Tuesday, 23 December 2014

Methodology work stream of Automation Industry: - Process stream of all the mechanization business are same as depicted beneath




1.Requirements: - There are distinctive necessities of robotized frameworks as indicated by the need of customers and industry. It might be utilized as a part of Manufacturing industry, Assembling, Load Distribution mechanized frameworks, Automated timing control circuits, for example, conveyer sashs, speed and procedure controllers and so on. A programmable rationale controller(plc's) can be customized and gathered as per particular application of work, such IC's are otherwise called Asic's(application particular incorporated circuits). Before amassing any controller gadget it ought to be checked and tried to satisfy the standards and the necessities of the work.

2.Design: - Designers need to outline the circuits according to the prerequisites; the configuration ought to be minimized and force proficient. The creator ought to remember the spot where mechanized frameworks must be introduced and configuration it appropriately. It needs implanted/Chip level programming, mimicking and testing before the usage.

3.Implementation: - Implementation comes after fruitful outlining and endorsed work methodology of the robotized frameworks. The creator/Assembler can just actualize/ Install/ Assemble the framework in the wake of taking regard from the customer were the frameworks must be conveyed.

4.Verification: - After the establishment of the robotized framework, it ought to be checked and confirmed, after the complete establishment it ought to be clarified to the customers and taking their 100% certification for fulfillment. It ought to be noted that mechanized machine parts need nonstop supervision, testing, dispatching and repaired at whatever point required.

5.Maintenance: - Maintaining the general proficiency of any mechanized industry obliges wellbeing checkup and upkeep of apparatus at normal interims of time, redesigning the frameworks as per the most recent innovation will enormously build the general effectiveness.

As the necessities of value yield is expanding, need of robotized frameworks are expanding step by step, there are numerous focal points for the organizations to pick mechanized frameworks as contrasted with manuals are as per the following:-

1.increased benefit with less work needed
2.increased Consistency and dependability
3.increased precision and accuracy
4.high volume generation
5.safer
6.energy effective
7.reduced downtime
8.improved quality
9.accountable and simple to handle

The main downsides of robotized frameworks are high introductory establishment costs, on the off chance that we search for long haul premise than it is more useful and financially savvy.
For smooth work stream in Automation businesses there are some key focuses:-

1.incorporation of new innovations, hypotheses and techniques to create the present modern procedure
2.optimizing the targets to be conveyed
3.research on perplexing mechanical procedure
4.coordination between the colleagues
5.creative colleagues
6.understanding and conveying yields as indicated by business process
7.proper information administration
8.process progression and Disaster recuperation
9.deep procedure examination
10.programming and designing the apparatuses
11.reporting to the unrivaled
12.security and security measures


In any modern environment the aforementioned key focuses ought to be remembered while working. Procedure stream of each industry may change as indicated by the need and methodology executed, But the essential procedure stream will stay same.

Friday, 19 December 2014

Motion Control Market in Midst of Record Year

December 16, 2014 – Global shipments for motion control products grew by nine percent to $2.3 billion in the first nine months of 2014, according to new statistics released by the Motion Control Association (MCA), the industry’s trade group.

“The strong growth in the market is impacting the entire automation industry. We’re seeing this reflected in the large increase of exhibitors and floor space at our upcoming Automate trade show (March 23-26, 2015 at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois)”, said Dana Whalls, Vice President of MCA. “Overall, the show is already 56% larger and motion control specific exhibitors are currently up 209% over the last show as motion control suppliers look to help more companies reap the benefits of adding automation technologies.”

“We’ve seen growth in each statistical category year to date,” said Alex Shikany, MCA Director of Market Analysis. “Through September, the strongest growth has been in the AC Motors category, at 59%. Sales of motion controllers have continued to rise and are up 36% over the same period last year. Motors, the largest statistical category, has grown seven percent, while actuators and mechanical systems are up 12%.”

