by Gary Mintchell | Dec 17, 2021 | Automation, Embedded Control, Industrial Computers, Software
A fervent issue for discussion in German automation circles, especially for those who wish to displace Siemens from its leading position, is software-based control. An early leader in this technology is Beckhoff Automation. This press release made public this week gives some of the technology historical foundation. Yes, it’s commercial. But, yes, it’s interesting to see where we’ve been in order to speculate on where we’re heading.
The TwinCAT automation software suite from Beckhoff has reached its 25th anniversary in the market. Ubiquitous in automation today, TwinCAT has served as a powerful resource for engineers since 1996 – a quarter of a century. In addition, the underlying PC-based control technology from Beckhoff has been going strong since 1986, marking 35 years in the industry. TwinCAT, short for The Windows Control and Automation Technology, provides numerous benefits from its robust software functionality. The advantages of TwinCAT stem from its modular expandability extending to support for innovations such as integrated machine vision and artificial intelligence.
Since the 1996 introduction of the first software generation, TwinCAT 2, this product is still available and maintained, which is proof of its continuity and compatibility with current systems. Windows served as the operating system and the PLC programming was adapted to meet the requirements of the IEC 61131-3 standard. This introduced the ability to implement an industrial control system on a “regular” PC with a standard operating system.
Another milestone was the decision to align the TwinCAT programming environment with the world’s predominant IT programming environment. Microsoft Visual Studio is used for all major IT software developments, and Beckhoff also used this tool to develop TwinCAT 2 software. So why not develop PLC software applications with Visual Studio as well? The subsequent TwinCAT 3 software generation was introduced in 2010 and delivered to customers from 2011 on – which makes for another 10-year anniversary and another track record of success in the field.
The integration of the TwinCAT automation tools into Visual Studio established a completely new type of engineering environment. With the availability to use additional programming standards such as C/C++ and MATLAB/Simulink, further possibilities emerged for more efficient code generation for machines and systems. This has also gained widespread acceptance in the automation industry.
In addition to programming, TwinCAT offers an I/O configuration interface for a wide variety of fieldbus systems – first and foremost EtherCAT as well as more than 30 other communication protocols. Motion control applications from simple PTP movements to sophisticated CNC and robot kinematics are just as much part of the ongoing evolution as safety functions, image processing for machine vision and machine learning. With the advent of Industrie 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), it quickly became clear that the cloud, long established in IT, would also become a major factor in the automation market. To provide this functionality for customers, Beckhoff launched hardware and software solutions for IoT and cloud connectivity in 2015, followed by data analytics tools in 2018.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 16, 2021 | Manufacturing IT, News, Organizations, Software, Standards
Industries cannot advance without standards. Trains could not operate across a continent. I could not connect to the world from my computer through WiFi to an Internet. Standards may be recognized by governments or they may be de facto industry standards. The key benefit from standards is interoperability. At some level, competing proprietary products can interoperate. I can send a text from my iPhone to your Android phone. I support standards in the name of interoperability. I say this as preamble to three pieces of news coming from the Linux Foundation.
EdgeX Foundry Announces Jakarta, the Project’s First Long Term Support Release
EdgeX Foundry, a Linux Foundation project under the LF Edge project umbrella, announced the release of version 2.1 of EdgeX, codenamed ‘Jakarta.’ The project’s ninth release, it follows the recent Ireland release, which was the project’s second major release (version 2.0). Jakarta is significant in that it is EdgeX’s first release to offer long term support (LTS).
“Our Jakarta release is a stabilization release,” said Jim White, the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Chairman and co-founder of the project. “As such, it is our project community’s pledge to adopters that EdgeX offers you a stable version of the platform that you can expect the community to stand behind and support for a period of two years. We stand with you in support of EdgeX in real world, commercial deployments of the platform.”
“Only a few open-source projects offer long term support; the rapid change of open source projects and the effort needed to LTS is significant,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, at the Linux Foundation. “By including LTS, EdgeX demonstrates it understands the needs of the operational technology (OT) user base, and how products in this space must work and operate over longer periods of time than traditional IT solutions,” said Arpit Joshipura. “This is a big milestone for any open source community, and we are incredibly proud of EdgeX Foundry for this achievement.”
