Two state-of-the-art IO-Link products under the same roof!

Information about new products and interesting theories can often be found online. A Google search or a quick scan of a newsletter, and we move on quickly. But as we also know, in many cases it is the small conversations that can lead to knowledge sharing and sales. That is the case in this story, where it turns out there are two world firsts in IO-Link under the same roof.

Two world firsts at the same address within IO-Link

At GPower, we are part of a larger shared office community at Point Nordic in Hinnerup near Aarhus. This is also the case for Wika, which has turned out to offer an “internal” world first within IO-Link.

While Wika has the world’s first IO-Link pressure sensor with a 360° LED status display (Wika A-1200 IO-Link 1.1), we at GPower have the world’s first IO-Link Toolkit for LabVIEW and TestStand.

How revolutionary?

What is revolutionary about Wika’s product is that it is the first IO-Link pressure sensor with a 360° LED status display (see image). A product that enables operators and maintenance technicians to quickly see whether everything is OK or whether there are issues that need to be resolved.

If a green signal is shown, everything is OK; if a yellow one is shown, a critical condition has occurred; and if a red signal is shown, an actual fault has occurred. Via IO-Link, you can make the status LED flash, making it easy to find the device you want to work with in a setup with many devices.

What is revolutionary about GPower IO-Link, on the other hand, is that the product makes it easy and fast to connect your IO-Link devices to NI’s toolchain. By simply installing a toolkit, GPower IO-Link provides access to data from more than 30,000 devices in the LabVIEW code. In addition, with the product we have taken our own medicine by using our IO-Link LabVIEW Toolkit to build IO-Link step types for TestStand.

“During our development of GPower IO-Link, we went far and wide to source various IO-Link-compatible devices so we could test our product. It was only after the release of the first version that we happened to discover that Wika, which is located in the same building as us, has IO-Link devices in its portfolio. I hope that going forward we can help each other find application areas for our products,” says Senior Specialist at GPower, Jens Christian Ø. Andersen.

Learn more about the two IO-Link products in the videos:

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