IoT, Industry 4.0, Cloud
In these times nothing more characterize industry press articles than these 3 phrases. Blank astonishment comes up while reading these euphoric strung together coinages, pretending a new age. Professional marketers are on the road in droves, to fill up these non-words with some sense. Useless or not – engineers develop devices with network capability almost categorically.
While the first euphoria is fading away, we have to ask, what really is behind the concept. Which benefits are there at the end of the day, how much do we have to pay and how do we bring this hype into some profitable? The owners and shareholders want to see a profit, just to be in the media is too little. Short term rising prices only leading to disillusion when the price falls deeper than before.
The more and more increasing interconnection will be inexorable. Everytime and everywhere we want to be up-to-date, want to have access to more and more data from every point of the world. But more often than not, things are not that new as people insist it would. For instance, cloud-computing is there from the beginning of networks. Data was saved centrally for a long time to have the possibility to work together. Data is stored in databases to abstract and compute them in different applications.
But there are more than a few worries. Which conclusions can be made from a companies data hosted somewhere on the internet? How safe are these data, which persons really have access to it? Quite often there are no distinct answers to this questions. To calculate the real risk is harder than one wants to admit to oneself.
Nothing new
While all this is sold as big news, GEMAC developed a Fieldbus diagnostic device that fit into the world of industry 4.0, long before this term was born. Monitoring a CAN bus on the physical layer, online available, polled from your control station system, there rateable and presentable. The CANobserver has it’s own web server, to display its data. No connection to a control station system is required but possible over SNMP. Alerting can be done by email. To set up the system no expensive rented – but still not without a doubt – the server is needed. Your smartphone will tell.
If you need it to be connected to an external server and monitor your Fieldbus with worldwide access, it is possible with CANobserver. The linking can be done over the built-in-webserver or while directly polling measured data over SNMP.
The CANobserver allows you to do predictive maintenance. Because also a CAN bus is aging by time, it is a wearing part. This is not only for systems with abrasive rings or drag chains, plugs alone are enough potential source of disturbance, to someday temper delight about a system.
Conclusion
Back on industry 4.0, the internet of things and clouds there, do it where it pays and set on the “clever Dick” CANobserver as your relentless assistant: higher uptime and longer running time are the delights for the operator.
