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- 🌹 Automation loves you..loves you not 🌹
🌹 Automation loves you..loves you not 🌹
irreverant take on robotics and automation
Thomas Norris
November 14, 2022
Robot building a robot
Before getting into the newsletter I have to comment on this robot pic. It's freaking hilarious to me. But I have a really weird sense of humor. Seriously I made this pic using AI with the request, robot building a robot. It's like AI admitting automation just isn't at the point of creating a perpetual existence for itself.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, unless it's a robot, then it could maim you for life!
Topics of the Day
Damn Lincoln you're on to something!
See ya later AutoGuide
Software pwns hardware (yeah pwns!)
Tech of the Day: EDGE Computing
Holy Hot Pants Batman, let's take the WAMV?
Damn Lincoln you're on to something!
What does $427M buy you? Well, you could buy a mega yacht like Jeff Bezos has or if you want to be practical, how about an automation company with over 700 employees with 8 locations globally. I love heckling mergers and aquisitions but Lincoln Electric just bought Fori Automation and it seems like a great buy. Fori does about $230M per year in sales and is profitable. So Lincoln scored on 2 fronts. First, they bought a working cash making machine that's growing. Second, they're getting deeper with their automative clients. Oh who's Lincoln Electric? They've been in business since 1895 making welders but now they're getting into the automation business. Like automated welding. There are plenty of companies that do automated welding robotics but Lincoln has been wanting to get into the game. It'll be interesting to see if they can leave the Fori Automation team alone. Hey Lincoln, don't let your corportate politics and policies burden the agility of Fori. You are a product business, Fori is a solution business...leave them alone if you want them to be successful.
See ya later AutoGuide
Teradyne. Sounds like it's a chemical like iodine but nope it's a multi-billion dollar beast of an automation company.
Teradyne has decided that their agv(AutoGuide) and mobile robotics(MiR) groups are too clunky and need to be brought together. So, AutoGuide is being extinguished and the MiR name shall prevail. So what this tells me is that the AutoGuide sales and management side of the business has lost out to it's little brother (MiR). Everything I've seen and heard points to the agvs being rolled into the MiR portfolio streamlining their sales channels. Sucks for the AutoGuide team.
Tech of the Day
Living on the EDGE! The most complicated computer network idea in existence.
I'll try to boil this down to the basics. Edge computing is basically just getting the best of being in the cloud and having local computers. The idea is that it takes too long for requests from your computer to go out to the cloud and the responses to come back AND if there's an issue with the "cloud" you're down. So close your eyes and imagine for a second you have 3 computers all in your house. Those 3 computers all talk to each other and operate like 1. If your hard drive becomes full on one of them the system automatically saves it onto computer 2. Also, processing power gets shared.
What makes this all work? Software. There are software systems that allow you to set up edge computing systems.
Who cares about using edge computing? Well...one use case that comes to mind is automobile telematics. So imagine we have all these self driving cars. These cars need to make decisions in fractions of a second to prevent little Tommy from taking an ambulance ride. Cars will need to communicate to local, redundant hubs that provide lightning fast data flows.
Not sure if I can forgive myself for this Plug of the Day
This newsletter isn't cheap. It takes alot of small child like hands to type all these letters. Keeping these hands lotioned, or at least covered in petroleum jelly takes cash. This week we got a 5 gallon bucket of pj from our pals at Leonard McDowell. Ol' boy Frank over there knows his way around tech. Cybersecurity...check, Edge computing...you bet. Productivity solutions...I think. www.leonardmcdowell.com
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Software pwns hardware
Just my opinion but in the robotics and automation space the hardware companies WERE king. Companies would make robots and equipment with lots of bolts and buttons but they were pretty dumb machines. You gave the machine an input and it would do something.
But nowadays software is king! Companies that try to deny this will take a spiral ride down to nonexistence. Software is the brain of any robotic or automated system. The reason why software is now in the drivers seat is because computing power is now faster than the mechanics it's driving. At the core of any automated system you need to be able to receive inputs, make decisions, get feedback, adjust based on the feedback, and do it all over again but super fast. Like so fast. Like think of the word cat, now say the letter C. In the time it took you to say the letter, software driving an automated system would have already made hundreds of decisions, if not thousands. So now we approach machines as dumb things and we make them super smart by adding sensors and then giving them a brain with software so these hunks of metal and plastic can do awesome things.
Why do I say Software Pwns Hardware? Cause it does. When was the last time you bought a rotary phone?
Happy Monday Junkies!
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Have feedback? Not sure that I'm looking for it. If you have something constructive you can catch me on Twitter. @robotsrcoming
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