Anyone following the usual Industrial Automation blogs and news will have heard about the cybersecurity threats against Siemens WinCC and PCS7 platform. Among others, Control Global has an article, and Gary Mintchell has been following it closely on his blog. While this doesn’t specifically apply to OPC, it definitely affects the overall industrial automation space. [...]

Today Honeywell has completed the acquisition of Matrikon.  Matrikon will be integrated with the Advanced Solutions business of Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS). It has also been announced that MatrikonOPC will operate as a separate business entity within HPS. The VP of OPC Products, Sean Leonard, gives more details in the most recent MatrikonOPC e-newsletter.  The main [...]

The OPC Foundation’s next roadshow seminar for End-Users and System Integrators, on June 23rd in Minneapolis, the City of Lakes. The event will be held at the Minneapolis Marriott Southwest, 5801 Opus Parkway, Minnetonka, MN 55343; ph. 952-935-5500. The program will begin with a continental breakfast and registration at 8:00 a.m. followed by program start [...]

Boy, has it really been that long since I put up a post?  You get busy with the day to day grind, and say to yourself, ‘I’ll get one up by Tuesday, and realize it is Thursday already’.  I’m sure we all have something we know we should be making more time for during our [...]

  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently issued an initial list of standards and other elements needed to support an interoperable smart grid. The NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, Release 1.0, concentrates on standards that will help achieve interoperability among devices and systems. OPC Unified Architecture (UA) is one [...]

The results are in for the 2010 Control Readers’ Choice Awards. This annual survey of brand preference among suppliers of process automation technologies, represent the collective opinion of more than 1,000 process automation professionals. Those surveyed include the print magazine’s U.S.-centric readership as well as subscribers to their increasingly international digital media outlets anchored at [...]

I’ve been very remiss of late on getting blog posts up.  That will be my number one resolution for the coming year.  To make up for the lack of posts recently, I thought I’d do a recap of some of the noteworthy OPC happenings of 2009. This year saw a lot of activity from the [...]

Happy Halloween to all the ghouls and goblins out there.  Halloween is really a time of excitement, expectations and a little uncertainty.  What’s in the treat bag? Candy or Apples?  Who’s that behind the mask?  It’s that combined factor of anticipation and unknown that makes Halloween fun.  The same can be said for new interfaces. [...]

What is an Engineer’s favorite software tool? It has got to be Excel.  When I worked as a Project Engineer I had spreadsheets for everything!  Reports, graphs, data manipulation, text parsing. I’ve even had a flight simulator.  Excel is a great tool for analyzing and manipulating data, so it’s no surprise that there are OPC [...]

As Gary said in a recent post on tradeshow tips, this the event and conference season.  That means I’ll be on the road again spreading the OPC message.  This year I’ll be attending Emerson Exchange, ISA Expo and Rockwell’s Automation Fair.  Other MatrikonOPC folks will be showing up at Invensys OpsManage as well as globe [...]