The Automation Podcast

Shawn takes a look at the ET 200SP line of Distributed I/O from Siemens in Episode 19 of The Automation Show, Season 2. For any links related to this episode, check out the "Show Notes" located below the video. Watch The Automation Show from The Automation Blog: Listen to The Automation Show on The Automation Blog: The Automation Show, Season 2 Episode 19 Show Notes: The links mentioned in the video are listed below: ET 200SP Website ET 200SP Manual Collection Shawn's Siemens S7 Course Programming Note: Due to scheduling conflicts, episodes 17 & 18 and releasing after episodes 19-2x :-O Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey everybody. Welcome back to the show. My name is Shawn Tierney from Insights and Automation. And today, we're talking e t 200 s p distributed IO from Siemens. Before we go any farther, I do wanna thank Siemens for sending in the samples and for sponsoring this episode so it will be ad free, and that's as far as it goes. Everything else is my own opinion and thoughts. And, although I do appreciate them making this ad free and sending in the samples because I wanna be able to show them to you if I didn't have them. And, this is one of the reasons I'm doing this is I just put these hands on demos together for my students who come out to the automation school for hands on training. So I wanted to have something they could bring to their station and program with an s seven twelve hundred or 1,500. And, so I'm creating a bunch of these, and you'll see more and more of these as the weeks go on. But in any case, I we previously covered a couple on IFM, but now I'm doing the e t 200 s p. So we'll take a closer look at the hardware in a little bit. But But before we get into the hardware, I did wanna run through some slides that do a great job of explaining what e t 200 s p I o is. And, again, I call it distributed IO, not remote IO because here in America, most of us know there is a remote IO product from Rockwell Automation that is trademarked, Rockwell. So we don't wanna confuse people by using the term remote IO when possible. So let's go ahead and go to the slide deck now. And, the first slide is and, again, these this is a slightly of a couple three year old slide deck from Siemens that we're gonna be going through. And, you know, the first thing is, hey. E t 200 s p and e t 200 m p I o or I p 20 in cabinet I o. They're not on machine or machine mount IO. And, of course, the e t 200 MP is the full size IO that's about the same size as the 1,500, whereas the SP is the smaller. They're like the slice IO you see from all the different vendors. A matter of fact, a couple of big vendors are coming out with new IO this fall or have already come out with it, and we'll be covering those as well in the coming weeks. But today, we're focusing on e t 200 s p. And so I wanted to, talk about, you know, this is a marketing slide that Siemens puts in their presentations, and it makes sense. All the vendors wanna have IO for all the different applications, and Siemens is no different. And, actually, they got some stuff that other vendors don't have. But I'm gonna go right beyond this one and jump right into, you know, the main selling points of this product line where it's compact, it's fast, it's any of NG efficient, it's easy to wire, and I can attest to that having done three, four hundred wires here. It was very easy to wire. I really liked it. They say it has a great environmental coverage. There actually is, some extreme modules. We'll talk about that towards the end. And then built in diagnostics. Again, depending if you buy the high function and standard or basic modules, right, will depend on what kinda diagnostics you get. In any case, here is what it looks like now. The coloring of this slide, I think that the pictures colors the gray is a little lighter, almost it's almost like a light green. It's darker in person as we saw. Let me switch over here. As you can see here. So, I don't know what's going on with that, but one of the things you do see on this slide is, one of the first things you'll notice is a fail safe module, so safety modules. So, yes, you can mix standard and fail safe modules in the same rack or same lineup. The other thing you'll notice is it's compact like most of the Slice I o that's out there. Energy efficient ruggedness, there is an extreme version of this available. Intelligent, you can get high functionality modules. Right? Push in terminals, which I really liked, very easy to use, tool free connections. Of course, if you'd put a wire in the wrong place, which happened to me once or twice out of 400 wires, you can use a screwdriver and get it out really quick, and then, reduced parts of variance. So that's their marketing on this product line, but I also wanna call attention all the different ways you can actually mark up the products. You can put labels in the front, right in the front of the module itself. You can put labels on top and on the back as well. So a lot of different labeling options is also a color coding you can put over the terminals as well. We'll see that a little bit later. In any case, this is the physically how it goes together. So first of all, it doesn't you they don't all just slide together like tongue and groove. You do have to put them on the DIN rail and slide them into each other from right to left. So keep that in mind. Okay. And we always start the leftmost part is what we call an interface module. And so think of that if you're a Rockwell guy, that's your adapter. Okay? Now the interface module, most of these take a bus adapter. In other words, you can choose copper or you can choose fiber, or you can choose copper and fiber. And I love this design because, well, I'm sure it adds a little cost to the product. Being able to swap out copper for fiber if you need