The EdgeX long term support policy states that the community will work as quickly as possible and give “best effort and development priority to fix major flaws as soon as possible.” Major flaws by the project are defined as
• bugs causing the system or service to crash and where there is no work around for the function
• bugs for a feature/function that does not work and there is no work around for the function
• a security issue deemed a critical or high-level CVE (per CVSS)
The project has further stipulated in its LTS policy that “no new major functionality (at the discretion of the TSC) will be added” to the LTS version after the release happens.
The next EdgeX release, codenamed “Kamakura,” is set for Spring 2022. The community has held its semi-annual planning session to lay out the goals and objectives of this release. Kamakura is likely to be another dot-release that will again be backward compatible with all EdgeX 2.x releases (Ireland and Jakarta). Major additions currently under consideration and being developed by the community include:
• Initial north to south message bus. Improved security secrets seeding and allowing for delayed service starts.
• Metrics collection
• Dynamic device profiles. Better (native) Windows support
• Improve testing – including real hardware testing
• A second version release of the EdgeX Command Line Interface (CLI) which, compatible with EdgeX v2.x.
The Cyber-Investigation Analysis Standard Expression Transitions to Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation announced the Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression (CASE) is becoming a community project as part of the Cyber Domain Ontology (CDO) project under the Linux Foundation. CASE is an ontology-based specification that supports automated combination and intelligent analysis of cyber-investigation information. CASE concentrates on advancing interoperability and analytics across a broad range of cyber-investigation domains, including digital forensics and incident response (DFIR).
“Becoming part of the Linux Foundation is a major milestone for CASE that will significantly benefit the broader open source and cyber-investigation communities,” said Eoghan Casey, Presiding Director of CASE. “As an evolving standard supporting structured expression and exchange of cyber-investigation information, CASE will substantially enhance efforts to address growing challenges in the modern world, including cyberattacks, ransomware, online fraud, sexual exploitation, and terrorism. Our objective is to create a culture of common comprehension and collaborative problem solving across cyber-investigation domains.”
Organizations involved in joint operations or intrusion investigations can efficiently and consistently exchange information in standard format with CASE, breaking down data silos and increasing visibility across all information sources. Tools that support CASE facilitate correlation of differing data sources and exploration of investigative questions, giving analysts a more comprehensive and cohesive view of available information, opening new opportunities for searching, pivoting, contextual analysis, pattern recognition, machine learning and visualization.
Development of CASE began in 2014 as a collaboration between the DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) and MITRE, led by Dr. Eoghan Casey and Sean Barnum, involving the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In response to international interest, this initiative became an open source evolving standard, with hundreds of participants in industry, government and academia around the globe. Early contributors include the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), the Italian Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems (IGSG-CNR), FireEye, and University of Lausanne. CASE governance and community coordination were formalized with support of Harm van Beek, Rich Brown, Ryan Griffith, Cory Hall, Christopher Hargreaves, Jessica Hyde, Deborah Nichols, and Martin Westman. Growing international involvement is tracked on the CASE website.
CASE, built on the Hansken trace model developed and implemented by the NFI, aligns with and extends the Unified Cyber Ontology (UCO). This year has seen the release of UCO 0.7.0, and most recently CASE 0.5.0. CASE and UCO now both are built on SHACL constraints, providing an instance data validation capability. Currently, CASE is developing a representation for Inferences, both human formulated and computer generated, to bind investigative conclusions to supporting evidence and associated chain of custody.
Linux Foundation to Host the Cloud Hypervisor Project
The Linux Foundation announced it will host the Cloud Hypervisor project, which delivers a Virtual Machine Monitor for modern Cloud workloads. Written in Rust with a strong focus on security, features include CPU, memory and device hot plug; support for running Windows and Linux guests; device offload with vhost-user; and a minimal and compact footprint.
