Articles and News

This program leverages the key elements of our Northern regional user group meeting that has caused it to grow to over 100 attendees per year. The many years of experience and responses from customers has helped us to shape it into meaningful informational day-and-a-half workshop event. This year, we have adapted this model and created additional events in East Chicago, Houston and Las Vegas. All four events are open to any Bristol Babcock product users or engineers who specify or design systems using our products.

Bill Greer, Senior Product Specialist at Contemporary Controls, created this blog to share his thoughts, experiences and insights on this ever-popular technology. Subjects discussed may range from simple to complex to those that challenge at the outset but appear fascinating to our team of engineers once a conclusion has been drawn.

Green Hills Software, Inc. announced that Jack Greenbaum, director of embedded software engineering for Green Hills Software, will present at the Multicore Expo 2006 in Santa Clara, California, on the topic of: A new breed of debugging: addressing the requirements of multicore ARM/DSP processors. Last month, Green Hills Software announced the support of its MULTI integrated development environment (IDE) for DaVinci™ technology from Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) for both DSP and ARM cores, and is also the only embedded tools vendor that supports multi-processor, multi-operating system, multi-threaded, multi-language systems, all from a single environment.

PAS, a leading provider of advanced automation solutions, announced Cory Engel, Vice-President and senior executive at Matrikon, has joined the leadership team at PAS with immediate responsibilities for all of the Americas solutions sales. Mr. Engel brings tremendous experience in the sale and delivery of software solutions for the process industries, having established Matrikon in the US and eastern Canada – regions accounting for nearly half of all Matrikon’s global sales.

This year Danaher Motion, one of the world's leading providers of drive technology, will again be represented at the Hanover Fair. This time the focus is on system control and system solution expertise from the Danaher Motion Group. In Hall 14, Stand J24, Danaher Motion will present its new SERVOSHAFT software package for simplifying system programming together with an animated, multi-axis system, which consists entirely of our own components.

ISA has recently released a fully operational free online demo of its Certified Automation Professional® (CAP) Learning System. The system is a comprehensive CAP exam preparation and professional development tool. The program combines printed textbooks with online review and testing tools to provide automation training.

Fletcher’s 2-hour talk, called “How Vision Sensors Are Being Applied to Improve the Quality of Formed and Fabricated Metal Parts” includes plenty of stories and pictures from the shop floor, including hole, burr, and slug detection. Fletcher will discuss how to determine if an application is a good candidate for a vision inspection and how to select the right sensor, lighting, and lens.

Intergraph Corporation announced that the American Red Cross presented the Company with the Circle of Humanitarian Award, the organization's highest award honoring financial assistance, for its support of disaster relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The award was presented by Rick Cantrell, executive director of the Madison/Marshall County Chapter of the American Red Cross, and received by R. Halsey Wise, president and CEO, Intergraph.

Indacomp specializes in custom automation applications for a variety of industries. The transaction will bring Indacomp into the Litzler Group as Litzler Automation. Litzler Automation will serve existing Litzler customers with high quality drives and control systems and existing Indacomp customers with expanded automation solutions.

The company, Egypt's only manufacturer of carbon black, installed the new line to meet increased demand for its carbon black products which are used in the manufacture of tires, rubber products, plastics, inks, dyes and paints. The Alexandria Carbon Black Company is the fastest growing carbon black producer in the world with over 90% of production being exported to companies that include Goodyear, Michelin, Bridgestone, Pirelli, Dunlop and Continental Tire.

National Instruments Director of Product Marketing Eric Starkloff will deliver a keynote address to design engineers and industry experts at the D2M 2006 conference, co-located with the Embedded Systems Conference, in San Jose, Calif., on April 5. In his keynote address, “Making Test Disappear: Leading Examples of Transparency between Design and Test,” Starkloff outlines a vision of software-based virtual instrumentation that can drastically reduce test development time.

At Inductive Automation, our integrator program is the core of our business. We believe that our integrators are doing us a service by promoting our software to their customers. We understand that it is only through your hard work and skillful implementation that the quality of our software shines through. Being born from a system integration company, these philosophies have guided Inductive Automation since its inception, and are most apparent in our integrator program.

Mitsubishi Electric is continuing on its growth course, with the Industrial Automation division posting double-digit growth figures throughout Europe in all product categories. At the 2006 Hannover Messe trade show the company is going to continue the product offensive started in 2005, presenting a wide range of new products in strategically important sectors.

