Innovative Thinking

Gone are the days of having to manually control aspects of the manufacturing processes with valves and buttons and doing everything by hand. In the modern day and age ripe with technology, automation and electronic controls systems have replaced much of that manual work across the industry.

But creating logic controllers from scratch that are specific to every project or job can be time consuming and expensive.  What if there was a better way? 

That’s what many of the smart software developers around the world were thinking, and luckily they came up with an incredible solution — open source PLCs. 

So, what are open source PLCs and what can open source software do for me?

Strap in and get ready, it’s time to take a look into the exciting world of open source software to see how it works and what it can do for you and your company.

Adoption of robotic automation in both manufacturing and e-commerce has been on a steady rise over the past ten years, as robots can typically do many things more efficiently, more reliably, and consistently while saving operators from difficult, dangerous and demanding tasks. But there are many operations that still need the human element for directing the automation, loading materials and adapting to the ever-changing production environment. So it made sense for automation companies to come up with a way for humans and robots to work together.

Even with the new age of manufacturing coming in and automation becoming more prevalent in factories, there is still always going to be the need for factory workers. Machines today can do more than we ever thought possible, but at least for now, human factory workers are still necessary to keep everything up and running as smoothly as possible. More machines means more moving parts and automated processes. More moving parts and automation means more potentially hazardous situations for factory workers.

And with factory workers, safety has to be considered above everything else. So the question is — how safe is your factory?

Industry 4.0 — also known as the 4th Industrial Revolution — has been taking the manufacturing and processing world by storm in recent years. It’s just in its infancy and there are no signs of it slowing down any time soon.