The project is supported by Alibaba, ARM, ByteDance, Intel and Microsoft and represented by founding member constituents that include Arjan van de Ven, Fellow at Intel; K. Y Srinivasan, Distinguished Engineer and VP at Microsoft; Michael Zhao, Staff Engineer at ARM, Gerry Liu, Senior Staff Engineer at Alibaba, and Felix Zhang, Senior Software Engineer at ByteDance. Initial focus for the Cloud Hypervisor project will be security and modern operation for Cloud.
K.Y Srinivasan, Advisory Board member from Microsoft adds: “Cloud Hypervisor has matured to the point that moving it to the Linux Foundation is the right move at the right time. As LF continues to standardize key components of the software stack for managing/orchestrating modern workloads, we feel that the Cloud Hypervisor will be an important part of the overall stack. Being part of LF will help us accelerate development and adoption of this key technology.”
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 7, 2021 | Data Management, Enterprise IT, Internet of Things, Operations Management, Software
I just wondered when Michael Bird of HPE was going to release another Technology Untangled podcast and, voila, here came one this morning into my Overcast feed. In this episode, Bird interviews Anthesis Group CEO Stuart McLachlan, HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri, Micro:bit Educational Foundation CEO Gareth Stockade, and ROKiT Venturi Racing CEO Susie Wolff. Bird summarizes, “2021 was a year to press on toward the future. We learned successful organizations are resourceful. The message of taking it on the chin and moving on came from each speaker. Each of us changed over the past two years, but there was also opportunity. As Wolff summarized in an earlier podcast, ‘Live in the moment, enjoy right now, be part of the journey instead of focusing just on end results.’ “
Interested in knowing more about what Artificial Intelligence (AI) consists of? Well, the podcasters from MIT’s Technology Review concocted a game show style explanation presented on its In Machines We Trust podcast.
The Internet of Things began to gain prominence a decade or more ago with the sensors added to smart phones and then to smart watches. GE touted the “Industrial Internet.” Then the Industrial Internet of Things swept the manufacturing and production landscape.The IT companies jumped on the wave. I went to Dell Technologies conferences (long since abandoned) followed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) first with Aruba networking and then the now dormant (I guess) IoT group, and briefly by Hitachi Vantara, which abandoned its manufacturing IoT emphasis faster than fans leaving after another Cleveland Browns loss.
On the other hand, smaller software startups began building IIoT platforms and either acquiring or being acquired. I noticed just a few years ago how my long-time sponsor, Inductive Automation, began adding components to its SCADA platform transforming into also an IoT platform. Talk sprung up about IoT Platforms replacing SCADA platforms. I listened today to a webcast from Litmus “Will Industrial IoT Platforms Replace SCADA?” This is a clearly presented comparison of the two with some MES thoughts thrown in for good measure. It is worth a listen. Definitely not a sales pitch.
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by Gary Mintchell | Nov 24, 2021 | Automation, Robots, Software
The “Subscribe” links goes to a MailChimp sign up page. I have stopped using MailChimp due to its obnoxious marketing tactics. WordPress stopped its service of sending a notice of updated posts. I am now using the Web page and email service of Hey, developed by BaseCamp. Please visit world.hey.com/garymintchell to register for the newsletter. There is no tracking or other privacy-invading tech.
Industrial automation products have blended hardware and software for many years. Companies, likewise, find the need to develop software products augmenting their hardware products. News has reached me from a couple of different segments of the market with similar emphases. This one is from OnRobot, manufacturer of collaborative robots, the so-called “cobots”. This appears to be a valuable adjunct to its main product line.
WebLytics brings remote monitoring, device diagnostics, and data analytics capabilities to OnRobot’s line of collaborative application-focused hardware solutions.
The company describes this as “a unique production monitoring, device diagnostics, and data analytics solution designed to enhance productivity and minimize downtime.”
Capable of monitoring the performance of multiple collaborative applications simultaneously and in real-time, WebLytics gathers equipment data from both robots and tools and transforms it into easy-to-understand, visualized device and application-level intelligence.
