Wednesday, May 25, 2005

SPS Electric Automation I'm having trouble finding Ethernet connections this week. So, I'm sitting at a Starbucks at Higgins and River Road in Rosemont, IL just down from the Rosemont Convention Center site of the inaugural North American edition of the SPS Electric Automation conference and trade show. It's a small show, but nicely laid out. Support from European (mainly German) suppliers is great. Siemens Energy & Automation, Bosch Rexroth, Beckhoff and B&R Automation have major displays. Unfortunately, there are no visitors to see them. I saw maybe 10 visitors who were interested in the products. The other yellow badges were on people with other agendas. Siemens did invite many customers who came for the Siemens training part of the conference, but few wandered the hall. Automation World columnist Jim Pinto gave the opening keynote in his usual challenging style trying to motivate those there to realize the challenges facing manufacturing in the United States and do something positive to overcome them. Jane Gerold and I were honored with a personal tour of the Siemens booth with S E&A CEO Aubert Martin. Martin showed us all the displays, professionally and thoroughly explaining each and calling each person at the display by name. I wonder how many other industry CEOs of such broad companies could do the same. He is certainly a sharp executive and has Siemens moving in positive directions in the US. The company will bear watching. Those companies now fighting for number two in the US market behind Rockwell had best watch over their shoulders. In fact, Rockwell best not become too complacent as well. OK, I expect the comments. Go ahead and hit me. 9:14:17 AM    comment []

Proximity Sensors I remember some product training from about 13 years ago on terminal blocks. The product manager starts out something like, "What can I say, terminal blocks are my life." Yeah, we all groaned, too. I had that flashback Monday when several people from Turck visited the Automation World offices. This product manager tells us that proximity sensors can be exciting. Proximity sensors work on the principle that when a copper coil wrapped around an iron core is energized a magnetic field is created. Introduce a switch circuit in the sensor such that when a metallic object breeches the field, the switch changes state. In other words, proxes are a non-contact sensor much used in conveying and machining operations. So what's exciting? Turck has introduced a new proximity technolgy. They didn't go very deep into the electronics, but forget the coil and iron core stuff. It's almost like little antennas operating at a higher frequency than that of a typical prox. That eliminates much of the outside electromagnetic interference that plaques some proxes and enables more elaborate feedback circuitry to control the field. The result is a greatly enhanced sensor. So it is exciting, at least for us manufacturing geeks. Read about it here. 8:58:17 AM    comment []