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Shawn Tierney (host): Welcome back to the automation podcast. My name is Shawn from Insights, and I wanna thank you for tuning back in. Now in this episode, I had the pleasure of meeting up with Eugene Silva from Emerson to learn all about the industrial control and monitoring system that comes with their industrial dust collectors. Now I thought it was very interesting. I hope you do as well.

But before we jump into this episode, I do wanna thank our members who made the video edition possible. So So when a vendor does a sponsor of the episode, the video becomes a member only perk, and that is just $5 a month to get started. So thank you members for making the video edition possible. With that, I also wanna thank our sponsor for this week’s show, the automationschool.com and the automationblog.com. I have an update later in the show what’s going on on both sites, and I hope you’ll, stick around and listen to that, towards the end of the show.

But with that said, let’s go ahead and jump into this week’s episode of the automation podcast. It is my pleasure to welcome Emerson back on the show and Eugene on the show to talk about dust collector monitoring. You guys can see the slide if you’re watching dust collector monitoring and control solutions. I’m excited about this because this is a solution versus, like, a discrete product. So with that said, Eugene, would you please introduce yourself to our audience?

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. Shawn, thank you very much for this opportunity. Hello, everyone. Here’s Eugenio Silva. I’m a product manager, intelligence automation within Amazon, the discrete automation part of Amazon.

I’m glad today gonna share some, some of our understanding and learnings with the dust collector monitoring control solution. And, when I talk about that, Emerson is also involved in in others, types of solutions that, our purpose is to drive innovation that makes the world healthier, safer, smart, and more sustainable. And I’m also responsible for continuous emission monitoring, pest collectors is one, utility, energy and compressed air management solutions. So for today, I prepared something that, we go a little bit, into why this type of, test collector solution is important, from understand of our customers and industry point of view. We’re going to look into the fundamentals of a dust collection, from the particle sensors to the dust collector systems, and then dive in into the dust collector solution where I’m going to provide you, some features, also explanation why they are there, and how this kind of capabilities deliver value to our end users and customers, and, hopefully, to have time as well to have a short, recorded demo that, brings us, full scope how the operators look into into that solution when they they use it.

Shawn Tierney (host): But before we jump in, I wanna thank the automationschool.com for sponsoring this episode of the show. That’s where you’ll find all of my online courses on Allen Bradley and Siemens PLCs and HMIs. So if you know anybody who needs to get up to speed on those products, please mention the automationschool.com to them. And now let’s jump back into the show.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): In terms of key applications, industries use cases, dust collector is essential for many industries that produce dust, produce any kind of a pounder, any kind of a fume, and typically air pollution control, boundary processing, handling, industrial dust, fume ventilation are covered by one or another way by dust collectors. And, the industries that I put in both, these are the the dirty ones in the sense that they produce a lot of, particle, either in terms of gases or dust. Therefore, the regulations that are in these industries are quite strong. So cement, metals, chemical plus, carbon, black and toner, like lithium battery assembly, disassembly, metal foundry. And what is interesting is the either you produce a waste that you have to manage it properly, can be also recycled, for example, in the industries like plastics in food or wood.

All the collected dust that you have, you can also reuse and sometimes recycle. But why? Why this is important? Why is it important to extract dust from these industries? Let’s start on the right side because this is what the the customer is looking for.

Because the cost of our pollution, the hazards, this this safe safety accidents that can be caused by this kind of harmful airborne and particles and forms are so substantial, then of course, it’s very much regulated in all these industries. And if you calculate the costs on the public health, Sometimes big accidents in plants where even big fires or hazards to people operating the plant. We talk about billions per year, the cost of that. And one of the consequences of having such issues is that when the dust extraction system is not working properly or you have really a downtime. For example, I’m going to explain that this really depends on components that are very, they use so often that they wear down, like filters, like post files.

And each time that we have a downtime is not the cost of the dust collector downtime that’s important. It’s the overall downtime costs that imposes to the operation of the plant because in order to be conformist, they have to stop operating until they fix the issue. And these downtimes, of course, arise in many ways in different aspects. How complex is this dust collector. But I’m I’m going to give you, some insights that, if a dust collector system does not have any solution to monitoring real time or control, the efficiency.

Basically, the personnel is managing these assets without any sight, and everything can go wrong. That’s why the TCO and the maintenance aspects are quite important. Because if you’re not aware where is the problem, when you have to plan and this becomes a firefighting or reactive mode, then your costs are going to be quite high. And when you talk about the TCO, it’s about the cost of the equipment, the acquisition, the cost of operation, meaning not only the personnel, but in this case, we use a lot of compressed air. I’m going to explain why.

The maintenance costs, as we explained, and the disposal costs. Disposal means, the filter bags that must be replaced and and changed, but also the the dust, the fume, all the elements that must be, properly managed and recycling sometimes. So this is the aspects why it’s important. Now let’s turn us about, the benefits and savings. So if you use the dust collector solutions, of any kind that can monitor in real time all the aspects, of the operation of a dust collector system and, also contributes turning maintenance from reactive to preventative and maybe predictive, then the best thing that you can do is to avoid huge penalties.

As you can see on this graph, every decade, let’s say, the fines are getting steeper. And the reason for that is because of the the damage and the result of a big, like, say, issue on the plant regarding to this dust part is is quite heavy. So, therefore, we talk about 100 k’s or even plus in some industries like primary metal and chemical, where one single incident, it’s about a 100 k in average or more. And then, of course, to avoid that and to be completely compliance, you have to operate that systems, in many cases, 24 by seven. And, therefore, any way possible to reduce downtime and, as a plus, reduce the energy costs because for compressed air, you have to use electricity, then, it pays off because you’re going to be full time compliant.

And the other thing is if you do properly, monitor and control your dust collector system, you also increase the filtration efficiency. So that means you are far from the high levels, where after that threshold, you would be penalized. You can operate under, conformist, under compliance, but can also expand the equipment life. For example, the life bags, the post valves, you don’t have it to replace as often, which is the case if you don’t do any real time monitoring diagnostics. On the left side, the way that we talk about improving maintenance is the total cost.

When we talk about the filter life, at least one unit of a filter, It’s about 18 k, US dollars. And you see that, the tip of a iceberg is just the purchase price. The dust collector system, like, of course, has an acquisition cost. But below that, as a total cost of ownership, you have the energy that you expand utilizing the systems. You have the filter bags.

You have to keep parts in your inventory. You have to dispose of that. And, of course, you have the downtime costs and also the labors labor costs. Now I’m going to just to give, a chance to say, okay. Tell me how a dust collector system works.

Shawn Tierney (host): Before we get to that, we gotta pay the bills. So I wanna tell you about our sponsor, the automationschool.com. It’s actually the next room over. We have a huge training room. We have, some of the most unique products you’ll be able to work on.

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Eugenio Silva (Emerson): And these are going to be general principles and basics. In general, a dust collector system looks like this. It’s a unit where the air is pulled in at the bottom of the compartment, and this could be forced or not. And then the air gets out, on the top, the outlet, and the dust is collected on the outside of the bag. So if you see this, in this picture, we have one full bag in kind of light brown color with a specific fabric, could be porosis fabric, a PVC, or some even paper in some cases.

And then the cleaner exceeds at the top. And the what happens is that the dust cake builds up on the bags, on the outside part of the bag. And, if you see the number one on top, in that particular, entry point, we have two pulse valves with, compressed air in order to shake a little bit these, post bags, filter bags, and then knocks down the dust out of these bags, and then they are collected by a hopper at the bottom. Okay? So that’s basically, in general, how it works the principle.

It’s a bit more complicated. Here is just to show that in order to automate a dust collector system including the filter bags, we use, a combination of, electrical and pneumatic, components. And these are from post valves, the ones that continuously blow air into these pipes, the compressed air tanks that hold the right pressure and the right compressed air capacity in order to keep the filtration efficiency very high. Then you have the filter regulators that, you have to bring, the pressure of this line to higher enough, to to be efficient, but not so high to spend too much compressed air. Then you can use controllers, black boxes that are able to do a time based sequencing, but these are not so so much sometimes efficient because it doesn’t take into consideration all the diagnostics that you can get out of it.

And then, basically, the very important element is this, particle sensor that is on the outside of the clean air because that is gonna be your canary in the mind. Right? It’s gonna be the one that indicates if the filter, system is efficient efficient and if the the job is done right. And then the other things. But let’s go back to a very interesting view.

You remember this picture here that, you you’re looking at, a cross session of the dust collector. Now you could imagine how it looks like from the top. From the top, it looks like that. There is a compressed air tank, that covers, certain portion of the filters units. For example, it’s very common that a filter, complete filter unit, might have different compartments.

And in each of these compartments, you have a series of filter bags. And then imagine that you provide short but very powerful pulses of compressed air that are periodically injected on top of this columns. And below, there’s a filter bag. So, therefore, they are going to to receive to expand a little bit, and the dust cake then, outside of of their surface follows. And by inertial forces, of course, this dust is accumulated at the bottom, which is, extracted into a hopper.

Of course, now depending of the number of the filters per line, per roll, these pulse valves needs to pulse a little bit faster or not. And the interval time, if you just follow time based approach, could be three to six minutes. Now if you calculate the average filter units, you may have 12 of these filter bags. You can have about seven to 10 pulse valves per unit. It’s very common that, one large installation would have about, like, 500 pulse valves and four, six times more filters, install it.

And imagine that if each of them having boost every three minutes, 24 by seven, during seven days a week. So can you imagine the amount of compressed air that can be spent? That’s why these pulses must be very short and powerful, in hundred milliseconds to avoid it also big waste. I think that, picture on the left side, just to simply say that, it’s a lot of, interesting things to to get the dust removal, but basically is a jet of compressed air on top, that shakes the filter. And then by gravity, the dust cake is removed.

Shawn Tierney (host): It’s not just a filter. You know, I think main main people may just think, well, a dust collector is just this bag that catches all the dust. You’re actually, you know, you’re you you do have the bags, but, you’re using compressed air to sequentially, depends depending on how many you have, shake those bags in a sense by blowing air into them, to shake off the dust so it falls into the hopper. And so I can you can definitely see, like you were mentioning, if you have lots of these cylinders or these bags, then the sequencing has to be, you know, pretty pretty precise and and pretty, repeatable to make sure you’re you’re cleaning all of the bags off. And I’m I’m assuming too, you need to know when the hopper is full because everything stops working if if if the hopper gets, over full.

So very interesting. I think your diagrams do a great job of explaining it as well.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yeah. If I play a little bit when I mention that, it’s a a little bit the reverse, way of our vacuum cleaner. Right? Because Yeah. We suck the the dust inside of the bags.

Mhmm. And when the bags are completely full clogged, the suction, power, it’s far reduced. Right? So then you have to to empty our, let’s say, filter bags. Here is the although the all the dust is accumulated on the outside, the outer surface of the fabric, but the effect is the same.

If there’s so much dust on the surface or out of the surface, then, the air that is shown here, the intake, the air, and then the filter simply stops. That’s why affects completely the efficiency of, that, unit. And the post jet cleaning is a way to unclog or to clean, the filters in order to bring them to the more efficient operation.

Shawn Tierney (host): Yeah. Especially if you have lots of dust, you need an automatic way to continue to clean it and get it off of the filter and into the bin. So yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yeah. In in other cases, although you talk about, dust, of course, it could be any kind of a pounder. Like, for example, in the foods and beverage industry, you don’t want this for example, let’s say, a dry milk production. You don’t want that dust to be floating around because it can bring contamination. But believe it or not, it can ignite fire sometimes.

So that’s why it’s important to to get that completely eliminated. So this is the part that very people would say, okay, on the outlet where the the air should be cleaner, as you can see on the right side, that this, particle sensor is located at the outlet, clean air side. It has a very interesting the way it works is quite interesting. We use a we have a sensor in our portfolio called p 152 that, we take advantage of this triboelectric effect. Basically, this sensor, is coated with PTFE or a Teflon layer, so it’s completely electronic, electric isolated from from, of course, the media.

And then when the dust starts touching, that probe, a DC charge is transferred. But because of this, sensor probe is completely isolated, we set the flow layer, the resolution and the electric charge is in the order of a peak ramp. So 10 minus 12. And that the resolution is about point five picoamp. So, therefore, if you’re touching the particles, depends of their size, They are going to generate more or less electricity that’s going to be transferred.

And the ones that are just surround, they are not touching. For example, imagine that this, duct air exhausting pipe is quite big. A bit half meter, maximum one meter around that sensor, the particle also generates, induced charge in AC. And by measuring that, we have an idea about how clean is, of course, there that’s getting out. But it’s a bit more tricky than you can imagine because it looks like this.

Shawn Tierney (host): Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoy this week’s show. I know I really enjoyed it. And, of course, I wanna thank our members for making the video edition possible. So this vendor did not sponsor this episode.

So the video edition is available for members, and there’s some great graphics in their presentation you guys may wanna check out. Now with that said, we do have some really exciting podcast episodes coming up. I’m sitting down with Inductive. I’m sitting down with Software Toolbox. I’m sitting down with Siemens and a bunch of other vendors.

So we have plenty of new podcasts coming up in the coming weeks this summer. And I also wanted to give you an update of what’s going on over at the automation blog. We’ve had some new articles come out. Brandon Cooper, one of our freelancers, wrote a great article about emulating Allen Bradley e threes. We had a vendor, actually, submit an article and sponsor the site to submit an article about what makes a good automated palletizer.

We also had an update about the automation museum. That’s a fundraiser we’re running. We’re trying to open a automation museum. I got a lot of legacy stuff I’d like to donate to it, and I’d love to have it so you can come in and actually walk through, not just see the stuff, but actually learn on it. Right?

So maybe you have some old stuff in your plant. You come out to the automation museum, and you can learn how to use it. With that said, we’re also looking at possibly doing a podcast for automation museum to drive awareness of legacy automation. So any of you out there interested in that, contact me directly. And, you can do so over at the automationblog.com.

Just click on the contact button. And, we also have an article two articles from Brandon Cooper about things he learned as he transitioned from working in a plant to traveling around and visiting other plants to help them with their processes and automation. So check those articles out over at the automation blog. And finally, over at the automation school, you know, we have the new factor IO courses. We also have I just added a new lesson to the logics version of that course.