to or do one copper one fiber if you need to, I think it's a great idea. That kind of flexibility is great. Now there is a low cost interface module that has that bus adapter built in, but in any case, most of them, as you'll see, what was what I'll show you here on the workbench, it's module. You choose the one you want and this basic and advanced and we'll take a look at all those. Then you have the bases and the IO modules and we'll look at this in real time here on the workbench in a moment, but you can see here the basis of what the IO modules plug into. If you look there on the the fourth item there, it's just a base module without the IO. And, that's what clips onto the DIN rail and slides together, and then we stick our IO modules in. Also, share the keying. A lot of people leave that out, but I think it's pretty cool what they do there. And at the very end, they have something called a server module. The name for this, I'm thinking of servers like a computer server. So I don't know what happened with the translation there, but it's like an end cap. If you're a Rockwell person, it's like an end cap. You gotta have that at the end. It doesn't really serve up anything, but, in any case, you gotta have it. So in any case, then you can see kinda how it's laid out there. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide here. And, these are all the different type of interface modules they have. So the very basic one, right, if you needed a low cost drop of IO, it only does up to 12 modules, but, you know, it's an all in one unit with two Ethernet ports built in, and you can use all the modules with it except for safety modules. K. So that's important to know. Then we have the standard interface modules, which do up to 32 modules. Right? You can use safety with them. You can actually expand them to e t 200 a l if you needed to have some, on machine products or machine mount I o. I'll show you the a l in a future video. We're gonna cover that separately. And you can hot swap any single module at a time, which is very cool. And then, of course, if we go to the high featured, we get up to 64 modules. You can multi hot swap, multiple modules. You can actually set it for asynchronous mode so you can get the speeds up to two hundred fifty microseconds. So it's, very cool there. And you can see the other options there including the CPU, which we will cover. That'll probably be next week, though. Alright. So, one of the cool features they have is this was new at the time of this, you know, two, three years ago of this presentation is they added a, a unit that actually could use three Ethernet ports. So why would you do that? Well, think of it. Right? You maybe you're daisy chaining from one interface module to the next and you have a station where you either need a bulkhead connector so you can program from or you have an HMI. You need that third connection. Right? And so this allows you to have three connections. Now the downside of this is you actually have four connections, but you can only use three and I'll show you what I mean here. Let's go back to the overhead, and I actually have that module right here. Thank you, Siemens, for sending him in. And you can see I have my two bus adapters, but I can only use three of the four. Okay? So it's it's just a limitation. And, you know, I don't really know why they're limited to that. I'm sure there's a reason. I was thinking about that earlier. It's like, maybe they wanted to prevent this or that or the other thing, but in any case, it's still cool. It's so much cheaper than buying a switch and putting it in that place. Well, in most cases, it would be. Right? There's also the optional, grooves here. Let me switch back. There's also optional grooves here. I don't know if you can see them very well. We'll zoom in later. But that is for, strain relief, if you need to have that as well. You can see those plastic pieces go in, and then you can, you know,...

This week Shawn Tierney hosts Michael Warren from Wieland Electric in studio to demonstrate the SAMOS PRO Safety Controller in episode 15 of The Automation Show Season 2: #Automation #IndustrialAutomation #InsightsInAutomation Watch The Automation Show: Samos Pro Safety Controller Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Show Notes: Thanks to Michael for coming out to our office, and to Wieland for sponsoring this episode! For more information about the SAMOS Pro Safety Controller, see the below links: Wieland Electric Safety Products Free Download of Samos Plan6 SAMOS PRO SAFETY CONTROLLER Safety Training Wieland Electric North America Contact info Note: The video edition was originally released on 07-22-25, and re-released with Audio Podcast Edition on 08-21-25. Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Everybody, welcome back to the show. Sean Tierney here from Insights and Automation, and we have a special show for you today. I have Michael here from Wheelan, and we're gonna talk safety PLCs and all kinds of great stuff. But before we jump into that, you know, I haven't had Wheeling on the show before. So, Michael, I'm hoping you can give us a well, not only introduce yourself. I got to meet him this morning before we started recording. But, if you could introduce yourself and then maybe tell us a little bit about your company, and then we can jump into why we're here to talk about these good looking products. So let me turn it over to you. Michael Warren (Wieland): Okay. Great. Well, thank you, Sean. Thank you for having me. I appreciate that. And, yeah, my name is Mike Warren. I'm a business development manager for, Whelan Electric, North America. I've been, with Whelan a couple years now, but, I got over twenty years of experience in the industry. I have a couple of TUV certifications under my belt. I have a TUV functional safety engineer and