“The launch of WebLytics is an important landmark for OnRobot, our customers, and our global integrator network,” said Enrico Krog Iversen, CEO of OnRobot. “WebLytics is the first software solution to provide real-time, application-focused data for collaborative applications across major robot brands. As our first software product, WebLytics marks the beginning of OnRobot’s journey into robot software and completes our vision of providing a One Stop Shop for collaborative applications on both the hardware and software side.”
For end users and integrators, WebLytics not only eliminates manual data collection — it provides actionable insights into how well a collaborative application is performing, offering live device diagnostics, alerts and preventive maintenance measures to keep costly robot cell downtime to a minimum.
This software appears to solve one of the many drawbacks of OEE—consistent and accurate reporting of the actual data from the machine.
Integrating the globally recognized overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) industry standard, WebLytics identifies trends in real-time in the robot cell, including patterns, peaks, and disturbances in application productivity. OEE measures the percentage of manufacturing time that is truly productive – a score of 100% indicates that the collaborative application is producing only good parts, as fast as possible, and with no downtime. Leveraging these OEE measures, WebLytics can determine whether the manufacturing process is running at optimal speed and can monitor and analyze the quality of application cycles –key insights for manufacturers of all sizes.
WebLytics can report on utilization of the robot arm and OnRobot tools such as grippers, vision cameras, and sensors, as well as the number of safety stops initiated, and the number of grip cycles performed while an application is running.
When changes are made to a robot cell, such as adjusting the speed of a robot or the settings on a gripper, WebLytics can also automatically report on the impact of those changes on application performance.
If anomalies occur in the collaborative application after deployment, WebLytics enables users to analyze the data collected directly from the robot(s) and tools and report on its findings using customizable dashboards.
Customer testimonial. We’ve been writing about automated data collecting for 20 years. Each year the industry moves another step forward.
Laszlo Papp, Product Manager & Sales Engineer at Wamatec Hungary Kft., tested WebLytics on machine tending, pick & place, and palletizing applications: “In this fast-paced world, time is everything. When cycle time is really important, WebLytics helps you identify the small mistakes that cause time wastage,” he said. “WebLytics can also save a lot of time for yourself and for your production line by making it easy to schedule all maintenance and product changes. My favorite function was the dashboard. I really liked how WebLytics allowed me to monitor all my applications, my cobots/robots, and my end-of-arm-tools using one platform that provides real time monitoring, data collection and line charting. WebLytics makes optimizing all applications much easier than before.”
Access to WebLytics’ is provided through a secure, intuitive browser-based user interface, that displays OEE measures and user-defined KPIs through customizable dashboards that provide an immediate and transparent view into real-time and historical application performance.
The WebLytics server can be deployed on a shop floor’s local network or added to a virtual network that connects to the robot cell. Collected data is stored locally on the WebLytics server. Meanwhile, WebLytics’ built-in web server is always accessible from the shop floor network or from anywhere in the world via secure HTTPS connection.
WebLytics also creates new revenue opportunities for system integrators, by providing the software required to offer their customers data-backed custom service agreements and engineering services for cell optimization.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 9, 2021 | Enterprise IT, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software, Standards, Uncategorized
Open source predominates in IT. One can find open source growing within OT. I expect more as the younger generation of engineers takes over from the Boomers. My generation has laid a great foundation of standards. These make things better for engineers just trying to get a job done with inadequate resources. A few news items have piled up in my queue. Here is a CESMII announcement followed by several from the Linux Foundation.
SME and CESMII Join Forces to Accelerate Smart Manufacturing Adoption
SME, a non-profit professional association dedicated to advancing manufacturing, and CESMII – The Smart Manufacturing Institute, are partnering to align their resources and educate the industry, helping companies boost productivity, build a strong talent pipeline, and reduce manufacturers’ carbon footprint.
CESMII and SME will address the “digital divide” by connecting manufacturers to technical knowledge. These efforts will especially help small and medium-size companies—a large part of the supply network—to overcome the cost and complexity of automation and digitization that has constrained productivity and growth initiatives.
“The prospect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution catalyzing the revitalization of our manufacturing productivity in the U.S. is real, but still aspirational, and demands a unified effort to accelerate the evolution of this entire ecosystem,” said John Dyck, CEO, CESMII. “We couldn’t be happier to join with SME on this important mission to combine and align efforts with the best interest of the employers and educators in mind.”