Somebody wanted to try to use bit shifts instead of counters, so I added a lesson on that. Plus, I’m now starting to update all of the courses, including the brand new ones I’m working on. So you’re gonna see a brand new start here lesson later in the week, and I’m working on some cool emulation, lateral logic for my PLC courses that if you don’t have any push buttons or limit switches, you can actually use this code I’m gonna give you for free to simulate the widget machine that I use as kind of the basis for my teaching. So in any case, check that out if you’re in one of my PLC courses over at the automationschool.com. And with that said, you know, I’m very thankful for all the vendors who come on, especially those who sponsor the episodes so I don’t have to do these commercials.

I’m not a big commercial guy, but I do wanna thank you for hanging in there and listening through this update. And now we’ll get right back into this episode of the automation podcast.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Every time you get, use the jet boost with the boost valves on top of the filter bags, it creates a peak. So that means the cleaning cycles that are happening in a duration of, just a 100 milliseconds. That’s why they are very, very thin. And they happening every two, three minutes, per roll. They have to they have in nature a little bit of noise because imagine that every time that, you clean, more dust gets into inside of the the filter back.

So that means it’s like when you clean your vacuum cleaner, immediately when you turn on that, some of this dust is gonna get inside immediately, and that’s the peak. But now imagine that, you have a rupture in the filter or you have a big role because, unfortunately, these the things are wear out. And then these peaks starts getting higher and higher. So, therefore, what we do when we, put that solution in place for a little time, let’s say, couple of days, we needed to kind of, set up, these thresholds. We need to figure out the level of noise that could be because depends very much the capacity, the types of, of a test.

But once you do that, in our solution, we set the thresholds like alarming, a warning alarm, which means that after that point, the maintenance crew, starts looking at, that could be a early indication that a filter bag is not okay until the maximum point that avoids any any nonconformist, issue, which is already a rupture. You really pass the time where this filter, must be replaced.

Shawn Tierney (host): So we’re looking at this chart for those who are listening. And the particle sensor, you know, it’s measuring the particles as air flows normally. But during the pulse, right, we’re forcing a lot of air back in, back down. So we’re getting a lot more, you know, than the average air would have x amount of particles. But if we’re forcing a bunch of it back in, we’re gonna see a lot more particles per, let’s say, hundred millisecond pulse.

Right? So we do expect a peak when we when we pulse it because we’re just forcing a lot of get back go into the reverse direction. So we can we catch the bag loose. But what you’re saying here on this chart, I find so in so much interesting. So you can quantify, like, the expected increase in, in dust that you’re gonna sense with the sensor when you go in the reverse, when you pulse pulse, blow the ear downwards to, to shake the bag free.

But you’re saying if that if that extra increased amount of detected dust is either too high, above normal, or too low below normal, then that tells you that you you could either have a clogged bag or you could have a burst bag. Is that am I understanding that correctly?

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. Is this correct? And then the interesting thing is that as soon as you’re getting closer to replace a filter back, this baseline starts raising a bit with a kind of, how can I say, there is a drift? Why? Exactly what you said.

A filter is completely clogged. It’s not yet any rupture, but is the efficiency of the cleaning is not so okay. So therefore, this slightly changes needs to be analyzed. Why I’m showing row one to row 10? Exactly in the picture, if you remember, a compartment filter with several, let’s say, filter bags, they are under the row.

So under the row one, you may have 10 filter bags, row two, row three, and so on. So that means you are able to indicate which row is the problem, but it might be that you still need to check further which of the filters in that particular row have the problems. The more quick this peak happens, more number of, filter bags can have a problem.

Shawn Tierney (host): Mhmm.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Okay?

Shawn Tierney (host): So you have one sensor on the exhaust, and you’re sequencing through, you know, blowing out or shaking out, you know, pulsing each of the rows. So that’s why we see, you know, one reading across the, you know, across the horizontal, and we see your row, row one, row two, row three, row four, each of them with discrete values or pulses. And like you just said, if you have multiple issues on a row, then you’re going to see, you know, a higher or lower peak depending on what the issue is. I’m with you.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. That’s why I’m going to show the other diagnostic capabilities that we needed to associate with this, particle sensor. And just to remember that, this particle sensor, we simply use one unit on the outlet part. That’s why I needed to make the sequence in serialization of the post because then I need to to synchronize with the post jets of every role.

Shawn Tierney (host): Mhmm.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): No? Row by row.

Shawn Tierney (host): And I think too, if you tried to do them all at once, the the you would need a lot higher pressure. So it it kinda makes sense to do it row by row because it reduces your maximum pressure required.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yeah. In this practical sense, we’re not be able to

Shawn Tierney (host): Differentiate.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Identify which of the roles, would be the problem. That’s why we kind of still have to do that. But now let’s give in a solution overview, and I think that, some of the key capabilities and features are going to highlight even more, the other, diagnostic capabilities that we are able to to provide in order to identify correctly and early as possible such issues. So this is a typical dust collector system. And if you look at around, if this dust collector system is just, let’s say, automated with nomadic electric components and they don’t have real time monitoring, you’re not really know the emission level.

If it also this is not real time monitoring with some diagnostics, then you are not able to identify when this particle sensor, for example, is completely taken by, the dust because the humidity entrance in that, in that pipe, or it might be that, it’s so dirty, your dust that, is already ingrained so much on the probe. Mhmm. So that’s why the poor, reliability or the low level sensitivity of that could be affected. And if you were not monitoring, these signals that I showed the these peaks synchronized with the post valve jets Mhmm. You don’t have any early warning.

Okay? The post valves basically are coils. They are solenoid coils

Shawn Tierney (host): Mhmm.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): With tag diaphragms that open and close at the speed of a hundred milliseconds. The point is that their life time is about a couple of millions of cycles. Mhmm. But imagine, in some cases, one, two years is already enough to to have end end of life. So a fault valve, has to be connected to a control system because you need to know if this is a short circuit or if the diaphragm is completely open.

And you can only do that if every time that you cycle the valve, you also, check that. For example, the power that, you drive the coil gives you a feeling if that is a coil that is already gone. Okay? Now let’s talk about the compressed air. Right?

If you have a a filter that is open, there’s a rupture. If you have, a diaphragm that’s completely gone open, you start consuming higher and higher the compressed air. The point is this is continuously increasing. You can just imagine that this is normal. But if you go into average and look at this in a historical way, you’re gonna see that this trend is caused because of the broken post valves, for example.

So that’s why it’s also important aspect of the automation solution is to minimize the usage of the compressed air is to have a clearly operating under a baseline that is normal. The filter bags, independent of the materials, because if you talk about life sciences, foods, chemical, or metal, they have a different materials. They have a different, where else, lifetime span. The point is the costs might be the filter itself is not so expensive. But going up there, exchange stopping, moving things around, getting the dust out before you change, putting all the personal protection equipment may take hours.

So, therefore, that is the cost of that. And if you’re not able to prevent or even have an early warning when that is going to occur, is gonna be a reactive, maintenance issue. Right? So that’s why just convincing that, it’s worth looking into different aspects. And that’s why, on the left side, when we talk about solutions, we talk about, the connectivity part that, we have to work with devices that are hard or four to 20 milliamps.

Some of devices are modbus to CP. Newer actuators in post faults could be mu m q t t or even OPC UA. That’s the the PLC part that, we have. And we can work with pneumatic systems, for example, that they turn at AP, PROFINET, or any other, standards. Then, of course, we have the IOs, that, we have to look at to control the post jet systems, but also to monitor the differential pressures, to measure the compressed here in some cases, until the parts where at the top, we put HMI SCADA software platform that, we pre engineered, in order to to make it simpler the development, of that solution by our OABS or many cases directly to our end users.

And all in the right are the elements that we offer in our portfolio. Some cases, OEMs of a dust collector systems just to take from us, and they might be that they have their own solution as well.

Shawn Tierney (host): So just for the audio audience, I know we’ve covered these products a lot, especially on the news show. But, I mean, I’m just wanna kinda go through a couple of these things. You got the ASCO product line. Right? So remote piloted valves and, you know, all of those, that category, you know, the, pulse valves.

But we also got the Advantex, which we’ve talked about, like figure filter regulators and, different cylinders. Topworks, which I think we’re all familiar with, proximity sensors and whatnot. And, some of the other products you guys, Rosemount, differential pressure transmitters. We also see, we have, the PAC systems. In this case, you could have edge analytics, and so you may have one of the PAC systems, edge IPCs.

And we even see the, down in the corner there, the Emerson PLC and IOs, which I think we’re all familiar with as well. So that kinda shows you how, you know, this solution, you know, they’re taking all these different products they have in their catalog and putting it together in one solution, which is, you know, you kinda need all this stuff. You know, basically understanding how it works. We just went through it. And so it’s interesting.

I don’t think I’ve seen a slide yet from Emerson where they kinda include in one application all, if not all, many of their their, different product lines. And then, the the skate on the top, it looks like, just some beautiful screens and charts and and, you know, dials showing the current status. So, and and I I didn’t mean to interrupt you, Gino, but nonetheless say that, especially since the people listening, they’ll be familiar with all those trade names because we’ve covered those in the past. But, in any case, let me turn it back to you.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): No. No. It’s thanks for highlighting. And I I say that, when I introduce myself that I’m from the discrete automation part of Amazon. Mhmm.

Because most of, people would know Amazon by the Rosemont, for example, pressure, Fisher valves, and then the, you know, the delta v, DCS. Right? This is the discrete automation part, and that’s why probably something new, for everybody here. Thank you very much. So when I look at that in a nutshell, we, of course, have to put the sensory devices, the PLC on top, the HMI scanner.

And, basically, what we provide is real time monitoring of this particulate, emissions. We detect but also locate where the leak is by compartments in rows. You can see on the picture that, on the top of this HMI screen, we have a filter unit with three compartments, compartment one, two, three. And each compartment has these rows on top, which is the number of rows, then the more a number of filter bags that, within each, compartment. So, therefore, just locating which compartment and which row, you have a problem, I can tell you it saves half day of the people, in the maintenance.

We also optimize the push at cleaning. It’s an, patent based algorithm that is completely adaptive, and works not just with the post valves, but, we put, head pressure sensors. And this fluctuation and the differential pressure that we measure from the outlet and inlet allows us, of course, to, increase or decrease the frequency of these push heads, which allows not only to be more efficient, but also minimize compressed air. And then finally, when you talk about solidoids involved diaphragms, these ones we can indicate one by one where they have problems. So, therefore, if you look at down to the other HMI screen, there are two rows on top.

The one that is a solenoid, the one that is a diaphragm, and these vertical bars are the filter bag health. If they are getting closer to red with the high levels, meaning that, their life span is already gone. And if you have, light indicators on the solenoid, the diaphragm depend of the color might be that you have a short circuit fail, open diaphragm. Therefore, you have also to replace. And, basically, when we install that solution, sometimes our customers, ask it to also integrate with their control systems.

So, therefore, they compress their generation, the fan, the hoppers, the safety alarms, of the plant sometimes are fully integrated as well. Now let’s talk very much about few features features because these are the ones that probably you haven’t seen yet. Wanna talk about our HMI control system is based on Movicon, Movicon next platform. And, basically, it provides everything that you know from the Scott HMI. And that’s why to use this in general for applications like OIE, energy management, in some others, infrastructure monitoring, like, smart cities, wastewater facilities, solar, mega mega plants, etcetera.

Of course, it provides data visualization, but, I like to highlight that, you could ask we provide connectivity to all major POCs that you can imagine, with communication drivers. Of course, the open standards like OPC UA, like, Modbus. And on the lower part, the the green, let’s say, the the gray part here is what we used for that solution. Sometimes we use a geo maps, to indicate where the filters are. Some geo references, let’s say geo fences as well.

The people have to be, with a personal protection equipment to be there. So there are some, real time, data that, of course, we are collecting for the particle emissions and other elements like differential pressure, header pressure. And then you have the headlines. You can see some screens that are completely dedicated to alarms and alerts. And one of these, diagnostics that you see are related to the solenoid, to the filter bag, and to the diaphragm diagnostics.

A lot of them are diagnostic get diagnosed in different ways. For example, the solenoids, we look into the power output of our IO cards to see if the valve post the solenoid is open or complete short circuit. The filter bag, I already explained it. We detect with some logic with the the particle sensors, And the diaphragm diagnostics is based on the header pressure because if it’s this diaphragm is completely open, the differential pressure within the chamber, it starts fluctuating, and then you know that there’s something wrong there. But all of them increases the filtration efficiency, changes from reactive to predictive maintenance, of course, keeps the site compliant, minimize dust emissions, and for sure increase equipment lifetime, like the filter units, and reduce the compressed air usage.

If you sum up all of that, the return in investment is it might be quite fast, of course, for large big large installations might be within two years, but it’s still a very fast return in investment for that particular solution. That’s what it looks like. A little bit, let’s say, zoom in. You see that they’re not nice looking, but they indicate graphically where the issues are, the number of issues, on this screen about thresholds alerts. The second one on the right side, is like the number of cycles.

Imagine that every pulse valve would have, about a couple of millions of cycles of lifetime. Here, you can at least predict when or how many spare parts that, you need to have in the next quarter. And then, the yellow or red signals means that, red gone, you have is a faulty. And the white ones or the red the yellow ones are the ones that, you need to watch because they’re getting closer to the lifetime dead of lifetime. The other aspect is, like I said, when thus collector systems, you acquire that without the solution, it comes with this sequence box, which basically is a time based posting.

So it keeps posting three to six minutes, like I I said, hundred milliseconds, but it can change. It’s it’s fixed. And that means that leads to, an excessive use of the post valve. So you’re going to wear out quite sooner than it should, but also reduce the valve back life because stretching the the the back filters, of course, you’re gonna also wear out, and you waste much more compressed air than than probably you should. That’s why we implemented this other two types of a post jet cleaning methodologies.

One is on demand. That really depends on the high differential pressure between the the chamber and, you can set, in the in the solution how these multiple filter lines are going to operate normally, And this differential pressure threshold can be, for example, when the efficiency is getting bad, the differential pressure gets lower. And then if that is within a certain band, you can estimate that, there is accumulation of the cascade. The other one is very, intelligent. It’s a function block, in our PLC that, does a dynamic change.