also TUV certified functional safety expert. In addition to that, I do consulting for safety applications. I teach safety classes. I also teach the CFSE class. And, I do things like, review machine safeguarding, standards, CE marking, risk assessments, remediations, lockout tagout, basically everything that, is involved in in the safety world. These are some of the classes that I cover. So, what we're doing today, Sean, is to talk about, our product. Okay? The the Samuels Pro Compact. And the Samuels Pro Compact is a safety PLC. It's known, by various names, safety controller, brick PLC, whatnot. But it is a compact, as the name implies, safety controller. And in a safety chain, it really is, the keystone to a safety, system. There's always, an input device. Okay. We follow the ILO system. Okay. I for input devices. L for logic, in this case, the Samuels Pro Compact. And an output devices could be contactors, which I have here, in the demo itself. Okay. It could be a, OSSD, inputs from a VFD or robots. Okay? So those qualify as output devices. But the input device is for detection. The large device makes a decision, and the output device executes. And the primary purpose of an output device is to remove energy in an emergency or a, an intrusion, situation. So let's take a look at the product itself. Okay? The Samuels Pro Compact, again, is occupying this spot right here, in the demo itself. It's 45 millimeters. Okay? Very compact. The base system is set up with 20 inputs. Okay? 20 devices. Okay. 20 inputs, it would be, 10 safety devices. Safety device is always redundant. There's two points per safety device. So that device is already set up for 10. There's four safety outputs on it. And the version that I have here in the demo is actually an upgraded version including motion. So not only will it, set up and accept the inputs from some of these safety devices that I have here, for example, like light curtains, I have door switches, I have an e stop, I also have an analog position switch right there that'll detect the input. Other than those devices, I also have a safety encoder attached to one of the axes, in the demo to do motion detection. Not only are we detecting people, but we're also detecting shaft movements, okay, with the encoder itself. Shawn Tierney (Host): And that's optional. So there's two models, one with motion and one without. Michael Warren (Wieland): That's absolutely right. Alright. And I wanna point out that the software is free. It can be downloaded easily. It can throw it on your laptop. And the nice thing about it, and we'll get to the software. We're gonna show a little bit about it, that you can use the software without any hardware attached to it yet. Okay? You could literally can build your safety system in the virtual sense, test it out, check to see if it's, working properly. And, again, when we dive into the software, you'll see a little bit, the nice, additional features you get. Things like a schematic and a report, and also show you the modules that are actually part of the system itself. Okay? Now, we talked about, the communications on this too. Okay? We have three onboard communication, protocols. Okay? Onboard, we can, work with PROFINET, Ethernet IP, and Modbus TCP. Shawn Tierney (Host): Oh, nice. Michael Warren (Wieland): There are additional gateways that you can get to add additional, cons. Okay? That includes CAN open, PROFIBUS, and EtherCAT. So, again, we have a nice way of communicating with other protocols, and let's face it, other manufacturers. And in the safety world, the manufacturer's controllers, the actual, automation controllers are not to dictate to the safety system when to remove energy or not. It's the other way around. The safety always has a a precedence and a priority over the controls. Its purpose with these communication gateways is to inform the control systems of what's going on in the safety. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. I mean, most of the time, your your master PLC is gonna already have an HMI or SCADA system. Correct. So they're gonna wanna display that information. So if you have those especially the the three you have built in, I'll be able to probably the biggest three Yep. You know, according to all the surveys and industry reports and whatnot. Having those built in means I mean, you cover most PLCs standard PLCs. You're gonna be able to give the data to them. They're gonna be able to know in their program. They're They're gonna be able to let their operators know using the existing equipment. So very cool. Michael Warren (Wieland): Yep. And in this world, we, fully understand that, it's a it's a mix and match. Okay? Okay. Rare do we find customers that are using a single brand for everything. You and it's necessary that, you know, one brand of light curtains works with the controller and another brand of door switch and whatnot. They're all kinda compatible. And the communications, though, is very, very important, because, again, they're not, operating, independently and in a silo. Shawn Tierney (Host): So if I understand that correctly, so we're seeing your products, Ian. I really don't know much about your company and what products they make, but I can see you make a lot of products here. So you're saying that you don't just work with the Whelan products, you work with other people's safety products as well. Absolutely. Third party light curtain or third party contactor or safety contactor or third parties, safety push button. Michael Warren (Wieland): Absolutely. Okay. Whelan, itself is a, it's a German company. Okay? Okay? They're famous for their terminal blocks. Okay? So really we put them on the map, you know, many, many years ago. But, there's two pillars for the company right now. One is safety products, and the other is distributed power. And, again, this is an