Sorry to be a little slow on the blogging front. I'm on a California trip this week. Meant up at 3:30 am to catch a 6:15 flight Monday morning. Dinner Monday night and meetings Tuesday morning followed by a flight from San Diego to San Francisco. Meetings in Silicon Valley area yesterday morning followed by drive to Sacramento and another meeting. Great dinner at Carpe Vino (seize the wine?) in Auburn last night. Meetings in Sacramento this morning then drive back to Fremont to catch another meeting and dinner. Home Friday.
Here's a short recap. We had meetings, dinner and more meetings with Opto 22 Monday and Tuesday. Recorded some video interviews on Tuesday that we hope to have up on the Automation World Website shortly. (at least some, I think we recorded about 2 hours) The discussion centered on the addition of WiFi to the Opto SnapPac product line. I wrote a little about it on Automation Gear. I've had 11 years of indepth technical discussions with Opto, and the message has been consistently the use of industry accepted standards for as many technologies as possible. So, the curent Ethernet ports on the PAC and I/O is the same with no modifications as on, for example, your laptop. So is the new WiFi--which will be standard from June on, and is a completely independent channel on the product meaning you can address (IP) the two wired and one wireless port independently. Opto uses IP for messaging. At the application layers of the famous 7-layer stack, you can use what you want. Opto itself supports Modbus TCP and EtherNet/IP in addition to its historic Opto protocol. But also SNMP, SMTP, FTP and the like.
Had a refresher course on Apprion's products yesterday. It is a wireless solution provider. I knew about the way it can enable all sorts of wireless applications from sensor networks to voip to video, but I never realized how cool its software for network management is. Wireless is still building toward critical mass, but I think solutions are becoming stable and accepted.
We left Apprion and met with Idec. I knew that company from my time before becoming an editor. Push buttons, pilot lights, relays--bunch of stuff. Appearing in our May issue as the lead product for safety is a new safety relay combination. Something between just one safety relay in a circuit and a full blown safety controller. I've never had a contact I knew well there, so now that I do and have access to application engineers, AW should have some interesting stories about a variety of applications.
Next stop was Galil and talk about motion control. Actually, more than motion, but also logic. The company is now advertising a "Pocket PLC" -- picture is a PLC in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. I had sort of forgotten the history of the general motion control market--how it was so fragmented with many players. The market has been consolidating over the past few years--yet the technology has been gaining power and flexibility. So Galil noticed among its customers requests for a few more I/O points to tie into a distributed motion control architecture. Therefore, an integrated product with 8 each analog and 16 each digital I/O, a ladder programming editor to go along with the motion control/drive package. Once again, I now have access to application engineers so that I can gather some interesting stories about creative use of motion/logic to solve machine builders' problems.
Today, I'm going to talk software at Inductive Automation and then dive back into motor control at Fuji Electric. More later.
9:57:44 AM 
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