Automation List:

My latest article: "Mobile Devices in Automation" is on the web at:
http://www.jimpinto.com/writings/mobiledevices.html

In Automation World magazine, the article is at:
http://www.automationworld.com/control/mobile-devices-automation

Tethered-hardware thin-clients and mobile equivalents - tablets,
smartphones and other portable devices, deliver vastly improved
productivity and yield drastically reduced total cost of ownership.

Comments and feedback, please.

Jim
--------/
Jim Pinto
Carlsbad, California, USA
email: [email protected]
web: www.JimPinto.com
--------/

 

Hi Jim

Exactly as predicted when OSS and 21st century software and hardware gain a foothold.

Regards
cww

 

The modern mobile devices are nothing else than normal computers with a small display and a touch screen (including virtual keyboard) replacing the keyboard and mouse. There are some additional peripherals like wireless communication, USB, GPS, absolute position transducer, camera ... which make them very capable devices. They have enough resources and computing power to run full blown applications and not only simple small apps.

I think these standard devices which are used in the consumer market will be used as thin clients that allow users to operate automation systems. This will probably be some kind of browser running on the mobile device that can connect to a server within the plant or machine.

We will have to rethink security for this scenario.

But even more will be possible now. Open Source Hardware and Open Source Software will be possible. Why not build PLC's and remote IO's with the above ? I have been playing with the Raspberry Pi recently and think only little is missing. Eventually a interface card.
http://tinyurl.com/cs32hn4

When experimenting with the Pi i used our
http://pvbrowser.org
and let the pvserver run on the Pi where the pvbrowser ran either on the Pi itself and/or on standard PC's or Android tablets.

Now when a PLC runs at a device that is as capable as a standard PC why use ladder logic any more? I'm familiar with programming in high level computer programming languages like C or C++ but not in ladder logic. But i think when automation guys learn high level computer languages instead of ladder logic it would be progress. This does not necessarily mean that they must learn C/C++. Our pvserver can also be done in the Lua scripting language for example.