Control systems engineering requires a broad knowledge base of many components. Why? Applications of all shapes, sizes, functionality and needs are brought to machine-builder tables, and automation is requested to provide solutions to manufacturing problems. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Tobey Strauch, editor in chief Mike Bacidore discusses motor starters and variable-frequency drives.

Did Industry 4.0 go away? No. It seems that, behind the scenes, the open-source platform community is just working along, developing the next go-around of competitive devices for the traditional automaton folks to keep up with. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Tobey Strauch, editor in chief Mike Bacidore discusses Ethernet-APL.

Integration of PLCs and robots has become standardized. Standard robot command interface is a means for robots to increase its interface capacity with programmable logic controllers, but SRCI has been around for a while. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Tobey Strauch, editor in chief Mike Bacidore discusses the standard robot command interface.

Field-mounted devices change the way controls engineers approach industrial networking. The shift toward on-machine connectivity can simplify design, streamline wiring and enable strategies like conveyor zone management. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Rick Rice, editor in chief Mike Bacidore talks about how field networking unlocks automated setup and diagnostics.

While China's technical design report for its proposed circular electron-positron collider (CEPC) is still awaiting government approval for inclusion in the next five-year plan, hope is still strong that construction of the $5.2 billion supercollider could begin as soon as 2027 and be completed in a decade, surpassing CERN's large hadron collider (LHC) as the world's largest machine. In this episode of Control Intelligence, editor in chief Mike Bacidore talks about the race to surpass the world’s biggest machine.

The guest on this episode of Control Intelligence is Jeremy Pollard, who was a 10-year veteran of Allen-Bradley as a technical specialist. Pollard established Allen-Bradley's Toronto District Training Office where PLC-2, PLC-3 and PLC-5 courses were implemented, and more than 1,000 students were personally trained by him. Pollard has consulted for SoftPLC, Flexis Control, Wonderware and IndX Software and was responsible for product development and direction for PLC support software packages under DOS, OS/2 and six different Windows iterations. He is the former North American Managing Director of PLCopen, the international association for standardized control system solutions. Pollard has written countless articles for various automation trade publications, and he is our longest-standing monthly columnist on Control Design, where he writes the Embedded Intelligence column. Pollard holds a diploma in electrical engineering technology from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto. He's worked on projects for companies ranging from Baxter Pharmaceuticals and General Motors to Chevron and Labatt Breweries.

For many years, real-time control software, whether running on a dedicated controller or an industrial PC, operated on a single CPU core. The runtime scheduler could precisely calculate scan times, and the engineer’s mental model of “one processor, one control loop” held true. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Joey Stubbs, editor in chief Mike Bacidore shares how to handle determinism, jitter and load balancing in multicore control architectures.

The combination of technology and market forces is reshaping the automation supply chain for machine builders. Where can you turn for guidance? In this episode of Control Intelligence, editor in chief Mike Bacidore discusses automation distribution and Control Design's upcoming webinar on the supply chain.

At its core, an industrial machine vision system comprises high-resolution cameras, specialized illumination, image processors and software algorithms. The system captures images or video of products and processes and then analyzes this visual data to detect defects or anomalies, measure dimensions with high precision, verify the presence or position of parts and guide automated equipment or robots. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Charles Palmer, editor in chief Mike Bacidore shares how vision systems impact industrial productivity.

Industrial enclosures and human-machine interfaces (HMIs) represent a pivotal advancement in automation and control. These integrated systems enable seamless interaction between operators and complex machinery, offering robust protection for sensitive electronics and user-friendly access to real-time data. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Charles Palmer, editor in chief Mike Bacidore talks about the relationship between enclosures and HMIs.

In factories, motion control systems are more complex than ever. Multi-axis machines, integrated robotics and tight production schedules leave little room for trial and error. For decades, programmers have had to wait until the first machine was assembled to test their code, often discovering issues once it was most costly to fix them. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Joey Stubbs, editor in chief Mike Bacidore discusses motion control digital twins.

There are many applications in the industrial automation realm that benefit from state machines. Therefore, it was surprising to hear from an industrial programming specialist who says he does not like state machines and was adamant about their not working. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Tobey Strauch, editor in chief Mike Bacidore discusses state machines.