So, therefore, you put the single set point and the adaptive algorithm based on the virtual pressure starts controlling the intervals between the posts. So the idea is that to optimize by eliminating unnecessary posts in the cycle of these valves and also minimizing the compressed air. Of course, when you install the solution and, you put the set point for the first time, the system needs a little bit time to learn, and it’s a learning algorithm that, starts adapting. And very soon, it starts performing optimally. Okay?

Shawn Tierney (host): Hey, everybody. I just wanna jump in here one more time. Just thank our members, both on YouTube and at the automationblog.com. I got some really exciting stuff coming up for you guys, in the fall. I’m I just have this huge plan that I’m working on.

And so, I really just thank you guys for being members. Don’t forget, you get access to Discord. Don’t forget, there’s a whole library of older episodes you get to watch. It’s such just what I’m doing this month for members. It’s, you get a whole library of stuff.

We did so much member only content over the last couple of years that you have hundreds literally hundreds of hours of content that you and only you get access to as a member, whether you’re on YouTube or you’re at theautomationblog.com. And, of course, if you have any questions about your membership, reach out to me directly, please. And with that, let’s go ahead and jump back into this week’s show.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): And that looks like that. This is just another, possibility to see. You see that, on the left side, you see a particular rows, and each of these rows have the filter bags. Each filter bag has a vertical bar that indicates the healthy of that solenoid diaphragm is on the top. And then, each of these compartments can navigate from one to another.

Then you have other additional elements like the header pressure, differential pressure, particle density, and you have a trained diagram that, you are able also to generate reports, but you also also to to monitor, in order to to type a little bit, the parameters in order to be more efficient. And then, completely right side, if you have more than one dust collector, you can create different screens if you want. But the idea here is that the C1, C2 means compartment one, two, three. Again, a diagnostics that leads to preventative predictive maintenance and avoids completely reactive maintenance. Interesting, if you don’t know, in order to replace a single filter, in order to check if a solenoid valve is completely short circuits, In order to see if, a diaphragm valve is open, you needed to get there in this personal protection equipment using mask, gloves.

You need to go up. You need to kind of get to know where these things are. And imagine that if you could avoid and just look at the screen and say, hey. I know that this is the compartment one of the filter a, and I know where I needed to look at. And by the way, I have the spare part because I had early indications to fix it.

So then we are not just talk about reduction time, but, I guess, reduction costs and avoid to put people every time in such a very interesting environment. Okay? I’m not going through the the right part because you can imagine that this is a description of how things are usually done. And if you turn this around into a proactive predictive maintenance, then you have less and maybe faster steps. And you can prevent and can plan in advance when you wanna go with these, units, and you have to wear this equipment for protection.

So very quickly in the developer position. Of course, like any solution, customers are interested to know if, they can pay off payback very quickly. So the return investment of that. So that’s why we check, the size, the number of, units, what’s the minimum size the customer could start with, because the it’s a pre engineered solution, how fast it could be that we implement in the whole site. It could be also, of course, calculate how much their current expenditure in terms of maintenance, reactive maintenance, the cost of utilities like compressed air, how many times they have to or they have downtime issues.

And from that, we can prove very quickly, very simply that, it’s worth investing in automation. 20 to 30% of our reduction is a lot if you consider that they use a huge amount of compressed air. And compressors, they use electricity. So, therefore, if you’re able to reduce compressed air, you also increase your operation efficiency because cost of utilities is one of the points. Downtime is everything.

Maintenance, it’s about preventing that you need to do these manual inspections. Just go there, check, and come back, and you see that, okay, we could wait for another week. But because I’m here, I’m going to change anyhow the filter. And that, of course, you’re not, increasing the lifetime of our equipment. And interesting that some downstream equipment, like the blowers, like the vacu pumps, if they get a lot of dust or excessive dust, they also, damage them.

So therefore, maximizing maintenance, optimizing every step pays off in that sense. And finally, of course, customers do that because they want the full compliance. Every possible issue can be tracked, can be report. The efficiency of the systems can be audit ready, reports. It can re really prove that you can you are reducing part commissions.

You provide a lot of visibility what’s going on. So, therefore, the technical teams are in very high confidence to operate the system. Because if without, they are operating blindly, And that’s why they feel a bit concerned many times that, might be that the bad things are just going to happen. In a nutshell, we talk about savings, extending the filter life. We talk about savings, reduce the compressed air.

We can avoid downtime. Each downtime is one event that costs not only in the maintenance part here, but also the whole production costs that are not calculate here. And half the penalties that, if you have a single issue, it’s gonna be a big one. So, therefore, it’s a good way to give customers an idea why they should invest the CapEx parts and how we can help with the OPEX to save, their budgets in the sense of operating dust collector systems. So, Shawn, if I have time three minutes, I’m going to run this HMI demo because then you can see on the screen how the different screens are operated, but it’s up to you if I if I if if I need to do that.

Shawn Tierney (host): Yeah. Go ahead.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Okay. So this is an HMI demo, of course, simulated here because imagine it’s not possible to connect to live or to have all this whole equipment. So then I’m going to click here. So, basically, you see how a operator would navigate the type of information that, is provided. I made this click through very quickly because then we don’t owe too too much time here.

But you see that, you are able to trend the particle density, the air consumption. You can set the alarms. You can indicate which boost valve is not okay. How is the level of filter bags? And now the settings.

The cleaning, these are the parameters that you can adjust. Like I said, we have an adaptive learning algorithm, but in many cases, you needed to steer at least set up, the sensors as well, how sensible sensitivity of that. There are many different thresholds. And then the diagnostic part, for the diaphragm and the rupture where you can detect. And once this is done, you can see that, you have, quite, interesting information.

For example, if you change, you devolve, you reset the counter. These are the alarms that you can acknowledge, etcetera. Okay? And, that’s it. That was the case.

Shawn Tierney (host): Yeah. That gives you a good idea of what you’re getting with as far as the HMI is concerned, and, it’s good to see a full screen. I mean, it looks it looks like a very well designed HMI. From my perspective, it looks like it’s really giving you it’s focusing in on any errors. So you have, like, just standard graphics, a very good looking graphics, and then if there’s an error, you see it in red or yellow, really calls the eye to it.

But, Eugeno, I see that, there’s a QR code on the screen right now. Can you tell people where that goes?

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. It goes to the product page on our amazon.com site. And from there, you can request for demo. We can request for proposal. We can request for more information.

So this is the entry point for you to go to know, how it how we provide that solution, which kind of, basic elements. And there, we have also the related product pages if you wanna get, get to know more.

Shawn Tierney (host): And I think the important part here is a lot of times you you, you know, when when you have a dust collector system that is that is constantly needing care, right, to keep you in compliance and make sure your products are products are being made correctly and you’re keeping people safe and all of that, You know, these systems, you’re gonna they’re they’re gonna be expensive. And, you know, larger systems, of course, are gonna be expensive. And so that cost savings, it’s like energy savings we do with VFDs on pumps and fans. Right? Or energy savings we do when we’re doing lighting, the folks over at Emerson are gonna wanna help you kinda quantify that because, you know, they know that for you to be able to justify not only, hey.

This has given us a lot of problems. We know it’s costing us money. You also wanna know your ROI. Right? And so they’re gonna work with you on that because that’s on these big projects, those are those are some of the things that we have to look at to be able to, you know, to budget correctly.

Anybody who has ever been in the budgeting part of a company knows you just don’t spend money because it’s fun. You know, you have to have a reason beyond everything. So I would I would guess I’m right on that, Eugenio.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. And, Shawn, although I just covered the technical part, of course, without any commitment, we can talk to customers and consult them Yeah. To look it around and see, in terms of maturity, how they operate this dust collector systems. We can, of course, check the install base. We have a questionnaire, that can fill it in.

We can understand the size. We can, for example, talk about the energy consumption, the number of, hours that they are spend or active maintenance. And based on that, we give them opportunity to analyze whether they want to invest in that solution, which is a CapEx investment, but, also improve how much reduction they could have on the OPEX part.

Shawn Tierney (host): Yeah. Which is which is, yeah, how they’re gonna justify it. Well, Eugeno, I wanna thank you for going through that. I really enjoyed your presentation. I learned a lot more about about, this product line and actually this product category than I that I knew coming in, and you’re I think you did a great job of walking us through it all.

So thank you very much for coming on the show.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Shawn, on behalf of Emerson, we appreciate this opportunity. It’s my first one here, so I also enjoy it, and this was was great. A great conversation, great questions, and, thank you.

Shawn Tierney (host): Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. I wanna thank Eugene for coming on the show and bringing us up to speed on dust collector systems. I really didn’t know all of those technical details, and I really appreciate him going through that. And it’s cool to see how they integrated so many different Emerson products into that solution. I mean, it’s just not like a PLC into my o.

The sensors, this I mean, you guys, sorry. I’m not gonna go through it again. But in any case, really appreciate that. And I also appreciate our members who made the video addition possible. Thank you, members.

Your $5 a month not only locks this video, but so many other videos that we’ve done, hundreds of videos I’ve done over the last twelve years. So thank you for being a member and supporting my work. I also wanna thank the automationschool.com and the automationblog.com. I hope you guys listened to that update that I included in the show. So many good things happen at both places.

I hope you guys would take a moment to check out both websites. And with that, I just wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

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Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

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Shawn Tierney (Host): Everybody, thank you for tuning back in. In this episode, I actually meet back up with Jackie Stokes from Siemens to learn how to use a start drive to commission Siemens drive, specifically the g one twenty and the g two twenty. Although, I’m sure some of the other drives are very similar. And this actually came from a request from a viewer who’s who asked that we have somebody on the show us that. And because I’m not the expert, I reached out to Jackie and she agreed to come on.

So I’m looking forward to that. Now we’re gonna cover the g one twenty. The g two twenty, we’re gonna cover how to change Siemens drives to be Ethernet IP instead of PROFINET. They have Ethernet IP built in, which is really cool. And then we’re gonna cover some free training they have coming up.

I will include those links below as well as the links from Jackie below in the description. You should see that on all platforms. And I do wanna reach out to you and ask for a favor. I’m coming up on my ten year anniversary of doing this full time, and I was hoping that you guys could help me out to reach a 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. Now I know a lot of you listen on Apple, a lot listen on Spotify, a lot of you consume the shows over at the automationblog.com, and I appreciate you all.

But I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could hit a 100,000 subscribers over on YouTube by the end of the year? And maybe if we do, we could have a celebration. We could do a live stream, do some q and a. I’d love to hear what you guys thought over I actually started the channel twelve years ago. I was doing a part time to start, and I’d love to know what your favorite episodes were or what episodes what kind of episodes you like to see in the future.

And so if you guys I know even if you’re on another platform, if you do have a YouTube account, if you could swing by, it’s at insights I a. That’s a lot shorter than insights in automation. So I shortened it up, I think it was a year ago or two years ago. So it’s at insights I a. Again, if you guys are up to it, I’d love to try to hit a 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year to celebrate my tenth year doing this full time.

And with that, let’s go ahead and jump into how to use StarDrive to set up and commission Siemens VFDs like the g one twenty and g two twenty. Jackie, welcome back to the show. I’m so happy to have you back on and here to talk about using, Siemens VFDs inside of TIA portal. Now we’ve talked about your VFDs so many times on the show over the years, and but we’ve never actually, like, put one in TIA portal and tried it out. And I had actually had a a viewer ask about that.

So thank you for agreeing to come back on. And just in case, some of the audience members didn’t watch the previous episodes where you were on, Could you quickly introduce yourself before jumping into our topic for today?

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Sure. And thanks for having me back on the show. So my name is Jackie Stokes. I am a marketing programs development manager at Siemens. I work in the motion control business unit.

I’ve been in the business for, oh my goodness, I’m getting old, like, fourteen years now. So I but I’ve been with Siemens for about three and a half years. So, yeah, we’ve talked about, our drives family. I think most recently, we talked about the Synamix g two twenty drive with Ivan, one of our product managers. But, yeah, happy to be back and talking about how to integrate our VFDs into portal.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And I appreciate that. I mean, you don’t know what you don’t know. And so when we’re going to integrate our first, you know, drive into TIA Portal, it’s kinda like, well, what do we do? And so I wanted to have you on.

I I could have fumbled through it myself, but I’m like, why not just talk to the experts? So let me turn it back to you, and, let’s go ahead and jump in.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yeah. Sure. So, I have just brief slides before we get hands on. I have a demo unit with me, but just wanna cover what we’re talking about. So we’re talking about our general purpose VFD.

It is called SINAMICS g one twenty. So Sinamics is the name of our drive family, and g stands for general purpose. So that’s kind of the decoder ring for Sinamics g one twenty. It does come in a few different flavors. It comes in a modular version version, which we’re using today.

It comes in a compact version, which is g one twenty c, And it also comes in a distributed or on machine version, which is, g one twenty d or a similar drive, g one fifteen d, and that d is for distributed. So the modular version of this drive, comes with a control unit, a power module, as well as an operator interface. So you can kind of see on the pictures to the right, what this looks like. So the control unit can be separated from the power, module, and then the operator interface can be separated from the components as well. So we’re using control unit two forty e Dash two p n dash f, and then we’re using a power module two forty dash two IP 20.

The firmware version, I believe, is the latest. It’s firmware version 4.7 service pack 14 hotfix four. And the software, we are using start drive. StartDrive is our software for commissioning drives, and it’s in TIA Portal. So if you don’t, have a TIA Portal license, to program our PLCs, for instance, StartDrive is free.

So you can download StartDrive and it will open essentially in TIA Portal. It’s just that if you’re using the free version of StartDrive and you don’t have a license for TIA Portal like programming the PLCs, you won’t be able to program a PLC in it, but you will be able to commission your drive. So that’s the little distinction between Start Drive and TIA Portal. There is also a Start Drive Advanced, for advanced features and programming in the drive that you do have to pay for, but, most of what you can do and what we’ll do today, you can do in the free version of StartDrive, and we’ll give you a link to that, how to download StartDrive. And, of course, this is just one way to commission a drive.

