After the connection technology specialist Weidmüller re-entered the IO business with ‚u-remote‘ in September 2013, the announcement of its first own PLC followed last year. The market release of the so-called ‚u control 2000‘ finally took place in November of this year, in time for this year‘s SPS IPC Drives. Equipped with a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 with 624 MHz and 512 MByte RAM as well as up to 32 GByte program memory, this Linux-based controller primarily targets small to medium-sized applications - for example stand-alone machines such as carton erectors. According to Michael Matthesius, Head of Automation Products & Solutions Division at Weidmüller, the special feature of this controller is that the engineering software was developed entirely using open web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript). This means that the browser becomes an application platform for the user and allows system configuration, programming according to IEC 61131-3 and connection to interfaces (e.g. HMI) in a web-based engineering tool. 

Now Weidmüller is going one step further: In Nuremberg, the Detmold-based company announced that it would expand its portfolio by acquiring products from Keba in the future. In return, the Austrian automation technology provider will also supplement its range with the Analytics and Machine Learning modules or the remote maintenance solution ‚u-link‘ from Weimüller. „Individual Weidmüller components such as switching power supplies, routers and switches can also be very well integrated into the Keba projects,“ says Matthesius. Last but not least, both companies want to work closely together in the future to further develop their product, solution and service offerings. In a first step, the cooperation will focus on ‚KeStudio‘, the all-in-one engineering suite for all phases of Keba‘s automation process. Weidmüller now offers it under the name ‚u-create studio‘. The software has a Codesys V3.5 development environment and supports all programming languages defined according to IEC 61131-3 such as ST, IL, LD, FBS and AS. In addition, a C/C++ environment allows object-oriented programming. Users of the ‚u control 2000‘ will thus have the choice in the future whether to use Weidmüller‘s completely web-based ‚u-create web‘ engineering software or the Codesys-based ‚u-create studio‘ as their engineering environment. „In addition, Keba offers many other interesting automation products for Weidmüller‘s project business that can ideally complement our portfolio - such as mobile hand-held pendant stations,“ says Matthesius. Weidmüller will also be introducing the ‚u-create IoT‘ tool at the trade fair: a web-based, license-free software for u-control that can be called up using a standard web browser and ultimately transforms the controller into an IoT controller. The data can be sent directly to the cloud via Node-RED. Cloud providers such as Microsoft, IBM or Amazon are supported.