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I frequently see applications that create hazardous areas that are fairly large. Examples include large robots that need access to a large radius through 360 degrees of travel (or nearly so), palletizers, and similar applications where physical barriers might not be feasible (or might be easily...

I've seen a wide variety of practices employed when people design and commission automated machinery, when it comes to evaluating risk and determining appropriate safeguarding. In some cases, it's just part of the design process, integrated into mechanical design as the various motions on a...

I came across this question the other day, and it gave me pause. This fellow has a station set up where the machine automatically starts up when the operator removes his/her hands from the area, as detected by a light curtain. Presumably it stops again when the light curtain is interrupted...

Hi all, Every time we hear of an accident in our own industry or a related field, we're reminded of how much importance is attached to the safety aspect of our work. Many of us are dealing with the control of actuators and mechanisms with significant forces involved, sometimes in proximity...

I have to admit to a certain amount of skepticism when it comes to robots designed to mimic human modes of action. For years, I've had to explain to friends outside the industry that anthropomorphic robots were almost never the optimal solution for industrial automation. So, here's a company...

Hi all, Well, it had to happen. I finally gave in and started a blog, called Beyond Control: http://beyond.control.com/ The first two entries are up, in which I talk about my first encounter with PLC programming languages (back when PC meant Programmable Controller), and how it was so...

The massive power failures that affected the northeastern U.S. after our unusual October snowfall left us with a few tricky problems to solve. One of these was an odd external routing issue in the Verizon system which, unbeknown to us, appears to have prevented people on the Automation List...

Hi all, I'm writing to ask your assistance. Over the years, Control.com users have posted some amazing tutorials on a variety of general automation topics. However, identifying them out of the over-150,000 posts (!) on the site is a major undertaking. Do you recall any good, descriptive...

We just installed a new feature on Control.com that allows you to rate each post as to whether you think it is helpful or not. This appears when you visit any discussion thread, in the form of "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" icons you can click on to register your vote. Note that you have to...

The Control.com site was down for a bit yesterday due to a defective firewall. It's interesting that all of our outages in recent memory, apart from a few at the network level, were due to defects in the very devices intended to prevent outages, namely firewalls and UPSs. I'm sure there's a...