Under the umbrella of Factory Automation, the leading trade fair for production automation, "Automation Live" is becoming one of HANNOVER MESSE's strongest draws. Together with Volkswagen AG and other renowned technology partners, Deutsche Messe AG will present visitors with a live demonstration of innovative applications in automobile manufacturing in Hall 17.

LXI certification indicates approval by the LXI Board to officially license the LXI logo for display on compliant products. Agilent is now shipping a variety of modular and compact instruments within five product families: modular power system; DC power supplies; digital multimeters; and multifunction switch/measure unit. Elgar achieved certification for two programmable DC power supply families.

The 16th Annual Joint ISA POWID/EPRI Controls and Instrumentation Conference and the 49th Annual ISA POWID Symposium will be held 4-9 June 2006 at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, California. The theme of the symposium is Effective Integration of Safety, Security, Reliability with Control Systems: Measurement and Control Challenges and Solutions for the Power Industry in the Changing Economic and Regulatory Environment.

For a limited time only, organizations that currently use a competitive EAM solution can trade in 50% of their existing EAM software seat licenses for Avantis.PRO licenses at no charge. This free license trade-in is coupled with an attractive fixed price implementation (including data migration), and a cost-effective support plan to provide a complete, low-risk solution.

This strategic partnership will enable PSI and Norpak to further penetrate the United Kingdom’s mail, catalog and internet order fulfillment markets with PSI’s patented packaging automation solutions: Autoslip, Print Feeder and Print Feeder DF in addition to patent pending systems: LC IN-Feeder 3000, PDFS, and APPS.

Automation professionals around the world are invited to submit an abstract for the ISA EXPO 2006 Technical Conference Program to be held on 17-19 October 2006 in Houston, Texas. Abstracts are selected based on topic area and presentation category. Topic areas for the event include safety and security, environmental and quality control, industrial networking, process automation, and systems integration.

PackAL will be added to the OPW Guidelines for Packaging Machinery Automation. An updated version of these guidelines is scheduled to be released in April. PackAL is an application library of common software elements used in packaging applications that was developed by the PackSoft subgroup of the OPW. The application library is made up of twenty-three functions. Thirteen functions are machine functions, such as wind/unwind, dancer control, registration, and indexing.

Attendees will receive an introduction to the WAGO-I/O-SYSTEM hardware, overview of Industrial Ethernet components and protocols, hands on IEC 61131-3 programming session with live demo PLCs, and review/create web services or applications (such as alarm emails, web pages, etc. from the controller.

The symposium covers all aspects of process composition analysis including analyzer technologies such as chromatography, spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, chemical analysis, physical analysis methods, sample systems, and gas and liquid sensors and detectors. The symposium also covers the practical use of these technologies and explores maintenance, systems integration, safety and networking and communications.

The Invensys implementation for Cheniere’s TOMS project will employ a system architecture that integrates Invensys and third-party software solutions to support the supervision and management of the Sabine Pass LNG receiving terminal, with scalability to accommodate additional terminals. Invensys will provide consulting, software products, and a range of integration, implementation, testing and training services, all of which will leverage Invensys’ extensive expertise and experience in the global LNG industry.

Application Engineers from the many companies will be on hand to demonstrate their products and answer all your technical questions. The Automation Fair/Technology Expo is an open tabletop show format with individual Classroom Presentations. Individual appointments with specific suppliers can be arranged by calling ahead at TOLL FREE (877) 737-8698. Refreshments will be served throughout the day. See the following latest product technologies on display...

Intermec's IF5 RFID reader, which is being used in the METRO Group Future Store in Rheinberg, Germany, is the first production-scale integration of IBM's WebSphere RFID Device Infrastructure software on an RFID reader. This potent combination of hardware and software provides early data filtering, to minimize network overload, correlate RFID events and integrate RFID event data with enterprise applications.

The company has eliminated cadmium as well as lead from all of its devices - and does not require the benefit of the period of grace that the EU has granted the industry on the use of cadmium in switch contacts.

The committee will be formed to create a standard that adopts the generic language specified by IEC 61804 to describe the properties of automation system components. The specified language is capable of describing device parameters and their dependencies, device functions, graphical representations, and interactions with control devices.