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Automation NOW!

Our customers and employees in Baton Rouge continue to endure dire conditions from the staggering flooding in that area and throughout southern Louisiana. One of our customers, a printing plant, sustained horrible damage. Everything flooded. Office turned upside down. Every control panel went under water. On the scene, IIDM field service technician from our Baton...

When designing a motor and control application, how often do we actually take the total cost of ownership into account? Are we “saving money” by cutting corners on conductor sizes, ignoring voltage drop and imbalance in our designs? Are we sizing wires incorrectly? The real answer is we probably don’t think about total cost of...

We were at one of our customer sites yesterday showing off Sawyer, one of our collaborative robot models. The thing about Sawyer is that he’s so easy to program for simple tasks. Obviously, in a manufacturing line setting there are additional considerations to fine tune. But this one-minute video underscores just how easy it is...

One of my customers had a challenge with his pneumatic air dryer. The pass-through contaminants were costing him parts, time and money. His facility had in place Ingersoll Rand air dryers. But the dryers were not properly sized for the application. The result was the dryer was allowing inordinate amounts of water and compressor oil...

Industrial electronics use Electrolytic Capacitors on control and power boards, power supplies and elsewhere inside the component. From our experience, unfortunately, capacitors are the most high-fail component in electronic devices. The great news is, a reputable repair facility can bring your component back to life. VFDs use Electrolytic Capacitors in the DC Bus section. Capacitors...

This aluminum extrusion work station was built from the ground up by Innovative-IDM’s Bryan Rinehart. The customer needed a work station that was lightweight and portable. But it still needed to offer comfortable ergonomics and efficiency of work. Rinehart gives you a quick two-minute tour of the work station in this video. The work station...

I was reading an article on electrical troubleshooting fundamentals in Electrical, Construction & Maintenance magazine. In this article they talk about using a “divide and conquer troubleshooting” to save time. Fellow Marine and Navy vets will recognize this a what we were taught as the “Half-Split Bracketing.” This electrical troubleshooting fundamental technique is a very...

Can an AC controls system save you money vs. a DC controls system? Here is an interesting slide from our recent webinar, “DC to AC Drive Retrofits.” Over the expected life of a DC motor, you can expect to spend nearly $600,000 in repairs, maintenance and field service costs. This cost includes the associated downtime...