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Thursday, August 3, 2006 |
Still at PTO in Phoenix. Profibus / Profinet / Profisafe all support wireless. In fact there exist wireless implementations. Therefore, Harry Forbes, the ARC Advisory Group networking guru, was invited to speak both on Ethernet and wireless. I didn't blog the Ethernet presentation because it became a frank give and take session and I need to maintain some credibility (that comment is for all of you who are afraid to talk to me for fear of winding up on this blog--actually that could be a quick claim to fame :-) ).
On the wireless side, Harry thinks that wirless location management (both for things and people) will become big. Wireless is a morass of standards and technologies, and the opportunity for obfuscation and misinformation is there. Harry tried in a short period of time to sort things out. I'm working on an article on wireless for the November issue of Automation World, so perhaps I can try to make some sense of the situation in a way that helps educate the industry and expand on his remarks.
Just to show that wireless is real, Richard Theron and Barb Brunswick of ProSoft Technology presented a Profibus wireless application of a water project in Shanghai (using ProSoft radios, of course).
6:06:08 PM 
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Carl Henning and I finally got a few minutest to chat after lunch at the PTO meeting today. He mentioned that NEC also sells Profinet chips. Hilscher also has a cool chip I wrote about in the March issue of Automation World. There are more coming (I had an introduction, but it's not quite out yet, watch for October news).
It should be noted that Profinet will work without a custom ASIC. My first reaction that adding a custom ASIC must be more expensive. However when you add a networking stack and custom engineering to a commercial Ethernet chip, the cost differential narrows. The Hilscher chip would allow developers to use one chip to connect to both Profinet and EtherNet/IP (and others) that has the potential to reduce the cost of networking for them.
Surely the highlights of the presentations were user application stories. Jim Tomlinson of the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino of Las Vegas detailed the extensive use of Profibus/Profinet in the automation of the Cirque du Soleil show "KA." For all you geeks out there, watch the motion of the platforms and people and winches and so on. There are 32 PLCs, 186 drives, 206 coordinated axes of motion and 240 Profibus devices. Showing video clips of the show is a good way to hold an audience's attention, too. Later, Michael Darnell of Prism Systems, a systems integrator and engineering firm, showed how Profinet was key to a successful cigar manufacturing system.
Right now, Wolfgang Stripf is discussing ProfiSafe. This bus is not only approved, but there are products in applications. As I pointed out yesterday, there are about 190,000 ProfiSafe devices in the field. Safety networking is not only a hot topic, it's possible to implement one today.
4:56:16 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Gary Mintchell.
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