On the road to Industry 4.0: ifm supports Technikerschule Allgäu

Modern intelligent sensors are an important component of Industry 4.0. The ifm group, one of the leading manufacturers in this sector, supports Technikerschule Allgäu (Allgäu technical college) in providing students with qualified education in this field.

"Not only for electrical engineers, but also for mechanical engineering developers, knowledge in this area is absolutely important," says Michael Renner, headmaster at TSA in Kempten when handing over the IO-Link sensor kits worth € 10,000 for eight workstations.

"At the SPS IPC Drives 2018, the Technikerschule Allgäu came to ifm," says Rainer Fuchs, Senior Application Control Systems ifm prover. "The college was planning to add IO-Link to their curriculum, and the teachers wanted to do this with ifm. They had already bought a starter kit QA0011, and the LR Device it includes had simply convinced the teachers." The ifm Board of Directors have decided that ifm will provide the college with free components. On 4 March 2019, the components were handed over officially by Rainer Fuchs and Stefan Lachenmayer, Sales Engineer Applications ifm Vertrieb Bavaria.

"We have provided each workstation with an LR Device licence to show how easy it is to set parameters via IO-Link through the PLC", says Rainer Fuchs. "Different from the starter kit, we have chosen the AL1300, a Dataline device, for the IO-Link master. This makes it possible to use the Y path PLC / cloud." The reason: The goal of the class is to integrate both IO-Link into the PLC work and to gather data via JSON using a Raspberry PI and to store it in a database.

With regard to sensors, the following devices have been chosen:

• Photoelectric distance sensor O5D150 since it is also included in the starter kit and because it is very easy to create IO-Link events with it.
• Temperature sensor TV7105 since it is already equipped with the smart sensor profile for measuring sensors V2.
• Inductive sensor IG6616 to show how devices that so far could only switch can become measuring devices.

According to the motto "ifm - close to you", "we have decided to also supply the cables required for sensor connection, voltage supply and network connection", said Rainer Fuchs.

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