If there’s so much dust on the surface or out of the surface, then, the air that is shown here, the intake, the air, and then the filter simply stops. That’s why affects completely the efficiency of, that, unit. And the post jet cleaning is a way to unclog or to clean, the filters in order to bring them to the more efficient operation. Shawn Tierney (host): Yeah. Especially if you have lots of dust, you need an automatic way to continue to clean it and get it off of the filter and into the bin. So yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yeah. In in other cases, although you talk about, dust, of course, it could be any kind of a pounder. Like, for example, in the foods and beverage industry, you don’t want this for example, let’s say, a dry milk production. You don’t want that dust to be floating around because it can bring contamination. But believe it or not, it can ignite fire sometimes. So that’s why it’s important to to get that completely eliminated. So this is the part that very people would say, okay, on the outlet where the the air should be cleaner, as you can see on the right side, that this, particle sensor is located at the outlet, clean air side. It has a very interesting the way it works is quite interesting. We use a we have a sensor in our portfolio called p 152 that, we take advantage of this triboelectric effect. Basically, this sensor, is coated with PTFE or a Teflon layer, so it’s completely electronic, electric isolated from from, of course, the media. And then when the dust starts touching, that probe, a DC charge is transferred. But because of this, sensor probe is completely isolated, we set the flow layer, the resolution and the electric charge is in the order of a peak ramp. So 10 minus 12. And that the resolution is about point five picoamp. So, therefore, if you’re touching the particles, depends of their size, They are going to generate more or less electricity that’s going to be transferred. And the ones that are just surround, they are not touching. For example, imagine that this, duct air exhausting pipe is quite big. A bit half meter, maximum one meter around that sensor, the particle also generates, induced charge in AC. And by measuring that, we have an idea about how clean is, of course, there that’s getting out. But it’s a bit more tricky than you can imagine because it looks like this. Shawn Tierney (host): Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoy this week’s show. I know I really enjoyed it. And, of course, I wanna thank our members for making the video edition possible. So this vendor did not sponsor this episode. So the video edition is available for members, and there’s some great graphics in their presentation you guys may wanna check out. Now with that said, we do have some really exciting podcast episodes coming up. I’m sitting down with Inductive. I’m sitting down with Software Toolbox. I’m sitting down with Siemens and a bunch of other vendors. So we have plenty of new podcasts coming up in the coming weeks this summer. And I also wanted to give you an update of what’s going on over at the automation blog. We’ve had some new articles come out. Brandon Cooper, one of our freelancers, wrote a great article about emulating Allen Bradley e threes. We had a vendor, actually, submit an article and sponsor the site to submit an article about what makes a good automated palletizer. We also had an update about the automation museum. That’s a fundraiser we’re running. We’re trying to open a automation museum. I got a lot of legacy stuff I’d like to donate to it, and I’d love to have it so you can come in and actually walk through, not just see the stuff, but actually learn on it. Right? So maybe you have some old stuff in your plant. You come out to the automation museum, and you can learn how to use it. With that said, we’re also looking at possibly doing a podcast for automation museum to drive awareness of legacy automation. So any of you out there interested in that, contact me directly. And, you can do so over at the automationblog.com. Just click on the contact button. And, we also have an article two articles from Brandon Cooper about things he learned as he transitioned from working in a plant to traveling around and visiting other plants to help them with their processes and automation. So check those articles out over at the automation blog. And finally, over at the automation school, you know, we have the new factor IO courses. We also have I just added a new lesson to the logics version of that course. Somebody wanted to try to use bit shifts instead of counters, so I added a lesson on that. Plus, I’m now starting to update all of the courses, including the brand new ones I’m working on. So you’re gonna see a brand new start here lesson later in the week, and I’m working on some cool emulation, lateral logic for my PLC courses that if you don’t have any push buttons or limit switches, you can actually use this code I’m gonna give you for free to simulate the widget machine that I use as kind of the basis for my teaching. So in any case, check that out if you’re in one of my PLC courses over at the automationschool.com. And with that said, you know, I’m very thankful for all the vendors who come on, especially those who sponsor the episodes so I don’t have to do these commercials. I’m not a big commercial guy, but I do wanna thank you for hanging in there and listening through this update. And now we’ll get right back into this episode of the automation podcast. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Every time you get, use the jet boost with the boost valves on top of the filter bags, it creates a peak. So that means the cleaning cycles that are happening in a duration of, just a 100 milliseconds. That’s why they are very, very thin. And they happening every two, three minutes, per roll. They have to they have in nature a little bit of noise because imagine that every time that, you clean, more dust gets into inside of the the filter back. So that means it’s like when you clean your vacuum cleaner, immediately when you turn on that, some of this dust is gonna get inside immediately, and that’s the peak. But now imagine that, you have a rupture in the filter or you have a big role because, unfortunately, these the things are wear out. And then these peaks starts getting higher and higher. So, therefore, what we do when we, put that solution in place for a little time, let’s say, couple of days, we needed to kind of, set up, these thresholds. We need to figure out the level of noise that could be because depends very much the capacity, the types of, of a test. But once you do that, in our solution, we set the thresholds like alarming, a warning alarm, which means that after that point, the maintenance crew, starts looking at, that could be a early indication that a filter bag is not okay until the maximum point that avoids any any nonconformist, issue, which is already a rupture. You really pass the time where this filter, must be replaced. Shawn Tierney (host): So we’re looking at this chart for those who are listening. And the particle sensor, you know, it’s measuring the particles as air flows normally. But during the pulse, right, we’re forcing a lot of air back in, back down. So we’re getting a lot more, you know, than the average air would have x amount of particles. But if we’re forcing a bunch of it back in, we’re gonna see a lot more particles per, let’s say, hundred millisecond pulse. Right? So we do expect a peak when we when we pulse it because we’re just forcing a lot of get back go into the reverse direction. So we can we catch the bag loose. But what you’re saying here on this chart, I find so in so much interesting. So you can quantify, like, the expected increase in, in dust that you’re gonna sense with the sensor when you go in the reverse, when you pulse pulse, blow the ear downwards to, to shake the bag free. But you’re saying if that if that extra increased amount of detected dust is either too high, above normal, or too low below normal, then that tells you that you you could either have a clogged bag or you could have a burst bag. Is that am I understanding that correctly? Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. Is this correct? And then the interesting thing is that as soon as you’re getting closer to replace a filter back, this baseline starts raising a bit with a kind of, how can I say, there is a drift? Why? Exactly what you said. A filter is completely clogged. It’s not yet any rupture, but is the efficiency of the cleaning is not so okay. So therefore, this slightly changes needs to be analyzed. Why I’m showing row one to row 10? Exactly in the picture, if you remember, a compartment filter with several, let’s say, filter bags, they are under the row. So under the row one, you may have 10 filter bags, row two, row three, and so on. So that means you are able to indicate which row is the problem, but it might be that you still need to check further which of the filters in that particular row have the problems. The more quick this peak happens, more number of, filter bags can have a problem. Shawn Tierney (host): Mhmm. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Okay? Shawn Tierney (host): So you have one sensor on the exhaust, and you’re sequencing through, you know, blowing out or shaking out, you know, pulsing each of the rows. So that’s why we see, you know, one reading across the, you know, across the horizontal, and we see your row, row one, row two, row three, row four, each of them with discrete values or pulses. And like you just said, if you have multiple issues on a row, then you’re going to see, you know, a higher or lower peak depending on what the issue is. I’m with you. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. That’s why I’m going to show the other diagnostic capabilities that we needed to associate with this, particle sensor. And just to remember that, this particle sensor, we simply use one unit on the outlet part. That’s why I needed to make the sequence in serialization of the post because then I need to to synchronize with the post jets of every role. Shawn Tierney (host): Mhmm. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): No? Row by row. Shawn Tierney (host): And I think too, if you tried to do them all at once, the the you would need a lot higher pressure. So it it kinda makes sense to do it row by row because it reduces your maximum pressure required. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yeah. In this practical sense, we’re not be able to Shawn Tierney (host): Differentiate. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Identify which of the roles, would be the problem. That’s why we kind of still have to do that. But now let’s give in a solution overview, and I think that, some of the key capabilities and features are going to highlight even more, the other, diagnostic capabilities that we are able to to provide in order to identify correctly and early as possible such issues. So this is a typical dust collector system. And if you look at around, if this dust collector system is just, let’s say, automated with nomadic electric components and they don’t have real time monitoring, you’re not really know the emission level. If it also this is not real time monitoring with some diagnostics, then you are not able to identify when this particle sensor, for example, is completely taken by, the dust because the humidity entrance in that, in that pipe, or it might be that, it’s so dirty, your dust that, is already ingrained so much on the probe. Mhmm. So that’s why the poor, reliability or the low level sensitivity of that could be affected. And if you were not monitoring, these signals that I showed the these peaks synchronized with the post valve jets Mhmm. You don’t have any early warning. Okay? The post valves basically are coils. They are solenoid coils Shawn Tierney (host): Mhmm. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): With tag diaphragms that open and close at the speed of a hundred milliseconds. The point is that their life time is about a couple of millions of cycles. Mhmm. But imagine, in some cases, one, two years is already enough to to have end end of life. So a fault valve, has to be connected to a control system because you need to know if this is a short circuit or if the diaphragm is completely open. And you can only do that if every time that you cycle the valve, you also, check that. For example, the power that, you drive the coil gives you a feeling if that is a coil that is already gone. Okay? Now let’s talk about the compressed air. Right? If you have a a filter that is open, there’s a rupture. If you have, a diaphragm that’s completely gone open, you start consuming higher and higher the compressed air. The point is this is continuously increasing. You can just imagine that this is normal. But if you go into average and look at this in a historical way, you’re gonna see that this trend is caused because of the broken post valves, for example. So that’s why it’s also important aspect of the automation solution is to minimize the usage of the compressed air is to have a clearly operating under a baseline that is normal. The filter bags, independent of the materials, because if you talk about life sciences, foods, chemical, or metal, they have a different materials. They have a different, where else, lifetime span. The point is the costs might be the filter itself is not so expensive. But going up there, exchange stopping, moving things around, getting the dust out before you change, putting all the personal protection equipment may take hours. So, therefore, that is the cost of that. And if you’re not able to prevent or even have an early warning when that is going to occur, is gonna be a reactive, maintenance issue. Right? So that’s why just convincing that, it’s worth looking into different aspects. And that’s why, on the left side, when we talk about solutions, we talk about, the connectivity part that, we have to work with devices that are hard or four to 20 milliamps. Some of devices are modbus to CP. Newer actuators in post faults could be mu m q t t or even OPC UA. That’s the the PLC part that, we have. And we can work with pneumatic systems, for example, that they turn at AP, PROFINET, or any other, standards. Then, of course, we have the IOs, that, we have to look at to control the post jet systems, but also to monitor the differential pressures, to measure the compressed here in some cases, until the parts where at the top, we put HMI SCADA software platform that, we pre engineered, in order to to make it simpler the development, of that solution by our OABS or many cases directly to our end users. And all in the right are the elements that we offer in our portfolio. Some cases, OEMs of a dust collector systems just to take from us, and they might be that they have their own solution as well. Shawn Tierney (host): So just for the audio audience, I know we’ve covered these products a lot, especially on the news show. But, I mean, I’m just wanna kinda go through a couple of these things. You got the ASCO product line. Right? So remote piloted valves and, you know, all of those, that category, you know, the, pulse valves. But we also got the Advantex, which we’ve talked about, like figure filter regulators and, different cylinders. Topworks, which I think we’re all familiar with, proximity sensors and whatnot. And, some of the other products you guys, Rosemount, differential pressure transmitters. We also see, we have, the PAC systems. In this case, you could have edge analytics, and so you may have one of the PAC systems, edge IPCs. And we even see the, down in the corner there, the Emerson PLC and IOs, which I think we’re all familiar with as well. So that kinda shows you how, you know, this solution, you know, they’re taking all these different products they have in their catalog and putting it together in one solution, which is, you know, you kinda need all this stuff. You know, basically understanding how it works. We just went through it. And so it’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen a slide yet from Emerson where they kinda include in one application all, if not all, many of their their, different product lines. And then, the the skate on the top, it looks like, just some beautiful screens and charts and and, you know, dials showing the current status. So, and and I I didn’t mean to interrupt you, Gino, but nonetheless say that, especially since the people listening, they’ll be familiar with all those trade names because we’ve covered those in the past. But, in any case, let me turn it back to you. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): No. No. It’s thanks for highlighting. And I I say that, when I introduce myself that I’m from the discrete automation part of Emerson. Mhmm. Because most of, people would know Emerson by the Rosemont, for example, pressure, Fisher valves, and then the, you know, the delta v, DCS. Right? This is the discrete automation part, and that’s why probably something new, for everybody here. Thank you very much. So when I look at that in a nutshell, we, of course, have to put the sensory devices, the PLC on top, the HMI scanner. And, basically, what we provide is real time monitoring of this particulate, emissions. We detect but also locate where the leak is by compartments in rows. You can see on the picture that, on the top of this HMI screen, we have a filter unit with three compartments, compartment one, two, three. And each compartment has these rows on top, which is the number of rows, then the more a number of filter bags that, within each, compartment. So, therefore, just locating which compartment and which row, you have a problem, I can tell you it saves half day of the people, in the maintenance. We also optimize the push at cleaning. It’s an, patent based algorithm that is completely adaptive, and works not just with the post valves, but, we put, head pressure sensors. And this fluctuation and the differential pressure that we measure from the outlet and inlet allows us, of course, to, increase or decrease the frequency of these push heads, which allows not only to be more efficient, but also minimize compressed air. And then finally, when you talk about solidoids involved diaphragms, these ones we can indicate one by one where they have problems. So, therefore, if you look at down to the other HMI screen, there are two rows on top. The one that is a solenoid, the one that is a diaphragm, and these vertical bars are the filter bag health. If they are getting closer to red with the high levels, meaning that, their life span is already gone. And if you have, light indicators on the solenoid, the diaphragm depend of the color might be that you have a short circuit fail, open diaphragm. Therefore, you have also to replace. And, basically, when we install that solution, sometimes our customers, ask it to also integrate with their control systems. So, therefore, they compress their generation, the fan, the hoppers, the safety alarms, of the plant sometimes are fully integrated as well. Now let’s talk very much about few features features because these are the ones that probably you haven’t seen yet. Wanna talk about our HMI control system is based on Movicon, Movicon next platform. And, basically, it provides everything that you know from the Scott HMI. And that’s why to use this in general for applications like OIE, energy management, in some others, infrastructure monitoring, like, smart cities, wastewater facilities, solar, mega mega plants, etcetera. Of course, it provides data visualization, but, I like to highlight that, you could ask we provide connectivity to all major POCs that you can imagine, with communication drivers. Of course, the open standards like OPC UA, like, Modbus. And on the lower part, the the green, let’s say, the the gray part here is what we used for that solution. Sometimes we use a geo maps, to indicate where the filters are. Some geo references, let’s say geo fences as well. The people have to be, with a personal protection equipment to be there. So there are some, real time, data that, of course, we are collecting for the particle emissions and other elements like differential pressure, header pressure. And then you have the headlines. You can see some screens that are completely dedicated to alarms and alerts. And one of these, diagnostics that you see are related to the solenoid, to the filter bag, and to the diaphragm diagnostics. A lot of them are diagnostic get diagnosed in different ways. For example, the solenoids, we look into the power output of our IO cards to see if the valve post the solenoid is open or complete short circuit. The filter bag, I already explained it. We detect with some logic with the the particle sensors, And the diaphragm diagnostics is based on the header pressure because if it’s this diaphragm is completely open, the differential pressure within the chamber, it starts fluctuating, and then you know that there’s something wrong there. But all of them increases the filtration efficiency, changes from reactive to predictive maintenance, of course, keeps the site compliant, minimize dust emissions, and for sure increase equipment lifetime, like the filter units, and reduce the compressed air usage. If you sum up all of that, the return in investment is it might be quite fast, of course, for large big large installations might be within two years, but it’s still a very fast return in investment for that particular solution. That’s what it looks like. A little bit, let’s say, zoom in. You see that they’re not nice looking, but they indicate graphically where the issues are, the number of issues, on this screen about thresholds alerts. The second one on the right side, is like the number of cycles. Imagine that every pulse valve would have, about a couple of millions of cycles of lifetime. Here, you can at least predict when or how many spare parts that, you need to have in the next quarter. And then, the yellow or red signals means that, red gone, you have is a faulty. And the white ones or the red the yellow ones are the ones that, you need to watch because they’re getting closer to the lifetime dead of lifetime. The other aspect is, like I said, when thus collector systems, you acquire that without the solution, it comes with this sequence box, which basically is a time based posting. So it keeps posting three to six minutes, like I I said, hundred milliseconds, but it can change. It’s it’s fixed. And that means that leads to, an excessive use of the post valve. So you’re going to wear out quite sooner than it should, but also reduce the valve back life because stretching the the the back filters, of course, you’re gonna also wear out, and you waste much more compressed air than than probably you should. That’s why we implemented this other two types of a post jet cleaning methodologies. One is on demand. That really depends on the high differential pressure between the the chamber and, you can set, in the in the solution how these multiple filter lines are going to operate normally, And this differential pressure threshold can be, for example, when the efficiency is getting bad, the differential pressure gets lower. And then if that is within a certain band, you can estimate that, there is accumulation of the cascade. The other one is very, intelligent. It’s a function block, in our PLC that, does a dynamic change. So, therefore, you put the single set point and the adaptive algorithm based on the virtual pressure starts controlling the intervals between the posts. So the idea is that to optimize by eliminating unnecessary posts in the cycle of these valves and also minimizing the compressed air. Of course, when you install the solution and, you put the set point for the first time, the system needs a little bit time to learn, and it’s a learning algorithm that, starts adapting. And very soon, it starts performing optimally. Okay? Shawn Tierney (host): Hey, everybody. I just wanna jump in here one more time. Just thank our members, both on YouTube and at the automationblog.com. I got some really exciting stuff coming up for you guys, in the fall. I’m I just have this huge plan that I’m working on. And so, I really just thank you guys for being members. Don’t forget, you get access to Discord. Don’t forget, there’s a whole library of older episodes you get to watch. It’s such just what I’m doing this month for members. It’s, you get a whole library of stuff. We did so much member only content over the last couple of years that you have hundreds literally hundreds of hours of content that you and only you get access to as a member, whether you’re on YouTube or you’re at theautomationblog.com. And, of course, if you have any questions about your membership, reach out to me directly, please. And with that, let’s go ahead and jump back into this week’s show. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): And that looks like that. This is just another, possibility to see. You see that, on the left side, you see a particular rows, and each of these rows have the filter bags. Each filter bag has a vertical bar that indicates the healthy of that solenoid diaphragm is on the top. And then, each of these compartments can navigate from one to another. Then you have other additional elements like the header pressure, differential pressure, particle density, and you have a trained diagram that, you are able also to generate reports, but you also also to to monitor, in order to to type a little bit, the parameters in order to be more efficient. And then, completely right side, if you have more than one dust collector, you can create different screens if you want. But the idea here is that the C1, C2 means compartment one, two, three. Again, a diagnostics that leads to preventative predictive maintenance and avoids completely reactive maintenance. Interesting, if you don’t know, in order to replace a single filter, in order to check if a solenoid valve is completely short circuits, In order to see if, a diaphragm valve is open, you needed to get there in this personal protection equipment using mask, gloves. You need to go up. You need to kind of get to know where these things are. And imagine that if you could avoid and just look at the screen and say, hey. I know that this is the compartment one of the filter a, and I know where I needed to look at. And by the way, I have the spare part because I had early indications to fix it. So then we are not just talk about reduction time, but, I guess, reduction costs and avoid to put people every time in such a very interesting environment. Okay? I’m not going through the the right part because you can imagine that this is a description of how things are usually done. And if you turn this around into a proactive predictive maintenance, then you have less and maybe faster steps. And you can prevent and can plan in advance when you wanna go with these, units, and you have to wear this equipment for protection. So very quickly in the developer position. Of course, like any solution, customers are interested to know if, they can pay off payback very quickly. So the return investment of that. So that’s why we check, the size, the number of, units, what’s the minimum size the customer could start with, because the it’s a pre engineered solution, how fast it could be that we implement in the whole site. It could be also, of course, calculate how much their current expenditure in terms of maintenance, reactive maintenance, the cost of utilities like compressed air, how many times they have to or they have downtime issues. And from that, we can prove very quickly, very simply that, it’s worth investing in automation. 20 to 30% of our reduction is a lot if you consider that they use a huge amount of compressed air. And compressors, they use electricity. So, therefore, if you’re able to reduce compressed air, you also increase your operation efficiency because cost of utilities is one of the points. Downtime is everything. Maintenance, it’s about preventing that you need to do these manual inspections. Just go there, check, and come back, and you see that, okay, we could wait for another week. But because I’m here, I’m going to change anyhow the filter. And that, of course, you’re not, increasing the lifetime of our equipment. And interesting that some downstream equipment, like the blowers, like the vacu pumps, if they get a lot of dust or excessive dust, they also, damage them. So therefore, maximizing maintenance, optimizing every step pays off in that sense. And finally, of course, customers do that because they want the full compliance. Every possible issue can be tracked, can be report. The efficiency of the systems can be audit ready, reports. It can re really prove that you can you are reducing part commissions. You provide a lot of visibility what’s going on. So, therefore, the technical teams are in very high confidence to operate the system. Because if without, they are operating blindly, And that’s why they feel a bit concerned many times that, might be that the bad things are just going to happen. In a nutshell, we talk about savings, extending the filter life. We talk about savings, reduce the compressed air. We can avoid downtime. Each downtime is one event that costs not only in the maintenance part here, but also the whole production costs that are not calculate here. And half the penalties that, if you have a single issue, it’s gonna be a big one. So, therefore, it’s a good way to give customers an idea why they should invest the CapEx parts and how we can help with the OPEX to save, their budgets in the sense of operating dust collector systems. So, Shawn, if I have time three minutes, I’m going to run this HMI demo because then you can see on the screen how the different screens are operated, but it’s up to you if I if I if if I need to do that. Shawn Tierney (host): Yeah. Go ahead. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Okay. So this is an HMI demo, of course, simulated here because imagine it’s not possible to connect to live or to have all this whole equipment. So then I’m going to click here. So, basically, you see how a operator would navigate the type of information that, is provided. I made this click through very quickly because then we don’t owe too too much time here. But you see that, you are able to trend the particle density, the air consumption. You can set the alarms. You can indicate which boost valve is not okay. How is the level of filter bags? And now the settings. The cleaning, these are the parameters that you can adjust. Like I said, we have an adaptive learning algorithm, but in many cases, you needed to steer at least set up, the sensors as well, how sensible sensitivity of that. There are many different thresholds. And then the diagnostic part, for the diaphragm and the rupture where you can detect. And once this is done, you can see that, you have, quite, interesting information. For example, if you change, you devolve, you reset the counter. These are the alarms that you can acknowledge, etcetera. Okay? And, that’s it. That was the case. Shawn Tierney (host): Yeah. That gives you a good idea of what you’re getting with as far as the HMI is concerned, and, it’s good to see a full screen. I mean, it looks it looks like a very well designed HMI. From my perspective, it looks like it’s really giving you it’s focusing in on any errors. So you have, like, just standard graphics, a very good looking graphics, and then if there’s an error, you see it in red or yellow, really calls the eye to it. But, Eugeno, I see that, there’s a QR code on the screen right now. Can you tell people where that goes? Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. It goes to the product page on our Emerson.com site. And from there, you can request for demo. We can request for proposal. We can request for more information. So this is the entry point for you to go to know, how it how we provide that solution, which kind of, basic elements. And there, we have also the related product pages if you wanna get, get to know more. Shawn Tierney (host): And I think the important part here is a lot of times you you, you know, when when you have a dust collector system that is that is constantly needing care, right, to keep you in compliance and make sure your products are products are being made correctly and you’re keeping people safe and all of that, You know, these systems, you’re gonna they’re they’re gonna be expensive. And, you know, larger systems, of course, are gonna be expensive. And so that cost savings, it’s like energy savings we do with VFDs on pumps and fans. Right? Or energy savings we do when we’re doing lighting, the folks over at Emerson are gonna wanna help you kinda quantify that because, you know, they know that for you to be able to justify not only, hey. This has given us a lot of problems. We know it’s costing us money. You also wanna know your ROI. Right? And so they’re gonna work with you on that because that’s on these big projects, those are those are some of the things that we have to look at to be able to, you know, to budget correctly. Anybody who has ever been in the budgeting part of a company knows you just don’t spend money because it’s fun. You know, you have to have a reason beyond everything. So I would I would guess I’m right on that, Eugenio. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. And, Shawn, although I just covered the technical part, of course, without any commitment, we can talk to customers and consult them Yeah. To look it around and see, in terms of maturity, how they operate this dust collector systems. We can, of course, check the install base. We have a questionnaire, that can fill it in. We can understand the size. We can, for example, talk about the energy consumption, the number of, hours that they are spend or active maintenance. And based on that, we give them opportunity to analyze whether they want to invest in that solution, which is a CapEx investment, but, also improve how much reduction they could have on the OPEX part. Shawn Tierney (host): Yeah. Which is which is, yeah, how they’re gonna justify it. Well, Eugeno, I wanna thank you for going through that. I really enjoyed your presentation. I learned a lot more about about, this product line and actually this product category than I that I knew coming in, and you’re I think you did a great job of walking us through it all. So thank you very much for coming on the show. Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Shawn, on behalf of Emerson, we appreciate this opportunity. It’s my first one here, so I also enjoy it, and this was was great. A great conversation, great questions, and, thank you. Shawn Tierney (host): Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. I wanna thank Eugene for coming on the show and bringing us up to speed on dust collector systems. I really didn’t know all of those technical details, and I really appreciate him going through that. And it’s cool to see how they integrated so many different Emerson products into that solution. I mean, it’s just not like a PLC into my o. The sensors, this I mean, you guys, sorry. I’m not gonna go through it again. But in any case, really appreciate that. And I also appreciate our members who made the video addition possible. Thank you, members. Your $5 a month not only locks this video, but so many other videos that we’ve done, hundreds of videos I’ve done over the last twelve years. So thank you for being a member and supporting my work. I also wanna thank the automationschool.com and the automationblog.com. I hope you guys listened to that update that I included in the show. So many good things happen at both places. I hope you guys would take a moment to check out both websites. And with that, I just wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. The Automation Podcast, Episode 241 Show Notes: To learn about becoming a member and unlocking hundreds of our “member’s only” videos, click here. Until next time, Peace ✌️ If you enjoyed this content, please give it a Like, and consider Sharing a link to it as that is the best way for us to grow our audience, which in turn allows us to produce more content

