The trend-watchers tell us that water will become the next oil.  As populations grow and climate-change shifts the patterns of rain, we are slated to require more and more water where there are the least resources.

There is a plethora of topics that can be blogged about when it comes to Control Systems Integration. In almost six years at Hallam-ICS, I’ve touched a variety of types of documents, hardware, software, communication networks and protocols, etc.

Problem

The problem I want to discuss here comes up when you need to reference a user define data type (UDT) that is nested within another UDT, and has been passed into a template as a parameter.

Over the years from the mid-1990s until the present, I have developed many Microsoft (MS) Access database applications for clients and for in-house projects.  Most of these databases are still in use at client sites and others are still used within Hallam-ICS on projects.

For those of you who, like myself, have been in this automation game for a while, you may have noticed a steep decline in the availability of native serial ports on your PLC.  We have all of this fantastic Ethernet connectivity, of which I am a huge fan; but that doesn’t do me any good for all of the legacy stuff I still have to talk to.

If you have spent time on a construction site, you would likely agree that poor communication is one of the problems that hinders every contractor. As system integrators, not only are we affected by communication breakdowns between individuals, but also by the communication breakdowns between equipment.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)and Industry 4.0 are allowing factories to improve performance by gaining access to detailed plant data and presenting it so that employees at all levels of an organization can make better decisions more quickly.  The challenge we face when implementing the IIoT is gaining access to data, analyzing data, and presenting it so that is actionable.  Here are three new technologies that will help in each area in 2018:

The Manufacturing Intelligence Team at Hallam-ICS currently provide a variety of services from Data Analytics to Custom Multiplatform Applications for our customers. However, the future of Manufacturing Intelligence is changing very rapidly and therefore, our team will need to adapt to these future technologies in order to offer our customers the best tools to do their jobs efficiently. Here are a few new technologies that will help us capture, analyze and display data in whole new ways in 2018 and beyond.

Many times in life we look back and ask what could we have done better? Or, if the situation was something more dramatic we say "I'm not doing that again”. In either case we are always striving for a more positive outcome in everything we do.

Mr. Whiskers is my daughter's favorite Beanie Boo and he traveled to Houston Texas with me to attend Rockwell Automation's annual gathering at this year's Process Solution User Group (PSUG) and Automation Fair.  We learned about a lot of new technologies and software that Rockwell and their partners are offering.  Mr Whiskers loves Legos, so our first stop was the First Lego booth!