Not All I/O Is Created Equal!
Episode 23 of the Myths, Facts and Lies of Smart Manufacturing (Digitalization, Industry 4.0) discusses the seldom-told truth of factory floor IO: “Not All I/O Is Created Equal!”.
Factory floor I/O has made incredible strides in the last ten years. Older I/O systems were simply nothing more than relay contacts. Today, we have I/O devices with sophisticated embedded controllers that can do all sorts of signal manipulation. It can automatically apply dead band checks, do signal analysis and automatically signal faults.
While those capabilities are marvelous and a tribute to the design teams that created them, it can be hard to maintain those kinds of smart devices. How does a maintenance team backup those settings, transfer them to other devices and do device replacement on failure? It’s a problem worth considering before adopting these kinds of devices.
The other problem today that is often overlooked is how to incorporate I/O devices that can connect to higher-level systems. Many I/O blocks now support HTTPS, MQTT, OPC UA and other high-level, standardized protocols used for Enterprise and Cloud communications. Several questions are worth pondering when thinking about direct communication from an I/O device to an Enterprise or Cloud application.
One question is, of course, cybersecurity. How secure is the I/O device? If it has a connection outside of your manufacturing system, someone will try to hack it. Unfortunately, these hackers are a pretty sophisticated lot and often, more sophisticated than the device designers. An overlooked part of this question is how to manage hundreds (or thousands) of devices with some cybersecurity software. If the vendor has an update, how will you know the location of every one of those devices? Who and how many people do you need to track all that and run around updating all those devices. More importantly, will all those systems, work identically with the new update as they did when the machine was initially certified for quality operation? It’s an important question that should make manufacturers up at night.
A second question concerns the data generated by these devices. Binary data, True and False, isn’t a problem. On and off are also pretty clear. But digital data has lots of different data types, formats and units. The last thing a manufacturer needs is a digital garbage dump with data from lots of devices that have generated data in incompatible formats.
Capturing I/O data on a machine is no longer simple. There is a lot to think about and questions that need to be answered. There’s a lot more to picking I/O devices than how many points and how much it costs. All I/O is not created equal and that’s a truth of Smart Manufacturing.
领英推荐
John Rinaldi
John Rinaldi is Chief Strategist and Director of WOW! for Real Time Automation (RTA) in Pewaukee WI. He is a nationally respected author and expert on manufacturing automation with over 30 years of experience. At RTA, he architected RTConnect?, a software platform for moving data from controllers, networks and machines over open standard IT communication systems. John is not only a recognized expert in industrial networks and an automation strategist but a speaker, blogger, the author of more than 500 articles on industrial networking and six books including Industrial Ethernet,? OPC UA: The Basics, Modbus,? OPC UA - The Everyman's Guide and ETHERNET/IP.
John Rinaldi
Real Time Automation
?
Professional Profile - "be willing to teach others"
5 个月Not to mention how quickly IO devices today change with smaller and smaller footprints and higher densities. What is today's latest and greatest IO device is obsolete in just a few years.
Executive Advisor
5 个月John, as my buddy Bob Kollmeyer taught me, it’s all about the application. Brand centric solutions don’t always provide the best ROI and solve the specific application. I made a pretty good living picking up the crumbs left over from Rockwell and Siemens. I also experienced the early days of Beckhoff as a rep, to quote them “they want it all “. Sometimes a simple solution is the most elegant. Folks can always come to you for low cost gateway solutions as well as my former principle Turck.