You probably have your fair share of smart or Internet-connected units such as a smartphone, wireless scanner that sends your images to the cloud, or a fitness-tracking device. Your place of work may have industrial equipment related to the “Industrial Internet of Things,” sending readings, performance reports, and alerts to managers and technicians. Some of these units may even communicate with different devices, automating any number of tasks. Add smart laser marking manage boards to the list.
What are Smart Laser Marking Control Boards
Smart laser marking control boards are hardware devices that can join a network and communicate with different devices such as programmable logic controllers. These manage boards look similar to standard motherboards that are found in PCs. Also, the control boards make marking structures much smarter.
For example, an article in Industrial Lasers explained that it is not unusual for producers to have dedicated terminals used to control every piece of laser equipment (source: Industrial Lasers, Laser marking Joins the Industrial Internet of Things). With such an arrangement, any change to the laser-marking job has to be made at every dedicated terminal. This isn’t an easy matter of clicking a few buttons. The jobs need to be downloaded and initiated, which can turn out to be quite tedious and time-consuming.
If you’re questioning this is highly inefficient, you’re right. With clever laser marking control boards in place, just one programmable common sense controller is used to control the entire community of connected and appropriately geared-up laser devices.
This innovation is likely to change laser-marking, making it a good deal more efficient shifting forward. Just as you can print a document to a network printer, manufacturing facility workers can ship laser jobs to marking devices — all without having to in my opinion configure each device’s workstation.
While the control boards make it viable to download, select, and send marking jobs to marking devices, there’s greater to the story than hardware alone. Software, remote APIs, and Ethernet IP communications enable the trade of information.
Advantages of Smart Laser Marking Control Boards
Though the technology is complex, the advantages are simple:
- There’s no want for individual computers to control each marking device. This simplifies marking dramatically, improves efficiencies, and reduces energy consumption and costs.
- Each clever control board simply plugs into the network, turning into a part of the Industrial Internet of Things. These control boards exchange the individual PCs, allowing your marking gadgets to be controlled remotely.
- There’s less downtime related to laser marking job changes. Let’s say you have ten marking devices handling your laser jobs and that it takes a common of 10 minutes to download and initiate a new job. When altering the job, you’d have to download the new job ten instances on ten different computers as properly as perform the same initiation steps on every computer. Using our hypothetical 10 minute time frame, that’s over an hour and a half of time spent. The extra devices you have, the more time is lost.
