Regional PI Associations (RPAs) from around the world gathered for their annual meeting in Sydney Australia and stayed to support PI Australia’s PROFIBUS & PROFINET Global Forum and Automation Innovation Summit.
Many new products to announce this month including I/O from Acromag, an IO-Link master from Comtrol, a switch from Helmholz, a weighing terminal from Mettler Toledo (shown), easy safety from Phoenix Contact, and three new products from Siemens.
Because the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) leverages so many existing technologies, it seems that everybody and their mother can claim to have the necessary expertise. But let’s not forget that IIoT roots are firmly planted within industrial Ethernet.
An automation evolution exploration from industry veteran Carl Henning.
I’ve been around PROFIBUS and then PROFINET for a couple decades now and I have to admit that I’m still excited by these technologies. It’s been fun to watch them mature and grow. I’ve been doing automation for decades before that so I’ve seen the long arc of automation’s evolutionary growth. Our evolutionary position is currently the Industrial Internet of Things. And it is an evolution I believe.
Being in the business of moving data with PROFINET, references to the data-driven factory appeal to PI. Appealing as that is, it’s an incomplete story. Like a word-driven blog post. Random words collected do not a blog post make. Random data collected does not a factory drive. Data is the raw material.
How can you tell an engineer has social skills? When he’s talking to you, he’s looking at your shoes. Actually, he’s probably messaging you on his smartphone, even if he’s sitting beside you.
The electronically-social engineer has many non-face-to-face options for communications. Here are some suggested sites for the electronically-social engineer.
Lunch for 1,263 please. In 2015, PI North America fed 1,263 students lunch at the 17 PROFINET one-day training classes. A similar crowd is expected in 2016. Industrie 4.0, Internet of Things, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are everywhere now, including these PROFINET classes.
Additional classes and events include the fee-based PROFIsafe Designer Training coming in March. Become a “Certified PROFIsafe Designer” by passing the tests there.
PI’s strength has always been to provide more than technology. We provide a community. A community of experts, vendors, and even users are tightly integrated in our worldwide network. So it is no surprise that PI announced major cooperations at this year’s SPS/IPC/Drives Press conference.
