Programmable Logic Controllers, PLCs, Reliability.

PLCs are not about all the long list that gets hauled out about their speed and ease of programming and all the issues of "how they work". PLCs are about reliability. PLCs are expensive... for reasons that many are too late in understanding.

You can make your own PLC if you work out how to get the hardware and ecosystem up to or better than the standards for existing PLC reliability. Most will never understand what this requires until they fail. Nor will they have the self awareness to get past their own flaws and look outwards (and maybe even bypass failure?).

Am I challenging you? Yes. Am I challenging you to "self sufficiency" or "rugged individualism"? Look at how ecosystem plays to reliability and then ecosystems like the open source and maker movement and then decide.

Are PLC use cases what is driving the massive reduction of costs in underpinnings of their function?  Spoiler: It is the glass screen in your pocket, and the search bar everywhere.

"Come now, let us reason together". You want to build one? Yes you do! *grin* Let's see how.

MassTLC IoT at PTC - Smart Connected Products Transforming Competition - HBR.

IoT has had much discussion lately. Went to a great MassTLC sponsored seminar at PTC on November 4. How Smart, Connected Products are Transforming Competition. Went hand in hand with article in Harvard Business Review. Lay of land for Smart Connected Products. Ten questions businesses should ask themselves. Very appropriate.  Looking at steps

1. 1. Monitoring.
2. 2. Control.
3. 3. Optimization.
4. 4. Autonomy.

Could not help but think about the roots of IoT in tracking/viewing things. The order should perhaps still be

1. 1. Monitoring.
2. 2. Optimization (based purely on what is monitored and outside of any actual IoT programme).
3. 3. Autonomy.
4. 4. Control - Control is last because one should understand the situation before taking action.

And in many cases there are limits (safety, regulatory, privacy, moral, etc.) on what can be controlled. Most of the value is in monitoring and optimization. Some situations never get to control.

 

There were questions during discussions about..

When will industries standardize? What are we waiting for?

1. Leadership from Apple, Amazon, Google and so forth were cited for consumer.
2. Leadership by the main players are often cited in commercial industry. But there is a commercial incentive for non-standard approaches (differentiators) in many situations.
3. Cooperation and collaborative openness. There are examples of collaborative standardization. There are ecosystems which makes it easy to exchange, normalize, coordinate, aggregate and analyze data.

Examples of collaborative standardization:

• BACnet in buildings.
• Sunspec in renewables.
• MTConnect in factory systems.
• OPC (XML DA) in automation.

And the following too - if an ONLY if the mapping/schema is well known... the universally accepted schema is the heart of the matter

• Modbus in industrial. The depth and of Modbus (all the way to sensors), and the breadth of its install base, should not be ignored.
• SNMP in IT.
• RESTful exchange in commerce.
• Any XML in any domain.
• MQ (message queuing) in any domain.

SQL is often hauled out as an exchange method. There is no universal public schema for any database system. Such a schema would be orthogonal to the performance needs of a database.
 
And as a final word. Smart connected things without goals and analytics are fruitless. And goals need not be set in stone, as they are generally informed by analytics. Tactical drives the strategic and vice versa. They are two sides of the same coin. Planning is essential but plans are useless.

 

OHS Open Hardware Summit 2014 Rome, Italy - by OSHWA.

Open Hardware Summit OWS 2014 Rome, Italy - by OSHWA. Self-servingly fond of this OWS 2014 link and its two photos of OWS 2013 at MIT...

because I happen to be in both of them *grin*.

Open Hardware Summit 2013 at MIT

Open Hardware Summit 2013 at MIT.
http://2013.oshwa.org/
http://2013.oshwa.org/schedule/
http://2013.oshwa.org/archives/

OHS people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addie_Wagenknecht
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limor_Fried