You can also commission it with that industrial operator panel, the IOP dash two, which you can see on your screen. We also have a basic version of it, and then we do have a smart access module which generates, a Wi Fi hotspot, and then you can, you know, step away from the drive, connect on your phone. So three different ways to commission that drive. But if you’re a portal user and you’re using a Siemens PLC or maybe you just, you know, want to do this in software, it’s really easy to do as well. So I’m going to give you a brief overview of what we’re doing, so the procedure, and then I’ll jump into the software and show you what we’re doing.

So basically, basic, we’re going to start off with opening TIA Portal, creating a new project, we’ll go online with the drive via accessible devices. This is where we have the opportunity to assign a name and IP address to the drive, and then we will add the drive to the project. So we are going to upload the device as a new station. So once it’s in the project, we’ll go online with the drive. We’re gonna use a commissioning wizard, which is gonna step us through all the parameters and settings that we need to commission the drive.

We’ll do a motor ID and tuning and optimization. And then finally, we’ll just kind of take a look at the parameters and other features that we can see in portal. So with that, I am going to switch screens. So now we are in, my other computer, which we’re gonna use to program the drive. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna open TIA portal.

I already have it open, but you can see the icon here. We are gonna use TIA Portal v 20, so this is the latest version of Portal. And this is what it looks like when you open Portal. What you wanna do is create a new project. So I’m just gonna hit create a new project.

We’ll call this g column 20. Okay. So if you’ve never seen TIA Portal before, you have a lot of different options, and it can be slightly overwhelming. So I recommend we go to project view, and that’s a good way to just jump into what we need to see, for our commissioning. So the first thing we wanna do so this is what portal looks like.

A lot of different windows, a lot of things going on. At the end, I’ll talk about some free training we have. If you’re unfamiliar with portal and you want to, just see what it looks like and understand all the windows and buttons and how to be efficient in the tool. But for today, I’m just gonna show you the commissioning. So under online access, I’m just gonna expand this on the left hand side.

So this is our project tree. You can see we don’t have any devices here. You could add a new device if you wanted, but right now, we’ll just look at our online access. So these are all the things that we can access online, our communications. I’m gonna click up here, which is accessible devices.

And up here, this is how we’re gonna find the drive. So on my computer, I am networked to the drive. So I’m connected to an Ethernet switch on the drive itself, and then my computer has two Ethernet ports, and the port I’m looking for is this, gigabit network connection. So this is the one that’s tied to the drive. You may have to adjust these settings on your own PC in order to see the drive.

But, once you have these configured, you know, you can see different options here. You’re gonna hit start search, and as we’re waiting, one thing to keep in mind is you will need to configure your network adapter settings so that you’re on the same subnet mask as this drive. So, just make sure your PC is configured properly. Otherwise, it won’t be able to find the drive. So here we are.

We see this G 120 Drive one. It has this IP address, one nine two point one six eight point zero point one, and you can see the device type here. So, earlier I mentioned that control unit, that CU two forty e, that is the drive we’re connected to. So we’re gonna hit show here. We’re gonna highlight it, and then we’ll hit show.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Now just for the audience who is listening, there is an option there to flash the screen. So like I showed you with the PLCs in previous episodes, you can do that with the drive as well. It has a little checkbox here. So if you had three or four drives side by side, you could make sure you connect it to the right one by flashing the screen. So go ahead.

I’ll turn it back to you, Jackie.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yeah. That’s a that’s a good point. So right. I I have just one demo unit in my room, so I know what I’m connected to, but that is that’s a very good point. You can flash that little LED.

So now you can see we have under online access, under this, gigabit port network connection, we have this g one twenty drive, and this is where we can go to online and diagnostics, and we can make some changes here. So you’ll see, we know we’re online. So this is another key thing when you’re commissioning drives or any devices within or working with devices within TIA Portal is making sure you’re online with the the correct device and and that you are online. And so this turns to orange up here, and you can see, like, online access here. So that’s an indication that you are online with that device.

So we’ll go to functions here, and this is where you can assign a name. So if you wanted, we could call this drive underscore one. And then what you do is just hit assign name. And then, like, let’s say we wanna change the IP address to dot three, and we’ll assign the IP address. So we changed the name, we changed this IP address.

If you double click on update accessible devices, you can see that our drive one drive underscore one name changed and that, the IP address changed. So that’s what we that’s what we’re looking for. So we just made those changes to the drive. Now what we can do, and, actually, once you change the IP address, you might need to cycle power. So I’m gonna cycle power to the drive.

One second. But what we can do in the meantime is we can upload this device as a new station. So what this is going to do is it’s going to put the drive into the project and it’s creating this drive underscore one. And it’s giving us a little bit of a warning, but that’s okay. We’re gonna upload from the device.

Okay. So now we see drive underscore one in our project tree. I’m going to kind of minimize this online access, and we’re gonna look at the drive up here so we don’t get too confused. So here, we wanna make sure we want to go online with the drive so we can make sure you so, you know, once you if you’re following along, you wanna make sure you select this drive, especially if you have lots of other things in your project tree, because you can go online with a lot of different things. So if you have I remember when I was first learning, portal yeah.

If you don’t have the right thing selected and you select go online and you’re going online with something else, that’s not quite right. So make sure you have it selected and then hit go online up here. It’s this little orange connector. And then you’ll see this green check mark. So that indicates that we are online and connected and the drive is happy.

So now we’ll go to the commissioning wizard. So under here, we’ll double click commissioning, and we have a few options here. So you see the commissioning wizard. We see control panel, motor optimization, and this backup and restore. So we’ll start here with the commissioning wizard.

And then, basically, it’s just gonna step us through how we wanna set up this drive. So we have some options here, the application class. So, there’s expert, which means that all the options are available in the wizard. There’s standard drive control, which again is the most common applications. And then we have dynamic drive control.

So these are more advanced applications. So you can kinda read through this. And if you had questions about what I should be using, you can click this little green arrow here at the bottom for online help. So we’ll just click standard drive control, and we’ll hit next. And this is where you have the option.

You need to tell it, are you connected to a PLC? If you are, where that ramp function is. Is it in the PLC, or are you gonna do it in the drive, or is it gonna be a standalone drive, no PLC? So I’ll walk through this scenario with, standard drive no PLC, and then I can also show you what it looks like if you go the PLC route and how that configures. But a lot of the things are are the same.

So you have an IO configuration here. You have some options. I’m gonna choose 12. As you can see at the top here, they’re predefined interconnections of the inputs and outputs. However, you can change them later.

So, choose the one that best fits your application, but, again, keep in mind, you can change it later if, you change your mind or need to change something. We’ll click next. We are using this motor. So I’m just gonna keep this here, this IEC, and then two twenty volt. We do not have a breaking resistor, and we do not have a filter.

Again, this is where you have the option to select a filter if you are using one, and then it’ll give you a few more. I’ll just show you an example. So if we had a a sine wave filter third party, you would have to input these values. But for this application, we’ll choose no filter, and then we’re gonna enter the motor data. So this is where you’re going to need to read your motor nameplate data, and then we’ll input the motor nameplate data here.

So right now we have point nine seven, point one eight and kilowatts, and then 350 RPM, and then we’ll hit next, and then we’ll hit next. This is where, I wouldn’t don’t touch the current limit. I’m not gonna touch the minimum speed or maximum speed. You have the option here to change your ramp up time or ramp down time if you want. So just, for example, we’ll change these values here, and we’ll click next.

You have an option to change the application, so constant loads, speed to dependent load, and then the motor identification. So if you want, inhibited, identifying motor at standstill, or motor data identification. So I’ll click, this option two here, and then it says that the motor data identification will be performed at the next time that the drive is enabled. And then we’ll hit next. And then here, we’ll save the RAM to ROM, so it’ll be saved in the drive.

And then we’ll hit and you can see the summary up here. So, you have the opportunity, like, if you’re reading through this and maybe you mistyped your motor current, you can go back and, change that setting right now if you wanted. So I would recommend that you read through this, make sure it’s all correct, and then hit finish. So now we are saving to the eprom. I’m going let’s see what’s so it says maintenance required in lower component.

So we’re gonna look at diagnostics here. So you can see, sometimes you wanna you know, if this is unhappy, you kinda wanna see what’s going on. So we’ll go to this online and diagnostics here. Diagnostics, general. Okay.

So you can see, you know, we have our name of our drive and the part number, but let’s look at active faults on alarms. Okay. And what it doesn’t like, the motor data identification activated. So it basically, it’s looking for that motor data, and that’s why it’s it’s giving us this little maintenance required. So what we can do is we’ll go back into commissioning.

We’ll go into motor optimization here. And so once you click on it, it’s gonna give you a warning. This motor identification is performed once the drive is enabled. So we’ll click okay. And then what we can do so first, what you can we’ll hit, activate here.

We’ll click accept, and then we’ll switch on. And then our motor ID is done. And you can see here, it has switched from that, kind of wrench icon to this green checkbox icon, which means that we did a good job.

Shawn Tierney (Host): So it went through and, identified the motor. It applied power to the motor, and I couldn’t see what was happening with the motor. Did it turn the motor at all, or did it just supply power to it? Or

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yes. So it just supplied power to it. So and you can see here the the following parameters are determined or changed when the motor with with the motor data identification. So this is what it’s looking at. And we did a stationary measurement, so it did not rotate during that measurement.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Okay.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): And then we can deactivate control. Yes. Okay. And then we can look at the control panel. So this is kinda cool.

This allows you to test the drive in TIA Portal. You know, we didn’t write any PLC programming. We haven’t, you know, since I have this demo unit, it’s wired up for these particular, you know, little switches that I have on it. But Mhmm. Regardless and independent of that, we can actually, you know, kinda jog and turn on the drive and just test it out.

So I’m gonna hit activate master control. And again, it’s gonna give us a warning because the drive can move. So just be aware of what you’re doing. It wants to make sure you’re you’re okay with this. So I’m gonna hit accept.

We can give it a speed set point, so we’ll give it 200 RPM, and then we can give it a forward command. We can tell it to go backwards. We can increase the speed. And, you know, you can jog forward to this momentary push button here. And yeah.

So it says a nice way to to kinda test it out right here. And then we can deactivate the control. And so and then once you’ve done this, you know, you can go to backup and restore. So this will save RAM to RAM. We can save it here.

It’ll save RAM to RAM. One thing that I should have done when I was first starting out, and that is restore to factory settings. So I won’t do this now, but you can you know, if you get in a situation where you do need to restore to factory settings or, you gotta drive from somewhere else and you need to restore it, you can do that within TIA Portal. So we could do that now and then and then redo the commissioning. So occasionally at least in my experience with the demo units, sometimes they come in and you don’t know what someone has done with them.

Sure. So you wanna start with this. But since I’ve been playing around with this demo, for the past few days, I kinda know what’s in it.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And that would be important too if you took the if you’re repurposing it from one application to another, you definitely wouldn’t wanna wipe out everything, restore it to the factory defaults before you, before you use it on a new application.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yes. And that is something, that’s something you can do in, that online access area. So once you’re you know, so here, when you first saw that drive before you upload it as a new station, you have that ability. You know, again, it’s in that commissioning menu. It’s it’s mirrored up here too.

Yeah. But you can go there and do that backup and restore. So that’s the best practice, again, if you’re repurposing a drive. But if it’s out of the box, you know, it’s already at factory default. So once your drive is in a good state, you’ve done your commissioning, you’ve saved RAM to ROM.

What you want to do is you want to make sure your drive is selected, which it should be, but we’ll just go offline here. And then what you wanna do, just to be sure so your project should match what was in the drive, but, a good best practice here is to upload from the device. So that means your project will match whatever is in the drive right now. So this is just warning us, this Telegram configuration, but we’ll hit upload from device. And then we will save our project.

So that is, how you make sure your project now matches the drive. And then if you wanted, you could, you know, have another drive that you’re connecting to, and you could then download to that device, but we know the project matches. So that was a good overview of commissioning basic commissioning for Synamix g one twenty. Our newer drives look a little different. The commissioning wizard is different.

So we’re coming out with our next generation of Synamics drives, two drives to look out for. One is our motion drive. So it’s a servo motion. It is the Synamix s two ten, and then we have a new drive, the Synamix g two twenty, who Ivan, our product manager for that product, was on the show about a year ago and talked in-depth about it. But the whole product family sits a little bit higher than the g one twenty in terms of, capabilities and performance.

So it’s not a successor to the g one twenty. It’s it’s a complement to the product portfolio. But I’ll just give you an overview of what that looks like. We can since I don’t have this demo myself, right now, I’m gonna add a new device. So, again, another idea if, let’s say, you wanted to get your project already so that once your drive arrives, you can just simply download to it.

Another way to do this is to add a new device here in your project tree instead of scanning for it, you know, on the network, assuming you’re connected to a physical device. We can just add it here, do all the commissioning, set up all the parameters, and then once you get the physical drive, you can download to that drive. So, as you can see here, on the left hand side, we have controllers, HMI, PC systems, drives. So it’s gonna let you add whatever you want to your project. I have it selected on drives, and we’ll name this, g two twenty.

And then here, you know, we’re just gonna filter down. So you see all of our g drives here. The g two twenty is at the bottom. We’ll do g two twenty PROFINET also means Ethernet IP, and make sure the version, article number, and we’ll hit okay. Ah, so if you listen to Ivan’s overview of the g two twenty, one of the new features is its security.

And when we say security here in this context, we’re talking about user security. So user management and access control, also known as UMAQ or abbreviated UMAQ. So what you have the opportunity to do here is to configure your security settings. If you want, you can also continue with low security settings. But this is what this looks like.

I’ll just kinda walk through what it looks like. So start a new configuration, what it is. So if you’re unfamiliar with user manage management and access control, this is what it tells you you can do with this tool. So you can enable UMac for the project and prompt users to log in in order to work with the project. You can enable UMac for the drive and prompt users to log in in order to work with the drive via the web server and start drive.

So one of the new commissioning options that you have with our next generation of drives is a web server. And, again, I don’t have the drive with me now, so I won’t show you the web server. We’ll just show you TIA Portal, but that’s what it’s referring to when it says this web server. So just be aware if you check these boxes, and then these later steps will go through, you will have to know your username and password or you will not be able to access this drive. So, just remember to save save your passwords, if you do yes.

