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When I first became involved in the ISA (now International Society of Automation), it was already facing a major challenge. It's name was then the Instrumentation Society of America, but not only was it rapidly being pushed into international engagement, but the field of instrumentation was...

Hi all, A quick note to let you know that we've converted Control.com to be served as an encrypted site. You shouldn't notice any difference -- any access to http://control.com will automatically get converted to https://control.com, as will any of our sub-communities. Please let us know...

A new article just published by David Greenfield in Automation World revisits the recent CERT warning about intrusions into automation systems in manufacturing: https://www.automationworld.com/article/industry-type/all/infiltration-us-control-systems Of particular interest to us at...

There's a new Draft for Comments available on the NIST website of a publication entitled Systems Security Engineering: Cyber Resiliency Considerations for the Engineering of Trustworthy Secure Systems: https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-160/vol-2/draft You can download the PDF...

A report issued by the US Department of Homeland Security - reported today in the New York Times here: https://nyti.ms/2Dv2gXY - states that there has been a years-long program of cyberattacks by Russian operatives that has extended into the control rooms of US utility plants. The report implies...

Hi all, Over the past few days we've seen an unprecedented level of attacks on Control.com by spam-bots. These are bots which repeatedly attempt to post irrelevant commercial messages to the site (known as comment spam), inviting you to increase the size of your body parts and MAKE MONEY...

Hi all, We've just launched a new series of sites specially formatted for use with mobile phones and similar-size devices: bigger fonts, bigger buttons, single-column design and simplified menu structure. Next time you visit Control.com or one of our sub-communities using a mobile, you'll...

Hi all, As part of our recent site redesign, we built in a Twitter feed provision. If you use Twitter and frequently check it during the day, following this feed is a way to keep tabs on discussions happening on the site. We used to have such a feed, but it stopped working when Twitter...

Hi all, There's a company called Precision Flow Engineering Calibration Systems (I guess that would be PFECS for short) that claims to have a metering system for water usage that measures only water and not suspended air, thereby reducing water expenditures. Unfortunately, all details about...

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...

Hi all, What a surprise - the new version of Internet Explorer, IE9, is more standards compliant than IE8. Unfortunately, this breaks the workarounds for the incompatibilities of IE8, IE7, and IE6 in the menu system we use for Control.com. What this means is that, for users of IE9...