Individually, the third quarter of 2014 followed a good first half with 14% growth to $794 million. The main growth categories for the third quarter were AC motors (101%), motion controllers (35%), and actuators/mechanical systems (20%).

MCA’s most recent survey of motion control manufacturers revealed that 59% of respondents believe that total shipments of motion control products will remain flat in the next six months, 38% believe the market will increase, and three percent expect it to decline.

MCA summarizes market results from suppliers and distributors in quarterly tracking reports and trend analysis reports. These reports examine orders and shipments by major product category quarterly and annually with helpful tables and graphics. Growth rates and book to bill ratios are provided for each product category. MCA also provides an economic indicator report, which enables report users to interpret quarterly statistics from the standpoint of macro-economic indicators by individual manufacturing industry, as identified by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).

All reports are available free of charge to all MCA members. Members providing data for the reports receive “full” versions of the reports, which are highly detailed examinations of order and shipment results. Non-participating members receive “abridged” reports, which contain shipment results. Members find the reports valuable as gauges of overall market performance and as benchmarks for assessing relative company performance.

About MCA
The Motion Control Association (MCA) is a global not-for-profit trade group dedicated to promoting the understanding and use of motion control technologies and developing business opportunities for mechanical and electronic (mechatronics) motion control companies.  Its members include manufacturers of complete motion control systems, component manufacturers, system integrators, distributors, end users, consulting firms, academic institutions and research groups directly involved with mechanical and electronic (mechatronics) motion control around the world.  MCA is part of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3).

About Association for Advancing Automation (A3)
The Association for Advancing Automation is the global advocate for the benefits of automating. A3 is the umbrella group for the Motion Control Association (MCA), Robotic Industries Association (RIA), and AIA – the vision and imaging association. MCA, RIA, and AIA combined represent 750 automation stakeholders from throughout the world.

Thursday, 18 December 2014

B-Scada to supply HMI/SCADA Software to Indonesian Power Plant

August 26, 2014 - B-Scada to supply Enterprise HMI/SCADA software to Indonesian Power Plant. B

-Scada’s Indonesian partner, LDK, will be installing the software as a web monitoring solution for the new Senipah Gas Power Plant operated by PT. Kartanegara Energi Perkasa.

The Senipah Power Plant is an important part of the Indonesian government’s ongoing efforts to provide electricity to the rapidly growing East Kalimantan region of Indonesia. Today, approximately 70 million Indonesians live without electricity. The government plans to connect an additional 1.3 million households through the year 2025.

About B-Scada
B-Scada specializes in the compelling visualization of real-time data. Its visualization technology and SCADA products are deployed in manufacturing, power & utilities, transportation, petrochemical, building automation, and other fields of business where visualization of real time data is critical. B-Scada's in-house expertise and experience has provided them the opportunity to partner with companies from various vertical markets, and assist them to develop custom solutions that meet their specific needs. B-Scada's goal is to help clients transfer real-time production and operational data into actionable information through graphically-compelling, functional, and intuitive user interfaces.    

Source:-http://www.automation.com/portals/process-automation/scada-rtu/b-scada-to-supply-hmiscada-software-to-indonesian-power-plant  

OSI to deliver 7 SCADA/EMS Systems to 7 Companies

December 17, 2014 - Open Systems International (OSI) has been awarded seven contracts by a Joint Utility Procurement (JUP) project to deliver seven SCADA/EMS systems.

JUP members include: Gainesville Regional Utilities, Florida; Lakeland Electric, Florida; Memphis Light, Gas & Water, Tennessee; Minnkota Power Cooperative, Inc., North Dakota; South Mississippi Electric Power Association, Mississippi; City of Tallahassee, Florida; and Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative, Inc., Michigan.

The JUP group has been a voluntary membership program since the mid-1990s, between a group of utilities that wanted to collaborate on procurement and support of their SCADA/EMS systems. The utilities achieve economies of scale savings in the procurement, implementation and support costs as well as collaborative relationship between parties to assist in the long-term support of these systems. The utilities leverage not only the buying power of the combined utilities but also coordinate periodic system upgrades to ensure they stay current with the latest technology.