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I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain und was das für Automotive HMIs bedeutet

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2025 39:24

„I miss my pre-internet brain.“ Dieser Satz stammt von der US-Autorin Virginia Heffernan und trifft mitten ins Herz unserer digitalisierten Existenz. In dieser Episode des Mensch-Technik-Podcasts gehe ich der Frage nach, warum uns moderne Technologien mental überfordern – und was das mit unserer evolutionären Geschichte zu tun hat. Was passiert, wenn ein steinzeitliches Gehirn auf Hochfrequenz-Interfaces trifft? Wenn aus Werkzeugen Umwelten werden? Und welche Rolle können Fahrzeuge dabei spielen? Inhalt der Episode: - Warum unser Gehirn kein Multitasking-Organ ist – und was das für digitale Interfaces bedeutet - Fünf Gründe, warum wir uns nach dem „Pre-Internet Brain“ sehnen - Wie heutige HMIs und Fahrzeug-Innenräume unsere mentale Kapazität überfordern - Welche Chancen entstehen, wenn wir Autos wieder zu Orten der Klarheit, Ruhe und Sinnlichkeit machen

Talking Automation with Rylan Pyciak of Cleveland Automation Systems (P238)

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2025 49:47 Transcription Available

Shawn Tierney meets up with Rylan Pyciak of Cleveland Automation Systems to discuss Trends in Automation, Inspiring a New Generation of Controls Engineers, and more in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video. Watch The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Welcome back to the Automation Podcast. My name is Shawn Tierney from Insights and Automation. And in this episode, I sit down with Ryland Pychak from Cleveland Automation Systems, a system integrator house, to talk about all things industrial automation, including how do we get more people involved in controls engineering as well as, like, what are the latest products and technologies people are using. So with that said, let’s go ahead and jump right into my interview with Ryland Piechak from Cleveland Automation Systems. Ryland, it’s great to have you on the show. Now before we jump into our conversation, can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself? Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Certainly. Well well, first and foremost, thanks for having me as well, Shawn. Definitely appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. To give a little bit of background, I’m Radom Pyshak, founder, president of, Clearwater Automation Systems, as well as a controls engineer. You know, we’ve we’ve essentially been in business for ten years now. And, ultimately, you know, my background has been controls engineering through and through. Actually started the manufacturing floor myself. You know, a lot of maintenance technician role, a lot of day to day kind of supporting troubleshooting equipment and whatnot. From there, obviously, went off to college, got a controls engineering background, did a little stint at Rockwell, also worked at an OEM as well as a system integrator. And then from there, kind of saw the entire picture of manufacturing and decided to go out and start cleaning automation systems myself. You know, so since then, like I said, we’ve been in business going on ten years so far. And, yeah, it’s been been great. You know, there’s a lot of unique things we’ve come across in the manufacturing industry, and, I’m definitely very passionate. And it’s, something that’s very interesting from my perspective. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, I appreciate you coming on the show. And, really, that’s our audience, the controls engineers, the, really, the automation electricians, those electricians who just really get into automation and do that as kind of a specialty, as well as the, maintenance technicians and control technicians, you know, maybe have an electronics background, a mechatronics background, and then get into automation. And so, really great to have you on. And it’s you have a great pedigree. They have different companies you’ve worked with. You’ve kinda seen the industry from different angles, which, you know, a lot of people don’t get that get that chance to work for a vendor and a integrator and an OEM and on the plant floor. So what really, tell us about your company, Cleveland Automation Systems. What do you guys do? Like, what was the purpose and found doing it? And and, really, what’s your what’s your focus? Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. Certainly. So click on automation system is probably the best, you know, term for us as a system integrator. Right? We typically have various clients that come to us to solve unique problems. That’s anywhere from simple, you know, field troubleshooting, simple service calls we get to complex equipment development, a lot of custom automation, as well as a lot of integration. You know? So, really, we work pretty much with every clientele across the board. I would say the main one, pretty much the only thing we don’t do is oil and gas. But we support clients across various manufacturing industries. And, really, you know, we essentially got into business to solve a lot of these complex problems. What I saw from my perspective was a lot of, you know, lack of support for various legacy systems, you know, other challenges that our our clients would have where, hey. How do we integrate various components together? So really going into business kinda to solve a lot of those problems, and that’s still what we do today. You know, anywhere from upgrading, you know, obsolete components and hardware, software control systems, all the way to developing custom unique, you know, different kinds of equipment and machinery. So very interesting industry, and our client base is pretty wide as well. Shawn Tierney (Host): Now I know with your background, right, there’s probably a focus on, like you were just saying, on helping people migrate to the latest generation or to a platform that’s gonna be stable for them. I know in the pre show we talked about some of your clients have, like, just a mishmash of controls. And so, and I know a lot of people in the audience, they have to deal with all different types of vendors. And so, just a, you know, a minute and not that not you know, we’re gonna be preaching to the choir here. But when you’re when you have a a one of your customers come to you and say, here’s what I got. What’s the best path forward? What’s some of the things you tell them about? Maybe not having every vendor on the planet every control system on the planet in your plan, well, that would be great for a museum, is not really great for your your people because it can be difficult. I mean, people struggle understanding an iPhone how to use an iPhone and an Android. Right? Because it’s so different. And if you take that times five or 10, it really just puts a lot of stress on the, the maintenance staff, the electricians, and and the engineers on-site. So what’s some of the advice you give when when you’re working with your your, vendors? Your I’m sorry. Your, customers. Rylan Pyciak: Certainly. I mean, I think you hit the nail right on the head there with the, you know, the iPhone to Android comparison. I use that as well. You know, the biggest thing is what we like to do. First and foremost, we usually do a site assessment for our clients, and that is coming in and understanding everything within the facility. Right? That is, you know, what control systems, hardware, software, motors, kind of everything that makes automation run. And really from there, it’s identifying and saying, hey. You have these, you know, five, six, 15 different vendor hardware, software platforms in your facility. You know, which route do you wanna go? Obviously, there’s some name brands that, you know, all of us understand are are primary here, you know, at least in The US that most people use. And and, really, it’s more of an educational thing than anything else with our customers of outlining and saying, hey. You know, to be able to hire somebody, you know, to fill a maintenance technician role, to fill a controls engineer role, you know, not only do they have to bring the skill sets of actually doing that work, they also need to bring along the skill sets of how to support these systems. You look at something such as DeviceNet versus Ethernet IP. Right? There are, you know, different I’m gonna call it generations, different demographics that grew up supporting that versus what is currently used in the market. So, you know, really, it’s sitting down, talking to our customers, kind of looking at that list we’ve developed with them and saying, hey. This is everything you have within your facility. Which route do you wanna go? What does your current maintenance staff look like? What can you support? As well as what does your infrastructure look like? Because end of the day, it’s you know, one, obviously, obsolescence is huge. I’m sure we’ve all been there. Right? You have a an obsolete hardware software device that goes down. Now you’re scrambling to go and find another one, right, typically on eBay, pulling it off the shelf, potentially opening up and soldering things. Nobody wants to go that route. So it’s more so understanding this is the route you should go and a lot of guidance education on, you know, one, why you should migrate as well as two, what that’s going to look like, you know, from your support and maintenance perspective where, hey. Now you only have one software license to manage. You only have one platform to manage, and it’s not, you know, five, six different platforms and somebody’s old Windows XP sitting on the shelf that you have to clean dust off of every time. So that’s, you know, I’d say in a nutshell, a lot of education, you know, goes into a lot of these conversations. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know, I think about over the years, all the peat times people upgraded and the reasons for upgrading and just the the cost of upgrading. There was a lot of people who upgraded in, for y two k when there was no reason to. And but they would there was a fear factor there. You know? Fear and certainty, doubt. Right, FUD? And so they would do upgrades, and they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I was just sitting there as a technical person being like, you’re wasting your money. You don’t need this. And, you know, I often see, like, an end user where they have a, you know, they have a a storeroom full of every IO module and every terminal block and every, processor and memory card, and it’s like, should we update the entire plan? I’m like, why? You not only is everything running smoothly and everybody’s trained on it, you have all the speeds you could ever use, and this stuff will last forever. Whereas when you’re sitting down with an OEM and they’re like, well, now I need to do six axes, and I have to do, you know, coordinated motion. You’re like, well, yeah, you’re not gonna wanna use that old stuff. Right? You we need to get you into the latest stuff where we have these new text test axes, commands and different things we can do that will just make your development so much easier. Plus, you’re gonna want tech support because if you go into the new generation, you’re probably gonna have some questions because you’ve been using the old generation. So it can really be case. And then I see, like, a lot of the the sensor vendors we have on, they come out with this new sensor that has features that no other sensor on the market has. And so I can see an end user saying, well, we usually use brand x, but brand y is really killing it. And this is the application brand x couldn’t solve, so we’re gonna go with brand y. And so it does make sense to I mean, you know, you can come at this from every different angle, but at the end of the day, I guess, like you were saying, you don’t wanna have a plan with 15 different things in there, 15 different software licenses. And, you know, it’s like, just because you’re good at Word doesn’t mean you’re an expert at Excel or PowerPoint. Right? And just because you’ve learned brand x does not mean you’re gonna be able to pick up brand y quickly. I know when I started working with Siemens, it was like a huge just, it was like going from, you know, Photoshop to PaintShop Pro or you know? It was just like a huge, huge change, and you really just you’re not as efficient when you first start off. So definitely definitely a lot of considerations there. You know, I think one of the things we’re talking about, in the preshow was the you know, how do you attract young people? Because so many people like us who are getting older. Right? And then the people who taught us who are retiring, you know, there’s a a lot of a lot of the younger, audience, you know, they they’ve been using a touch screen since they were. My grandkids have never known, devices without touch screens. Right? Rylan Pyciak: Mhmm. It’s Shawn Tierney (Host): so and so, you know, how do we what do what can we do to help get that younger generation in? Because we need to bring before everybody retires who has that that, you know, that knowledge. We’re gonna we’re gonna get that the younger folks to keep coming in and, you know, maybe we won’t have as many because, you know, systems are more mature and the you know, when I first started PLCs, we’re still relatively new. So programming PLCs with software was still relatively new, only a couple years, three, four years old. And so but today, we’ve been doing it for, you know, thirty five years, forty years. So, we may need less people as as as the knowledge is easier as a and and the products get easier, easier to use too. But how do we attract, younger engineers into this? I think we would both agree is a phenomenal, industry of, you know, automating manufacturing and other and other Rylan Pyciak: things? Yeah. Yeah. No. That that’s a great question. You know, honestly, I think some of it from my perspective, manufacturing