Certified Engineers and Installers meet a global standard of excellence and are listed on the PI website. Learn more about certification classes and become acquainted with the other types of training offered. A live webinar is scheduled for August 30, “Introduction to PROFINET.” In North America the 22nd annual member meeting is scheduled.
This month, read up on PROFINET Road Shows occurring in Brazil, Technology Awareness Seminars taking place across South East Asia, and PROFIBUS Troubleshooting and Maintenance classes being taught in the Middle East. Is there an event in your area that might be worth attending?
Plugfests are in the news with a recent PROFINET plugfest in Germany and an upcoming PROFINET plugfest in the US. IO-Link has a similar event scheduled for October.
Recent events included an international meeting of PI Competence Centers (PICC), PI Training Centers (PITCs) and PI Test Labs (PITLs) plus an IO-Link member meeting.
There are still hundreds of training and events scheduled for 2016.
New products this month include signal conditioners from Acromag, valves from AUMA, segment couplers from Pepperl+Fuchs, Ethernet switches from Phoenix Contact, rotary encoders from POSITAL, and rail-application controllers from Siemens.
The Hannover Fair is the largest industrial trade show. Each year a partner country is featured with this year’s partner being the USA. Not surprisingly, attendance from the USA reached an all-time high at 5,000 out of the 190,000 attendees. PI had its own booth on the red carpet tour route.
The annual determination of the installed base of PI technologies show a significant growth in market acceptance. The numbers for PROFINET and PROFIsafe are particularly strong. IO-Link is also exhibiting a strongly accelerated growth.
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is expected to be the next big advancement in standard Ethernet. This set of standards will allow deterministic performance as part of IEEE-standard Ethernet. Some of the standards will not be finalized for quite some time, but PI has begun a Working Group to determine how best to leverage TSN in PROFINET. Note that PROFINET already provides deterministic, high-speed performance, but as TSN starts to appear as part of the Ethernet infrastructure, PROFINET will use it. Initial results from the working group are expected in November.
If you do nothing else, read this! Can’t make it to one of the hundreds of PROFIBUS or PROFINET training events going on around the world? Need a point of reference at the tip of your fingers? Many new documents are available, some with important updates.