The seven new SCADA/EMS systems are based on OSI’s monarch (Multi-platform Open Network ARCHitecture) platform and include OSI’s next-generation, .NET based Graphical User Interface, SCADA, Historian and Generation Management and Transmission Management applications.

“We are very excited and pleased to have the JUP group’s trust in OSI and our technology and we welcome this group to our family of users. We are confident that this project will be of an exemplary execution and will be delivered on schedule and within budget,” said Bahman Hoveida, President & CEO of OSI.

“From the viewpoint of current ability, business and personal relations and future enhancements, we have found OSI to be everything we expected and more. This decision was made with a great deal of research and investigation and in the end, we found OSI to be more than a product. We found each individual to be part of a talented and dedicated family who have produced a system with which they take personal pride and ownership. It is an honor to be associated with such,” said Tommy Clark, Director of Computer and Control Systems at South Mississippi Electric Power Association.

About JUP Members:
Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU), is a multi-service utility owned by the City of Gainesville and is the 5th largest municipal electric utility in Florida. GRU serves approximately 93,000 retail and wholesale customers in Gainesville and surrounding areas, offering electric, natural gas, water, wastewater and telecommunications services.

Lakeland Electric is a full service municipal utility, servicing over 120,000 customers with some of the most economically priced electricity in the state of Florida. Lakeland Electric is the third largest publicly owned utility in Florida and was one of the first to offer power in the Sunshine State over 110 years ago.

Memphis Light, Gas &Water (MLGW) is the nation’s largest three-service municipal utility, serving nearly 421,000 customers. Since 1939, MLGW has met the utility needs of Memphis and Shelby County residents by delivering reliable and affordable electricity, natural gas and water service.

Minnkota Power Cooperative, Inc. (MPC) is a regional generation and transmission cooperative serving 11 member-owner distribution cooperatives. Minnkota’s service area of 34,500 square miles is located in eastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota. Through its generation resources, Minnkota has some of the most competitive wholesale electrical rates in the country.

The City of Tallahassee is committed to enriching the quality of life in Tallahassee by providing clean and reliable electric service to their customers through a professional and diverse workforce that is committed to safe, responsible, cost effective and customer-focused operations. They are a vertically integrated electric utility with generation, transmission and distribution operations. As the 4th largest municipal electric utility in Florida and the 22nd largest in the United States (of over 2,000), their 295 employees are dedicated to meeting the electric service needs of their customers.

South Mississippi Electric Power Association (SMEPA) is a Generation and Transmission cooperative that has been in business for more than 40 years. SMEPA began by meeting the wholesale power requirements of seven small electric power associations. SMEPA provides reliable, economical electric power for more than 412,000 homes and businesses served by their eleven Member systems.

Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative, Inc. (WPSC) is a generation and transmission electric cooperative headquartered in Cadillac, Michigan. Wolverine is owned by and supplies wholesale electric power to seven members: Cherryland Electric Cooperative, Great Lakes Energy, HomeWorks Tri-County Electric Cooperative, Midwest Energy Cooperative, Presque Isle Electric & Gas Co-op, Spartan Renewable Energy and Wolverine Power Marketing Cooperative. Wolverine members have served rural portions of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula for nearly 70 years and today, they provide electricity to more than 260,000 homes, farms and businesses.

OSI  provides open, state-of-the-art and high-performance automation solutions to utilities worldwide. These solutions include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, Network Management Systems (NMS), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distribution Management Systems (DMS), Outage Management Systems (OMS), Generation Management Systems (GMS), Substation Automation systems (SA); Data Warehousing and Historians, as well as individual software and hardware products and Smart Grid solutions for utility operations. OSI is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Infineon Launches ARM-Based Auto Bridge Drivers

Infineon announced at Electronica an ARM-based Embedded Power family of bridge drivers offering an unmatched level of integration to address the growing trend towards intelligent motor control for a wide range of automotive applications.
Infineon Embedded-Power-IC_VQFN-48Infineon integrated on one chip a microcontroller using the ARM Cortex-M3 processor, as well as the nonvolatile memory, the analogue and mixed signal peripherals, the communication interfaces along with the mosfet gate drivers.