is almost like a black sheep. Right? A lot of people haven’t heard of manufacturing. They typically look at it of, hey. It’s something either I see on TV or it’s how cars are made. But I feel like there are a lot of younger generations that may not just fully understand what we do day in and day out. You know, from the technical aspect, from problem solving, from engineering design, you know, all of the things that go into manufacturing a product, both on our side as integrators, programmers, things like that, but also from support, from production, you know, on the flip side. So, you know, I think there’s some of that of actually drawing an awareness to what our industry is and what it does. You know, if I’m being frank, a lot of my first introductory really was just talking to friends of friends, you know, and primarily, you know, older generations of, hey. You’re really hands on, really like to do things like this. You should look at this industry. And if it weren’t for those conversations, I probably would have never ended up in this industry either. You know, so, really, I think it’s it’s kind of opening up and saying, hey. You know, First Robotics, other, you know, kind of vocational or technical, you know, trades kind of situations when you’re in high school, even middle school of identifying people that are interested in these industries or interested in more, you know, hands on designing things, building things, and getting in front of those younger generations and showing them, hey. Manufacturing is something you can get into. And, right, you could pick up a teach pendant and move half of a car around with a robot. That’s really cool. So I think it’s a lot of kind of, you know, not only educational from a sense of educating people, but also just, you know, getting in front of younger generations, showing them what’s out there, you know, things that we like to do. There are a lot of career days at schools if we can go in and do things like that. Any kind of, you know, I guess, community involvement or outreach where you do have middle school, high schools, you know, even vocational schools of having introductories. Definitely love to do that. I mean, I sit on a couple advisory boards. Anytime we have professors that wanna invite us in, absolutely would jump on board and say, yes. I will sit down, show everything what we do, show Dawson pictures, kind of walk them through what you can do, you know, as controls engineers, as mechanical engineers, and really get a better sense of of this is what this industry looks like. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know, I think, when my kids were growing up they’re all grown up now, have kids of their own. When I was when I was when they were growing up, there was really no inexpensive way to to they nothing inexpensive I really could put in front of them to let them let them learn, you know, electronics and programming. We had, you know, we had PCs, but, beyond that, that’s not the way it is today. Today, we have, and we’ve covered them on the channel is, you know, I think one of the best places to start is with the Arduinos. And you can buy kits from kits with lots of electronics. It’s kinda like when I was a kid, they had a thousand and one experiments. Right? So you can buy buy, you know, kits that are, you know, $20 or $30. And we’ve reviewed a lot of the kits and and and the what comes in them, but they they come with all kinds of electronics and then the world, you know, the the world’s your oyster from there. You can do so many things. But even before you get to that point, I loved and I used to coach legal league. And for those younger middle school kids, right, legal league, you know, you can I was I had kids in there in fourth grade, right, learning to do the Lego League stuff, and they they do a great job of trying to make it fun? You you’re plugging the like, motors into into bricks, onto a a computer, and then you program it graphically, you know, with, you know, moves and, you know, if you’re into motion, everybody you know, you got a gut moves and how far you’re gonna go and sensors that tell you when to stop. And, I mean, it’s just I think it’s amazing. But the one thing I found, though, that that is difficult is that, you know, most most parents these days, they’re working, they’re both working, they don’t have a lot of time, they come home exhausted, and so they they have, an Xbox or a streaming surface that is their babysitter just so they can have some some alone time. And and I would just recommend, you know, limit that time. You know, the especially with video games these days, everything’s a season. You don’t wanna miss the next big thing that’s happening and and you would think from roadblocks to to, Destiny or, you know, Call of Duty or whatever. But don’t limit your kids’ time so when they’re bored, they have to they have to pull out that kit and stop playing with it. I was with my grandson recently, and he got grounded. And I said, well, I bet your mom well, you can’t play video games. I bet your mom will let you create your own video games. It’s like on her computer. He started, you know, designing his own levels and whatnot. It’s like, you know, if they if, you know, people are gonna go for easy. Right? But once easy is not there anymore, then they’ll they’ll look for something else. And, now talk to me about how how have you worked with the young have you done anything with the with the first robotics or with training? You said you’re on advisory councils. Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve, you know, we’ve sponsored a few high school competitions as well as some other local high schools that essentially, you know, they’re they’re just looking to do introductory into robotics design. You know, I think it almost goes back to the educational standpoint where, you know, your typical curriculum is is pretty standardized now. And a lot of, you know, shop classes, I feel like don’t exist at many high schools like they did, you know, ten, fifteen, thirty years ago. So some of it’s conversation. Some of it is honestly just where we’ve engaged with, you know, either prior high school, you know, where I went or other high schools that are interested in that and supporting it. Right? Like you mentioned, the biggest thing is is funding and finding opportunities. And to your point, yes, nowadays, it is hundreds of dollars. It’s not thousands or tens of thousands to do that. Exactly. But that that’s something I feel like us as, you know, us as companies in the integration world, and just speaking kind of at in general, being able to identify those things, you know, from anyone listening, if you are on the integration side or even if you’re on the manufacturing side of maybe having conversations with, you know, what your your current layout looks like, potentially your your children or high schools that you worked with, you know, and then going to higher ups and maybe asking for a little sponsorship. I mean, a couple $100 can get quite a few different pieces of hardware and software, and you could start building these things that, you know, allow for that aptitude and that intriguing, you know, design and and doing hands on design, you know, I think opens a lot of doors from that perspective. Yeah. I mean, definitely having good conversations with with, like I said, high school students, as well as trying to find other opportunities where you can work with these generations and allow them to have that curiosity. You You know, I think that’s the biggest thing. Once you get that spark and that curiosity, really just continuing to run from that and seeing what other options are out there in the world. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And and if you’re gonna sponsor as a company or as a group or as a, you know, organization, I would definitely put a put a requirement in there and and maybe go and and see the final project. Because my wife’s a principal, she’s been teaching for twenty years, and, people have sponsored different different, you know, things that she’s tried to implement in her school. And I think the one thing they fall down on is, yeah, they they have you fill out a form. They give you the money. Then so you can go buy the kits, but and then they don’t get involved. And it’s like, you know, people get busy. And if there’s not, like, this requirement that, hey. They have to show you know, at the end of the at the end of the season or year or course, we’re gonna come in and see what they did. Just to try to hold their feet to the, not hold their feet to the fire, but just to give the teacher or the instructor some accountability, some some, reason to make sure that this stuff gets used and covered because there are so many mandates. Hopefully, this will change, but today, there’s so many mandates that it’s difficult. They really have to make an effort to teach, outside of what’s mandated, which is and and like you said, unfortunately, shop class shop class, and, you know, basic electricity, those type of things are not mandated anymore or not mandated today. But, you know, as we’re talking about this, let if you don’t mind, can we switch over and talk about smarter manufacturing? So we’ve talked a while about how we get youngsters involved, but as you go to work every day, right, and you work with your people and you work with your customers, I mean, what are some of the trends you’re seeing out there where people are doing things maybe smarter or adopting new newer technologies that, you know, we didn’t have maybe ten years ago that are really making a difference in their plants? Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. Certainly. You know, there are quite a few different things that we’ve come across. You know, there there are some buzzwords definitely. You know, I think that you kind of have to sandbox exactly what they are, AI being one of them. Right? I think in the general sense, a lot of people may not understand. But there are some I’m gonna call them, you know, AI such as vision systems where essentially you’re teaching it, hey. Here are, you know, passable or passing products. Here are failing products. And it’s not necessarily how vision systems traditionally were, right, where it always has to be the same picture if it doesn’t line up. If it’s not good, it’s bad. Right? That that’s kinda more of the traditional sense where some of these newer AI, you know, learning systems that are out there are actually able to detect and say, hey. You know, I may be looking for something to be right side up, and it’s within that plus or minus 10 degree window. That’s gonna be a pass. If I see something flipped upside down, that’s certainly gonna be a fail. So we’re seeing some newer technologies like that definitely being implemented out there. IoT, smart sensors, IO Link are other ones that are huge. We’re seeing a lot of deployments, especially in food and beverage where you’re no longer having to run analog sensors everywhere, but rather, you know, you’re basically implementing IO Link and other similar platforms where now I’m actually getting that process data over Ethernet IP. I don’t know if they’re about scaling other things like that. They make field installation and setup time a breeze. We do a lot of that as well. So definitely some newer technologies. And then some other things I’d say are pretty unique too are more maybe around the robotics where we’re seeing a lot of your ROS and ROS two development where, you know, again, it’s kind of more of a open source platform that essentially allows you to run the control kind of independent of what we would traditionally look at from a controller where, hey. You may have a Fanuc or a KUKA robot that is essentially now running, you know, from a ROS perspective versus your traditional, you know, picking up the teach pendant and programming points. So it it it’s definitely interesting. I’d say, you know, we’re working on a quite a few different applications that are kind of bridging that gap between traditional and newer technologies, you know, where there’s a lot more dynamic going on. You know, for instance, an application we’re currently doing, essentially, we have, you know, a product coming into an area, a couple scanners doing a three d point cloud, and then robots that are actually going over top of that. That product that’s coming in is never the same from one product to the next. So there’s a lot of kind of, you know, ongoing smart technology that’s feeding in there, vision systems, three d systems, and that’s actually using one of the the ROS, you know, approach as well. So, yeah, it’s definitely something that I think as our our industry grows, there’s a lot more, interest in it, and there’s a lot more funding coming in, private equity, venture capitalists, that are are starting to try and solve some of these more complex problems. And I think from that, it it does allow us to now look at this. Hey. Traditionally, you would program with a PLC ladder logic. And the teach pendant. Well, that way you might be able to use more software based controls and engineering versus, you know, ladder logic programming and things like that. So, yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. Again, from our standpoint as a system integrator, we get to see so many of these different things going on, that you walk in and you’re like, this it’s pretty neat to see what other people are trying to do out there. