This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This blog is about technology, as well as some of my personal interests. I am the CEO/CTO of Virtual Photons Electrons. I was the CTO for MEMEX for three years, the President and Chairman of the Board for the MTConnect Institute from May 2010 to January 2014 and prior to that I spent 23 years at Sun Microsystems.
There are two items that are a must in the Edstrom family
every Christmas - one is outside and the other is inside. Outside it is
THE Deer of Ashburn and inside it is Tim's Gingerbread Man.
Below
was the first rev of THE Deer when I found it in my neighbor Rick's
trash. I did not ask for permission to take it (Rick later said I am
always welcome to take anything in his trash :-) and quickly mounted it
on my son John's Taurus (the famous Sun Microsystems $1 million Ford Taurus) John was not amused and ordered it off before he drove it to
high school that morning.
Now I needed to find a purpose for the deer and then it hit me, the ultimate Christmas Rudolph The Red Nose
Reindeer of Ashburn!
It is always nice to see the line of cars several miles
long in Ashburn as they wait in line to see Rudolph The Red Nose
Reindeer of Ashburn :-)
The
inside ornament that is a must is Tim's Gingerbread Man. This always
goes in the most visible space on our Christmas tree every year.
The
story here is that Tim is 3 years old and the pre-school teacher gives
out the Gingerbread Man, glue, some things to glue on there and lots of
noodles to glue on. It normally keeps the kids busy for 20 minutes
according to the teacher. After 1 minute Tim yells, "I'm done!" The
pre-school teacher thought this was priceless and was laughing out loud
when she told the story. She had never seen one like Tim created :-)
This blog post is a culmination of years answering questions on MTConnect that I will keep updated as it is easier to just point individuals to one blog site I have as opposed to multiple blog posts or a very large email with all of these FAQs, Presentations, Webinars, Websites and ALL Things MTConnect. A lot of this earlier work was when I was President and Chairman of the Board MTConnect Institute.
MTConnect is an open, royalty-free standard built to foster
interoperability between devices, equipment and systems. Using XML and HTTP,
MTConnect defines, structures, and exposes real-time data throughout a factory.
Unlike previous interoperability
attempts, MTConnect’s common communication and data dictionary empowers
software developers to implement applications aimed at providing more efficient
operations, improved production optimization and increased productivity. MTConnect is elegant because of its simple
and scalable design.
Think of MTConnect as the “Bluetooth for manufacturing” with
the clear goal of “Different Devices,
COMMON Connection”.MTConnect has become the default interconnectivity
fabric to enable manufacturing dashboards to understand exactly what is
happening in a plant or shop, an M2M communication mechanism and a simple, yet
elegant way to implement IoT or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). IIoT
has been predicted to be tens of billions of dollars per year with
manufacturing being a large percentage of that market.
John Byrd, former President of AMT, summarized the
significance, “MTConnect will be more
important for manufacturing in the 21st century, then CNC was in the
20th century.”Brian
Papke, former President of Mazak USA, stated the financial importance, "The
implementation of MTConnect is one of the simplest and fastest ways to improve
productivity and increase machine utilization. Mazak's MTConnect
implementation provided the highest ROI for any capital investment because of
the significant increase in utilization of equipment for a very moderate
expenditure."
A sample of global companies which joined MTConnect, that those
not in manufacturing have likely heard of, include Boeing, Bosch Rexroth, Cisco,
FANUC, Foxconn, GE (Aviation, Global Research, Power, Transportation), General
Dynamics, Lockheed Martin Electronic Systems, Mitsubishi Electronic Automation
and Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC).
If you are in manufacturing or WANT to be in manufacturing, then you NEED to join the MTConnect Institute!
What Do I Need To Know About Connecting ALL Of My machine tools, 3D Printers, Sensors and Devices to MTConnect?
In terms of legacy connectivity and create your own or partner, it would be worthwhile to at least understand what MEMEX's MTC-One is capable of before you invest a lot of time and money into creating your own legacy hw/sw black box. There are other connectivity devices out there, such as Mazak's SmartBox where MEMEX brought together Cisco and Mazak for the three companies to work together on legacy connectivity.
While the above two "Getting Started With MTConnect" documents are a little dated, the principles remain and the list of shop floor monitoring companies is still a good list.
Here is the video that has Ben Schawe of Mazak speaking on their Factory using MTConnect at the [MC]2 2014 Conference.
It is very compelling and shows the power of MTConnect and shop floor
monitoring. This might be helpful in terms of a machine tool company
that is considering to use MTConnect in their own factory with shop
floor monitoring by "flying their own planes" or "eating their own dog
food" :-) It should also be noted that Mazak has really expanded with
using MTConnect and MERLIN beyond that point to include full OEE, an
operator panel, as well as that was an earlier version of MERLIN.
The MTConnect page at MEMEX is something I put together that has lots of MTConnect educational links and videos. There is a FREE Shop Floor Monitor that talks to ANY MTConnect device called MERLIN OPTime, as well as an MTConnect Agent Configuration Tool called MTCACT
Using Excel as a simple monitor for MTConnect - this is a short webinar that I show you how to use Excel as a simple monitor for MTConnect. It shows just how easy it is to talk to an MTConnect device.
In the above 40 minute webinar, I provide my personal thoughts on the
technical and business issues to be aware of when implementing MTConnect
for machine tools, devices or sensors.
The impetus for this webinar is the tremendous amount of interest I have
seen globally for companies and individuals who are considering
deploying MTConnect enabled machine tools, devices and sensors.
When I think of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) I think of
MTConnect. The reason for this is that monitoring and data analysis
begets more requests for additional information and this can be
accomplished by the addition of MTConnect enabled devices and sensors in
the plant.
Additional Documents For Those Wanting To Implement MTConnect
Device Functionality Group This is listing of what data items some of the machine tool vendors are supplying would be of interest. Info that is included is partial machine, control, and adapter support and functionality supplied by builders are listed here. Many additional devices are supported from the factory or via third party adapters, and the MTConnect standard may be extended to cover additional data items.
An
interesting exercise to find out what is available is to go out to some
of machine tool makers and see how they setup their MTConnect pages
such as Mazak, Okuma, DMG MORI and others where you can go to their homepage and search for MTConnect.
This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This is the same name of the blog I had for Sun Microsystems for many years. I am the CEO/CTO for Virtual Photons Electrons, LLC. More info is available at http://VirtualPhotonsElectrons.com I was the CTO for MEMEX for almost three years. More information on MEMEX is at http://MemexOEE.com