important product for it. This is really our keystone and our leading product, as a logic device in a safety system. So a lot of time and energy and development has been put into this, to make it, a world class and, leading with all the features, like you said, including communications. Shawn Tierney (Host): Well, I think too the fact that the audience can go out there and grab a copy of the software and actually simulate their system, that gives them a you know, because maybe they maybe they're like me. Maybe they haven't used your system before. So they can actually build a system, put it together, test it in the simulator without spending a dime. They'll be like and, hey. They go to the boss and say, hey. I got a proof of concept here. Let's let's call Mike and say, we can't come to call out and and show us more. Michael Warren (Wieland): Yep. No. No. As a please call. By the way, I appreciate that. No. Like I say, it is a, a wonderful benefit. It helps people try to determine because, let's face it. Not everybody knows and understands safety unless you do this, day in and day out. Yeah. You're not up with the latest standards. You don't understand simple things like an e stop here requires a, a contrasting yellow background to it. Something as simple as that. And, again, the, the the software itself is smart enough where you put these devices together, and if you configure it wrong, it bounces you out. And the reason that it bounces you out or says that you can't, you're not permitted to do that particular because it's always traceable back to standards. Okay? So the standards are embedded in the configuration, and the algorithms that allow you to drag and drop and put particular devices together are based on, on the standards themselves. Okay. So the controller itself, in a safety system, is of the highest rating. Okay? In the PL system, it's PLE. Okay? That's, that's that is the highest, that you can, arrive to in in the PL system. It's PLE, SIL three, or CAT four. Okay? ...

Shawn Tierney meets up with Aaron Moncur of Pipeline Design and Engineering to discuss "The Most Underrated Skill in Automation," as well as the upcoming Product Design Expo, and the "Being An Engineer" podcast, all in this episode of The Automation Podcast. For any links related to this episode, check out the "Show Notes" located below the video. Watch The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 243 Show Notes: Special thanks to Pipeline for sponsoring this episode so we could release it ad free on all platforms! To learn more about Pipeline, the PDExpo, and Aaron's Podcast, see the below links: PDX: Product Design Expo, Registration Link (use coupon IIA50 to save $50!) Being An Engineer podcast The Wave (engineering community website) Aaron's LinkedIn profile Pipeline company website Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Thank you for tuning back in to the automation podcast. This week, I meet up with Aaron Moncur from Pipeline Design and Engineering to talk about what he thinks is the most important skill to have in industrial automation. And we also talk about his upcoming event, PDX, which is, coming up just in a few weeks, and we even have a coupon if you wanna go to save you $50 off the admission price. And we also talk about his podcast. He has over 300 interviews with engineers from all kinds of backgrounds, and, I think you guys will find that interesting as well. And, we just had a great time just talking and chatting about different strategies and different challenges we've had over the years in the automation world. So with that said, let's go ahead and jump right into our interview with Aaron Moncur of Pipeline Design and Engineering. I wanna welcome to the show for the first time, Aaron. And, we have a very exciting topic to talk about today. Should be very interesting to all you controls engineers and you high end electricians and technicians out there do automation. But, before we jump into the discussion, Aaron, please, tell the people a little bit about yourself. Aaron Moncur (Pipeline): Alright. Well, Shawn, thank you so much for the introduction and having me on the podcast. I've been excited to talk with you. I have my own podcast as well, actually. I'll I'll touch on that a little bit, but, I love talking about engineering and, business and automation. My company, Pipeline Design and Engineering, we've been around for about fifteen years now, and our focus is, industrial automation. We're integrators. We also do a lot of, just test fixtures, you know, smaller, not necessarily automated, but manual fixtures, things like that, machine building. We even do we actually started fifteen years ago in in general, product design. And so we did a lot of medical device design, consumer products, things like that. And then about three, four years in, one of our customers asked us if we could design a test fixture for them. And we said, what's a test fixture? Yes. And so, we figured out, you know, what that was all about and delivered it and they really liked it. And they said, this is great. We need more of this kind of thing. And so ever since then, slowly but surely, we we've, been moving more and more into that area of, like, fixtures. And then at some point, we started adding a little bit of motion, a motor, and a pneumatic actuator. And then at some point, we started doing full automation. And and at this point, that's that's kind of our focus is automation machine building, and we still do test fixtures and, a little bit of of product design as well. But I I have a degree in mechanical engineering, and I've been doing this, for a little over twenty years. Interesting story of getting laid off and then starting my company and, just living the dream here with a wonderful, wonderful group of people doing engineering and automation work. Shawn Tierney (Host): You know, I've worked with a lot of custom machine builders over the years, and a lot of what they do is test stands. And a lot of them are automated, and some of the most interesting ones I've seen were a lot for medical devices and whatnot. A lot of them are for things that we use every day, like the pieces that go in your door, like the door switch and the windows, you know, that send them up and down. Those things need to be not only assembled, a lot of time, pick and place type of, systems, but they have to be tested. And they're gonna be tested a lot, like, millions of times. A lot of times, if the prototypes, they gotta go through some very rigorous testing, and there's a lot sometimes lots of data collection that goes along with that. So I got an idea for for what you're saying and some, you know, test stands and actually, you know, manual assemblies. Sometimes you just need a bunch of jigs and different layouts so you can put something together quickly and, you know, in manufacturing, some of that has to be done by hand as well. So very interesting stuff. And so, with that said, I know we wanted to jump into a go a couple different ways here, but I do know I before we get too far in, you do have a upcoming event. So I wanted to make sure we get the talk about that a little bit before we jump into the topic of what would, you know, the meat of what we're gonna discuss today. Aaron Moncur (Pipeline): Yeah. Thank you. Something that's really big for me, important for me is, building community around engineering. And, we have a few ways that we've done this. We have our podcast, Being an Engineer. We also have an online community called The Wave. It's thewave. Engineer, free resources and tools, education for for engineers. And then we also have an event called PDX, and PDX stands for the Product Development Expo. It is, inclusive of all things hardware. So that includes, you know, product designers. It includes metrology folks. It includes automation experts. Basically, anyone who touches hardware developing, hard goods products would be a good fit for for this event. The, the PDX event is happening this October. That's a Tuesday and a Wednesday just outside of Phoenix, Arizona. And, kind of the unique innovative format of this event is that it's it's not just like a trade show where you show up and and, you know, you get a flyer or a brochure from a vendor. The focus of this event is is training and education. It's kind of like a two day boot camp for hardware professionals, whether they're mechanical engineers, automation engineers, manufacturing engineers. And so we have about about 35 experts in the industry who are are gonna be there as instructors training on different topics. These include AI tools for engineering workflows, GD and T, tolerance stack, modular extrusion for machine frames, robot programming, linear motor, motion control, precision fluid dispensing, CAD data management, FEA, engineering documentation, simulation, DIY, PCB design and prototyping, three d scanning, reverse engineering. So it's pretty extensive. There's something for everyone there. Again, it's a two day e event, a training boot camp, October, just outside, Phoenix, Arizona. You can go to pdexpo.engineer to learn more about the event and sign up. The cost is $295 and that's inclusive of all the different training topics that you can choose to sign up for at the event. Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. That sounds like a pretty good deal too. If you have somebody junior on your staff or if you're changed roles in your company and you're getting more into this kind of type of product design and engineering, then, definitely check that out. You typically can't go anywhere for two ninety five. Right? So Right. Just a walk in the door for a day is typically it's not and and I know that the people out there, they're probably gonna have some services that they can offer as well that some of you guys may wanna take, take advantage of. But for you folks, especially if you're in the area or if you have a need at work for one of these things, please check it out. And, if I get it correct, it's pdexpo.engineer? Aaron Moncur (Pipeline): That's right. P d e x p o dot engineer. Shawn Tierney (Host): Excellent. And speaking about engineering, of course, you're a mechanical engineer. We see a lot of mechanical engineers in automation as automation engineers when especially when it comes to, systems that have servos on them, systems that are very, you know, a lot of acceleration, a lot of mass, systems that require more than just, you know, very sequential type of logic that, you know, we have lots of parts moving around that have to be in certain places at certain times. And so, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, your journey as, the owner of a company? And I know how you came came to this conclusion about the most valuable resource in automation. We're not gonna give the answer away yet, because then we would never show. But, in any case, can you talk a little bit about that, your journey and what you've gone through and the different things you ran into and learned? Aaron Moncur (Pipeline): Yeah. I I think there is a a very underrated skill in automation, and it's not something that people talk about very often. But over twenty years in the industry, I've definitely seen this over and over and over. And so we're we're gonna talk about that today. In terms of my journey, how I got here, I worked at an engineering company twenty years ago and great company, very smart people. And in the beginning, I loved it. I got to do all the things that I enjoyed, right? CAD design and prototyping and, you know, working on a mill and a lathe to to make some parts and assembly is wonderful. Then the economy slowed down. Right? This is back in 02/1989. Mhmm....