The most popular discussions, topics, and tips of the year from the factory-supported OptoForums.

Is it just me, or are the years flying by faster than ever?

And as if time is not going by fast enough, I’d like to say how much I'm looking forward to writing this blog at this time next year. Why? Let's just say I can't wait to see what our customers put in the groov EPIC container over the coming year!!

But right now, let's recap the EPIC year of 2024 by looking back at the top 5 most discussed and searched topics in the OptoForums.

Get Enterprise WiFi and several other updates in the latest free firmware download of groov RIO.

If you have been getting some friction from your IT department about connecting any of the groov RIO family to your corporate WiFi network, this firmware update is for you!

Just like the groov EPIC firmware update 3 weeks ago, we have added WPA-2 Enterprise WiFi connectivity to the groov RIO MM1, MM2 and EMU (Energy Monitoring Unit).

This enterprise WiFi configuration complements the existing LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authentication options, which have been part of the RIO for a long time.

Discover how groov View, a simple, user-friendly HMI building tool, makes responsive web design easy.

I’ve had the line “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got till it's gone” from Joni Mitchell’s 1970 hit Big Yellow Taxi rolling around in my head the past few weeks.

I've been working on building web pages for a personal project I will use on my PC and my smartphone, so they must be responsive.

Because I’ve been working with groov View for so long, I’d forgotten just how really, really hard it is to use standard web design tools to build responsive web pages with graphical elements. There is so much HTML and CSS development required to get a single webpage to display nicely on both a PC-sized screen and a smartphone-sized screen (and everything in between).

With groov View, you don’t have to write a single line of code—it's all just drag and drop!

Read about the features, enhancements, and various fixes you'll get in the groov EPIC 3.6 firmware release.

You'll see some really amazing updates this year. Meanwhile, while it's exciting to be working on new hardware and software, we also know that regular updates that address some "pebble in the shoe" discomfort are just as important. Our 3.6.0 firmware release adds a few new features and takes out a few pebbles for some nice quality-of-life improvements.

Let’s do a quick unpacking of this new EPIC firmware release.

Need a generation-to-generation upgrade path? Opto 22 customers have it.

With all the buzz of Opto 22's 50-year anniversary in the air, many of us here at Opto 22 headquarters in Temecula, California, are sharing our Opto stories—mostly centered around memories of people and events. It wasn't until a live-chat message came in from a customer asking about migrating PID loops from a legacy Factory Floor application to PAC Control running on a groov EPIC that this blog post crystallized in my mind's eye.

What struck me even more than the question about migrating those mid-1990s PID loops is just how profound it is that the question actually does have an answer! (Stay tuned until the end.)

Understanding different data types in your PAC Control programming.

You don’t need to have the title "software engineer" on your business card before you code up your first automation process. In fact, I suspect that many industrial automation folks are like me—self-taught and come from the school of hard knocks.

This blog post is more of a musing out loud than a "you must" edict. Programming, after all, is often more art than science.

Some tech tip advice to help keep your industrial systems running smoothly.

Whenever I say this blog title out loud to the Premium Factory Training class attendees, I get some funny looks. I'm not sure if it's the Aussie accent, or the idea of adding delays to speed up that causes the double-take chuckles.

Compute power has come a long way in the last 10 years or so, but regardless, we programmers of all things industrial still need to be mindful of optimizing our code and systems to run as smoothly as they possibly can.

Arguably, one of the biggest tips for programming in PAC Control I can share with you all is to add delays through your flow charts and OptoScript blocks.

New features and improved performance are available on groov I/O modules with the click of a button.

A well-known electric car company is somewhat famous for its ability to add features and fix bugs with over-the-air updates to millions of cars. Of course, they are not the only ones with this feature. Many companies have been updating their hardware with firmware updates for decades, but it really captures the imagination when the hardware is something you drive.

Closer to our hearts and minds, Opto 22 has been adding features and squishing bugs on our controllers for more years than most of us can recall (it's our 50th year in 2024!). There are a few SNAP I/O modules that can have their firmware updated via our PAC Manager program—the serial data ones for example—but now with groov EPIC and RIO, ALL our modules can have new features and refined performance added at the click of a button.

A year in review of the most popular topics and discussions on the OptoForums.

Let's talk for a moment about our fantastic Opto 22 forum fans. The OptoForums host an amazing community.

It seems that only a very small number of industrial automation manufacturers run their own public forums. Some community-supported efforts have sprung up to backfill the need for a place where like-minded folks can gather, but there is something special about having a place that is, well, for lack of a better term, "factory supported."

Why is that a big deal?

This technical tip post covers the history and challenges of connecting RS-232 serial devices together.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Like every profession, industrial automation has a veritable cornucopia of standards we need to be aware of. RS-232 is no different or special in that regard.

Let's take a look at the history of this hardware communication standard and use that as a springboard. We'll take a look at how modern microprocessor technology can be adapted to this very commonly used data communication standard in the industrial automation world.