Visit the team at Electronics Weekly’s stand in Hall A6 – 569

Sample quantities of the first members of the Embedded Power family are available for the TLE987x series for three-phase (brushless DC) motors and the TLE986x series for two-phase (DC) motors.

Infineon combined its proprietary automotive qualified 130nm Smart Power manufacturing technology with its experience in motor control drivers to put the Embedded Power family in a standard QFN package of only 7x7mm. Where previous multi-chip designs needed a stand-alone microcontroller, a bridge driver and a LIN (local interconnect network) transceiver, automotive system suppliers now benefit from motor control designs of minimum external components count.


The Embedded Power products reduce the component count from today’s approximately more than 150 down to less than 30, allowing integration of all functions and associated external components for the motor control in a PCB area of merely 3cm². The Embedded Power family thus enables the integration of electronics close to the motor for true mechatronic designs.

“Smart motor control applications demand a large variety of sophisticated motor control schemes that are driven by energy efficiency, system cost reduction and comfort needs,” says Andreas Doll, vice-president and general manager, automotive body power at Infineon Technologies AG.

“Infineon addresses these design challenges with its new automotive qualified Embedded Power family for intelligent motor control using the ARM Cortex-M3 processor. Fostering the system-on-chip approach that combines a powerful microcontroller, the mosfet gate drivers along with all necessary sense, control and actuate functions, our scalable Embedded Power family makes automotive system suppliers benefit from reduced system costs, improved reliability and less system level complexity.”


Technical features of the TLE987x and TLE986x bridge drivers

Both, the TLE987x and the TLE986x, use the ARM Cortex TM-M3 processor. Their peripheral set includes a current sensor, a successive approximation 10-bit ADC synchronized with the capture and compare unit (CAPCOM6) for PWM (pulse width modulation) control and 16-bit timers.

A LIN transceiver is integrated to enable communication to the devices along with a number of general purpose I/Os.

Both series include an on-chip linear voltage regulator to supply external loads. Their flash memory is scalable from 36kB to 128kB. They operate from 5.4V up to 28V.

An integrated charge pump enables low voltage operation using only two external capacitors, resulting in a significant BoM reduction when compared with the commonly used voltage bootstrap techniques.

The bridge drivers feature programmable charging and discharging current. The patented current slope control technique optimises the system EMC behavior for a wide range of mosfets.

The products can withstand load dump conditions up to 40V while maintaining an extended supply voltage operating down to 3.0V where the microcontroller and the flash memory are fully functional.
The TLE987x series of bridge drivers addresses three-phase (BLDC) motor applications such as fuel pumps, HVAC blowers, engine cooling fans, water pumps as well as other pumps and fans.

It supports sensor-less and sensor based (including field-oriented control) BLDC motor applications addressed by LIN or controlled via PWM. Its LIN transceiver is compatible with LIN 2.2 and certified by IBEE-Zwickau and C&S Group.

It  includes six fully integrated NFET drivers optimised to drive a three-phase motor via six external power Nfets.

The TLE986x series is optimised to drive two-phase DC motors by integrating four Nfet drivers .It is suitable for applications such as sunroofs, power window lifts and generic smart motor control via Nfet H-bridge.

Infineon and third party vendors support the ARM Cortex-M3 based Embedded Power family of bridge drivers by a complete development tool chain. It includes compilers, debuggers, evaluation board, LIN low-level driver and configuration tool as well as example software code for motor control. Also, Infineon provides starter kits to support the design-in.


Engineering samples of the TLE987x and TLE986x bridge drivers in a space-saving VQFN-48 package are available with volume production planned to start in Q1 2015. For both series, there are several derivatives available, differing for example in system clock (24MHz or 40MHz) and flash sizes.