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know, we talked about AI quite a bit last year in in robotics. AI, you know, we and and I asked the audience to help me. Look. We gotta spread the the the knowledge about AI as far as what it really is. Couple years ago, I was on vacation, and we were on a tour, and we had these dinners every night. And this older man, he’s he’s like, AIs self aware, and they’re programming itself, and we don’t need people anymore. And I’m like, that’s a great science fiction book you just read, but, I mean, I think if you know? You know, you try to explain to them. It’s like, look. It’s like they published this. IEEE does a great job covering this. They’ve literally spent millions every year, like, 10 of the millions every year programming these AIs. They’re not self aware. They’re not then that people still are needed. That’s why they’re paying people, you know, millions of dollars to program them. And, you know, it’s it’s it’s basically you know, as we look at the I always go back to, like, voice activation, and I should mute my, my device here so I don’t accidentally trigger it. But, you know, if we think back, like, I bought Dragon Natural Speaking back in the day because I wanted I my old job for twenty five years, I spent half or more of every day driving. So four hours driving, seven hours working, or eight hours driving, four hours. It was just it was just a for somebody who likes to do for a doer, it’s just demoralizing to be on the road that much. For a driver, that’s great. I mean, they love that. But in any case, long story short, it’s 90% and, again, I have an accent. But 90%, you think that sounds great until you go to edit what you said. It’s not good. Right? It’s, like, too much work. I could just type this from scratch. And we we also see that with a lot of transcripts. Like, if you’re on a video streaming site, the transcripts, the, automatic English captions, right, closed captions, A lot of times, they’re not that good either. But we’ve seen that grow. I know when I first got my, my iPhone and it had Siri, and I would be like I would talk to it and be like, I can’t answer that. Today, I can talk to it, and it does a great job. It’s it’s the the database that has backing it up is so much better. And so I take that and I go into, like, the vision system example you gave. Right? Now in the past, like you were saying, we had to have the lighting perfect. We had the gauges and the tools, and the the product had to be in the spot all the time, and there was no way to for it to float around and find the product and and most early on. And today, you can shoot it, like, a 100 products and say these are all good, and it can the algorithm can figure out, hey. What are the minor variances of these so I can understand what falls into the good bucket? And then you can shoot at a 100 bad products and say, okay. These are bad. And they can actually build some, some, tables or or value sets to know, to really know really well, you know, much faster than any person could, what’s good and what’s bad. And it’s amazing. Even one vendor said, hey. If you need to give it train it do even more training, we you can upload it to our website. We’ll do it offline and send it back to you, which I just think is amazing. And I know it’s revolutionizing, you know, cancer treatment or or detection and all kinds of other things. But, yeah, no. This is not data from Star Trek. Rylan Pyciak: Right? Yeah. Shawn Tierney (Host): This is not Al from 02/2001. And, and, yeah. And so so go ahead. Go ahead. Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. No. I was I mean, you’re you’re spot on, Shauna. It it it’s a good balance. Right? I mean, you know, I even look at it. We’ve all been there, right, especially from the controls perspective where something isn’t running and you walk out and it’s that slight little turn of the photo eye. Right? So as much as I think a lot of people may look at it of, hey. It’s taking over the world and it’s taking over what we’re doing, It still requires people, you know, in in at least in our world, technicians to implement it, to program it, to set it up. And, again, a lot of our equipment too doesn’t even have that smart that technology. So, you know, it’s something that as we move forward educationally, I think, you know, generations that that still have a pretty good length of career left, it it’s making sure you’re educating yourself on it, understanding what it is, how to deploy it, utilizing it as it becomes more commonplace, but definitely not you know, I wouldn’t be intimidated by it because it it’s something that it it’s like anything else. It’s a tool that’s going to be used. You know, and I think it’s making yourself aware of it, understanding how you can actually deploy it in the future. And and something else, I guess, you know, a thought that they brought up from my standpoint is actually investment in this new technology. It’s something else that we have a lot of these conversations with customers. You know, I know automate just happened. Right? You go out and you see the latest and greatest of everything. Lot of cool technology, new technology. You know, we always caution our customers to be, you know, cautiously optimistic and consider what you’re investing in, because one of the things you have to look at you know, there are all these these crazy new technologies that are out there. I’m gonna use collaborative robots as an example. Right? When when they first came out, it was universal robots. Now you watch the show, you know, there are probably 50, a 100, I don’t know, 500 collaborative robots. The thing you have to really consider is not only are you purchasing this technology, you’re investing in education, you know, from an internal standpoint to to bring your teams up to speed. But you also have to make sure that technology still exists in five, ten, twenty years. A great use case, you know, we actually did case study on it. You know, Ready Robotics, I thought was a great platform, works really well, you know, kind of made robot programming agnostic. And and they had a really, really valuable, you know, use case, I thought. And, you know, they went bankrupt. They went out of business. So you have to look at that too of, hey. I’m gonna go and spend this money as a decision maker for my plant, for my company, for my process. You have to also make sure that that hardware, that software, that firmware, that company that developed that is also there in the long term. So you kinda have to do a pros and cons and make sure, really, our our biggest things, you know, how long have those companies been in business, what does their technology look like, what does their tech support look like, Right? Do they have a team? Is it one individual? Are they writing firmware on the back end as these bugs come up? But it really is a holistic picture. And and, again, I really recommend having conversations with your personnel that are on the floor supporting this. Reach out to integrators, reach out to individuals within the market. You know, ask a lot of questions before you make those decisions. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. But, you know, it’s does it work with your existing architecture? So there are so many great cobot and robot manufacturers. And, quite honestly, some of them work better with brand a and some work better with brand b. And if you have brand b, you probably want one that works really well with it. You know, if you have brand a, then, you know, that’s gonna be and I know they all try to work with all they try to be vendor agnostic as far as the control systems, but some do a better job with you know? A lot of times it’s geographical or it’s just, you know, the the mission of the company internally. But, and then there are there are companies out there who do just just do a phenomenal job or try to with all vendors. But, you know, I think Cobot’s, that’s one place we talk about the younger generation. I mean, you think about it. Right? And and I worked in a machine shop one summer when I was, in high school, and it’s it’s a job that young people do not want. Right? If you’re if you’re if you’re machining products, right, it it’s similar to, like, if an injection molding facility. People don’t wanna work there either. Right? Younger generation, a lot of them don’t because they want something more, you know, twenty twenty five ish. Right? And so, if you can have a COBOS sit at that machine and put the pieces in and out instead of a human being, and I could tell you that was very boring work. And I and and and most of the people there were not college graduates. Right? They were there because they were you know, it was the best paying job they could find without having any experience. And so as those people retire, if if you don’t have enough people to fill those roles, that’s where the Cobots, I think, could do a great job. And this people even have innovative uses for them. Like, this one company was it was a three d printing company, and so they like to work eight to five like most people do. They have families. They wanna enjoy their evenings. And, the problem was, though, the printers would finish the print. You know, they would take custom print jobs. They’d finish, like, in the evening. Right? And nobody wanted to drive back to work and switch out the trays so they could print something else. Right? Expensive machines printing expensive products. And so they bought a Kobo. Now all that Kobo does is it goes around and replaces the trays on the three d printers when they finish their job so that you can print something else. And it gives them another, you know, theoretically, another sixteen hours worth of printing they can get out of their machines while everybody’s at home, you know, spending time with the family and and and sleeping. And so there’s a lot of innovative ways to use cobots. Now have you guys done any work recently with cobots? Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. That’s it it’s definitely something, you know, we’ve deployed quite a few collaborative applications. Yep. You know, really, when when it comes to I’m gonna say collaborative versus noncollaborative. More so, we’re we’re kinda back to, I guess, what you just touched on is identifying, you know, what are the problems that you could potentially solve? Or, honestly even just walking in and saying, hey. There is a potential solution here that maybe somebody’s never thought of. You know, that’s identifying, like you said, that, right, the three d is dirty, dull, dangerous where people just it’s a boring job. People hate it. It’s high turnover. You know, really kind of finding those applications where it’s something simple. You know, it it it’s low cost. It’s something you could implement very easily. And then being able to walk in and replace that with a robot with a collaborative robot, you know, with an automated solution that actually solves those problems. Right? And then it takes those individuals from doing that that high turnover, boring, or dangerous, or, you know, mind numbing kind of position into something that that opens up a lot more doors, and now they can be technicians. They can, you know, kinda move into a higher position where they’re doing more from the company perspective. But, yeah, I mean, in terms of collaborative applications, definitely a lot of opportunity that’s out there. You know, I think the biggest things are, you know, obviously identifying what you’re trying to do, making sure you do proper risk assessments to make sure that application is actually collaborative, as well as, you know, really finding what are you trying to solve at the end of the day. Right? Is it a labor problem? Is it, you know, just just an ergonomic problem is definitely a big one we see a lot of. Time saving problems. We deployed one two years ago, actually, that essentially just mixing the solution. Right? In every fifteen minutes, operator would have to stop, open up the door, go in there and mix this this solution, essentially, to keep it mixed, shut the door, and hit go. That essentially removed that where now that operator is no longer there and actually doing the other pieces of their job. You know, it was a slam dunk for everyone involved. So definitely a lot of opportunities out there. You know, I think, really, it’s it’s identifying what you’re trying to solve. But you can definitely utilize them in quite a few different locations. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know? And I that kinda brings another thought to mind is, you know, we hear a lot of people say, well, automation is bad because it takes away jobs. And I usually, it’s a boomer when I see somebody saying this on TV and not to pick on boomers. Okay? But, typically, it’s a boomer. Right? Mhmm. And, they’re holding a, like, an $800 smartphone, and they’re standing next to a a, you know, a $5,500 big screen TV. And I’m just like I’m I’m like or with those products you love to use, the car you like to drive, that smartphone you love, you know, None of those can be made without automation. Impossible. Literally impossible to make your modern devices without automation. Technology, and I like to just say technology technology gets rid of the lowest level jobs. Right? So from the day we learned to tie an ox to that wheel to turn it so we could either pump water or grind, you know, grain or whatever, right, or harness it harness the wind with the wind with the winter a wind wheel, a windmill. You know, that where people are always trying to find smarter ways to doing thing. And, you know, not that mixing a container by hand is extremely difficult or but I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to the local, home supply store, and they’ve mixed my paint wrong, literally. Or I’ll say this too. Same place. Have my keys made wrong. I’ve I have, like, half a dozen keys I’ve paid them I had made, and they mess them up. Right? And so I’m not picking on people. They’re they’re stressed out. They got lots doing. But if If if if I need a key now, because I know there’s one, department store nearby that has the automated. You just put your key in. It does everything automated. I will only go there because I know it is done correctly every time. And quite honestly, I don’t have to listen to the to the the sales guy go, oh, I don’t like making keys. I can’t believe I gotta do this. You know? It’s just so funny. Yes. I wish you didn’t have to do this either because you keep doing it wrong. So Uh-huh. I mean, do do you agree with me? Or I mean, the technology I find is elevating. It’s giving people better jobs. It’s not it’s really eliminating the jobs that most people don’t want. Am I right about that? What what are your thoughts about that? Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. I you know, honestly, Shawn, I think I think you’re spot on with that. You know, really, automation and and I would say this. You know, the last couple years, a lot of our customers, they’re asking for automation because they simply cannot find enough people to fill their roles. It’s not that, hey. We wanna, you know, necessarily improve a process or, you know, replace people. Nobody’s actually filling those roles where they don’t have enough resources to do that manually. So it’s a, you know, it’s a labor shortage issue, honestly, of what we’re dealing with. But by no means is it actually taking over, replacing jobs, anything like that. I mean, exactly what you said. Right? You look at at jobs that are very labor intensive, that are, you know, very stressing, ergonomic issues that, you know, it it’s honestly it’s backbreaking work. And I definitely understand that I wouldn’t wanna do that kind of labor myself day in and day out, five days a week. And that’s where automation is key. Right? So you now walk in and a robot, a control system, you know, whatever it is is replacing those things that are, you know, beating up your body or, you know, other things, you know, very toxic locations, locations that you don’t wanna deal with chemicals, things like that. Now those same persons that had to go in and do that are now actually supporting it. And kind of back to what we were talking about before, right, now those individuals are learning how to operate the HMIs. They learn how to recover the robots. They’re learning how to do basic troubleshooting on PLCs, you know, robotic systems, things like that. So, you know, from from an employment perspective, from a technology and educational perspective, I think it’s taking them from doing a repetitive, laborious job, and now it’s opening up more avenues where you could walk in and say, hey. You know, I have background, you know, programming, doing basic troubleshooting on this system that has, you know, phanic robot, Allen Bradley PLC. I made edits. You know, we may be maybe that system, you’ve put in five new part variants since you purchased it. You know, so now you you have more applicable skills that I think, in general, our industry needs to head that rate. Right? As you mentioned, one, to be able to be competitive with the prices of what we pay for the cost of goods sold in general. But two, just from a standpoint of, you know, if corporations and companies are going to try and remain competitive, they certainly are going to have to automate. You’re not going to be able to replace and do everything with manual, you know, human labor, and you need to start implementing automation, you know, in the right locations, but also making sure you’re implementing it so you can, like I said, obviously, fill those labor gaps, fill the labor shortages that you have, you know, high turnover positions or dangerous positions, replace that with industrial automation. And, yeah, I mean, end of the day, It it is definitely not taking people’s jobs. I can’t say I’ve seen any project where we walked in and said, hey. Here’s a machine that runs x rate. These five people are now gone. Usually, they’re moving into higher level positions, technician positions, and and, honestly, getting more education. So, I mean, I’m absolutely on board that automations automation is nothing but a good investment from a company perspective. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And, you know, I think back to, BeachNet, they make baby food. And, I was, working with them when they were building a new plant, and, the old plant looked ugly. It was like an old brick building, multistory. Yeah. It I like, I walked through it, and I’m like, I don’t know that I could ever buy this baby food again. But their new plant was just beautiful. Beautiful. When you walk into the lobby, it’s huge and beautiful. You walk in the lobby, they have a mural on the wall. It’s like endless mostly ladies in hair nets, endless table of ladies cutting potatoes and carrots, and and, they’re all happy. They’re like, yeah. This is great. The kids are in school. I can make some extra money. Maybe we’ll buy a new car. You know? They were all pretty happy. It was like they can sit there. They can chat. They can cut the carrots and potatoes, and they’re making healthy baby food for the community. And so it was great. Today, I don’t think my granddaughter would wanted that job for a a, you know, million dollars. You know? She’s never known a time when it hasn’t been, you know, high screen high resolution touch screens in her hand or in her mother’s hand or, you know, in her house, and it’s like, why would we do this manually again? Rylan Pyciak: Mhmm. Shawn Tierney (Host): Why would I spend all day repetitively getting carpal tunnel tunnel syndrome or whatever? You know? You know? And and so that’s just where we are. I think most of us see most people most people who who are paying attention to what they’re doing, they wanna do it better. They wanna improve. You know? It’s that continuous improvement, CAN ban, all that stuff that talks about, you know, let’s let’s keep making changes to make the process better. And, you know, you’re not always not every change is is for the positive. But, you know, I think this kinda this brings us full circle too because, you know, I there was a technologist recently who was saying, we can import a lot of engineers because we don’t have enough engineers. And it’s like, I replied to him, like, we have tons of engineers. What you’re really seeing is the schools are not teaching what you want them to learn. Partner with the schools so like, my youngest son and all these other software engineers out there are not unemployed because the schools didn’t teach them what you wanted. You need a you need a thousand engineers. Go to the local go to the local school. Tell them this is why I need your people to learn. Trust me. They’ll start teaching it. Because the last thing that, you know, a competent school wants to do or college or university is, you know, put people out there who can’t actually get a job. They they love being able to brag about people getting jobs. They love to be able to brag about hey. I’m working with company Y, and, we send them a thousand engineers over the last four years. So we kinda come full circle. I think we all need to think about that. How can we encourage our local educational institutions? Maybe it’s our kids where our kids are going. Maybe it’s where our grandkids are going. Maybe it’s where nieces and nephews or siblings are going. How can we get involved and help those local you know, everything from grade school through high school through through, junior college, technical, you know, community colleges, and so on. We we gotta help them understand what we’re doing and what’s valuable so they can stay away from, you know, maybe saying, hey. The Raspberry PIs gonna take over the world, so that’s all you need to learn. No. Sorry. Yeah. No. I hate to bring it to you, but there’s a reason why we have major vendors, and they’ve been in business for over a hundred years because they make the what the customers want. But, yeah, that kinda brings a full circle to what we were talking about at the beginning of the show. Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, It it definitely it it’s an entire ecosystem. Right? I think from from that perspective, right, from the large corporations that are manufacturing, it is having those conversations and saying, hey. These are the kind of technicians, the controls engineers, the, you know, whatever roles you’re trying to fill. This is what we do day in and day out. And those individuals and corporations need to have conversations with, again, the the local vocational schools, the community colleges, the technical colleges, even, like I said, even high school and middle school and outline Yeah. This is what our career path looks like. This is what you know? Right? This is what our process looks like. Honestly, you know, doing site tours, facility tours, understanding how things are made, looking at equipment and working with equipments where, hey. We may have, you know, humongous boilers or, you know, I grew up in Southern Ohio where steel at one point was was very large before it went overseas. You know, understanding what that looks like, how electric arc furnaces work and function, and actually working with local community colleges of, hey. This is this is the kind of technical resources of what we need. Right? That’s low rates. It it’s electricians. It’s hands on labor, whatever that is. And then, you know, aligning both what you’re trying to fill from a technical perspective with what is actually being taught in those vocational technical community colleges even back again to high schools where, you know, hey. Yeah. PLC programming is great. We actually utilize, like you said, we utilize Siemens or Allen Bradley. We don’t do Arduino for, you know, a a $100,000,000 production facility. So I think a lot of it is honestly, it’s more community involvement. Quite honestly, it’s conversations like you and I are having, but on a on a bigger scale of understanding, hey. These are the skill gaps. This is where we’re currently at, and these are the roles we’re trying to fill. Because a lot of it, like you said, it’s it’s I feel like a lot of people in our industry more often than not, kind of stumble upon it or at least have some in. But if it weren’t for that, people really wouldn’t know what manufacturing does. So I mean, I would definitely encourage that. Again, kind of back to the advisory boards that I’ve talked about, we have a lot of those conversations with the local community colleges of this is what we do. This is what’s good. Your training systems, this is awesome. We don’t use any of this. And just having those those two way conversations and making sure you’re staying involved. I mean, end of the day, communication’s key, and I think that’s what we all need to do more of. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Rylan, I really appreciate coming on the show. I’m just looking at my list of bullets of things I wanted to talk about. Was there anything that you wanted to talk about that we hadn’t gotten through yet? Rylan Pyciak: I don’t think so. I mean, I think we touched on a lot of great topics. You know, in general, Shawn, I’d say, you know, really, one of my passions is definitely bringing in younger generations’ education into this industry. You know, end of the day, we’re all engineers. I think by default, we like to collaborate and have conversations. And, really, I’m just trying to encourage more of that, right, of of all of us being able to have open, honest conversations. I know you get onto the forums and you get onto Reddit and all these other, you know, areas of the Internet, and it’s great because there’s a lot of collaborative energy. And I and, honestly, I think it’s something we just need to do that more, be more supportive of other individuals, of others in the industry, and keep having these conversations. Right? Because the more collective minds we bring together, I think it’s gonna open up more doors, and it’s gonna allow us to have, you know, more exciting conversations like this. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Rylan, I really appreciate you coming on. Now if people wanna learn more about Cleveland Automation Systems, where would they go to find out more? Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Definitely. You can find us on our website since clevelandautomationsystems.com. I know it’s a mouthful. You could also look look up myself on LinkedIn, Rylan Pyshak, Cleveland Automation Systems as well as on LinkedIn. But definitely feel free to reach out. I’m always open. I love having conversations like this. So definitely you can find us, like I said, website LinkedIn. Send me a direct message if you wanna talk about something. I’ll definitely share my contact info, and, you know, we can connect any which way you want. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And we’ll include all those links in the description so you guys, wherever you’re listening or watching, you’ll be able to have access to that so you don’t have to type it all in. But in any case, Ryland, thank you so much coming on. I really enjoyed our conversation today, and, just thanks again for coming on. Rylan Pyciak: Definitely. And thank you for having me, Shawn. I definitely appreciate the opportunity. Shawn Tierney (Host): I hope you enjoyed that episode. I wanna thank Rylan for coming on the show and talking about all things industrial automation. I really enjoyed our chat. I hope you did too. And I will put his link to his LinkedIn profile and to his company in the description. I also wanna thank Cleveland Automation Systems for sponsoring this episode so we could bring it to you completely ad free. So if you’re talking to Ryland or anybody over there, please, tell them thank you for us. And, with that said, I just wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace. The Automation Podcast, Episode 238 Show Notes: Special thanks to Rylan for coming on the show, and to Cleveland Automation Systems for sponsoring this episode so we could release this episode Ad Free! Below you’ll find links to Rylan’s LinkedIn profile, and to Cleveland Automation Systems: Rylan Pyciak’s LinkedIn Cleveland Automation Systems Until next time, Peace ✌️ If you enjoyed this content, please give it a Like, and consider Sharing a link to it as that is the best way for us to grow our audience, which in turn allows us to produce more content

