Connectivity has transformed how information moves around the enterprise, with real-time data allowing manufacturers to proactively monitor, analyse and repair inefficiencies. But a decade after the idea of paperless manufacturing, there is still paper moving across the factory floor. Kevin Bull, product strategy director at Columbus UK has written an article about his experience of visiting factories where going paperless improved production efficiency and led to significant cost savings.
The growth of diverse IoT applications has exposed designers to the challenge of providing galvanic (ohmic) isolation between the sensor and the rest of the electronics. This isolation is critical for signal integrity, system protection, and user safety, but designers have to pick from three main isolation technologies: magnetic, optical and capacitive barriers. Each of these options has similar performance characteristics, but also subtle differences that designers need to account for.
Across the world, manufacturers are now embracing the vast array of benefits that vision systems can deliver to the factory floor. In turn, they are combining these with major information system networks to create ‘big data’ throughout the factory environment. This paves the way for further revolution, and indeed evolution, in Industry 4.0.
Providing the basis for a remote sensing platform is just one of the many uses to which the new Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) capable Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is well suited. In this tutorial, DesignSpark takes a look at the available interfacing options and some convenient approaches to integrating sensors, before giving a simple real world example which uses the DesignSpark Pmod HAT and a Python script, to take readings from a thermocouple Pmod and publish them via MQTT.
Industry 4.0 is a major paradigm shift for industry, with the convergence of enterprise IT and operational technology (OT) seeing systems and devices exchanging and interpreting shared data. Industrial manufacturing will therefore face massive disruption as developments move towards fully connected, self-organising intelligent factories. One of these disruptions is finding the answer to a new machinery safety approach.
This article will show how environmental sensing can be added to Industrial IoT designs with minimal effort using a single device and software from Bosch Sensortec.