Source:-http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/design/embedded-systems/141322-2014-11/

More on: Newbury Electronics Tracks Animals


Newbury animal tracker vulture
Yesterday it was announced that Newbury Electronics is to start a new electronic design services division called Newbury Innovations, and that the team transferring to the new entity had already designed some interesting electronics, including tags for tracking wild animals.
Here is some more on those tags.
They were created for the Swansea Live Animal Monitoring (SLAM) group, led by Professor Rory Wilson at Swansea University, are the size of a stamp, and weigh 3g.
Dr Mark Holton of SLAM approached Newbury Electronics with initial designs in the spring. From this, Holton and the firm developed the concept to get the smallest PCB that would still work with multiple sensors – see below.
To date Newbury Electronics has supplied around 200 of the sensor/loggers along with several dozen bespoke GPS logger, and timed release modules.
Newbury/SLAM animal tracker“We have been working on data analysis algorithms which, together with these devices, will certainly place us as a significant competitor within the animal research market place, said Holton, who is also MD of Swansea University spin-out Wildbyte Technologies.
The list of animals so far fitted with the trackers includes: badgers, beavers, camels, eagles, vultures, condors, whale sharks, turtles and humans – the latter to aid psychology and sports injury recovery through movement analysis, said Newbury.
Most recently was monitoring the movement of turtles off the west coast of Africa.
In this case the sensors detect movement and heading from accelerometer and geomagnetic sensors, along with light, temperature and depth – sensors are either on-board or blugged into the board.
Up to 75 million data points recorded over three weeks has been analyses to give an insight into behaviour under (movement and orientation, and depth) and at the surface (+GPS) including duration of dives, the number of breaths taken and foraging patterns at depth.
Newbury animal tracker turtle‘Daily Diary’ tag
  • Weight: ~2g +battery +housing)
  • Size ~27x26x8mm
  • Accelerometer: 3axis 13bit resolution +/-16g (3.9mg/LSB)
  • Magnetometer: 3axis 12bit resolution +/-1.3Ga
  • Thermometer: -40 to +85°C (0.1°C)
  • Air pressure: 300 to 1,100hPa (0.01hPa steps) Not active in sealed housing
  • Depth sensor: down to 200m (resolution ~1m)
  • Light – light dependent resistor (12bit) for dark to daylight transition
  • logging rate: 60Hz max
Sourec:-http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/design/embedded-systems/newbury-electronics-tracks-animals-2014-11/


Tuesday, 16 December 2014

Latest Electronic Embedded Systems News

Hi-fi card for Raspberry Pi A and B plus models

 Embedded Systems Training Institute
Cirrus audio Raspberry PiElement14 has launched a second hi-fi audio card for Raspberry Pi, this time for the A+ and B+, called the Cirrus Logic Audio Card.

Previously it introduced a hi-fi card for the model A and B based on the same WM5102 chip – which was branded Wolfson until Cirrus bought Wolfson.

“The Cirrus Logic Audio Card offers Raspberry Pi A+ and B+ users the ability to input and output high definition audio, said Element14. “The card allows audio input using either line level analogue, stereo digital [SPDIF], or on-board digital microphones. Outputs are line, headset analogue outputs, and SPDIF.”

Application include internet radio streaming, audio recording and sound playback.

“The Cirrus Logic Audio Card brings all the features found on the previous ['Wolfson'] version of this card from Wolfson to the Raspberry Pi A+ and B+ models. It offers a similar level of flexibility as a PC soundcard,” said Claire Doyle, head of Raspberry Pi at Element14.

A bespoke Raspbian image, and more information, is available from Element14′s Raspberry Pi community website.  “We are using the latest raspbian image and have added all the Cirrus drivers to it and packaged it up to give our customers and community an easy path to using the card,” an element14 spokesman told Electronics Weekly.

Source:-http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/design/embedded-systems/hi-fi-card-raspberry-pi-b-plus-models-2014-12/