ISO 9241: Die stille Macht hinter guten HMIs

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 24, 2025 35:12

In dieser Episode geht es mal wieder technisch zur Sache – ganz nah dran an der Entwicklungsrealität. Im Mittelpunkt steht die ISO 9241, die zentrale Normenreihe für ergonomische Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion. Warum jede und jeder eine Meinung zu HMIs hat, aber wir als Profis mehr brauchen als subjektive Einschätzungen – das klären wir ebenso wie den Ursprung, Aufbau und die Anwendung der ISO 9241. Es geht um Dialogprinzipien wie Aufgabenangemessenheit, Fehlertoleranz und Steuerbarkeit – und darum, warum Wissenschaftlichkeit und Systematik die Basis guter HMI-Gestaltung sein müssen. Zum Abschluss ein Blick nach vorn: Wie geht die Norm mit KI, Augmented Reality und multimodaler Interaktion um? Und was bedeutet das für die Zukunft von Human-Machine Interfaces? Themen: - Herkunft und Bedeutung der ISO 9241 - Die sieben Dialogprinzipien als Gestaltungsbasis - Zukünftige Herausforderungen: AR, VR, KI und humane Interfaces Eine Folge für alle, die HMIs nicht nur schön, sondern sinnvoll gestalten wollen.

The #1 Myth Putting Your Industrial OT Assets at Risk

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2025 24:17

Podcast: Industrial Cybersecurity InsiderEpisode: The #1 Myth Putting Your Industrial OT Assets at RiskPub date: 2025-03-25Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationIn this episode, Dino and Craig tackle one of the most overlooked vulnerabilities in industrial cybersecurity: the unintentional chaos caused when IT security procedures are blindly applied to OT environments. Using real-world examples like the CrowdStrike EDR failure, they illustrate how tools meant to protect can actually shut down production lines, cripple HMIs, and introduce massive operational risk. They call out the air-gap myth, the need for shared authority between IT and OT, and the critical importance of context when deploying cybersecurity solutions on the plant floor. For executives and practitioners alike, this episode is a wake-up call to rethink governance, accountability, and collaboration between traditionally siloed IT and OT teams.Chapters:00:00:00 – IT vs. OT: The Unspoken War00:01:03 – Meet Your Guides: Dino & Craig00:01:05 – IT/OT Explained… Without the Jargon00:02:26 – How IT Crashed the Plant Floor00:05:12 – Talk to Me Like I'm Production00:08:53 – Security Priorities: Worlds Collide00:13:40 – Vendors, Integrators & Invisible Risks00:21:52 – Who Owns the Fallout?Links And Resources:Cybersecurity & Digital Safety Group on LinkedInDino Busalachi on LinkedInCraig Duckworth on LinkedInThanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Industrial Cybersecurity Insider? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube to leave us a review!The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Velta Technology, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

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Understanding Cybersecurity Challenges in Industrial Settings with Lesley Carhart

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2025 58:38

Podcast: PrOTect It All (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)Episode: Understanding Cybersecurity Challenges in Industrial Settings with Lesley CarhartPub date: 2025-01-13Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationIn this episode, host Aaron Crow converses with Lesley Carhart, Technical Director at Dragos, who brings over 15 years of experience in incident response and forensics within critical infrastructure sectors. The episode dives deep into the standard practices in industrial settings, such as operators shutting down power plants for safety and the lack of forensic investigation into equipment failures. Lesley emphasizes the importance of integrating cybersecurity into these environments, pointing out that many failures are due to maintenance or human error, though a notable portion does involve cyber threats. Listeners will learn about the challenges and necessary collaborations between operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) teams. The discussion addresses cultural and trust barriers that hinder effective cybersecurity measures and advises on how organizations can improve their defenses regardless of size and resources. Lesley also highlights the evolving landscape of cyber threats, including the increasing sophistication of adversaries and the vulnerabilities caused by standardizations in industrial systems. Real-world examples underscore the complexity of securing these environments, emphasizing the need for proactive and informed cybersecurity practices, such as "cyber-informed engineering." Tune in to better understand the critical intersections of cybersecurity and industrial operations, and learn practical strategies to safeguard essential services. Key Moments: 05:00 IT-OT miscommunication leads to cybersecurity risks. 09:23 IT processes are too slow; bypassing is required for solutions. 11:36 Leaving an outdated system may pose less risk. 15:09 Slow changes in OT due to unforeseen impacts. 19:17 Include cybersecurity in root cause analysis discussions. 20:31 Nation-states analyze and bypass industrial control systems. 25:40 Cybersecurity is essential to combat potential system threats. 29:27 Communication, champions, and leadership crucial for cybersecurity. 31:37 Cybersecurity struggle due to resources community helps. 35:03 OT vs. IT language differences affect incident classification. 38:08 Empowered safety culture prevents accidents and retribution. 40:22 Few people have diverse cybersecurity skills and experience. 45:05 Experience across all 17 critical infrastructure verticals. 48:29 Evading detection in the nuclear enrichment process. 51:25 Identify industrial devices, build security program. About the guest : Lesley Carhart is a renowned cybersecurity expert specializing in industrial control systems (ICS) security. With a keen understanding of the convergence between traditional IT and operational technology (OT), Lesley has been at the forefront of safeguarding critical infrastructures. Her work emphasizes the vulnerabilities of human-machine interfaces (HMIs) and programming devices, which are increasingly resembling typical computers and thus becoming prime targets for malware and ransomware attacks. Lesley's insights highlight the significant risks posed by these hybrid systems, underscoring the importance of robust cybersecurity measures in protecting essential processes. Lesley is honored to be retired from the United States Air Force Reserves, and to have received recognition such as “DEF CON Hacker of the Year”, “SANS Difference Maker”, and “Power Player” from SC Magazine. How to connect Lesley: Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/hacks4pancakes/ Blog: https://tisiphone.ne Mastodon : https://infosec.exchange/@hacks4pancakes Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/lcarhart/ Connect With Aaron Crow: Website: www.corvosec.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronccrow Learn more about PrOTect IT All: Email: info@protectitall.co Website: https://protectitall.co/ X: https://twitter.com/protectitall YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PrOTectITAll FaceBook: https://facebook.com/protectitallpodcast To be a guest or suggest a guest/episode, please email us at info@protectitall.co Please leave us a review on Apple/Spotify Podcasts: Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/protect-it-all/id1727211124 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1Vvi0euj3rE8xObK0yvYi4The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Aaron Crow, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Enhancing OT Cybersecurity: From Legacy Systems to Cloud Solutions with Paul Shaver

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 19, 2024 57:11

Podcast: PrOTect It All (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)Episode: Enhancing OT Cybersecurity: From Legacy Systems to Cloud Solutions with Paul ShaverPub date: 2024-11-18Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationIn this episode, Aaron is joined by Paul Shaver, an experienced OT security consultant from Mandiant, part of Google Cloud. Together, they navigate the nuanced landscape of operational technology (OT) cybersecurity. The episode begins with Aaron recalling a critical incident at a power plant that underscores the potential pitfalls in OT environments. This sets the stage for a rich discussion on the evolution of OT technology, with Aaron and Paul reminiscing about primary domain controllers and early NT workstations. The conversation shifts to the future of OT in the cloud, where Paul highlights the benefits of cloud solutions, including enhanced resiliency, security, and data optimization through AI. A compelling customer case study illustrates modern technology adoption with web-based HMIs and Chromeboxes. Paul offers a detailed analysis of the current OT cybersecurity landscape, addressing the persistent legacy system challenges and the need for a cohesive IT-OT security strategy. He discusses the evolving threat landscape influenced by global geopolitical tensions and the rise of zero-day vulnerabilities. Listeners will gain practical insights into foundational cybersecurity measures, such as network segmentation, asset inventory management, and robust access control.. Key Moments: 04:14 Connecting IT and OT optimizes processes securely. 09:54 Lost production severely impacts manufacturing revenue recovery. 14:06 Ensure network notifications; control access, separate credentials. 17:10 Engineers need secure access to adjust parameters. 21:55 Endpoint detection on older systems is critical. 28:47 Resilience is crucial in CrowdStrike incident response effectiveness. 32:11 Limited resources for global incident response efforts.= 39:22 Rebuilt domain controller caused authentication issues. 42:37 Focus on resiliency and cloud opportunities, leveraging multi-cloud. 44:59 Improve grid operations using cloud and hyper-converged technology. 48:38 Local cloud provides redundancy for remote sites. 51:15 Critical for acquisition process and problem-solving. About the guest : Paul Shaver has dedicated more than two decades to various roles in Operational Technology (OT), primarily within the oil and gas industry. His expertise spans OT architecture, design, and build, along with run and maintaining responsibilities as an asset owner. Before transitioning into cybersecurity, Paul served as a Technology Director for an oil and gas company in California. Driven by a burgeoning interest in security, he joined Mandiant nearly five years ago. At Mandiant, now part of Google, Paul relishes the mission of enhancing security postures in OT and critical infrastructure, contributing to significant advancements in the field. How to connect Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pbshaver/ Connect With Aaron Crow: Website: www.corvosec.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronccrow Learn more about PrOTect IT All: Email: info@protectitall.co Website: https://protectitall.co/ X: https://twitter.com/protectitall YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PrOTectITAll FaceBook: https://facebook.com/protectitallpodcast To be a guest or suggest a guest/episode, please email us at info@protectitall.coThe podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Aaron Crow, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

EP 46: Hacking Israeli-made Water Treatment Devices In Pennsylvania

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 2, 2024 33:34

Podcast: Error Code (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)Episode: EP 46: Hacking Israeli-made Water Treatment Devices In PennsylvaniaPub date: 2024-09-24Political hacktivism once mainly focused on website defacement. Now it has shifted to targeting physical devices, affecting critical infrastructure such as water treatment plants. At Black Hat USA 2024, Noam Moshe from Claroty highlighted how the HMIs in PLC devices from Israeli manufacturers may be susceptible to political attacks by nation-state actors using unknown vulnerabilities in the PComm protocol.The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Robert Vamosi, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

HMIs Help With the Heavy Lifting: Improving operation & business agility

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2024 8:27

** 3 Consecutive Awards for Best Podcast, 2022 - 2024 APEX Awards of Publication Excellence. In this episode, The Journal's Executive Editor Theresa Houck brings the written word to life by reading the article, “HMI Helps With the Heavy Lifting.” It's written by Susan Burtch, Lead Commercial Portfolio Manager of, Visualization Software at Rockwell Automation. You'll learn how modern human-machine interface software removes barriers to accessing a manufacturing operation's data, and empowers OEMs and end users. Resources from this episode: Read the article online: “HMI Helps With the Heavy Lifting.” To subscribe to our 4 print magazines (Feb., May, July and Oct.), e-mail Anna Hicks at ahicks@endeavorbusinessmedia.com. Subscribe to our 4 digital magazines at http://rok.auto/thejournal-subscribe. Hit the “Share” symbol to share this episode with your colleagues who would benefit from this information. And please give us a 5-star rating and a review. Brought to you by The Journal From Rockwell Automation and Our PartnerNetwork magazine.

EP 46: Hacking Israeli-made Water Treatment Devices In Pennsylvania

Error Code

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2024 33:34

Political hacktivism once mainly focused on website defacement. Now it has shifted to targeting physical devices, affecting critical infrastructure such as water treatment plants. At Black Hat USA 2024, Noam Moshe from Claroty highlighted how the HMIs in PLC devices from Israeli manufacturers may be susceptible to political attacks by nation-state actors using unknown vulnerabilities in the PComm protocol.

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HMIs in hazardous areas

Control Intelligence

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2024 10:09

In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Rick Rice, editor in chief Mike Bacidore discusses how to protect HMIs in hazardous environments.

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Case Study: How a Craft Brewery Switched from Bottles to Cans

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2024 5:39

In this episode, The Journal's Executive Editor Theresa Houck brings the written word to life by reading the case study, “How a Craft Brewery Switched from Bottles to Cans.” It explains how Lakefront Brewery used updated PLCs, drives and HMIs to switch its operation to cans while also improving visibility and production. Resources from this episode: Read the article online: “How a Craft Brewery Switched from Bottles to Cans.” To subscribe to our 4 print magazines (Feb., May, July and Oct.), e-mail Anna Hicks at ahicks@endeavorbusinessmedia.com. Subscribe to our 4 digital magazines at http://rok.auto/thejournal-subscribe. Please give us a 5-star rating and write a review — it helps us, and we very much appreciate it. Brought to you by The Journal From Rockwell Automation and Our PartnerNetwork magazine. Find us on LinkedIn. Find us on Facebook. Find us on X (Twitter). ** 3 Consecutive Best Podcast Awards, 2022-2024 APEX Awards of Publication Excellence.

