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by Don Frey, ISA Volunteer Leader Faced with unprecedented declines in demand for training, advertising, and exhibit space, the ISA has had to make drastic cuts in its budget for 2010. Some significant areas where cuts have been made are in the areas of professional staff, frequency of publication of InTech magazine, ISA E-News production and distribution, and future ISA EXPO offerings.

While malware targeting mobile devices is a relatively recent problem, significant increases in shipments of smartphones, as well as increasing market penetration by Microsoft, have made mobile devices much more attractive targets for hackers. According to ABI Research, the newest and most intriguing market opportunity for mobile security is the growth of mobile device security managed services.

Motion control systems are capable of extremely precise speed, position, and torque control. This article compares the three main motion control choices: standalone controllers, PC-based controllers, and PLCs. It describes how indexing, direction and electronic gearing are accomplished, examines future trends in motion control, and describes products available today for motion control.

AutomationDirect’s technical support team compiled a list of frequently asked questions from customers on variable frequency drives (VFDs), on topics such as sensorless vector control, grounding, dynamic braking, ringing, standards, power cables, drives vs softstarts, low speed operation, line reactors, slow pump problems, and more.

By Darren Barratt, Omniflex (UK) Limited The purpose of an annunciator is to provide the plant operator with early warning of a problem, which allows time to take action before a situation degrades to the point where the process can no longer be controlled.

By Brian MacCleery, NI senior product manager How National Instruments LabVIEW as well as multicore and FPGA technologies are impacting machine builders and the growing mechatronics segment.

After traveling to Germany last week for Hannover Messe (Fair), the world's largest industrial trade show, I was struck again by the difference in how engineers are perceived in Germany versus the U.S. German Engineering is often revered as a high quality engineering standard. I'm convinced that this reverence has everything to do with the deep-rooted culture surrounding engineering in Germany.

As an engineer, you may not think you could learn anything about innovation from a former travel agent. But this former travel agent was the founder of Travelocity.com, one of the few profitable dotcoms during the dotcom bust. Jones referred to Wikipedia's definition of the word innovation - a new way of doing something that ultimately creates value to a producer or customer.

There's an old saying, "Necessity is the Mother of Invention." A number of experts have said that the United States has lost its edge – its ability to innovate. Kamen believes that inventions in the U.S. have not slowed down. However, Kamen says, "Our society has become more cautious and we don't accept new innovations as quickly."

As I travel from one user conference to another, there is one clear and consistent theme coming from the major automation suppliers. Services, which include systems integration, optimization, life cycle management, asset management, and maintenance, have become a major focus for many of them. Even in this challenging economy, the services groups within these organizations continue to grow – sometimes significantly.

The main reason you wish your product releases to be published on an online site like Automation.com is to generate sales leads and send traffic to your web site. Therefore, it's important to write your headline and first paragraph so that (a) web site editors know what it is and will want to publish it and (b) once published, it can easily be found by search engines.

White papers have become a popular online marketing tool of the times as they introduce a company's innovative products and demonstrate a company's strengths. Whether a paper is used for lead generation, education, customer retention or to close sales, the first step is making it attractive to your target audience.

By Andy Krapf, Loudoun Water Loudoun Water, in Louden County, Virginia, installed an Iconics Genesis64 HMI/SCADA system running under the Vista operating system and reduced their customization times by 30-40%.

By Rick Zabel, Publisher Have you ever wished you could look back at what your operator was seeing at some point in history? Now you can. The Console Recorder from Longwatch is a virtual time machine - a software package that lets companies see what the operator was watching on the HMI when an event occurred.

By Bill Lydon, Automation.com PLCopen finalized release 2.1 of the PLCopen Technical Committee 6 – XML Standard. This release 2.1 is based version 2.0 published in December 2008, as well as the feedback received from PLCopen members and the AutomationML organization. Here’s a synopsis of what the standard contains.

By Rick Zabel, Publisher There is nothing better than face to face meetings. Unfortunately, face to face meetings are not always possible, especially if the participants live in different parts of the country or world. Social networking tools have become a defacto standard of communication for many people and the trend is spreading from younger generations to older generations.

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The multi-session live event, recorded and available on demand for those who missed it, described how digitalization is a competitive imperative for manufacturing and production companies that want to thrive and survive.

Learn from an interview with Darek Kominek of Matrikon about the concepts of built-in security, the IT-OT gap, protecting against hacker/malware attacks, and many other features that have made OPC UA the secure data-exchange standard it is today. his is the third in the series of OPC Experts Interviews.

Learn how the science of the open platform communication standard, OPC UA, is applied across the industrial automation sector from an interview with Uwe Steinkrauss, CEO of Unified Automation. This is the second in the series of OPC Experts Interviews.