Thanksgiving moment...

Happy Thanksgiving ... the Internet of Islands..

No Man Is An Island

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

.....

...

John Donne

On US thanksgiving this year, I give thanks for the men and women who make up the Foxboro SCADA virtual team[s].  Located in many far flung cities, and more as an International group of friends/colleagues with a common purpose to support the Foxboro SCADA brand.  This year there are many long term colleagues as well as some new faces.  Without facebook and linkedIn or even our Invensys iShare portal it can be a struggle to put a face to a name or a voice to a name and a face on those late night conference calls.

Foxboro SCADA have an excellent distributed team with a positive helpful outlook.  Each member of the immediate product support team is located in many cities from many different countries.  Let me list them here.... but in particular - a special thanks to Patrizia and Simon, Joe and Fred, Shahid and Lu who really have put in an amazing effort daily.

USA, UK, ITALY, INDIA, CHINA, AUSTRALIA

For those of you who celebrate thanksgiving, have a great and happy holiday with your friends.  For those of you who don't you can breathe easy for a few days until the full distributed virtual team is back on deck.

Thankyou and bless all of our customers and our regional delivery and sales teams for your support and encouragement throughout the last year.

Chris Smith
Sydney Australia

PS: We don't get the holiday here in Australia [although it did make it to Norfolk Island] but having lived and worked in USA many times our family continues to celebrate Thanksgiving here in Sydney as well.  It's a lot warmer and light well into the evening... a perfect way to spend a Saturday.

Photo ISLAND : courtesy by attribution from Sinead Friel : Flickr.com

A Tale of Two Genius

2 genii speak key notes at automation events next month.

Whether you get your 'Spurs' on for the  Foxboro Triconex Global User Conference, San Antonio, or swing with the 'Saints' down at the ISA Sales and Marketing Conference in New Orleans. You just can't decide ? Never mind !.  Come to both events. Two great industrial automation events in one week. It's tough but it can be done.  Automation, once the province of enlightened engineers and university research bodies, now extends to professionals and amateurs in myriads of plants and small enterprises world wide. We've all become part of a global community alike through the ubiquity of the Internet.  We all can share information, ideas, translations and comment on progress of ideas daily.  Social networking has allowed people like myself in far flung corners of the world to connect and interact immediately with nearly anyone who can speak the language.  So how then do user groups and conferences play out in relation to their new online world ?

Shipping news - export clearance for RTUs required

IBM 604 Calculator from 1948 - a very very low APP.

Invensys industrial automation teams have been engineering large scale automation of production fields and pipelines for many years.  Recently much investment has been turned toward renewing and improving existing sites rather than applying for big capital to create greenfield projects.  Many older sites need a lot of new gear to get the most efficient production from them in times where sometime cash is not so freely available. Of course all the new gear is based on more modern chip technology with higher MIP ratings and .. yes... you guessed it.. even controllers and Remote Terminal Units have to be cross-checked for their Ajusted Peak Performance [APP] ratings before getting export permission to ship to some destinations.

Close the terminal cover door click, please.

This morning I am traveling to Melbourne Australia for a few days. While there I will be talking to one or two of end users about design - electro mechanical design, of our SCD5200 IO terminal assembly. The unique SCD5200 design has been stable since it's introduction 10 years ago, thereby begging a 'why change it ?' from our team as well as our end users.

SCD5200 remote terminal units are compact with a reasonably high density hard wired IO. The mix of IO type {Discrete,Analog} and DC/AC voltage levels {24,48,129} provides convenience but needs special design consideration.

The potential design change, would be based on a requirement to increase the insulation thickness of the end user wiring connecting to the assembly. No it's not about increased voltage levels, nor about an increase in accuracy, not current rating nor actual wire cross section.

Evolution - Revolution - Techno Modernization Solution

A Technical Evolution [1]

In this series of blog posts, I intend to make some searchable notes on the evolution of control systems hardware.  I say the word evolution carefully here.  What I can see however is that regardless of availability of key technical components, certain evolved arrangements of technology create a requirement for their own continuation. I will be exploring a number of features of this kind of evolution.