I looked on everybody's name tag for usernames I recognized, but the only fellow I met in person from the Forum was David Emmerich, at the CED party at the Milwaukee Art Museum. A good fellow, David is, and as enthused about Automation as I am. I had hoped to find Alan Case and Tom Jenkins, but to no avail.
And who would have thought I'd leave a 60F Milwaukee and come home to snow in Seattle !
I don't think the Fair could have gotten much larger and still fit in the Midwest Airlines Center. One of the catering managers told me they served over 13,000 lunches on Wednesday. And the exhbition floor filled the entire main exhibition hall, whereas at Long Beach or Anaheim we barely took up 1/3 of the facility. We had about 15 hands-on-labs and dozens of tech sessions in the meeting rooms to the Hyatt and Hilton hotels.
I assisted with most of the PanelView Plus hands-on labs. Those were a bit of a headache; we were running beta copies of RSView Studio to support the unreleased PV+600 demo units, and the FactoryTalk tag browser had a disturbing habit of crashing during shortcut creation or tag assignment. I took to paraphrasing Highlander: "If your browser comes away from your Studio, it's over." That sucker had better be fixed by February when it releases.
On the show floor itself I was like the proverbial kid in the candy store. I tried to focus on the partner booths, because A-B stuff I can see any day. I had booth duty for a while, talking until I was hoarse about the new CompactLogix L35E and it's upcoming cousins the L32E and L31.
The Best 4-Minute Overview award goes to Tom Trombley of the I/O group, for his thorough exegesis of the new ArmorPoint version of the Point I/O system. He even anticipated my questions about IP67 washdown ratings and the 1734-ADNX.
Coolest Demo Booth award is hands-down the big Oshkosh military truck with Rockwell controls. Electric Racing Team, eat your hearts out !
The most complex thing I saw was a CIM program that took DXF drawings, converted them to G-code, then converted that to ControlLogix coordinated moves. Cool !
I was also impressed by the new Sequence of Events module with 16-point timestamping and GPS synchronization. That'll go a long way toward more power distribution applications for ControlLogix.
Even though the Fair was three days this year, I don't think I saw even half of the stuff I wanted to.