Smart Manufacturing Executive Council
The first joint initiative is the formation of a new national Smart Manufacturing Executive Council. It will engage business and technology executives, thought leaders, and visionaries as a “think tank” advocating for the transformation of the ecosystem. It will build on each organization’s history of working with industry giants who volunteer their time and impart their knowledge to benefit the industry.
Members of the council will act as ambassadors to drive the national conversation and vision for smart manufacturing in America. Working with policy makers and others, the council will unify the ecosystem around a common set of interoperability, transparency, sustainability and resiliency goals and principles for the smart manufacturing ecosystem.
Focus on Manufacturing Workforce
The need for richer, scalable education and workforce development is more important than ever.
SME’s training organization, Tooling U-SME, is the industry’s leading learning and development solutions provider, working with thousands of companies, including more than half of all Fortune 500 manufacturers as well as 800 educational institutions across the country. CESMII has in-depth training content on smart manufacturing technology, business practices, and workforce development. Leveraging Tooling U-SME’s extensive reach into industry and academia, the synergistically combined CESMII and Tooling U-SME training portfolios and new content collaborations will expedite smart manufacturing adoption, driving progress through transformational workforce development.
Through this national collaboration, Tooling U-SME will become a key partner for CESMII for advancing education and workforce development around smart manufacturing.
“Manufacturers are looking for a more effective, future-proof approach to upskill their workforce, and we believe that the best way to accomplish that is for CESMII and Tooling U-SME to work together,” said Conrad Leiva, Vice President of Ecosystem and Workforce Education at CESMII. “This partnership brings together the deep domain expertise and necessary skills with the know-how to package education, work with employers and schools and effectively deliver it at scale nationally.
Linux Foundation Announces NextArch Foundation
The Linux Foundation announced the NextArch Foundation. The new Foundation is a neutral home for open source developers and contributors to build next-generation architecture that can support compatibility between an increasing array of microservices.
Cloud-native computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), Edge computing and much more have led businesses down a path of massive opportunity and transformation. According to market research, the global digital transformation market size was valued at USD 336.14 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.6% from 2021 to 2028. But a lack of intelligent, centralized architecture is preventing enterprises and the developers who are creating innovation based on these technologies to fully realize their promise.
“Developers today have to make what feel like impossible decisions among different technical infrastructures and the proper tool for a variety of problems,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. “Every tool brings learning costs and complexities that developers don’t have the time to navigate yet there’s the expectation that they keep up with accelerated development and innovation. NextArch Foundation will improve ease of use and reduce the cost for developers to drive the evolution of next-generation technology architectures.”
Next-generation architecture describes a variety of innovations in architecture, from data storage and heterogeneous hardware to engineering productivity, telecommunications and much more. Until now, there has been no ecosystem to address this massive challenge. NextArch will leverage infrastructure abstraction solutions through architecture and design and automate development, operations and project processes to increase the autonomy of development teams. Enterprises will gain easy to use and cost-effective tools to solve the problems of productization and commercialization in their digital transformation journey.
Linux Foundation and Graviti Announce Project OpenBytes to Make Open Data More Accessible to All
The Linux Foundation announced the new OpenBytes project spearheaded by Graviti. Project OpenBytes is dedicated to making open data more available and accessible through the creation of data standards and formats.
Edward Cui is the founder of Graviti and a former machine learning expert within Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group. “For a long time, scores of AI projects were held up by a general lack of high-quality data from real use cases,” Cui said. “Acquiring higher quality data is paramount if AI development is to progress. To accomplish that, an open data community built on collaboration and innovation is urgently needed. Graviti believes it’s our social responsibility to play our part.”
By creating an open data standard and format, Project OpenBytes can reduce data contributors’ liability risks. Dataset holders are often reluctant to share their datasets publicly due to their lack of knowledge on various data licenses. If data contributors understand their ownership of data is well protected and their data will not be misused, more open data becomes accessible.
