ASCII Part 2

Last night Elon Musk was on 60 Minutes. Now, generally I don’t watch much of 60 minutes anymore. It was really hot about 20 or 25 years ago. Everybody had to see 60 minutes but now, like everything else, there are so many more ways to get news that it is kind of irrelevant.

So Elon was on and they went into depth on his Space X adventures and what he’s done with the Tesla. Very cool stuff. I came away really liking the guy. I like that he came from humble roots with tenacity and vision and really made something of himself.

The Tesla is a pretty unique car. It’s all electric. No other backup power system. When the batteries die it’s a boat anchor just like a gas powered automobile is. There’s a 17 inch touch screen control panel. And some kind of odd, gull -wing doors. Some of the things solve problems but others, like the doors, are just showy.

This made me think of our ASCII products. We really try to focus on the former not the latter. Our products solve real problems. We don’t do things for show.

Take how we can assemble or disassemble strings from individual data items. Our devices for example, can get an ASCII string from an ASCII device, disassemble the component ASCII characters, convert them into Floats, Ints and other data types and then transfer them to some other device, like a Modbus PLC. And we can do the same in reverse. We can take data from a group of tags in a ControlLogix PLC, convert those tags to ASCII strings and then send the string out with some appropriate delimiters like commas, spaces or tabs. Checkout that link to see how easy it is to assemble and disassemble ASCII strings from ControlLogix Tags.

This works exceptionally well with our TCP transports. There are a lot of devices now that have Ethernet but don’t use a protocol. It’s just transfers raw data over Ethernet.

With our latest software enhancements you can get data from EtherNet/IP devices, Modbus devices, BACnet/IP devices and others. You can then send that data to a TCP device as a delimited ASCII string. You could also send it out to some ASCII RS485, RS232 or USB device.

Of course, you can also do the reverse. Pull ASCII data in from USB, TCP, RS485 or RS232, disassemble it, convert it to ints, floats or whatever you want and send it to devices over EtherNet/IP, DeviceNet, Modbus, Profinet IO or any of the other networks we support.

That’s a pretty cool feature and it serves our target market perfectly. It solves a problem that a lot of our customers have without being showy.

No, we don’t have any gull-wing doors on the side. But it is all Electric!

Think I can get on 60 minutes???

John