Automation and Flexibility, Twenty Years Later
Besides launching some new products – among which are the smartPanels and cloudPanels, which replace the ECO Series, and the V2.4 Feature-Pack, enhancing the performances of the new MICRO CPUs and SLIO CPUs – VIPA Italia, part of the Yaskawa Group, celebrated at the latest SPS an important achievement: the company’s 20th anniversary.
by Sergio Soriano
“Twenty years of VIPA Italia are quite an important step along a path featured so far by a steady technological evolution”. That’s how Eng. Luigi Bernardelli, CEO of VIPA Italia, commented the achievement of a relevant anniversary for the company headquartered in San Zeno Naviglio (BS) and specializing in hardware and software systems for industrial automation. Following the mother company’s strategy, VIPA Italia has quite a close relationship with the Yaskawa Group, to which VIPA GmbH has belonged since 2012. “The Group’s idea is to provide customers with a complete automation suite: from software to PCs and PLCs; from inverters to servo drives, up to robots. That’s why we have become able to provide technical support, product management and documents also for all Yaskawa’s motion product range. VIPA Italia is still a sales company: skilled technical assistance, warehouse management and the ability to deliver the items by 24 hours are our major strengths”.
The newest products: touch panels and increased functionalities for PLCs
Products are of course the core of the company’s offer. At SPS Italia, last May, some new products were introduced. The smartPanels and cloudPanels (available in display sizes of 4.3”, 7” and 10”) replace the ECO range. The cloudPanels are optimized for web applications, do not require any editor or runtime license and since the WebVisu creation feature is already integrated in the VIPAEngineering Tool Speed7 Studio, visualization via the new cloudPanel is child’s play: it runs within the respective PLC and is called up from the cloudPanel via an HTML5-capable web browser. The smartPanels support the OPC UA standard (with Movicon 11.5) and a broad range of communication drivers. These also have a VNC client for maintenance and remote control and the operating systems is Windows Embedded Compact7. Another relevant upgrade deals with the CPUs, with the introduction of the V2.4 Feature-Pack, enhancing remarkably the performances of the new MICRO CPUs and SLIO CPUs. Now these are all available with PROFINET Controller, I-Device, WebServer, WebVisu and some more functionalities that make them Industry 4.0-ready. “We have enhanced process speed thanks to a chip put inside the CPUs, which increases the efficiency of remote systems and communication management”, adds Mr Bernardelli, also highlighting the issue of flexibility. “All VIPA’s PLCs are sold with a basic memory card. Any possible extra memory can be carried out by simply adding a file to the memory card. This can be also sent via email, without even touching the PLC or replacing it”.