It’s easy to find the trends that rock our industry and our society to be ever amusing.  Fast food chains scramble to offer healthy options with lower calories and small portions while consumers are ordering more double, triple, quadruple, super-mega sized meals than ever.  In our industry big players are scrambling to create lower function, lower cost offerings while the world is demanding more function, data and control in all applications and processes.  Health conscience zealots and marketers touting Asian penetration take this advice; Less is not the new more.  

Apples and oranges are somewhat interchangeable. Apples and fries are not.  It’s a great idea on paper and in the focus group but not reality.   The big companies in our own industry seem to be chasing similar well intended ideas.  They are creating low level PLC’s and devices to meet the price points needed to penetrate India and Asia.  Yet we have factories moving back to America for first time because of increased technology has made it competitive.  How big of a window are you going to have to sell underpowered devices into systems that won’t be competitive on deployment in a world market?  The future will not be bringing a lot of opportunity for systems or devices that that do less.   Efficiency comes with a cost but in most cases it is easily justified over the decades of service many applications see.

The future is bright for those that can add additional features and functions in products while not turning them into clunky, inefficient, almost unusably complex paperweights.       

We are embracing that future and will be introducing upgrades to our entire line of gateway in 2012.  Aztec calendar and 2012 apocalyptic texts be damned we are ready to hit the ground running.

Starting in early 2012 Real Time Automation will be releasing upgrades across our entire line of gateways and will be releasing over 50 new versions.  Profinet server, Profibus slave, CC-Link, Lonworks and BACnet MS/TP master protocols will all be added to the 460 line of gateways. 

We have taken extreme care to make sure that the simplicity of our gateway products remains while adding features.  With additions like security, alarming, improved data limits and streamlined configuration screens we are confident we have made our simple gateways even better.  We hope you will agree.

For many of us primarily working in the Industrial Automation market summer is typically a rather slow time.  Big companies go to summer hours, all the lead engineers take extended vacations and developing projects continue to see deadlines pushed closer to fall.   It has become a business cycle to set your watch to.  This is however not the case in the building Automation market.

In fact quite the opposite is true.  Summer is the time for BACnet/IP.  This produces some interesting new opportunities for many integrators and device manufactures.  BACnet/IP it seems has officially emerged as the leading building automation protocol.  The leading suppliers are supporting the standard and state governments have made it their de facto standard.   It is that government involvement that has made summer the time for BACnet.

More than a dozen states across the country have made BACnet the standard protocol of their state buildings.  In many states the largest facilities are universities and what better time to upgrade a system then when it is relatively empty over summer break? 

This means that every summer integrators at hundreds of universities around the country are busily adding BACnet communication to pumps, power meters, HVAC,   temperature sensors, generators and every other device imaginable to control huge facilities spread over countless blocks.  This is huge opportunity for many integrators abut also leads to many challenges not seen in the application many of us are used to.    

In the industrial automation market the plant floor network is inherently a relatively safe network.  It is typically separate from the front office and has a pretty small geographic footprint.  This is not at all the case on campus networks.  In most applications monitoring devices are placed directly on the very public campus network spread over dozens of buildings and departments.  This makes security a much larger issue.  If you are installing a backup generator with browser based configuration you better enable any and all security features or risk having the next Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder) messing with it. 

You also have to consider additional variables in the network.  Why is it that every day at 3pm you lose communication with your devices?  Could it be Mr. Johnsons lecture on the geopolitical tendencies of nomadic apple pickers has sent the entire class to venture to Youtube for relief bogging down the network?  

New opportunities always come with new challenges.  If you are ready to tackle some BACnet integration jobs give us a call.  We have simple solutions and ample experience to assist.   

Scott and Drew of Real Time Automation set out on a week long road trip from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Orlando, Florida for the 2011 CSIA Executive Conference.  They are on a journey to see past and present customers using Real Time Automation gateways, explore Americana East of the Mississippi, and will try not to get into any trouble.

One Rental Car, Seven Days, One Engineer, One Marketer, all broadcast live via twitter, our blog and Facebook.

This will be a true road trip adventure for the ages.  Think Thelma and Louise without the crime, Louis and Clark without Pocahontas, Harold and Lloyd without the moped or bad haircuts, the National Lampoons without Chevy Chase, Easy Rider without the Motor Cycles, or Cheech and Chong without the dope.  I guess that leaves us with Drew and Scott stuck in a car for 7 days… 

This is Why We Need You

To make this anything more than just a test of patiences and a social experiment on long term coworker exposure we need your help.  If you reside east of the Mississippi and have used our products we want to stop by and get a picture of us with you, your business and our gateway in action on the front lines of your application.  If you want help getting a unit up and running we want to stop by to assist you and share your application.  If you just have a great roadside attraction for Scott and Drew we want to hear from you.  

