Posted by Mike Fahrion on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 @ 04:00 AM
Dear Reader:
The 2000's, or the Aughts if you will, are over. An entire decade zipped right by - and what a decade it was!
Remember Y2K? Seems like a quaint concern now doesn't it? It's almost symbolic of the "digital decade" of the 1990s - Y2K was about the biggest thing we could find to work ourselves into a tizzy.
Since then we've had 9/11, two wars, hanging chads, Google-ization, Katrina, a fierce tsunami, Climate Change®, and the Great Recession.
The Aughts were quite an ordeal. We just wrapped up the most difficult decade of our careers. And it shook us up. I doubt there is an irrationally exuberant bone left in your body. You're worried about your 401k and what your kids will need to do to meet or beat your standard of living.
It's time to get over it.
It's been tough, but it's over. And don't believe for a second that opportunities don't exist, for us or for our offspring.
There will always be successful people.
Take three steps back. Take two deep breaths. Now congratulate yourself. Survival of the Aughts was a notable feat. Now it's time to saddle up and make things happen for yourself, for your family and for your career.
Don't let the lingering haze of the Aughts cloud your vision. Technology continues to develop at a phenomenal pace opening new doors for pioneers and leaving a path of opportunities in its wake for anyone with vision and unrelenting dedication.
On your journey you will pass many who plod along, one foot in front of the other, staring down only at the sidewalk in front of them as they bemoan their IRA, or some other excuse not to achieve their potential. Don't let them drag you into their viper pit of discontent. You won't run into a single one of them on the sandy shores of your retirement beach house.
A few weeks ago I watched an interview of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, two men that understand success and overcoming obstacles. Buffett declared that "It's never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but it's not always a smooth ride."
My own version would be - never bet against Engineers. You have been trained to solve problems, big and small. And you're damn good at it. Put those skills to work and you'll solve whatever problem that you elect to pursue - as long as you do it with unrelenting dedication.
Enough of my soapboxing. What am I doing?
Lots. I'll skip the personal stuff, other than to say that it's imperative that yourself and family come first, otherwise you'll never be successful.
Here at B&B I'm cranking up the beans on the new product machine. New products not only do great things for B&B, but if I'm doing my job, they help you too.
Check your mailbox and find your brand new B&B Electronics catalog. If you haven't received yours yet, someone has already pilfered your copy. Click here to get your copy before they're gone.
Its chock full of great new products that just might help you and I kick off the Aughts with a bang. Here are a few of my favorites.
USB is a fantastic way to make quick and easy connections. But let's face it, when the folks were developing the USB specification they were thinking about speakers, printers and other namby pamby devices in comparison to the applications that you and I run into. When you use USB in a mobile, lab or industrial setting you have got to have isolation - USB doesn't have it. Sure B&B has had isolated USB to serial converters for ages, but what about the ever-growing list of other USB devices that are finding their way off of the desktop and into demanding applications? We now have a simple, plug it in and forget it, USB to USB isolator that easily isolates all kinds of USB devices from vicious surges and ground loops. Frankly, starting at only $99 I don't know anyone that shouldn't have one. The only question is do you need the 2000 volt or the 4000 volt model!
We just completed the most rigorous testing we've ever done for an industrial product line. Shock, vibration, humidity, intense RF and magnetic fields, 4000 volt surges, 15000 volt zaps just to name a few. All that testing was done to prove to ourselves, and to you, that we've developed our most rugged and reliable family of serial converters ever. The specs that we used were the worst case test levels from IEEE 1613 and IEC61850. Those are both specs for the construction of communications networks in electrical substations and represent some of the harshest electrical environments you'll find. So whether you're working on a smart grid project, or are in an environment where only a tough-as-nails converter will do, the new iLinx Hardened line will be just the ticket. There is a model for every application. 232 to 422/485 conversion, 485/422 isolation, 2 wire to 4 wire conversion, 232 isolation, and 232/422/485 to single or multimode fiber.
Have you ever needed to extend Ethernet into a hard to wire location - or beyond the 100 meter limit? Ethernet Extenders are a plug and play solution that allows you to extend the reach of your network using virtually any pair of unused wires. And now we've added a version that works over coaxial cable - making it easy to use that old network cable that's already lurking in your walls, or easily convert a video coax link over to Ethernet - and it works over 8000 feet!
Last summer I showed you a new mini version of our popular Ethernet to serial converters ("Ethernet Serial Servers" if you prefer the more uppity term) - and it was a huge hit. So now we've added two new versions, a RS-422/485 version and a version that supports RS-232, 422 and 485. If you're looking for a quick and easy way to hang a serial device on your Ethernet Network you won't find a better fit!
