Throughput Technologies was invited to separate events at Emperors Palace in July by two top PLC suppliers in the country.
One of its suppliers, Westermo Teleindutsri of Sweden, has agreements with both of the companies and has approvals for a number of their products to be used with their respective PLCs.
At both events a data link from the show areas was set up via a virtual private network (VPN) to an IP camera at Westermo’s offices at Southampton in the UK. The product used locally was a Westermo HSDPA/3G/GPRS Router. This in turn connected through the VPN to a Westermo DSL Router in Westermo’s workshop area (Figure 1).
Figure 1
Some of the images in Figure 1 are camera shots of Westermo engineers in their UK testing facility which were relayed live back to South Africa.
The link was a demonstration of what can be achieved with the latest IP to IP technology. Although the link was created to the camera in this case, typical applications would be to connect to remote Ethernet-based automation systems somewhere on the planet to check for faults, modify configurations or monitor events.
With the cost of fuel, travel and engineer’s time, especially on international trips, the Westermo routers offer a cost effective alternative for engineers wanting to monitor remote or hard to get to applications.
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