Control systems use direct current (dc) motors for many applications. Many systems displace dc with alternating current (ac) technology because ac motors are more cost effective and lower maintenance than a dc motor with brushes. But are they? In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Tobey Strauch, editor in chief Mike Bacidore discusses ac and dc motors.

It has become a de facto standard in plants and machines for interconnecting systems and in fact individual devices. So, what happens when it fails? What would make it fail? In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Jeremy Pollard, editor in chief Mike Bacidore network-troubleshoots dos and don’ts.

In 2023, the Control Intelligence podcast on RS-232 was greeted with immediate popularity, and it remains an often-downloaded podcast episode. Electronic Design, an EndeavorB2B partner brand, republished the podcast episode, initiating some feedback from listeners. Hear their stories, and revisit the original podcast, in this refreshed Echolocation Episode.

In this episode of Control Intelligence, editor in chief Mike Bacidore is joined by Mike Devereux and Tim Finerty from national accounting and consulting firm Wipfli.Mike Devereux is a partner at Wipfli in the St. Louis area. He is a certified public accountant (CPA) and certified manufacturing professional (CMP) and the author of "More cash, better machines: your guide to the new tax law". He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the Missouri Society of Certified Public Accountants (MOCPA) and the Associated Industries of Missouri. He is also a board member of the Manufacturers Association of Plastics Processors (MAPP), chairman of Allinial Global’s R&D Tax Credit Community of Practice, executive board member of the Manufacturing Services Association (MSA) and president of Manufacturing CPAs.Tim Finerty is also a partner at Wipfli and has co-written "Money on the table: Taking advantage of the R&E tax credit" and "What comes after COVID-19?" Working in the Detroit area, Finerty is a board member & International Business Advisory Council member of Automation Alley, a nonprofit technology business association and Digital Transformation Insight Center. He's also an Affinity Program member of the Control System Integrators Association, a member of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) and a member of the Michigan Association of Certified Public Accountants Task Force.

In 2021, Control Intelligence spoke with Austin Park, winner of the first ever Acopian Power Supply Scholarship in 2017. Park had completed his master's degree in energy resources engineering, Cleantech, machine learning and decarbonization at Stanford University and was working as a machine learning engineer at Gridmatic, where he's now been for almost six years. At Gridmatic, located in the San Francisco Bay area, Austin's responsibilities include designing, extending and improving wind, load and solar models, primarily focused on deep generative spatiotemporal sequence settings; building infrastructure to support model viz and evaluation; fetching and transforming new features; and leading quantification of Gridmatic's carbon impact. When speaking with Park four years ago, he talked about his education at UCLA and Stanford, how his scholarship benefitted him and his goals for his career in engineering.

This week’s guest on Control Intelligence is Tobey Strauch, senior staff electrical engineer, project manager and one of Control Design's most trusted controls engineers. Over the course of her career thus far, Strauch has accumulated valuable experience with a variety of industrial heavy hitters, including DWFritz, International Paper, Doosan Fuel Cell, Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Air Force. She is a regular contributor and columnist to Control Design.

In 2020, editor in chief Mike Bacidore spoke with Mattias Altendorf, then- CEO of Endress+Hauser Group. Much has changed since then. Since January of 2024, Altendorf has moved from the CEO role to become the president of the supervisory board for Endress+Hauser Group. He also founded Bionic Leadership, which applies evolutionary principles to modern management, extending to evolutionary economics and economic bionics. His organization explores the fusion of nature-inspired strategies, technologies and effective leadership in shaping organizational excellence. During this conversation, they discussed sustainability, sensors, cybersecurity, component interoperability and IT/OT convergence, as well as the impact of those topics on machine builders and system integrators. Altendorf’s insights still hold true in 2025, and his foresight on many topics was spot on.

The “safety PLC” is no longer more expensive for the hardware. Availability still may be an issue at times, and the programming costs may go up, but the safety chassis is becoming a mainstay. In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Tobey Strauch, editor in chief Mike Bacidore discusses CIP Safety and FSoE.