If you do go down this route. Now, the scenario of I lost my password, I lost my username, I can’t access this drive. How do I get around that? Well, the only way to get around that is you’re going to have to get a u sorry, an SD card and insert that into the drive and it will have just reset. Txt on it, so a reset text file.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Okay.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yes. So there is a way. It’s you’re not totally, you know, in trouble there, but, you will have to reset the whole drive. So there’s no there’s no, secret way of getting around it. So if you do enable that, that is how you would restore your drive or get access to it again, and then you can see here.

So, data encryption, if you wanted, you could do this, Activate user controls incomplete. Ah, okay. So it said it was incomplete because we did not specify a password, so we have to specify a password here. And I think it has some requirements for your password, so you just wanna make sure you remember this one. We’ll hit okay and then next.

It doesn’t like this. I have to click I have read the information above. Yes. Okay. Click next.

Username. So you could allow a guest to enable access to the drive. It’s up to you. Uses the anonymous user, so we’ll hit yes. Allow data exchange via fieldbus.

So is the anonymous user as they is used for fieldbus communication. So again, just want to make sure you understand these settings. The SDI standard panel access, so we’ll allow the drive to be changed via the standard panel without a username and password, web server access, so again going through all the different ways to access this drive and making sure you are okay with how you’re accessing it. Data encryption, next, and then we will hit finish. So it’s pretty in-depth.

Again, you if you don’t want to, you can skip the security settings. You can also go back and reconfigure them too. So if you’re just working on this project, you know, you don’t you can configure it later. So here, similar to that, drive one, which is the g one twenty, we have all of our options here. We’re gonna go to device configuration or yes.

So we’ll look at our device configuration. You can see here, we have our Synamix g two twenty. We have a motor here, which we actually don’t have a motor. So let’s see here. Properties.

Yes. So we just added the drive. We didn’t add a motor. So we can add the motor here. This is where we’re gonna enter our motor data, for whatever motor we have.

So I’m just gonna make up some values. This is what’s on my current demo unit, so point seven. Obviously, you wanna look at your motor nameplate and make sure it matches, and then we’ll go to our guided quick setup. So little different look and feel, compared to what we did with the g one twenty. It’s giving us a warning here, so the device is not specified.

Specify the device first. We can click on this here. So it wants a little bit more information on what drive we’re using.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. The power. Right?

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yes. So, again, since we’re, we cheated well, I wouldn’t say cheated. But with the g one twenty, when you have it, when you’re online with it, you can upload as new station, so it’s detecting what you have. Mhmm. But since we don’t have that, we’re making this up in the project.

It needs to know, the information. So we’re just gonna pick this one here to satisfy the requirement, and now it’s now it’s happy again. So we’ll go back to quick guided startup. Yes. And our warning went away.

I’ll just move this down. Alright. So connection to the PLC. Define connection. Actually, I’m gonna minimize this window here.

Yes. Do you want to connect it? Will it connect to a PLC via Telegram? In this case, we’ll say yes. It won’t be standalone.

It’ll be connected to a PLC. And then do we want the ramp function in the drive, or do we want in the PLC? We’ll say we want it with the drive. And then, you know, if you’re using safety integrated functions via Prophysafe, you can check that box. So we have made our selections here.

Actually, let’s I wanna see green check boxes at the top. Okay. So we’ve made our selection and you can see the green box. So we we have done completed this step. So select the application, we’re gonna select speed control, we’ll go next.

The operating mode, so similar to that g one twenty, it’s asking a standard drive control, dynamic, and you can see how this changes, or selecting other closed loop control modes. So we’ll go back with standard drive control and click next. Here are the limits. So again, that maximum and minimum speed, this ramp up time, we’ll change it to five seconds. Our limits has turned green.

So again, we have an option here, this fieldbus with data switch over. You can delete all these connections if you want, but, this is just how your digital inputs are, digital inputs, digital outputs, analog inputs, and analog outputs are connected. So you have the option if you wanna get rid of them, or if you want to to keep them and modify them. So we’ll just keep them, and we’ll hit next.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Graphical mapping there of each digital and each IO point to the actual value in the drive, where the previous drive, we had a bunch of items to choose from. We chose 12, which was the standard, you know, your standard inputs and outputs and analog values. But here, it’s very graphical. I like this. This looks really cool, and it looks like it almost looks like I can go in, like, the where it says no connection.

D I four. Right? No connection. It looks like you could choose, like, a yeah. Look at that list.

A whole list of parameters that you could choose to put in that spot.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yes. Exactly. You can get to this setting in the g one twenty. It’s just not part of the commissioning.

Shawn Tierney (Host): So Okay.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): So but that’s a that’s a good point. So in here, in the, you know, in this newest generation of drives, the commissioning, you have the option to set this up here. But, yeah, it you’re right. You can do it in the g one twenty, but it it doesn’t prompt you right from the get go.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Okay.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): I’m gonna go back to application setting because I just wanna make sure I you can show more data. Let’s see. Okay. Now that looks good. Next.

Telegram. Here we go. So since we’re talking to a PLC, it wants to know which Telegram we’re gonna use. So the Telegram is basically that exchange of data between PLC and drive. It comes from, like, the PROFI drive, profile.

So it’s kind of a a PROFINET thing term, I guess, I should say. So you want to know what I’m trying to say is you wanna know what each of these telegrams mean in terms of status and control words and the information being exchanged between PLC and drive. So we usually use well, I shouldn’t say usually, but we use, like, Siemens Telegram three fifty two, for basic, like, speed control. But you can choose any of these telegrams, and I would encourage you, if you’re not familiar with telegrams, to, you know, look at the table, see what what kind of data is being exchanged between the drive and PLC, so that you’re selecting the correct one. And you can change this later if you want.

So so, you know, so if, if you make the wrong selection here, you can go back and change it.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Now it looks like it wants us to update the, IO configuration now because we changed the Telegram, which would make sense.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Ah, yes. And, I’ll go back to that for a second. So if you go to this PZD interconnections and this and so this is, process data. That’s what the PZD kinda stands for. If we click on that, you can see here what, the Telegram configuration looks like.

So you can see, you know, the alarm code, the fault code, current torque speed, and the control. And then that’s in the receive direction. So that’s just what it looks like here. K. And you’re right.

So if we go IO configuration Yes. So you’re right. Since we are using Telegram three fifty two, we are not having these IO connections connected to parameters within the drive. Next. We’ll be prompted for this rotate and optimize.

So again, we have this option, identify motor data, optimize PDs controller, identify motor data at standstill. So we’ll just keep that and hit next. And at the end here is our summary. So these are all the changes we made, similar to g one twenty. You can go through, make sure you set everything correctly, and then you would perform a download, except we, don’t have our drive yet.

So you can’t quite do that right now. But what you can do, is you can save this. So you can save your project, and then once you get your drive, you can, go online with it and download to that drive.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Excellent. I mean, it’s interesting to see the difference between the, the original one we looked at, the g one twenty, and then this model, the g two twenty, and to see how the the wizard changed over time. And it’s it’s just very interesting. This one seems to be more like like, it’s offering you more details upfront. And, but it’s good to know both because you may have a one twenty or a two twenty or some other drive, so understanding the different interfaces is very helpful.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yes. So now what I wanna show so right now we have this drive configured, to run with a PLC. We’ve have it configured for Telegram three fifty two. And then what we can also do so, like, say we’re in a scenario. Right now it’s configured all the drives are configured, for PROFINET out of the box this G120 and this G220.

But let’s say we have a scenario where we need to configure it for ethernet IP. So maybe we’re using a non Siemens controller. How would you do that? So it’s a little different in the g two twenty compared to the g one twenty. So I just want to make, you know, our viewers aware of these differences.

So what we wanna do in the g two twenty is we wanna go to this drive here. We’re going to hit properties. So we’re gonna pull up this window, so that we can see it while close out that commissioning window. So now we’re in the properties of this. And what we want to do is go to protection and security here.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Mhmm.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): And ports and protocols, and this is the fieldbus and related protocol configuration. So this is where we can switch to Ethernet IP or Modbus TCP. We’re gonna switch to Ethernet IP, and then we’ll hit okay. And that’s all we had to do. So again here, you could right click.

I think you can yeah. Right click and hit properties here, and then that would is how you find it.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Nice. That was easy.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yes. Now what’s different is in the g one twenty, so we’ll go up here. It’s actually just a parameter in the g one twenty. Oh. So this is a little different.

So what I do usually is I go to parameter view, and then I go to display extended parameters. So this shows all the parameters. And I’m gonna hit control f, so I’m gonna find it. And it’s parameter twenty thirty for field bus. Let’s go find it.

And you can see here, you know, since we made this a standalone drive, it has no protocol, and this is where you can change it from PROFINET or Ethernet IP.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Nice.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): So the big difference here is, like the g one twenty, the s one twenty, these all have a parameter, parameter twenty thirty, and you just change one parameter and it switches between Ethernet and PROFINET. In the newer drives, you have to go into the device properties, ports and protocols, and make that change if you wanna make it.

Shawn Tierney (Host): That’s good to know. It’s, I don’t think I woulda guessed that.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): It was something we learned when we got our new demos. So is there anything else?

Shawn Tierney (Host): I think that’s enough to get anybody started. I mean, it’s always good. If you have to sit down with a new VFD, it’s always good to have somebody kinda walk through it first, and then that gives you the confidence to get in there. You know you could get something working. And I I don’t think you’ll ever get through one of these commissionings without having to crack the book.

You’ll definitely wanna read any literature that comes with the VFD. There’s safety stuff in there you gotta know about, because you’re gonna follow NEC and all those other applicable, codes, but, and all, you know, safety safety codes as well. But, you know, I think, you know, just having somebody it’s one thing to read a book. It’s another thing to see actually somebody walk through it. And I know I feel a lot more confident, that I’m, you know, now going and trying something out than I would have before you came on and showed us how to do this.

So I really appreciate you, Jackie, the time. And I don’t know. Was there anything else you want to show?

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yes. I do wanna show, some resources we have, to get you guys started and, you know, help you on your journey to commissioning cinematics drives in TIA Portal. So if you are new to, TIA Portal, Synamics drives, just integrating maybe a PLC into TIA Portal, integrating a drive into TIA Portal, we have a really cool tool. So, or I should say a really cool class. So it’s TIA University.

So they’re free expert led workshops, and self study courses. So there are some basic video series. Again, most of this is for, you know, PLC, TIA Portal. However, they do incorporate how to integrate a Dynamics drive into this. So if you’ve never opened up TIA Portal or if it’s been a while, I recommend you do this TIA Test Drive class.

So it happens every month. It’s a full day. It is virtual instructor led, so you’ll be able to remote into a TIA portal project and follow along with the instructor. So you will get to be hands on, but you can do it from your office, from home, from wherever. Again, it’s a day long class.

You can download the syllabus here and take a look. So that’s the TIA test drive. Gives you a really nice overview of TIA Portal and all the things you can do with it. We also have another class called Merge Logics with TIA Portal. So if you’re a Rockwell user, familiar with Studio 5,000, Logix Designer, and you have a a TIA portal project or a Siemens project coming up and you’re like, oh, I’m not quite sure, how to do that.

This gives you context of TIA or this presents TIA portal in the context of what you’re used to in Logix. So if you’re familiar with Logix, the instructor, kind of translates that into TIA Portal for you. So if you’re used to one thing, this is what it looks like in TIA Portal. So again, if you’re, you know, familiar with, Studio 5,000, this will give you a really nice overview. Similar to that TIA test drive class, it’s offered every month.

It’s a day long class. It’s hands on but virtual. So, again, we use a hypervisor. You’ll be able to remote into a virtual machine and, get hands on with the software. So I encourage you guys to, join one of those classes or both.

And then I also want to I’ll give you these links, or rather Shawn will in the video. So this just kind of covers, all things, Dynamics drives. I’ll link to our website, overview of our VFDs and our high performance and servo drives, distributor DC drives, digital drive train, and then our tools and resources. So we have our Siemens product configurator, sizer, TIA selection tool, SINAMICS selector mobile app, drive connections or drive applications. Here I’ve added this Ethernet IP connectivity.

So if you are using SINAMICS drives on Ethernet IP, this will give you all the resources you need to set that up, one, in the drive and then, two, we have add on instructions, EDS files, things like that to make your life easier. And then of course TIA Portal, Dynamic Start Drive, this is what this looks like. So if you do not have Start Drive yet you can download the latest version here And again, that, start drive is within TIA Portal and it’s free, so feel free to download it. And with that, Shawn, it’s been so great to show you all about, TA portal and commissioning, so dynamics drives in it. So feel free to reach out to me again.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Jackie, thank you so much for, taking time out of your busy schedule to do this for us. I know, you know, a, an audience member, you know, asked to, us to kinda cover that, and I’m like, you know, and I’m like, I’ll get Jackie back on the show. So thank you for coming on and showing us star drive and how you know, even though it’s integrated in the TI portal, that component allows us to commission our VFDs, you know, upload from download to them, change parameters, you know, identify the motor, and just everything you walked us through was very helpful. And I’m hoping the audience guys, let me know in the comments. Did you think that was helpful?

And, do you have any follow-up questions? I think we covered so much territory. I don’t have any questions right now, but I would be, I would be interested in knowing what the audience thinks. And, again, Jackie, thank you so much for your time and for showing us how to use stock drive.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Thank you, Shawn.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. I wanna thank Jackie for coming on and teaching us how to use stock drive. I’ve never used it before, so I really appreciate you’re coming on. And if there’s other things you guys wanna see, let me know. I’m have no problem reaching out to the vendors.

Sometimes, like, great vendors like Siemens and Rockwell and Schneider and other great vendors, they come on and they’ll they’ll offer it. Sometimes I get crickets, but that’s okay. You don’t know until you try. So if there’s anything else you’d like to see, let me know. And if you do have a YouTube account, maybe you’re watching this on YouTube or you’re listening on Apple or Spotify or at the automationblog.com, please consider giving me a sub over on YouTube.