Project OpenBytes will also create a standard format of data published, shared, and exchanged on its open platform. A unified format will help data contributors and consumers easily find the relevant data they need and make collaboration easier. These OpenBytes functions will make high-quality data more available and accessible, which is significantly valuable to the whole AI community and will save a large amount of monetary and labor resources on repetitive data collecting.
The largest tech companies have already realized the potential of open data and how it can lead to novel academic machine learning breakthroughs and generate significant business value. However, there isn’t a well-established open data community with neutral and transparent governance across various organizations in a collaborative effort. Under the governance of the Linux Foundation, OpenBytes aims to create data standards and formats, enable contributions of good-quality data and, more importantly, be governed in a collaborative and transparent way.
Linux Foundation Announces Security Enhancements to its LFX Community Platform to Protect Software Supply Chain
The Linux Foundation announced it has enhanced its free LFX Security offering so open source projects can secure their code and reduce non-inclusive language.
The LFX platform hosts community tools for security, fundraising, community growth, project health, mentorship and more. It supports projects and empowers open source teams to write better, more secure code, drive engagement and grow sustainable ecosystems.
The LFX Security module now includes automatic scanning for secrets-in-code and non-inclusive language, adding to its existing comprehensive automated vulnerability detection capabilities. Software security firm BluBracket has contributed this functionality to open source software projects under LFX as part of its mission of making software safer and more secure. This functionality builds on contributions from leader in developer security, Snyk, now making LFX the leading vulnerability detection platform for the open source community.
The need for a community-supported and freely available code scanning is clear, especially in light of recent attacks on core software projects and recent the White House Executive Order calling for improved software supply chain security. LFX is the first and only community tool designed to make software projects of all kinds more secure and inclusive.
LFX Security now includes:
● Vulnerabilities Detection: Detect vulnerabilities in open source components and dependencies and provide fixes and recommendations to those vulnerabilities. LFX tracks how many known vulnerabilities have been found in open source Projects, identifies if those vulnerabilities have been fixed in code commits and then reports on the number of fixes per project through an intuitive dashboard. Fixing known open source vulnerabilities in open source projects helps cleanse software supply chains at their source and greatly enhances the quality and security of code further downstream in development pipelines. Snyk has provided this functionality for the community and helped open source software projects remediate nearly 12,000 known security vulnerabilities in their code.
● Code Secrets: Detect secrets-in-code such as passwords, credentials, keys and access tokens both pre- and post-commit. These secrets are used by hackers to gain entry into repositories and other important code infrastructure. BluBracket is the leading provider of secrets detection technology in the industry and has contributed these features to the Linux Foundation LFX community.
● Non-Inclusive Language: Detect non-inclusive language used in project code, which is a barrier in creating a welcoming and inclusive community. BluBracket worked with the Inclusive Naming Initiative on this functionality.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 5, 2021 | Marketing, Software
I wondered how long it would take for someone to ask. What happens when an independent software developer who has a widely adopted product sells out to a particular supplier? The supplier proclaims independence, but will it really not absorb it into their proprietary product?
Then GE Digital sent an email to me at a very old address that I still have forwarded (note to self: delete that old address). Get Proficy Historian for up to 90% less than OSI—or swap your current OSI or eDNA license at no cost.
Wow. This sounded a bit like a late-night cable TV ad. “But wait, if you act now you can get two for this amazing low price of $19.99.”
Sorry to poke a little fun at GE Digital. The question is, does this ad reflect a real marketplace concern? Or, is it a weak marketing gimmick? I don’t know. But I have been curious. What do you think?
Gary,
We’re serious about helping you get the most from your OT data. So we’re giving you two offers to choose from:
Offer 1: Get Proficy Historian at our lowest price ever—up to 90% less than OSI
Offer 2: Swap your current OSI, AVEVA, or eDNA historian license for a Proficy Historian license at absolutely no additional cost. You’ll then also enjoy product support at 50% off your previous rate with OSI, AVEVA, or eDNA.
Thousands of companies worldwide depend on Proficy Historian for gathering their most important data. Take advantage of:
- Modern visualization and data in context with Historian Analysis app
- Up to 100 million tags with Proficy Historian Enterprise
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