Posts By: techadmin

Trends in Industrial Automation

Financial analysts are tagging industrial automation as a good investment. They have some interesting reasons: The race to the bottom is over. With third-world countries running out of their cheapest labor supplies — rural workers with little training and low expectations — automation is becoming attractive to nations that haven’t considered it before. Increasingly strict… Read more »

Excited About American Made Goods?

You know how, once a subject comes up, you see it everywhere? This morning I was reading about how the Outdoor Retailer Summer Show (it’s trade show season everywhere, not just in motion control) had a new award: a miniature Sasquatch figure designed to celebrate American-made goods. Then I read Jerry Jasinowski’s interesting article about… Read more »

Jernigan’s Law of Trade Shows

After many years of trade show attendance, I have formulated a law about trade shows that I think all trade show attendees will find helpful. I call it “Jernigan’s Law.” There is an inverse relationship between the length of exhibitors’ skirts and the number of actual new products being exhibited. That is, when there’s really… Read more »

Life Diagnosis Function

Mitsubishi’s new MR-J4 series sounds pretty smart. Its list of abilities provides a reminder that servo motors were one of the earliest examples of artificial intelligence, long before there was any real need for a Turing test. But the best item on the list, in my opinion, is probably not the one that dazzles most… Read more »

Engineers on Friday Afternoon

<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/dNkZQ_LKrKc?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe> In school, we learned that the average life span of a theory was 17 minutes, except on Friday afternoons. The reason a theory would last longer on a Friday afternoon is that people were thinking ahead to Friday night, when they might head down to the local watering hole… Read more »

Why You Need a Pilot to Handle Your Indramat Issues

Rexroth has been making the best motion control solutions available for about three decades now, and many of their Indramat motors and drives from the 1970s are still around and in use. One of the reasons for this is quality control. And one of the manifestations of that quality control is the fact that Rexroth… Read more »