Just post below to get your stop on the Great Eastern RTA road trip of 2011.

What’s in it for you?  As if seeing Scott’s boyish good looks in person is not enough…

Anyone who gives us an invitation or suggestion will receive the official “I got connected with Scott and Drew in 2011 and all I got was this crappy bumper sticker” bumper sticker, a full assortment of useless but fun RTA giveaways, and a USB rocket launcher (my personal favorite).  Also you and your company (link) will be included in all of the road trip event literature and web pages.  This will be included in our literature to all CSIA Executive conference attendees. 

The Logistics

Scott and Drew are leaving Milwaukee, WI at 5am on April 25^th and need to be in Orlando by Thursday April 28^th by noon.  They then have from 8pm Thursday till Sunday to make it back to Milwaukee.  All visits must be between April 25^th and the 28^th or the 29^th to May 1^st.   No location, no matter how obscure or out of the way, will be ignored if it is at all possible to get to within the time frame. 

Help us create a road trip for the ages and send your suggestion for the Gateway Connection tour 2011 now. 

Many of our customers have used and fallen in love with the simplicity of our 435NBA, 435NBS and 435NBP.  For 2011 we have made a few improvements that we hope will make the product even better.

First there is now one part number that supports communication will to all Allen-Bradley PLC’s, it will be the 435NBX.

Secondly and probably most importantly you can now save the configuration of your unit for back up or use during multiple unit installs. 

Thirdly we have improved the diagnostics of the device.  This should make installation even easier and greatly reduce the time spent trouble shooting. 

Finally we have added support for connected messaging to the gateway.

We hope you enjoy the improvements.

Happy New Year!

This fall we are launching BACnet MS/TP into our gateway line of products.  If you are interest in being a beta give us call.  New gateway versions will be  release throughout the quarter. 

UPDATE:

For those users who have our 435NBA Serial – EtherNet/IP gateways

We now have a way to send and or receive up to 400 bytes of string data in Control Compact and Flex Logix PLCS (any tag based PLC). Here’s how.

In  RSLogix 5000, under Data Types, Strings. Create a new string type. Give it a name.  Choose Maximum Characters in it to be to 400 bytes or less. Create a Controller tag. Under data type select the tag you created in above. You may use the tag you created for both incoming and outgoing data.

PLC Tag Set Up

Be sure to make the Buffer Transmit Length the same or less than what you created in the plc.

Happy Networking

We started sending out Saf-T-Pops with orders earlier this year. We did it as small token of our appreciation for the customers and in the hope that it would bring a few smiles in this turbulent year. At least that is how marketing justified it. Word to the wise, this is what happens when you send someone from the marketing department to make a bank deposit. They said they all had fond memories of getting suckers through the overhead suction delivery system at the banks drive through.  While we couldn’t recreate the suction tube system or the drive through we could get and deliver the “Paydirt” a.k.a Saf-T-Pops.

The response has been very positive, who would have thought engineers like suckers almost as much as kids.  We started with a small trial sending out roughly 25lbs of suckers a month.  With the success and positive response we received we have extended the program to all orders.  Fun for our customers and fun for us.  Today we got the full load of 189lbs of Saf-T-Pops to bag up and place in the boxes of all orders over the next few months.

I don’t know what it is but a pile of candy that big is enough to bring a smile to anyone’s face.  It certainly worked for Jessica (below).  We will see if she feels the same way after bagging up the remainder of the 7500+ suckers.  Don’t think this job comes without perks…  Jessica gets to eat all broken or malformed suckers. Of roughly 1000 packed so far she has already found 12 Saf-T-Pops for her candy stash.

May our suckers bring you as many smiles as they bring us.

On July 8th, Real Time Automation attended our third annual company Brewers game. In true Wisconsin tradition, the company tailgated and competed in a very competitive Bags tournament. While our own tournament got pretty heated, we left the real competition to the ball players. The Brewers took on the Cardinals and literally kept us on the edge of our seats with this nail biter. Keeping the game tied for four innings, the Brewers finally broke the tie in the last inning and ended the game with a final score of 5-4.

On May 8, 2009, Real Time Automation unveiled its brand new “Industrial Networking University.” The courses will offer you an easy-to-follow introduction of different industrial protocols. Each course contains two tests which will be scored at the end. The courses below are all free and you are welcome to take as many courses as you wish.

Hopefully by the time you complete each of the available courses, you will have a better grasp on the concepts and charactersistics of the Industrial Protocols. We hope everyone takes advantage of this newbie-friendly overview, and please feel free to contact us with your questions and comments.