Technology

This namespace holds AEI Corporation's engineering notes on the technologies industrial devices are built from: the communication protocols that carry plant data, the convergence layer above them, and the signal-processing and machine-learning work that runs at the edge. Each area below has its own hub page; the depth lives in the child pages under it.

• Industrial Ethernet — deterministic Ethernet on the machine: PROFINET, EtherCAT, POWERLINK, EtherNet/IP and TSN. Cycle-time budgeting, stack integration, pre-compliance.
• Fieldbus — the installed base that has not gone away: PROFIBUS, Modbus, CAN and FOUNDATION Fieldbus, and the gateway work that brings them onto an Ethernet network.
• Industry 4.0 — OT/IT convergence: OPC UA, DDS, MES/ERP integration and the cloud layer above the plant floor.
• Connectivity — the wireless and messaging side: MQTT, BLE, Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN, Zigbee, 6LoWPAN and NFC.
• Signal processing — the maths behind condition monitoring: motor-current signature analysis, spectral estimation, wavelet and Park-vector methods.
• AI / ML — inference at the edge and the model families we have worked with.

Almost every engagement crosses two or three of these areas at once, which is why they share one namespace. A machine network is a protocol problem, a platform problem and often a signal-processing problem in the same device: the protocol stack has to hold its cycle, the operating system underneath it has to schedule that stack, and whatever the device measures has to be processed before it is worth transmitting. The pages here describe how those layers fit together, not just what each standard says.

Adjacent namespaces: os: for the operating-system and runtime layer beneath these technologies, and silicon: for the parts they run on.

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