There's more, but that's enough for this letter. Take a few minutes to thumb through the new product section of your B&B catalog to check it out for yourself!
Comments and feedback are welcome.
Happy Connections,
Mike Fahrion
e-support@bb-elec.com
815-433-5100
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Thu, Oct 22, 2009 @ 01:51 PM
It's here - the definitive icon of fall has arrived.
Pumpkins are picked, leaves turned to golden hues and giant combines lumber through the Illinois cornfields. But that indeed is subtle evidence in comparison to the watershed event of the season.
That's right, dear reader, you know it is fall because the autumn edition of the B&B Electronics catalog has just arrived in your mail slot. 136 vibrant pages of data connectivity wonders unleashing the crisp exhilaration of the fall season.
So finish your pumpkin carving and wash that pumpkin seed slime off your fingers while I take you on a unique tour. Not some droning, guided bus tour but a journey of ideas and solutions.
Time is short, let's dive in.
The single most ubiquitous language in the industrial world, Modbus, is an elegantly simple and open protocol. Over its 30 year history it's been implemented on RS-232, RS-485 and Ethernet by thousands of manufacturers. That enormous success predicts that you will run into quirky Modbus connectivity issues. Mark did when he got called out to an oil rig that had two RS-232 transducers (both unfortunately hardcoded with an address of 1) that needed to be connected to a PLC via Modbus TCP. A quick call to B&B's support team guided Mark to page 12. When you've got a Modbus conundrum, the Vlinx MESR family of Modbus gateways is the solution and now both of Mark's transducers are connected into his Modbus/TCP control system with no conflicts.
A few weeks back I got a voice mail from plant engineer David, "Mike, I've got a problem" (my favorite kind of voice mail). David's plant had a work cell with productivity problems due to high setup times. Previously masked by high production volumes, now that the plant is turning over products every few days it had constrained the entire manufacturing operation with its long setup cycle. David was tasked with automating the programming process which would allow both operators to focus on retooling instead of futzing with the two aging PLC's. Simple enough, each controller had a serial port (one RS-232, the other RS-485). But the crux of the problem was that the work cell was out of reach of the plant's Ethernet and extensive wiring work wasn't in the budget. David's remedy was on pages 18 and 82. A two port Wi-Fi serial server and an industrial-grade outdoor access point provided the connectivity needed for remote programming and monitoring of the PLC's, eliminating thousands of dollars of wiring costs.
John is a crack SI in New England. He was adding a SCADA system to several wells in a municipality that previously had nothing but local control (and a lean budget). While there were bundles of wires going between the pump house and the control panel, there was no Cat5 cable in this 1980's installation. John was able to leave the trencher back at the shop using the Ethernet Extenders on page 32. Using a pair of extenders and an extra pair of wires in the cable bundle he was able to get full Ethernet connectivity into the pump house.
Jesse called me late in August. Jesse's company had installed three electronic traffic-information signs in Texas and had seven more installations to go. But things weren't going well. In only six weeks they had lost communications to the signs twice due to lightning storms and the contract was in jeopardy. After outage #2 they wisely brought in Jesse to diagnose the problem. He called me to review the two grounding practices he found; the design as intended, and how it was actually wired. And he also called to tell me that he was less than pleased to find that it was not a B&B Electronics RS-485 converter that had been installed. Not only was the converter fried, but it didn't even provide proper connections for grounding. Jesse's solution was on page 49, a triple isolated RS-485 converter that not only provided the isolation badly needed to survive a Texas lightning season, but also had the proper connectors and terminals to eliminate the bad wiring practices he found in the field (B&B is the serial market leader for good reason!).
Matt was another systems integrator with a challenge. He'd been tasked with adding SCADA to 14 water towers in an isolated community. Now, anyone could solve this problem with some brute force and a lot of installation labor. But that's not how you win business or turn a profit - something everyone is well in-tune with this year. Matt found his solution on page 74, where he selected a Zlinx wireless I/O module to beam the information from his level and flow transducers down to the control panel, where it flowed easily into his software thanks to Zlinx native Modbus protocol.
I've run out of time faster than I ran out of pages, so I'll leave it to the powers of your own imagination to conjure the unique connectivity solutions available in the remainder of your catalog.
Don't have your own copy? Click over to the web site and request one before they run out, that would lead to a dull fall season to be sure!
Happy Connections,
Mike Fahrion
e-support@bb-elec.com
815-433-5100