I really would like to try to hit a 100,000 subscribers before the end of the year. It’s kind of a stretch goal, but, you know, this is my tenth year doing this full time, twelfth year since I’ve created the, created the blog and the YouTube site. And I’d really like to see if we couldn’t hit that. I don’t ask a lot. I you know, I’m not one of those people who like to ask for subs and likes and whatnot.

I know you have to do it, but in any case, if you guys don’t mind, I’d love to try to hit that number. So if you can help, that would be awesome. In any case, with all that said, I wanna wish you good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

If you enjoy this episode please give it a Like, and consider Sharing as this is the best way for us to find new guests to come on the show.

Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.

Note: As mentioned above, this episode was not sponsored so the video edition is a “member only” perk. The below audio edition (also available on major podcasting platforms) is available to the public and supported by ads. To learn more about our membership/supporter options and benefits, click here.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

If you enjoy this episode please give it a Like, and consider Sharing as this is the best way for us to find new guests to come on the show.

Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Welcome back to the Automation Podcast. My name is Shawn Tierney from Insights and Automation. And in this episode, I sit down with Ryland Pychak from Cleveland Automation Systems, a system integrator house, to talk about all things industrial automation, including how do we get more people involved in controls engineering as well as, like, what are the latest products and technologies people are using. So with that said, let’s go ahead and jump right into my interview with Ryland Piechak from Cleveland Automation Systems. Ryland, it’s great to have you on the show.

Now before we jump into our conversation, can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Certainly. Well well, first and foremost, thanks for having me as well, Shawn. Definitely appreciate the opportunity. Yeah.

To give a little bit of background, I’m Radom Pyshak, founder, president of, Clearwater Automation Systems, as well as a controls engineer. You know, we’ve we’ve essentially been in business for ten years now. And, ultimately, you know, my background has been controls engineering through and through. Actually started the manufacturing floor myself. You know, a lot of maintenance technician role, a lot of day to day kind of supporting troubleshooting equipment and whatnot.

From there, obviously, went off to college, got a controls engineering background, did a little stint at Rockwell, also worked at an OEM as well as a system integrator. And then from there, kind of saw the entire picture of manufacturing and decided to go out and start cleaning automation systems myself. You know, so since then, like I said, we’ve been in business going on ten years so far. And, yeah, it’s been been great. You know, there’s a lot of unique things we’ve come across in the manufacturing industry, and, I’m definitely very passionate.

And it’s, something that’s very interesting from my perspective.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, I appreciate you coming on the show. And, really, that’s our audience, the controls engineers, the, really, the automation electricians, those electricians who just really get into automation and do that as kind of a specialty, as well as the, maintenance technicians and control technicians, you know, maybe have an electronics background, a mechatronics background, and then get into automation. And so, really great to have you on. And it’s you have a great pedigree. They have different companies you’ve worked with.

You’ve kinda seen the industry from different angles, which, you know, a lot of people don’t get that get that chance to work for a vendor and a integrator and an OEM and on the plant floor. So what really, tell us about your company, Cleveland Automation Systems. What do you guys do? Like, what was the purpose and found doing it? And and, really, what’s your what’s your focus?

Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. Certainly. So click on automation system is probably the best, you know, term for us as a system integrator. Right?

We typically have various clients that come to us to solve unique problems. That’s anywhere from simple, you know, field troubleshooting, simple service calls we get to complex equipment development, a lot of custom automation, as well as a lot of integration. You know? So, really, we work pretty much with every clientele across the board. I would say the main one, pretty much the only thing we don’t do is oil and gas.

But we support clients across various manufacturing industries. And, really, you know, we essentially got into business to solve a lot of these complex problems. What I saw from my perspective was a lot of, you know, lack of support for various legacy systems, you know, other challenges that our our clients would have where, hey. How do we integrate various components together? So really going into business kinda to solve a lot of those problems, and that’s still what we do today.

You know, anywhere from upgrading, you know, obsolete components and hardware, software control systems, all the way to developing custom unique, you know, different kinds of equipment and machinery. So very interesting industry, and our client base is pretty wide as well.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Now I know with your background, right, there’s probably a focus on, like you were just saying, on helping people migrate to the latest generation or to a platform that’s gonna be stable for them. I know in the pre show we talked about some of your clients have, like, just a mishmash of controls. And so, and I know a lot of people in the audience, they have to deal with all different types of vendors. And so, just a, you know, a minute and not that not you know, we’re gonna be preaching to the choir here. But when you’re when you have a a one of your customers come to you and say, here’s what I got.

What’s the best path forward? What’s some of the things you tell them about? Maybe not having every vendor on the planet every control system on the planet in your plan, well, that would be great for a museum, is not really great for your your people because it can be difficult. I mean, people struggle understanding an iPhone how to use an iPhone and an Android. Right?

Because it’s so different. And if you take that times five or 10, it really just puts a lot of stress on the, the maintenance staff, the electricians, and and the engineers on-site. So what’s some of the advice you give when when you’re working with your your, vendors? Your I’m sorry. Your, customers.

Rylan Pyciak: Certainly. I mean, I think you hit the nail right on the head there with the, you know, the iPhone to Android comparison. I use that as well. You know, the biggest thing is what we like to do. First and foremost, we usually do a site assessment for our clients, and that is coming in and understanding everything within the facility.

Right? That is, you know, what control systems, hardware, software, motors, kind of everything that makes automation run. And really from there, it’s identifying and saying, hey. You have these, you know, five, six, 15 different vendor hardware, software platforms in your facility. You know, which route do you wanna go?

Obviously, there’s some name brands that, you know, all of us understand are are primary here, you know, at least in The US that most people use. And and, really, it’s more of an educational thing than anything else with our customers of outlining and saying, hey. You know, to be able to hire somebody, you know, to fill a maintenance technician role, to fill a controls engineer role, you know, not only do they have to bring the skill sets of actually doing that work, they also need to bring along the skill sets of how to support these systems. You look at something such as DeviceNet versus Ethernet IP. Right?

There are, you know, different I’m gonna call it generations, different demographics that grew up supporting that versus what is currently used in the market. So, you know, really, it’s sitting down, talking to our customers, kind of looking at that list we’ve developed with them and saying, hey. This is everything you have within your facility. Which route do you wanna go? What does your current maintenance staff look like?

What can you support? As well as what does your infrastructure look like? Because end of the day, it’s you know, one, obviously, obsolescence is huge. I’m sure we’ve all been there. Right?

You have a an obsolete hardware software device that goes down. Now you’re scrambling to go and find another one, right, typically on eBay, pulling it off the shelf, potentially opening up and soldering things. Nobody wants to go that route. So it’s more so understanding this is the route you should go and a lot of guidance education on, you know, one, why you should migrate as well as two, what that’s going to look like, you know, from your support and maintenance perspective where, hey. Now you only have one software license to manage.

You only have one platform to manage, and it’s not, you know, five, six different platforms and somebody’s old Windows XP sitting on the shelf that you have to clean dust off of every time. So that’s, you know, I’d say in a nutshell, a lot of education, you know, goes into a lot of these conversations.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know, I think about over the years, all the peat times people upgraded and the reasons for upgrading and just the the cost of upgrading. There was a lot of people who upgraded in, for y two k when there was no reason to. And but they would there was a fear factor there. You know?

Fear and certainty, doubt. Right, FUD? And so they would do upgrades, and they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I was just sitting there as a technical person being like, you’re wasting your money. You don’t need this.

And, you know, I often see, like, an end user where they have a, you know, they have a a storeroom full of every IO module and every terminal block and every, processor and memory card, and it’s like, should we update the entire plan? I’m like, why? You not only is everything running smoothly and everybody’s trained on it, you have all the speeds you could ever use, and this stuff will last forever. Whereas when you’re sitting down with an OEM and they’re like, well, now I need to do six axes, and I have to do, you know, coordinated motion. You’re like, well, yeah, you’re not gonna wanna use that old stuff.

Right? You we need to get you into the latest stuff where we have these new text test axes, commands and different things we can do that will just make your development so much easier. Plus, you’re gonna want tech support because if you go into the new generation, you’re probably gonna have some questions because you’ve been using the old generation. So it can really be case. And then I see, like, a lot of the the sensor vendors we have on, they come out with this new sensor that has features that no other sensor on the market has.

And so I can see an end user saying, well, we usually use brand x, but brand y is really killing it. And this is the application brand x couldn’t solve, so we’re gonna go with brand y. And so it does make sense to I mean, you know, you can come at this from every different angle, but at the end of the day, I guess, like you were saying, you don’t wanna have a plan with 15 different things in there, 15 different software licenses. And, you know, it’s like, just because you’re good at Word doesn’t mean you’re an expert at Excel or PowerPoint. Right?

And just because you’ve learned brand x does not mean you’re gonna be able to pick up brand y quickly. I know when I started working with Siemens, it was like a huge just, it was like going from, you know, Photoshop to PaintShop Pro or you know? It was just like a huge, huge change, and you really just you’re not as efficient when you first start off. So definitely definitely a lot of considerations there. You know, I think one of the things we’re talking about, in the preshow was the you know, how do you attract young people?

Because so many people like us who are getting older. Right? And then the people who taught us who are retiring, you know, there’s a a lot of a lot of the younger, audience, you know, they they’ve been using a touch screen since they were. My grandkids have never known, devices without touch screens. Right?

Rylan Pyciak: Mhmm. It’s

Shawn Tierney (Host): so and so, you know, how do we what do what can we do to help get that younger generation in? Because we need to bring before everybody retires who has that that, you know, that knowledge. We’re gonna we’re gonna get that the younger folks to keep coming in and, you know, maybe we won’t have as many because, you know, systems are more mature and the you know, when I first started PLCs, we’re still relatively new. So programming PLCs with software was still relatively new, only a couple years, three, four years old. And so but today, we’ve been doing it for, you know, thirty five years, forty years.

So, we may need less people as as as the knowledge is easier as a and and the products get easier, easier to use too. But how do we attract, younger engineers into this? I think we would both agree is a phenomenal, industry of, you know, automating manufacturing and other and other

Rylan Pyciak: things? Yeah. Yeah. No. That that’s a great question.

You know, honestly, I think some of it from my perspective, manufacturing is almost like a black sheep. Right? A lot of people haven’t heard of manufacturing. They typically look at it of, hey. It’s something either I see on TV or it’s how cars are made.

But I feel like there are a lot of younger generations that may not just fully understand what we do day in and day out. You know, from the technical aspect, from problem solving, from engineering design, you know, all of the things that go into manufacturing a product, both on our side as integrators, programmers, things like that, but also from support, from production, you know, on the flip side. So, you know, I think there’s some of that of actually drawing an awareness to what our industry is and what it does. You know, if I’m being frank, a lot of my first introductory really was just talking to friends of friends, you know, and primarily, you know, older generations of, hey. You’re really hands on, really like to do things like this.

You should look at this industry. And if it weren’t for those conversations, I probably would have never ended up in this industry either. You know, so, really, I think it’s it’s kind of opening up and saying, hey. You know, First Robotics, other, you know, kind of vocational or technical, you know, trades kind of situations when you’re in high school, even middle school of identifying people that are interested in these industries or interested in more, you know, hands on designing things, building things, and getting in front of those younger generations and showing them, hey. Manufacturing is something you can get into.

And, right, you could pick up a teach pendant and move half of a car around with a robot. That’s really cool. So I think it’s a lot of kind of, you know, not only educational from a sense of educating people, but also just, you know, getting in front of younger generations, showing them what’s out there, you know, things that we like to do. There are a lot of career days at schools if we can go in and do things like that. Any kind of, you know, I guess, community involvement or outreach where you do have middle school, high schools, you know, even vocational schools of having introductories.

Definitely love to do that. I mean, I sit on a couple advisory boards. Anytime we have professors that wanna invite us in, absolutely would jump on board and say, yes. I will sit down, show everything what we do, show Dawson pictures, kind of walk them through what you can do, you know, as controls engineers, as mechanical engineers, and really get a better sense of of this is what this industry looks like.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know, I think, when my kids were growing up they’re all grown up now, have kids of their own. When I was when I was when they were growing up, there was really no inexpensive way to to they nothing inexpensive I really could put in front of them to let them let them learn, you know, electronics and programming. We had, you know, we had PCs, but, beyond that, that’s not the way it is today. Today, we have, and we’ve covered them on the channel is, you know, I think one of the best places to start is with the Arduinos.

And you can buy kits from kits with lots of electronics. It’s kinda like when I was a kid, they had a thousand and one experiments. Right? So you can buy buy, you know, kits that are, you know, $20 or $30. And we’ve reviewed a lot of the kits and and and the what comes in them, but they they come with all kinds of electronics and then the world, you know, the the world’s your oyster from there.

You can do so many things. But even before you get to that point, I loved and I used to coach legal league. And for those younger middle school kids, right, legal league, you know, you can I was I had kids in there in fourth grade, right, learning to do the Lego League stuff, and they they do a great job of trying to make it fun? You you’re plugging the like, motors into into bricks, onto a a computer, and then you program it graphically, you know, with, you know, moves and, you know, if you’re into motion, everybody you know, you got a gut moves and how far you’re gonna go and sensors that tell you when to stop. And, I mean, it’s just I think it’s amazing.

But the one thing I found, though, that that is difficult is that, you know, most most parents these days, they’re working, they’re both working, they don’t have a lot of time, they come home exhausted, and so they they have, an Xbox or a streaming surface that is their babysitter just so they can have some some alone time. And and I would just recommend, you know, limit that time. You know, the especially with video games these days, everything’s a season. You don’t wanna miss the next big thing that’s happening and and you would think from roadblocks to to, Destiny or, you know, Call of Duty or whatever. But don’t limit your kids’ time so when they’re bored, they have to they have to pull out that kit and stop playing with it.

I was with my grandson recently, and he got grounded. And I said, well, I bet your mom well, you can’t play video games. I bet your mom will let you create your own video games. It’s like on her computer. He started, you know, designing his own levels and whatnot.

It’s like, you know, if they if, you know, people are gonna go for easy. Right? But once easy is not there anymore, then they’ll they’ll look for something else. And, now talk to me about how how have you worked with the young have you done anything with the with the first robotics or with training? You said you’re on advisory councils.

Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve, you know, we’ve sponsored a few high school competitions as well as some other local high schools that essentially, you know, they’re they’re just looking to do introductory into robotics design. You know, I think it almost goes back to the educational standpoint where, you know, your typical curriculum is is pretty standardized now. And a lot of, you know, shop classes, I feel like don’t exist at many high schools like they did, you know, ten, fifteen, thirty years ago.

So some of it’s conversation. Some of it is honestly just where we’ve engaged with, you know, either prior high school, you know, where I went or other high schools that are interested in that and supporting it. Right? Like you mentioned, the biggest thing is is funding and finding opportunities. And to your point, yes, nowadays, it is hundreds of dollars.

It’s not thousands or tens of thousands to do that. Exactly. But that that’s something I feel like us as, you know, us as companies in the integration world, and just speaking kind of at in general, being able to identify those things, you know, from anyone listening, if you are on the integration side or even if you’re on the manufacturing side of maybe having conversations with, you know, what your your current layout looks like, potentially your your children or high schools that you worked with, you know, and then going to higher ups and maybe asking for a little sponsorship. I mean, a couple $100 can get quite a few different pieces of hardware and software, and you could start building these things that, you know, allow for that aptitude and that intriguing, you know, design and and doing hands on design, you know, I think opens a lot of doors from that perspective. Yeah.

I mean, definitely having good conversations with with, like I said, high school students, as well as trying to find other opportunities where you can work with these generations and allow them to have that curiosity. You You know, I think that’s the biggest thing. Once you get that spark and that curiosity, really just continuing to run from that and seeing what other options are out there in the world.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And and if you’re gonna sponsor as a company or as a group or as a, you know, organization, I would definitely put a put a requirement in there and and maybe go and and see the final project. Because my wife’s a principal, she’s been teaching for twenty years, and, people have sponsored different different, you know, things that she’s tried to implement in her school. And I think the one thing they fall down on is, yeah, they they have you fill out a form. They give you the money.

Then so you can go buy the kits, but and then they don’t get involved. And it’s like, you know, people get busy. And if there’s not, like, this requirement that, hey. They have to show you know, at the end of the at the end of the season or year or course, we’re gonna come in and see what they did. Just to try to hold their feet to the, not hold their feet to the fire, but just to give the teacher or the instructor some accountability, some some, reason to make sure that this stuff gets used and covered because there are so many mandates.

Hopefully, this will change, but today, there’s so many mandates that it’s difficult. They really have to make an effort to teach, outside of what’s mandated, which is and and like you said, unfortunately, shop class shop class, and, you know, basic electricity, those type of things are not mandated anymore or not mandated today. But, you know, as we’re talking about this, let if you don’t mind, can we switch over and talk about smarter manufacturing? So we’ve talked a while about how we get youngsters involved, but as you go to work every day, right, and you work with your people and you work with your customers, I mean, what are some of the trends you’re seeing out there where people are doing things maybe smarter or adopting new newer technologies that, you know, we didn’t have maybe ten years ago that are really making a difference in their plants?

Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. Certainly. You know, there are quite a few different things that we’ve come across. You know, there there are some buzzwords definitely.

You know, I think that you kind of have to sandbox exactly what they are, AI being one of them. Right? I think in the general sense, a lot of people may not understand. But there are some I’m gonna call them, you know, AI such as vision systems where essentially you’re teaching it, hey. Here are, you know, passable or passing products.

Here are failing products. And it’s not necessarily how vision systems traditionally were, right, where it always has to be the same picture if it doesn’t line up. If it’s not good, it’s bad. Right? That that’s kinda more of the traditional sense where some of these newer AI, you know, learning systems that are out there are actually able to detect and say, hey.

You know, I may be looking for something to be right side up, and it’s within that plus or minus 10 degree window. That’s gonna be a pass. If I see something flipped upside down, that’s certainly gonna be a fail. So we’re seeing some newer technologies like that definitely being implemented out there. IoT, smart sensors, IO Link are other ones that are huge.

We’re seeing a lot of deployments, especially in food and beverage where you’re no longer having to run analog sensors everywhere, but rather, you know, you’re basically implementing IO Link and other similar platforms where now I’m actually getting that process data over Ethernet IP. I don’t know if they’re about scaling other things like that. They make field installation and setup time a breeze. We do a lot of that as well. So definitely some newer technologies.

And then some other things I’d say are pretty unique too are more maybe around the robotics where we’re seeing a lot of your ROS and ROS two development where, you know, again, it’s kind of more of a open source platform that essentially allows you to run the control kind of independent of what we would traditionally look at from a controller where, hey. You may have a Fanuc or a KUKA robot that is essentially now running, you know, from a ROS perspective versus your traditional, you know, picking up the teach pendant and programming points. So it it it’s definitely interesting. I’d say, you know, we’re working on a quite a few different applications that are kind of bridging that gap between traditional and newer technologies, you know, where there’s a lot more dynamic going on. You know, for instance, an application we’re currently doing, essentially, we have, you know, a product coming into an area, a couple scanners doing a three d point cloud, and then robots that are actually going over top of that.

That product that’s coming in is never the same from one product to the next. So there’s a lot of kind of, you know, ongoing smart technology that’s feeding in there, vision systems, three d systems, and that’s actually using one of the the ROS, you know, approach as well. So, yeah, it’s definitely something that I think as our our industry grows, there’s a lot more, interest in it, and there’s a lot more funding coming in, private equity, venture capitalists, that are are starting to try and solve some of these more complex problems. And I think from that, it it does allow us to now look at this. Hey.

Traditionally, you would program with a PLC ladder logic. And the teach pendant. Well, that way you might be able to use more software based controls and engineering versus, you know, ladder logic programming and things like that. So, yeah. I mean, it’s interesting.

Again, from our standpoint as a system integrator, we get to see so many of these different things going on, that you walk in and you’re like, this it’s pretty neat to see what other people are trying to do out there.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know, we talked about AI quite a bit last year in in robotics. AI, you know, we and and I asked the audience to help me. Look. We gotta spread the the the knowledge about AI as far as what it really is.

Couple years ago, I was on vacation, and we were on a tour, and we had these dinners every night. And this older man, he’s he’s like, AIs self aware, and they’re programming itself, and we don’t need people anymore. And I’m like, that’s a great science fiction book you just read, but, I mean, I think if you know? You know, you try to explain to them. It’s like, look.

It’s like they published this. IEEE does a great job covering this. They’ve literally spent millions every year, like, 10 of the millions every year programming these AIs. They’re not self aware. They’re not then that people still are needed.

That’s why they’re paying people, you know, millions of dollars to program them. And, you know, it’s it’s it’s basically you know, as we look at the I always go back to, like, voice activation, and I should mute my, my device here so I don’t accidentally trigger it. But, you know, if we think back, like, I bought Dragon Natural Speaking back in the day because I wanted I my old job for twenty five years, I spent half or more of every day driving. So four hours driving, seven hours working, or eight hours driving, four hours. It was just it was just a for somebody who likes to do for a doer, it’s just demoralizing to be on the road that much.

For a driver, that’s great. I mean, they love that. But in any case, long story short, it’s 90% and, again, I have an accent. But 90%, you think that sounds great until you go to edit what you said. It’s not good.

Right? It’s, like, too much work. I could just type this from scratch. And we we also see that with a lot of transcripts. Like, if you’re on a video streaming site, the transcripts, the, automatic English captions, right, closed captions, A lot of times, they’re not that good either.

But we’ve seen that grow. I know when I first got my, my iPhone and it had Siri, and I would be like I would talk to it and be like, I can’t answer that. Today, I can talk to it, and it does a great job. It’s it’s the the database that has backing it up is so much better. And so I take that and I go into, like, the vision system example you gave.

Right? Now in the past, like you were saying, we had to have the lighting perfect. We had the gauges and the tools, and the the product had to be in the spot all the time, and there was no way to for it to float around and find the product and and most early on. And today, you can shoot it, like, a 100 products and say these are all good, and it can the algorithm can figure out, hey. What are the minor variances of these so I can understand what falls into the good bucket?

And then you can shoot at a 100 bad products and say, okay. These are bad. And they can actually build some, some, tables or or value sets to know, to really know really well, you know, much faster than any person could, what’s good and what’s bad. And it’s amazing. Even one vendor said, hey.

If you need to give it train it do even more training, we you can upload it to our website. We’ll do it offline and send it back to you, which I just think is amazing. And I know it’s revolutionizing, you know, cancer treatment or or detection and all kinds of other things. But, yeah, no. This is not data from Star Trek.

Rylan Pyciak: Right? Yeah.

Shawn Tierney (Host): This is not Al from 02/2001. And, and, yeah. And so so go ahead. Go ahead.

Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. No. I was I mean, you’re you’re spot on, Shauna. It it it’s a good balance. Right?

I mean, you know, I even look at it. We’ve all been there, right, especially from the controls perspective where something isn’t running and you walk out and it’s that slight little turn of the photo eye. Right? So as much as I think a lot of people may look at it of, hey. It’s taking over the world and it’s taking over what we’re doing, It still requires people, you know, in in at least in our world, technicians to implement it, to program it, to set it up.

And, again, a lot of our equipment too doesn’t even have that smart that technology. So, you know, it’s something that as we move forward educationally, I think, you know, generations that that still have a pretty good length of career left, it it’s making sure you’re educating yourself on it, understanding what it is, how to deploy it, utilizing it as it becomes more commonplace, but definitely not you know, I wouldn’t be intimidated by it because it it’s something that it it’s like anything else. It’s a tool that’s going to be used. You know, and I think it’s making yourself aware of it, understanding how you can actually deploy it in the future. And and something else, I guess, you know, a thought that they brought up from my standpoint is actually investment in this new technology.

It’s something else that we have a lot of these conversations with customers. You know, I know automate just happened. Right? You go out and you see the latest and greatest of everything. Lot of cool technology, new technology.

You know, we always caution our customers to be, you know, cautiously optimistic and consider what you’re investing in, because one of the things you have to look at you know, there are all these these crazy new technologies that are out there. I’m gonna use collaborative robots as an example. Right? When when they first came out, it was universal robots. Now you watch the show, you know, there are probably 50, a 100, I don’t know, 500 collaborative robots.

The thing you have to really consider is not only are you purchasing this technology, you’re investing in education, you know, from an internal standpoint to to bring your teams up to speed. But you also have to make sure that technology still exists in five, ten, twenty years. A great use case, you know, we actually did case study on it. You know, Ready Robotics, I thought was a great platform, works really well, you know, kind of made robot programming agnostic. And and they had a really, really valuable, you know, use case, I thought.

And, you know, they went bankrupt. They went out of business. So you have to look at that too of, hey. I’m gonna go and spend this money as a decision maker for my plant, for my company, for my process. You have to also make sure that that hardware, that software, that firmware, that company that developed that is also there in the long term.

So you kinda have to do a pros and cons and make sure, really, our our biggest things, you know, how long have those companies been in business, what does their technology look like, what does their tech support look like, Right? Do they have a team? Is it one individual? Are they writing firmware on the back end as these bugs come up? But it really is a holistic picture.

And and, again, I really recommend having conversations with your personnel that are on the floor supporting this. Reach out to integrators, reach out to individuals within the market. You know, ask a lot of questions before you make those decisions.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. But, you know, it’s does it work with your existing architecture? So there are so many great cobot and robot manufacturers. And, quite honestly, some of them work better with brand a and some work better with brand b. And if you have brand b, you probably want one that works really well with it.

You know, if you have brand a, then, you know, that’s gonna be and I know they all try to work with all they try to be vendor agnostic as far as the control systems, but some do a better job with you know? A lot of times it’s geographical or it’s just, you know, the the mission of the company internally. But, and then there are there are companies out there who do just just do a phenomenal job or try to with all vendors. But, you know, I think Cobot’s, that’s one place we talk about the younger generation. I mean, you think about it.

Right? And and I worked in a machine shop one summer when I was, in high school, and it’s it’s a job that young people do not want. Right? If you’re if you’re if you’re machining products, right, it it’s similar to, like, if an injection molding facility. People don’t wanna work there either.

Right? Younger generation, a lot of them don’t because they want something more, you know, twenty twenty five ish. Right? And so, if you can have a COBOS sit at that machine and put the pieces in and out instead of a human being, and I could tell you that was very boring work. And I and and and most of the people there were not college graduates.

Right? They were there because they were you know, it was the best paying job they could find without having any experience. And so as those people retire, if if you don’t have enough people to fill those roles, that’s where the Cobots, I think, could do a great job. And this people even have innovative uses for them. Like, this one company was it was a three d printing company, and so they like to work eight to five like most people do.

They have families. They wanna enjoy their evenings. And, the problem was, though, the printers would finish the print. You know, they would take custom print jobs. They’d finish, like, in the evening.

Right? And nobody wanted to drive back to work and switch out the trays so they could print something else. Right? Expensive machines printing expensive products. And so they bought a Kobo.

Now all that Kobo does is it goes around and replaces the trays on the three d printers when they finish their job so that you can print something else. And it gives them another, you know, theoretically, another sixteen hours worth of printing they can get out of their machines while everybody’s at home, you know, spending time with the family and and and sleeping. And so there’s a lot of innovative ways to use cobots. Now have you guys done any work recently with cobots?

Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. That’s it it’s definitely something, you know, we’ve deployed quite a few collaborative applications. Yep. You know, really, when when it comes to I’m gonna say collaborative versus noncollaborative.

More so, we’re we’re kinda back to, I guess, what you just touched on is identifying, you know, what are the problems that you could potentially solve? Or, honestly even just walking in and saying, hey. There is a potential solution here that maybe somebody’s never thought of. You know, that’s identifying, like you said, that, right, the three d is dirty, dull, dangerous where people just it’s a boring job. People hate it.

It’s high turnover. You know, really kind of finding those applications where it’s something simple. You know, it it it’s low cost. It’s something you could implement very easily. And then being able to walk in and replace that with a robot with a collaborative robot, you know, with an automated solution that actually solves those problems.

