Voices: Rick Rice
Rick Rice is a controls engineer at Crest Foods, a dry-foods manufacturing and packaging company in Ashton, Illinois. With nearly 30 years’ experience in the field of automation, Rice has designed and programmed everything from automotive assembly, robots, palletizing and depalletizing equipment, conveyors and forming machines for the plastics industry but most of his career has focused on OEM in the packaging machinery industry with a focus on R&D for custom applications.
To PLC or not PLC? That is the question
The programmable logic controller fights back and continues to go the distance
The general trend over the past 5-10 years points at an emerging preference of programming languages over traditional ladder logic for machine control. While there have always been those who spout the benefits of structured text (ST) over ladder logic (LAD), the waters are further muddied by what I would call a merging of PC-based programming with automation programming.
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Feb 28, 2018The next big thing could be right in front of your noseSo long, Remote I/O, and thanks for all the connections
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May 11, 2017Forget about assigned local and remote addresses; in the future, software will help to define types of I/O pointsHow do you solve a problem like cybersecurity?
Mar 17, 2017In data collection’s new frontier, is air gap passé?See what’s new with photoelectric sensors
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Mar 10, 2015Food-company engineer understands the value of knowledge capture and modular design.