Allen-Bradley

I also did the, uh, I was also a service technician.

I would start up and commission the equipment commission, then these control panels and got a fair amount of experience with PLCs with, uh, at the time we used telemechanique and Allen Bradley primarily.

And that translated into me eventually getting a job with a company called SCC in Elk Grove Village, Illinois.

And this is why I relocated to the Midwest.

Mm.

Um, I think we are seeing a lot of, uh, you know, so, uh, a lot of companies come to the space that are, are less proprietary, more PLC, Allen Bradley based.

Um, you know, we're using a company called Fidus Global for our, uh, WCS in our-

Okay [laughs]

One of the biggest things is, on top of that is, do I need to put a GUI or an HMI or some interface to it? That may push you in a particular direction as well.

Here at AGR, we're, Alan Bradley gold level member, we usually start with Allen Bradley components and only because, well, a couple of reasons.

Number one, they integrate nicely, integrated motion, but they're also available worldwide.

So for us, it's kind of a little bit of a, hey, your customers know what to expect.

Who the major brands are? The companies that came to dominate the industry fairly early on were generally companies that already made industrial electrical hardware.

These were Siemens, Allen Bradley, later known as Rockwell, Snyder, Mitsubishi, Omron.

These are still the dominant companies in the business.

although there are many small brands, particularly at the cheaper end of the market.

In the next episode, we will take a look at one of the early PLCs from the era when they began seeing widespread use.

This PLC was hugely successful and was for many companies the first PLC they used.

This is the Allen Bradley PLC-2.

This has been the second episode in an eight-part series.

And I was making maybe in that sixth year, maybe I was making like $150,000.

Well, if they'd have replaced me with someone from Allen Bradley or Siemens from outside the company who was already doing it, that person would have asked for $250,000, $300,000.

I would ask for way more and they would have said, what? I have more years of experience.

But who cares? You wouldn't have been better than me.

There's lots of great platforms.

One of the interesting things w- through my career, I've worked on Allen-Bradley, but they don't have a great simulator, so you have to-

Yeah

... have real hardware or you need to buy the expensive simulator software.

Consider the programmable logic controllers that run pumps and valves and switchgear across energy, water, and agriculture.

The NSA, CISA, and the FBI have issued a joint advisory warning that attackers are now using AI-generated exploit scripts against Siemens S7 series controllers, with similar campaigns hitting Schneider Electric, Rockwell Automation, and Allen-Bradley hardware.

The agencies are telling operators to get these things off the internet, patch them, and put monitoring in front of them.

Those controllers largely were not built to ask who was talking to them.