Member News – February 2018

  • Post category:MEMBER NEWS
  • Reading time:5 mins read

New Partnership for Monitoring and Control

Acromag announced today a strategic partnership with Ctek, Inc. to offer complete monitoring and control solutions for customers to manage their remote assets.

“With this joint solution from Acromag and Ctek, customers can reliably monitor and control remote automation equipment without the hassles of PLC programming or IT networking issues,” stated Robert Greenfield, Acromag’s Business Development Manager.

“Now system developers can confidently pair Acromag I/O and Ctek controllers to rapidly implement SCADA solutions with cloud-based reporting that are affordably scalable for small and large sites,” observed Bob Way, Ctek’s Business Development Manager.

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New Ways to Interconnect the PROFI-World

Automation engineers frequently need to bridge the gap between different protocols and networks used in a plant, but they also need to enable communication between equipment within the same network family.  For example, in the PROFINET and PROFIBUS-world, there are many devices and sub-systems that cannot necessarily communicate with each other. It may be necessary to connect different physical formats such as copper and fiber optics or couple/de-couple I/O data between two controlling networks. With their recently upgraded Anybus X-gateways, HMS Industrial Networks can offer ways to get heterogeneous PROFI-equipment connected.

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Still Coming to Terms with PROFINET – and TSN Now Just Around the Corner

The topic of Industry 4.0 poses new challenges for data communication: Low transmission times, high availability, real-time, reliability and ultimately an open, vendor-independent platform. The currently used, Ethernet-based transmission protocols are very close to meeting these demands but they still have a lot of catching up to do in terms of bandwidth and latency. In contrast, the demand for an open and independent communication platform seems insoluble. Time-sensitive networking (TSN) could well be the key to satisfying the needs of the industry without having to throw the tried & tested overboard. The following is to be expected: The more intelligent the network itself becomes, the more programmable logic controllers (PLC) will lose their central role in the network.

Against this background, the network experts from Indu-Sol see their future business eld as OT network operators (OT – Operational Technology / Production Level). Their conclusion is that powerful infrastructure components such as switches will not only take over the distribution but also tasks such as data storage, control and monitoring and thus become the central component in the network.

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The Future is Smart

Responding to the rallying call of Industry 4.0, Piab is introducing piSMART™ – more intelligent and cloud-connected versions of the company’s most advanced vacuum technology products, kitted out for the smart factories of the future.

Aimed at maximising productivity and energy-efficiency, the new piSMART products will employ a user-friendly piSMART app for mobile phones and other handheld devices to gather data such as cycle time, energy consumption and more, getting them ready for Industry 4.0 factories, where all processes and components are automatically and digitally guided, controlled and verified.

piCOMPACT, Piab’s premium all-in-one vacuum ejector series, is the first of the company’s products to be kitted out for this industrial revolution. Available with the generic and fieldbus-independent input/output technology IO-Link, piCOMPACT offers sensor data output and actuator communication for real-time distributed control systems, enabling on-board intelligence with self-optimising features.

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New Office Opened in Manchester, United Kingdom

PROCENTEC, knowledge partner in the field of PROFIBUS, PROFINET and Industrial Ethernet technology, is pleased to announce the official opening of its new office in Manchester, United Kingdom. The new office enables PROCENTEC to provide even better services to its British customers.

The opening of this brand new UK office is a natural follow-up for PROCENTEC. By now serving the market itself, PROCENTEC is able to give its name more shape in the British market for PROFIBUS, PROFINET and Industrial Ethernet. PROCENTEC will build further on the successful cooperation with its UK distributors, which it has been doing for years and will continue doing so. PROCENTEC wants to thank them for their support. PROCENTEC’s new Sales Engineer for the UK, Jonathan Machin, will manage the UK office and actively promote PROCENTEC in the UK market. The PROCENTEC UK office will be operational from the 1st of February.