New Unified Basic Panel HMIs (P198)

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2024 47:37

This week I meet up with Ramey Miller of Siemens to learn all about their new Unified Basic Panel HMIs in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For more information, check out the "Show Notes" located below the video. Watch to the Podcast on The Automation Blog: Listen to the Podcast on The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 198 Show Notes: Special thanks to Ramey Miller of Siemens for coming on the show to bring us up to speed on the Unified Basic Panels. To learn more about theses new HMIs just click on the link below: Siemens Unified Basic Panels Until next time, Peace ✌️ Shawn M TierneyTechnology Enthusiast & Content Creator Have a question? Join my community of automation professionals and take part in the discussion! You'll also find my PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com. If you found this content helpful, consider buying me a coffee here. (22 views)

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Unitronics PLCs, HMIs, VFDs, and Servos (P197)

The Industry 4.0 Podcast with Grantek

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2024 34:12

This week I meet up with Kelby Seyl of Unitronics to learn all about their PLCs, HMIs, VFDs, and Servos in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For more information, check out the "Show Notes" located below the video. Watch to the Podcast on The Automation Blog: Listen to the Podcast on The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 197 Show Notes: Special thanks to The Automation School for making this episode possible! To learn more about their PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses, click on the link below: TheAutomationSchool.com Until next time, Peace ✌️ Shawn M TierneyTechnology Enthusiast & Content Creator Have a question? Join my community of automation professionals and take part in the discussion! You'll also find my PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com. If you found this content helpful, consider buying me a coffee here. (27 views)

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Doug Yerger of Grantek - The Industry 4.0 Podcast with Grantek

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2024 45:10

Doug Yerger is a Principal Engineer at Grantek. Doug's 30-plus years of experience includes the architecting, design, implementation, commissioning, and support of PLC Control Systems, Robotic Applications, Vision Applications, Database Applications, MES Implementations, Warehouse Management Systems, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems, and HMIs. Doug serves as a leader within the organization, providing governance, technical direction, and facilitating knowledge propagation, Doug also helps advance the manufacturing industry through his membership on HMI and SCADA standards committees (ISA 101 and 112 respectively) with the International Society of Automation (ISA). Doug has been driving Grantek's adoption of new design tools, shortening and improving the design cycle. The Industry 4.0 Podcast with Grantek delivers a look into the world of manufacturing, with a focus on stories and trends that lead to better solutions. Our guests will share tips and outcomes that will help improve your productivity. You will hear from leading providers of Industrial Control System hardware and software, Grantek experts and leaders at best-in-class industry associations that serve Life Sciences and Food & Beverage manufactures.

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Pro-face HMIs & IPCs by Schneider Electric (P195)

On the Corner of Homelessness and

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 6, 2024 39:15 Transcription Available

This week I meet back up with Jay Cortel and Tom Reiter of Schneider Electric to learn all about the Pro-face line of HMIs and IPCs in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For more information, check out the "Show Notes" located below the video. Watch to the Podcast on The Automation Blog: Listen to the Podcast on The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 194 Show Notes: Special thanks to Jay Cortel and Tom Reiter of Schneider Electric for coming on the show to talk to us about Pro-face HMIs and IPCs! To learn more, check out the below links: HMI Centric Product overview Software Blue Software Blue Open Studio STC6000 HMI with IO and Control Until next time, Peace ✌️ Shawn M TierneyTechnology Enthusiast & Content Creator Have a question? Join my community of automation professionals and take part in the discussion! You'll also find my PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com. If you found this content helpful, consider buying me a coffee here. (16 views)

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Episode 56

The Water Entrepreneur

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2023 47:20

Shaul Rom Mr. Shaul Rom is the founder & CTO of Reali Technologies and he is the founder & president of Topco Control & Automation. With more than 30 years of track record in Industrial Control, instrumentation, fieldbus technologies, radio and cellular communication, his core expertise areas are Programmable Controllers, HMIs, Industrial IT and SCADA.…More

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Episode 56

The Water Entrepreneur

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2023 47:20

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On the Corner of Homelessness & Data

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 31, 2023 50:19

How do you define success when ending homelessness? What data and trends can we trust? We ask these questions and discuss how Family Promise of Spokane utilizes data in this week's episode about the Data behind ending homelessness. Want to learn more? Here are some resources that you might find helpful while listening to this episode. HMIS or CMIS- Homeless Management Information System COC- Continuum of Care PIT- Point in Time Count Other resources: Statistics of Homelessness in America Coordinated Entry Want to get involved at Family Promise of Spokane? Visit our website at www.familypromiseofspokane.org or follow us on social media.

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Harmony HMIs and iPCs from Schneider Electric (P176)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2023 34:53 Transcription Available

Today my guests are Tom Reiter and Jay Cortel of Schneider Electric and they introduce us to their Harmony Line of HMIs and IPCs in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For more information, check out the "Show Notes" located below the video. Watch the Show on The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast is also available on most Video and Podcasting platforms, and direct links to each can be found here. Listen to the Podcast on The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 176 Show Notes: Special thanks to Tom Reiter and Jay Cortel of Schneider Electric for coming on the show to introduce us to their HMIs and iPCs. For more information, see the below links: HMI Panels, Terminals & Industrial PCs | Schneider Electric HMI Configuration Software | Schneider Electric Industrial PC and display | Schneider Electric EcoStruxure™ Operator Terminal Expert | Schneider Electric EcoStruxure™ Machine SCADA Expert | Schneider Electric Vendors: Would you like your product featured on the Podcast, Show or Blog? If you would, please contact me at: https://theautomationblog.com/contact Until next time, Peace ✌️ Shawn M TierneyTechnology Enthusiast & Content Creator Have a question? Join my community of automation professionals and take part in the discussion! You'll also find my PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com. If you found this content helpful, consider buying me a coffee here. (113 views)

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HMIS 44: Children of the Corn w/ Emily Cornelius

The Legacy Series Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 3, 2023 90:38

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, Children of the Corn with guest Emily Cornelius. Together they discuss; corn, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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Embracing Change and Building Success: The Enriching Journey of Chris Mullens at SCI

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2023 39:12 Transcription Available

What if you found out that a short business would turn into a year-long, career-defining journey? That's exactly what happened to our guest, Chris Mullens, an area manager with Service Corporation International overseeing Lakeside Memorial Park, Riverside Gordon Minora Gardens, and Riverside Gordon Kendall in the South Florida area. Chris pulls us into his world, sharing his path at SCI; from handling corporate reconciliations to leading a pivotal project integrating HMIS and going Check-Free. It's a captivating tale of change, growth, and seizing unexpected opportunities.We delve into Chris' transition from consultant to SCI employee, a journey marked by challenges and triumphs. His experiences in building high-performing teams, fostering partnerships, and nurturing relationships serve as crucial lessons. He also shines a light on the technological revolution of the early 2000s and its impact, underlining the value of field involvement in decision-making. It's a dynamic discussion that stitches together the puzzle pieces of team-building, collaboration, and technology.But this isn't all about work. Chris reveals candid insights into his personal life, his influences, and his vision for his legacy at SCI. He opens up about the profound impact his parents had on his life and his journey as a father. As he paints a picture of his life outside of work, you'll hear his palpable enthusiasm echo throughout the conversation, a testament to his unwavering commitment to a positive work environment. So, get ready to be inspired, to laugh, and to learn from a man who's truly embraced change and transformed opportunities into stepping stones for success.

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HMIS 43: The Babadook w/ Rebeca Trejo

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2023 73:19

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of The Babadook with guest Rebeca Trejo. Together they discuss; motherhood, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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HMIS 42: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre w/ Matthew Mariner

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 5, 2023 81:23

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with guest Matthew Mariner. Together they discuss; cryptozoology, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

HMIS 41: The Amityville Horror w/ Mo Alexander

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 15, 2023 52:39

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, The Amityville Horror with guest Mo Alexander. Together they discuss; houses need to come with a ghost clause, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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HMIS 40: May w/ Gab Latona

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2023 88:55

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, May with guest Gab Latona. Together they discuss; bad taxidermy, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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HMIS 39: Session 9 w/ Derek Sheen

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2023 96:08

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, Session 9 with guest Derek Sheen. Together they discuss; burnt ziti, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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What's Coming Up in The Journal: August 2023

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2023 2:42

** 2 Consecutive Awards of Excellence Winner for Best Podcast, 2022 & 2023 APEX Awards of Publication Excellence. In this brief episode, Executive Editor Theresa Houck tells you what topics we're covering in the next issue of The Journal From Rockwell Automation and Our PartnerNetwork magazine — our August digital magazine that launches August 25. Learn about upcoming stories on how to evaluate motor & drive energy efficiency, how high-performance HMIs can improve process control, plus a Q&A about the skilled worker shortage. And as always, get your family-friendly, silly Joke of the Day. If you like “Automation Chat,” please leave us a 5-star rating, and follow/subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Resources from this episode: The Journal From Rockwell Automation and Our PartnerNetwork magazine online. To subscribe to our 4 print magazines (Jan., Apr., July and Oct.), e-mail Anna Hicks at ahicks@endeavorbusinessmedia.com. Subscribe to our 8 digital magazines at http://rok.auto/thejournal-subscribe.

HMIS 38: The Lost Boys w/ Krista Michaels

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2023 83:42

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, The Lost Boys with guest Krista Michaels. Together they discuss; aliens, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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HMIS 37: Se7en w/ Joshua Emerson

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2023 115:31

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, Se7en with guest Joshua Emerson. Together they discuss; the 7 deadly sins, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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What's Coming Up in The Journal: July 2023

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2023 3:01

In this brief episode, Executive Editor Theresa Houck tells you what topics we're covering in the next issue of The Journal From Rockwell Automation and Our PartnerNetwork magazine — our July print magazine that mails July 20. Learn about stories on motor & drive efficiency, high-performance HMIs, strategies to deal with the skilled worker shortage, weighing-status indicators that help achieve high precision, and more. And as usual, get your family-friendly, silly Joke of the Day. If you like “Automation Chat,” please leave us a 5-star rating, and follow us so you don't miss an episode. Additional resources: The Journal From Rockwell Automation and Our PartnerNetwork Magazine Online. To subscribe to our 4 print magazines (Jan., Apr., July and Oct.), e-mail Anna Hicks at ahicks@endeavorbusinessmedia.com. Subscribe to our 8 digital magazines at http://rok.auto/thejournal-subscribe. Award of Excellence Winner for Best Podcast, 2022 APEX Awards of Publication Excellence.

HMIS 36: Event Horizon w/ Lucy & Anne

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2023 84:21

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, Event Horizon with guests Lucy Dixon and Anne Robertson. Together they discuss; black holes, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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HMIS 35: Hush w/ Sumukh Torgalkar

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2023 89:42

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, Hush with guest Sumukh Torgalkar. Together they discuss; masks, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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HMIS 34: The Thing w/ Jen Riley

Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2023 86:10

In this week's episode, Katie dives into the plot of, The Thing with guest Jen Riley. Together they discuss; movies coming out at the wrong time, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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HMIS 33: Z w/ Matt Orrin

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2023 94:24

In this weeks episode Katie dives into the plot of, Z with guest Matt Orrin. Together they discuss; different types of horror movie watchers, personal fears, what makes something scary, and why we love it. Remember to like, rate, review, and share with a friend! If you would like to support the podcast donate on Venmo @Katie-Bowman Instagram: @katiebowmancomic Twitter: @katiebowmansays Facebook Website: katiebowman.rocks

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HMIS 32: Ready or Not w/ Georgia Comstock