Right? And then it takes those individuals from doing that that high turnover, boring, or dangerous, or, you know, mind numbing kind of position into something that that opens up a lot more doors, and now they can be technicians. They can, you know, kinda move into a higher position where they’re doing more from the company perspective. But, yeah, I mean, in terms of collaborative applications, definitely a lot of opportunity that’s out there. You know, I think the biggest things are, you know, obviously identifying what you’re trying to do, making sure you do proper risk assessments to make sure that application is actually collaborative, as well as, you know, really finding what are you trying to solve at the end of the day.

Right? Is it a labor problem? Is it, you know, just just an ergonomic problem is definitely a big one we see a lot of. Time saving problems. We deployed one two years ago, actually, that essentially just mixing the solution.

Right? In every fifteen minutes, operator would have to stop, open up the door, go in there and mix this this solution, essentially, to keep it mixed, shut the door, and hit go. That essentially removed that where now that operator is no longer there and actually doing the other pieces of their job. You know, it was a slam dunk for everyone involved. So definitely a lot of opportunities out there.

You know, I think, really, it’s it’s identifying what you’re trying to solve. But you can definitely utilize them in quite a few different locations.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. You know? And I that kinda brings another thought to mind is, you know, we hear a lot of people say, well, automation is bad because it takes away jobs. And I usually, it’s a boomer when I see somebody saying this on TV and not to pick on boomers. Okay?

But, typically, it’s a boomer. Right? Mhmm. And, they’re holding a, like, an $800 smartphone, and they’re standing next to a a, you know, a $5,500 big screen TV. And I’m just like I’m I’m like or with those products you love to use, the car you like to drive, that smartphone you love, you know, None of those can be made without automation.

Impossible. Literally impossible to make your modern devices without automation. Technology, and I like to just say technology technology gets rid of the lowest level jobs. Right? So from the day we learned to tie an ox to that wheel to turn it so we could either pump water or grind, you know, grain or whatever, right, or harness it harness the wind with the wind with the winter a wind wheel, a windmill.

You know, that where people are always trying to find smarter ways to doing thing. And, you know, not that mixing a container by hand is extremely difficult or but I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to the local, home supply store, and they’ve mixed my paint wrong, literally. Or I’ll say this too. Same place. Have my keys made wrong.

I’ve I have, like, half a dozen keys I’ve paid them I had made, and they mess them up. Right? And so I’m not picking on people. They’re they’re stressed out. They got lots doing.

But if If if if I need a key now, because I know there’s one, department store nearby that has the automated. You just put your key in. It does everything automated. I will only go there because I know it is done correctly every time. And quite honestly, I don’t have to listen to the to the the sales guy go, oh, I don’t like making keys.

I can’t believe I gotta do this. You know? It’s just so funny. Yes. I wish you didn’t have to do this either because you keep doing it wrong.

So Uh-huh. I mean, do do you agree with me? Or I mean, the technology I find is elevating. It’s giving people better jobs. It’s not it’s really eliminating the jobs that most people don’t want.

Am I right about that? What what are your thoughts about that?

Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. I you know, honestly, Shawn, I think I think you’re spot on with that. You know, really, automation and and I would say this. You know, the last couple years, a lot of our customers, they’re asking for automation because they simply cannot find enough people to fill their roles. It’s not that, hey.

We wanna, you know, necessarily improve a process or, you know, replace people. Nobody’s actually filling those roles where they don’t have enough resources to do that manually. So it’s a, you know, it’s a labor shortage issue, honestly, of what we’re dealing with. But by no means is it actually taking over, replacing jobs, anything like that. I mean, exactly what you said.

Right? You look at at jobs that are very labor intensive, that are, you know, very stressing, ergonomic issues that, you know, it it’s honestly it’s backbreaking work. And I definitely understand that I wouldn’t wanna do that kind of labor myself day in and day out, five days a week. And that’s where automation is key. Right?

So you now walk in and a robot, a control system, you know, whatever it is is replacing those things that are, you know, beating up your body or, you know, other things, you know, very toxic locations, locations that you don’t wanna deal with chemicals, things like that. Now those same persons that had to go in and do that are now actually supporting it. And kind of back to what we were talking about before, right, now those individuals are learning how to operate the HMIs. They learn how to recover the robots. They’re learning how to do basic troubleshooting on PLCs, you know, robotic systems, things like that.

So, you know, from from an employment perspective, from a technology and educational perspective, I think it’s taking them from doing a repetitive, laborious job, and now it’s opening up more avenues where you could walk in and say, hey. You know, I have background, you know, programming, doing basic troubleshooting on this system that has, you know, phanic robot, Allen Bradley PLC. I made edits. You know, we may be maybe that system, you’ve put in five new part variants since you purchased it. You know, so now you you have more applicable skills that I think, in general, our industry needs to head that rate.

Right? As you mentioned, one, to be able to be competitive with the prices of what we pay for the cost of goods sold in general. But two, just from a standpoint of, you know, if corporations and companies are going to try and remain competitive, they certainly are going to have to automate. You’re not going to be able to replace and do everything with manual, you know, human labor, and you need to start implementing automation, you know, in the right locations, but also making sure you’re implementing it so you can, like I said, obviously, fill those labor gaps, fill the labor shortages that you have, you know, high turnover positions or dangerous positions, replace that with industrial automation. And, yeah, I mean, end of the day, It it is definitely not taking people’s jobs.

I can’t say I’ve seen any project where we walked in and said, hey. Here’s a machine that runs x rate. These five people are now gone. Usually, they’re moving into higher level positions, technician positions, and and, honestly, getting more education. So, I mean, I’m absolutely on board that automations automation is nothing but a good investment from a company perspective.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And, you know, I think back to, BeachNet, they make baby food. And, I was, working with them when they were building a new plant, and, the old plant looked ugly. It was like an old brick building, multistory. Yeah.

It I like, I walked through it, and I’m like, I don’t know that I could ever buy this baby food again. But their new plant was just beautiful. Beautiful. When you walk into the lobby, it’s huge and beautiful. You walk in the lobby, they have a mural on the wall.

It’s like endless mostly ladies in hair nets, endless table of ladies cutting potatoes and carrots, and and, they’re all happy. They’re like, yeah. This is great. The kids are in school. I can make some extra money.

Maybe we’ll buy a new car. You know? They were all pretty happy. It was like they can sit there. They can chat.

They can cut the carrots and potatoes, and they’re making healthy baby food for the community. And so it was great. Today, I don’t think my granddaughter would wanted that job for a a, you know, million dollars. You know? She’s never known a time when it hasn’t been, you know, high screen high resolution touch screens in her hand or in her mother’s hand or, you know, in her house, and it’s like, why would we do this manually again?

Rylan Pyciak: Mhmm.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Why would I spend all day repetitively getting carpal tunnel tunnel syndrome or whatever? You know? You know? And and so that’s just where we are. I think most of us see most people most people who who are paying attention to what they’re doing, they wanna do it better.

They wanna improve. You know? It’s that continuous improvement, CAN ban, all that stuff that talks about, you know, let’s let’s keep making changes to make the process better. And, you know, you’re not always not every change is is for the positive. But, you know, I think this kinda this brings us full circle too because, you know, I there was a technologist recently who was saying, we can import a lot of engineers because we don’t have enough engineers.

And it’s like, I replied to him, like, we have tons of engineers. What you’re really seeing is the schools are not teaching what you want them to learn. Partner with the schools so like, my youngest son and all these other software engineers out there are not unemployed because the schools didn’t teach them what you wanted. You need a you need a thousand engineers. Go to the local go to the local school.

Tell them this is why I need your people to learn. Trust me. They’ll start teaching it. Because the last thing that, you know, a competent school wants to do or college or university is, you know, put people out there who can’t actually get a job. They they love being able to brag about people getting jobs.

They love to be able to brag about hey. I’m working with company Y, and, we send them a thousand engineers over the last four years. So we kinda come full circle. I think we all need to think about that. How can we encourage our local educational institutions?

Maybe it’s our kids where our kids are going. Maybe it’s where our grandkids are going. Maybe it’s where nieces and nephews or siblings are going. How can we get involved and help those local you know, everything from grade school through high school through through, junior college, technical, you know, community colleges, and so on. We we gotta help them understand what we’re doing and what’s valuable so they can stay away from, you know, maybe saying, hey.

The Raspberry PIs gonna take over the world, so that’s all you need to learn. No. Sorry. Yeah. No.

I hate to bring it to you, but there’s a reason why we have major vendors, and they’ve been in business for over a hundred years because they make the what the customers want. But, yeah, that kinda brings a full circle to what we were talking about at the beginning of the show.

Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, It it definitely it it’s an entire ecosystem. Right? I think from from that perspective, right, from the large corporations that are manufacturing, it is having those conversations and saying, hey.

These are the kind of technicians, the controls engineers, the, you know, whatever roles you’re trying to fill. This is what we do day in and day out. And those individuals and corporations need to have conversations with, again, the the local vocational schools, the community colleges, the technical colleges, even, like I said, even high school and middle school and outline Yeah. This is what our career path looks like. This is what you know?

Right? This is what our process looks like. Honestly, you know, doing site tours, facility tours, understanding how things are made, looking at equipment and working with equipments where, hey. We may have, you know, humongous boilers or, you know, I grew up in Southern Ohio where steel at one point was was very large before it went overseas. You know, understanding what that looks like, how electric arc furnaces work and function, and actually working with local community colleges of, hey.

This is this is the kind of technical resources of what we need. Right? That’s low rates. It it’s electricians. It’s hands on labor, whatever that is.

And then, you know, aligning both what you’re trying to fill from a technical perspective with what is actually being taught in those vocational technical community colleges even back again to high schools where, you know, hey. Yeah. PLC programming is great. We actually utilize, like you said, we utilize Siemens or Allen Bradley. We don’t do Arduino for, you know, a a $100,000,000 production facility.

So I think a lot of it is honestly, it’s more community involvement. Quite honestly, it’s conversations like you and I are having, but on a on a bigger scale of understanding, hey. These are the skill gaps. This is where we’re currently at, and these are the roles we’re trying to fill. Because a lot of it, like you said, it’s it’s I feel like a lot of people in our industry more often than not, kind of stumble upon it or at least have some in.

But if it weren’t for that, people really wouldn’t know what manufacturing does. So I mean, I would definitely encourage that. Again, kind of back to the advisory boards that I’ve talked about, we have a lot of those conversations with the local community colleges of this is what we do. This is what’s good. Your training systems, this is awesome.

We don’t use any of this. And just having those those two way conversations and making sure you’re staying involved. I mean, end of the day, communication’s key, and I think that’s what we all need to do more of.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Rylan, I really appreciate coming on the show. I’m just looking at my list of bullets of things I wanted to talk about.

Was there anything that you wanted to talk about that we hadn’t gotten through yet?

Rylan Pyciak: I don’t think so. I mean, I think we touched on a lot of great topics. You know, in general, Shawn, I’d say, you know, really, one of my passions is definitely bringing in younger generations’ education into this industry. You know, end of the day, we’re all engineers. I think by default, we like to collaborate and have conversations.

And, really, I’m just trying to encourage more of that, right, of of all of us being able to have open, honest conversations. I know you get onto the forums and you get onto Reddit and all these other, you know, areas of the Internet, and it’s great because there’s a lot of collaborative energy. And I and, honestly, I think it’s something we just need to do that more, be more supportive of other individuals, of others in the industry, and keep having these conversations. Right? Because the more collective minds we bring together, I think it’s gonna open up more doors, and it’s gonna allow us to have, you know, more exciting conversations like this.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Rylan, I really appreciate you coming on. Now if people wanna learn more about Cleveland Automation Systems, where would they go to find out more?

Rylan Pyciak: Yeah. Definitely. You can find us on our website since clevelandautomationsystems.com. I know it’s a mouthful. You could also look look up myself on LinkedIn, Rylan Pyshak, Cleveland Automation Systems as well as on LinkedIn.

But definitely feel free to reach out. I’m always open. I love having conversations like this. So definitely you can find us, like I said, website LinkedIn. Send me a direct message if you wanna talk about something.

I’ll definitely share my contact info, and, you know, we can connect any which way you want.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And we’ll include all those links in the description so you guys, wherever you’re listening or watching, you’ll be able to have access to that so you don’t have to type it all in. But in any case, Ryland, thank you so much coming on. I really enjoyed our conversation today, and, just thanks again for coming on.

Rylan Pyciak: Definitely. And thank you for having me, Shawn. I definitely appreciate the opportunity.

Shawn Tierney (Host): I hope you enjoyed that episode. I wanna thank Rylan for coming on the show and talking about all things industrial automation. I really enjoyed our chat. I hope you did too. And I will put his link to his LinkedIn profile and to his company in the description.

I also wanna thank Cleveland Automation Systems for sponsoring this episode so we could bring it to you completely ad free. So if you’re talking to Ryland or anybody over there, please, tell them thank you for us. And, with that said, I just wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

If you enjoy this episode please give it a Like, and consider Sharing as this is the best way for us to find new guests to come on the show.

Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.

Note: As The Automation Show “After Show” is a member/supporter only perk, the above video is not accessible to non-members. Learn more about our membership options here.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

If you enjoy this episode please give it a Like, and consider Sharing as this is the best way for us to find new guests to come on the show.

Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

If you enjoy this episode please give it a Like, and consider Sharing as this is the best way for us to find new guests to come on the show.

Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.

Note: As mentioned above, this episode was not sponsored so the video edition is a “member only” perk. The below audio edition (also available on major podcasting platforms) is available to the public and supported by ads. To learn more about our membership/supporter options and benefits, click here.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

If you enjoy this episode please give it a Like, and consider Sharing as this is the best way for us to find new guests to come on the show.

Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

If you enjoy this episode please give it a Like, and consider Sharing as this is the best way for us to find new guests to come on the show.

Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

If you enjoy this episode please give it a Like, and consider Sharing as this is the best way for us to find new guests to come on the show.

Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.

Note: As mentioned above, this episode was not sponsored so the video edition is a “member only” perk. The below audio edition (also available on major podcasting platforms) is available to the public and supported by ads. To learn more about our membership/supporter options and benefits, click here.

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

If you enjoy this episode please give it a Like, and consider Sharing as this is the best way for us to find new guests to come on the show.

Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.