CE subscribers pick eight Engineers’ Choice Award winners

Three of the exhibitors at National Manufacturing Week 2005 were among eight winners of Control Engineeringe's (CE) second annual Engineers' Choice Awards, which were announced March 8 at the magazine's 18th annual awards reception at the Peninsula Hotel. Innovative products from National Instruments, Solidworks, and Wago were voted the best in their respective Editors' Choi...

By Staff March 1, 2005

Three of the exhibitors at National Manufacturing Week 2005 were among eight winners of Control Engineering e’s (CE) second annual Engineers’ Choice Awards, which were announced March 8 at the magazine’s 18th annual awards reception at the Peninsula Hotel. Innovative products from National Instruments, Solidworks, and Wago were voted the best in their respective Editors’ Choice Award categories by CE’s subscribers.

CE’s North American subscribers were asked to choose the best technologies from among 40 winners of CE’ s 2004 Editors’ Choice Awards, announced in the January 2005 issue and also presented March 8. Criteria for selection are: service to the industry, technological advancement, and market impact. Subscribers were asked to apply the same criteria in their decision-making to select the Engineers’ Choice winners, one in each of eight categories.

“This is the second year we’ve added an extra dimension to our annual Editors’ Choice awards by finding out what our subscribers—the engineers who use the products we cover—thought about the 40 winners we selected,” says David Greenfield, Control Engineering ‘s editorial director.

Preceded by the categories in which they won and followed by their Web sites, the eight winners of Control Engineering ‘s 2004 Engineers’ Choice Awards are:

Embedded control

An industrial PC with embedded PC technology, Wago Corp. ‘s I/O-IPC Series 758 integrates standard PC functions, including network and fieldbus interfaces, to achieve decentralized control, sub-networking with popular fieldbuses, as well as recording, analyzing, and measuring even large amounts of data. www.wago.com

HMI

BeamOne Touchless Holographic Interface is a touchless, holographic interface that lets operators enter commands and data into electronic equipment by simply passing a finger through holographic images of “keys” floating 4 in. in front of the device. Atlantex Corp. reports that Beam-One uses HoloTouch Inc. ‘s technology to generate its floating controls images. www.holotouch.com

Instrumentation and process sensors

Honeywell Process Solution ‘s XYR 5000 wireless transmitters can measure and communicate process variables online without wiring or external power, which gives users the flexibility to gather data in places where hardwired transmitters would be too costly, difficult, or time-consuming to implement. www.honeywell.com/acs

Machine control and discrete sensors

Allen-Bradley Pico GFX-70 small-footprint controller from Rockwell Automation features a multi-function HMI, with 70-mm graphic display. Engineers can use the integrated graphic display to program control and HMI functions with a software package or with on-display buttons. www.rockwellautomation.com

Motors, drives, and motion control

SoftMotion Development Module for LabView lets machine builders and OEMs create customized motion controllers for any platform with National Instruments ‘ (NI) SoftMotion technology. The module’s software includes functions for trajectory generation, spline interpolation, position and velocity PID control, and encoder implementation in LabView Real-Time and FPGA modules. www.ni.com

Networks and communications

Foxboro Automation Systems ‘ “mesh” networking technology for Invensys ‘ I/A Series system uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Ethernet switches, ports, and fiber-optic media to provide multiple communication paths between network stations, and configure 100 Mbps/1 Gbps switched Ethernet process control and field networks for I/A Series systems. www.Foxboro.com

Process and advanced control

Smart Safety Instrumented System (SIS) from Emerson Process Management uses digital intelligence and diagnostics, from sensor to logic solver to final control, to extend PlantWeb digital plant architecture. SIS implements a safety integrity level (SIL) 3 strategy, with transmitters and valve controllers certified to IEC 61508 and SIL-3-compliant safety systems. www.emersonprocess.com

Software and information integration

Cosmos 2005 software is an upgrade of SolidWorks ‘ advanced design analysis capabilities. It consists of CosmosWorks, CosmosFloWorks, and CosmosMotion, and features more than 100 user-driven enhancements, such as updated interfaces, simplified analysis processes, and tighter integration with SolidWorks 3-D mechanical design software. www.solidworks.com