I promised in my last blog to give you the run down on the SPS show. Well, first there’s Nurnberg. Nurnberg is an old city that’s about an hour train ride north of Munich, which I think still counts as Southern Germany (Bavaria), though I could be wrong.

Nurnberg seems to be an odd place for this show. Northern Germany is the heart of German Industrial might. While Nurnberg is centrally located, it doesn’t have the manufacturers you would find in Stuttgart or Hannover. I’m glad the show is there though, as it doesn’t have the distractions of Munich and is much prettier than the northern German cities.

Here are my top takeaways from the show:

IT’S HUGE

The first thing about this show is that it is huge. There are twelve halls. Three I think are dedicated to anything and everything having to do with Motion Control. From Motors to systems, if you can’t find it at SPS, no one makes it. But the really weird thing is the shape of the halls. They’re not rectangles. Not even pentagons or octagons. One is a triangle with rounded corners. Another is sort of a rectangle with a ball on the end, and so on. Not only that, but it’s really hard to walk through them because the aisles go in all sorts of odd directions.

THE FOOD

If you like to eat, you’ll love this show. Vendors here aren’t into the logo’d up pen or luggage tag type of giveaways. Here, you eat (and drink). At the high end, the Siemens, Phoenix Contact, and Wago’s of the world have essentially complete restaurants in their booths. You can get sausage dinners or Wiener schnitzel with beer, wine, and cocktails. At the next level, you can get sandwiches, pretzels and some German bakery. At the lowest level, everyone has cookies and candy. Some companies were even handing out Schnapps and other liqueurs.

THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

Lots of attendees didn’t speak English. Maybe I’m an Anglophile but I pretty much believed that if you are an Engineer anywhere in the world you have a pretty good command of English. Well, that’s not the case. Lot’s of people moving through our booth were not English speakers. They recognized DeviceNet, EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP but that’s about it.

WIRELESS

I didn’t see anywhere near the amount of wireless I expected. Maybe because I am working on wireless everyday now I am more sensitive to it, but it just wasn’t there. I’m not talking about the 803.11 Wireless Ethernet routers and gateways. Everybody has those - it’s old hat. But I barely saw any cellular, Zigbee or other sensor networking, even in the “wireless area” which wasn’t more than two small booths.

STUDENTS

Germans are big into Engineering education. There were many teachers taking students on tours, so a large portion of attendees were much younger than you would see in the US.

WOMEN

This is short. There weren’t any. Almost no women working in booths. A few companies used them to accessorize their booths but they were mostly the typical German style women (I won’t comment further). 98% of the wait staff doing food duty were women, but that was about it. Engineering is a very male dominated profession in the US, but in Germany it appears to be even more so. However, there was one very popular, nearly naked woman for some company in Hall 6 - I’ll post a picture if I get some requests.

EUROPE SALES BARRIERS

Distributor after distributor explained to me how hard it is to sell in Europe across country lines and even within a country. In Switzerland for example if you’re from Lucerne (German part) you have a really tough time selling in Geneva (French part). In France, you have to be French. In Belgium, Holland and other places it’s the same way. If you’re not like me, I don’t buy. I was totally unaware of this problem before the show.

It was a great show, our booth was a success and I am glad I got to experience it - sinus infection and all.

Yes, it’s my fault. I arrived home from SPS 2009 a week or so ago and I still haven’t recapped the show in my blog. I’ve got so much to say about it, but I brought home a pretty massive sinus infection from Germany that has kept me down and out until now. If you’ve been on a plane with any kind of congestion you know how miserable that was. I literally got home, walked into the house and collapsed on my bed without even taking off my coat. What I forgot to do was to take the phone off the hook. My “restful” sleep was interrupted by about 10 phone calls.

I actually developed my sinus infection right there in Nurnberg though not at the show. On Wednesday I decided that a good 20 to 25 minute run through the old town would be fun, so off I went. At home, you see, I run up and down “kettles”. For those of you who are not from Wisconsin – those are hills made by glaciers. I live in the midst of hundreds of them. When I run the next hill is always a short distance away. It’s agonizing but a really good workout.

In Nurnberg there are no hills. Just level ground with beautiful thousand year old castles and eight hundred year old restaurants. It was a fabulous morning run. Right up until I got lost. And I mean not just lost, but really lost. So there I am drenched with sweat, freezing in 40 degree weather, standing on a street corner in Germany trying to figure out if I go forward, backward, left, right or just stand there until someone comes along that will speak English. Well, 45 minutes later, I’m back at the hotel with my Sinus’ preparing for all out war with my head.

Sinus infections are the kind of thing that hit you hard, and keep you down for a while. I was able to answer a few emails but just didn’t have the energy to do much of anything else. Today, it’s a week later and I am just starting to get my old energy back. I even went for a bit of a run yesterday to prove I still had it in me.

Here are my top surprises of the show. I will go through them in detail in the next blog:

1. It’s HUGE – Eleven odd shaped halls with hundreds and hundreds of vendors
2. Their big into food. I’m talking full blown restaurants right there in their tradeshow booths.
3. A lot of Germans haven’t really mastered English – that was a surprise to me
4. Lot’s of Ethernet and not much CAN. In fact, a lot of EtherNet/IP – as much as Profinet IO, which surprised me.
5. Only a little wireless
6. Lot’s of students
7. Few Women
8. European Loyalty

I just had a birthday. Not much of a celebration around my house. In fact it passed virtually unnoticed. My step granddaughter’s birthday is the next day. She’s 7 and it’s a really big deal for her.

