Most Recent

• A better interface

  By Dave Perkon, technical editor

  An office worker is likely to have a mobile device somewhere—on the desk, in hand, in the pocket or clipped to the hip. The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend is maturing, and workers are using smart phones for both personal and business purposes. It was inevitable in the industrial…

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• What has one arm and can see?

  By Jonathan Wilkins, EU Automation

  Remember the gold or blue dress debate? The human eye is undoubtedly impressive, but it has some limitations. Luckily, machine vision is rapidly taking responsibility for inspection, validation and motion control processes.Robots bring the most value to dull, repetitive and mundane tasks.

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• Step up the technology in machine control

  By Dave Perkon, technical editor

  Those who’ve been in automation industries for years have certain ways they like to design and program machines. They have baseline schematics or system architectures they always start with—they have always done machine control that way.The fruit of those in automation doesn't fall far from the…

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• New approaches come in unexpected visits

  By Rick Rice, contributing editor

  The challenge in any design is to incorporate all the features that your customer desires without making a whole new design each time. Previously, I’ve discussed ways we can modularize our designs to leverage the experience we gained in previous projects. While this approach is good, sometimes it…

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• How do I replace an obsolete controller?

  By Mike Bacidore, editor in chief

  A Control Design reader writes: Our plant had standardized on Siemens (Moore) 353 and the Procidia i|pac (353R) process automation controllers. The controllers have been retired and are no longer available for purchase, so I need something to replace them.We were using them for boiler control,…

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• Back in the '90s, there was this SFC

  By Jeremy Pollard, CET

  My first interface with sequential function chart (SFC) programming was with a mining application whereby the developers of a new diamond core drill were using an Allen Bradley (A-B) PLC with SFC. This was in the 1990s, folks.The code was written by a representative of a distributor for A-B, and I…

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