Written by Gareth Chamberlain, Product Manager- Cyber Security & Automation

Over the last year, other than staring at four walls of the home office, we have seen a lot of retrofit projects come to us to help to bring older technology up to date. Most common needs are to replace serial systems with an ethernet based topology. The most common product family that comes up in applications is the FL WLAN 2100 and the FL WLAN 5110 to create a wireless cable replacement of what was the serial communication.

The most common application is retrofitting communications to overhead cranes. These faithful work horses play such a crucial role in everyday production that there is no leeway for a critical piece of equipment to be down due to component failure. A lot of maintenance departments spend thousands on spares that are depleting at an alarming rate due to obsolescence or the OEM that commissioned the crane originally simply does not exist anymore.