24 / May 2019 / ControlDesign.comHow is the development of software solutions
impacting your requirements for hardware?Fran Bridges, vice president of engineering at Magline (www.
magliner.com), Hardware requirements must be able to
support the needs of our products in all of the
environments they are expected to perform in—indoors,
outdoors, heat, cold, rain—and be able to stand up to the abuse
they will be given.Mike Freund, managing director at Rittal North America (www.
rittal.us), The evolution of the industry around the
availability of data and the transmission of data is
something that we keep in mind with everything that we
manufacture. Software integration comes into play with
automation, and from the standpoint of development, as well.
It’s important for our panel builders and our OEMs to be able to
model their systems and modify their systems on the fly. So
capabilities of the ePlan software, in conjunction with Rittal
products, gives them extensive flexibility.
Scalability and industry partnerships are also ways that
software has impacted hardware requirements. Our key
industry partnership with folks like HP and ABB help us
prepare for what’s coming and ensures hardware is aligned
with those changes.Kevin Barker, president at Beckhoff Automation (www.beckhoff.
com), Hardware and software development go hand in
hand and affect each other in profound ways at
Beckhoff. Consider the fact that Beckhoff develops mother-
boards in-house for our IPCs. This is so we have complete
control and predictability in terms of how TwinCAT software
runs on Beckhoff IPCs across the entire product portfolio from
entry level to high end. Advances in multi-core and many-core
PC processor technology have opened up new worlds of
features and functionality to standard PC-based control. This
started with one IPC being able to handle PLC, motion control
and HMI and now expands out into the realm of scientific
automation, which covers high-end measurement, condition
monitoring, robotics and vision. More recent advances in IoT
concepts have only expanded the deep pool of tasks one
modern IPC can handle because the hardware and software
capabilities have also grown exponentially. The future
migration path is assured at Beckhoff because TwinCAT 3 was
developed to fully accommodate many-core processor
architectures up to 256 cores when available in the future.Holger Zeltwanger, managing director at CAN in Automation
(www.can-cia.org), Sophisticated software development
environments and tools request increasingly more
computing power and memory capacity. On the other hand,
enhanced configuration tools avoid programming effort.As engineering and IT continue their
convergence, which one will be making your
products better, faster and easier to use?
Kevin Barker, president at Beckhoff Automation (www.
beckhoff.com), Both are driving advances in our
automation technologies, but which one ultimately
makes a major difference depends on the users. Whether an
engineer’s background is in IT or more traditional PLC
programming, many options are available to make it easier
to program machine control logic and connect machines to
the cloud or other high-level business systems. Either way,
we meet engineers where they are at in the same TwinCAT
environment. For example, we support very traditional
ladder logic programming in IEC 6 1131-3 but also support
object-oriented extensions, C# or HTML5 for responsive,
Web- and mobile-enabled HMI.
Beckhoff can adapt and iterate more quickly whenever Mi-
crosoft, Amazon or Google introduces new cloud technologies
because we rely on similar hardware platforms and operating
systems. This allows us to focus on platform performance,
stability and reliability, as well as application expertise.Fran Bridges, vice president of engineering at Magline (www.
magliner.com), We treat them as a combined system.
Both are equally important.Mike Freund, managing director at Rittal North America (www.
rittal.us), Systems are increasingly more complex; the
ability to take efficiency, process and speed into
account as you design your system will ensure the success of
convergence. It’s not just the product solution; it’s not just the
software solution; it is a package solution. Everybody is
supplying it these days, whether you’re a panel builder, a
systems integrator an OEM or and end user; you have to look at
the whole solution in order to optimize your automation system.
I would also say that people don’t realize the role of the enclo-
sure in making sure that all of the hardware and the software
are optimized. I would go back to the scalability and flexibility
of enclosures in the footprint of a data center in a controlled ormachine input
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