Much has changed in my 35 years, ooops I mean 53.  That holds especially true on the factory floor.  My first impression at Procter & Gambles Charmin Tissue Plant in 1981 was the sheer noise of it all.  Just a terrible drone that made it hard to hear, but it was kind of exciting.  All this clanging, clacking, products whizzing by, getting wrapped, put into boxes and moved into semis, it was overwhelming.  Incredible energy and flow to it all.

It seemed like a really cool place to work. You could actually make machines do things right before your eyes. Much more fun that writing some PC program that displayed characters and logic on a screen.

In those days there wasn’t DeviceNet, EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP or even AS-i bus. We didn’t even have serial comms that I can remember. Just one big line shaft that drove the entire machine or a series of belts or chain drives. The Gear Box was the high tech wonder device and Mechanical Engineers were revered. They argued endlessly about those gear boxes. How many to use, how big to make them, how to prevent “backlash”…they were real gurus.

In those days, the PLC vendor ruled. You bought an Allen-Bradley system, a TI system, a Modicon system, and that vendor got everything. It was a completely captive customer market. No need for any other vendors stuff here. We’ll supply it all, they said.

It was the Wild West days of factory automation, especially in Detroit where the auto companies were making endless piles of cash. There was gold on the streets in those days.

Selling was also a lot different in those days. I was always told they used the philosophy “Get Em Drunk, Get Em Laid, Get The Order”.  I never witnessed it, but I don’t doubt a lot of that was true. Sales guys (and they were all guys as were their customers) had virtually unlimited expense accounts. I hear tell that the money flowed like water.

The pendulum has now swung the other way. GM is on life support, Chrysler may yet fall and Ford is holding on by its fingernails. Detroit is impoverished and I read today that even the bars are closing and dancers are leaving the business.

So what does the future hold? Given that I’ll be working for the next 20 or 30 years (What else would I do with myself?), where are things headed. We’ll, I’ll make a few predictions:

• Mechanicals had their time, Electricals had theirs.  Now we Software guys are having our time with 70% to 90% of a project being software.  Alas time will change that as well.   Everything will be reconfigurable in the future. There will be little to no software to write, it will all be included.
• Logic will move to the devices, there will be no central processors with thousands of lines of code.
• Over the next 20 years DeviceNet, Profibus and the rest will die off - lots of reasons for this including no silicon in chips to support things like Profibus and a move away from Master Slave systems.
• The big PLC companies will decline in importance
• Everything will be a PLC (or have logic capabilities) with I/O, communications, logic, HMI – even things like photo-eyes will be programmable
• Everything will be reconfigurable – machine concept to first production run in days not years
• There will be some new standard for communications that everything will use and it will be built right into the silicon. It will obsolete Profinet, EtherNet/IP and all the rest.
• LEDs will replace all incandescent. Windows will be able to let the sunlight in or generate light using LED technology.  Why, because that would be cool.

Despite our current problems Americans are still the most determined, innovative and resourceful people on the planet. I’m lucky to be born in the US. We’ll survive and continue to find ways to succeed. I for one am looking forward to it.

I’d like you to meet Derek, our newest addition to RTA. Derek’s a pure bred Greyhound and has accepted the position as the RTA mascot. And Yes, Derek is one of those racing Greyhounds. He’s retired now but luckily found a good home with Emily Brockman on our Engineering staff.

Greyhounds have a really interesting bloodline, actually an ancient bloodline. If you look at some of the ancient art from various museums around the world you’ll see dogs depicted that are extremely similar to today’s greyhounds. And if the pictures etched by hand on the walls of Egyptian tombs are an indication, Greyhounds must have had a significant place in ancient Egypt.

All around the world and throughout history Greyhounds have been revered. Some of the writings indicated that Arab princes celebrated the birth of a new greyhound only slightly less vigorously than they celebrated the birth of a son. A thousand years ago in England, laws were passed to restrict ownership of Greyhounds to those of the Noble Class.

Greyhounds were brought to America in the 1800s as a deterrent to jackrabbits which were destroying the crops of farmers throughout the Midwest. Their intelligence and gentle, loving nature made them very popular in the late 1800s.

The racing business started early in the 20th Century when Owen Patrick Smith invented the mechanical lure. That made racing around a track possible and spurred the growth of the Greyhound racing industry throughout the US. At its height Greyhound racing was a three to four billion dollar industry.

In the latter part of the 20th Century Greyhound racing and the wagering that goes with it started to decline and decline dramatically. In the early 90s alone, wagering dropped almost 50% in a five year period. This is similar to the decline that is being experienced in the casino industry today where the average age of a patron is over 65 years old.

But the dogs remain and are being retired and euthanized at a record rate. Unfortunately, they don’t get severance packages and they can’t be retrained to do anything else. A Greyhound runs. Runs all out for 2 minutes and sleeps most of the next 24 hours.

Well, RTA is doing something to help these animals. You’ll find a page on our website dedicated to Derek and his breed. We’ll be featuring Derek in some promotions and sending a portion of product sales to some of the organizations dedicated to finding homes for dogs like Derek.

But why do this? Well, it makes sense. Derek is a very good example of specialization. How, specializing in something makes it easy to understand and easy to use. Derek is designed for only one thing and is exceptionally good at that. Just like our Products, our Barcode to PLC gateway, our TCP to PLC gateway or our Modbus to BACnet gateway. We build products that only do one thing, do them very well and are easy to understand, just like Derek!