C-FRAME PRESSES

• Heavy Gauge Steel Design objects to the Internet. But beyond that, as soon as you move beyond those simple connectivity to more functionality, you immediately get to automation. That's really an application sitting on top, but you can have that functionality sitting at the edge. Like a nest thermostat, like your smart refrigerator or your smart lighting.

• Press Bed bolted on, not welded, to prevent distortion.

• Large press bed to accommodate a variety of tooling other than just punching.

• Pump, motor, valve and reservoir are all easily accessible for maintenance.

• Large rectangular tubes used at base of machine to give safe, instant portability.

Lots of automation capabilities now become possible with more advanced Internet of Things infrastructure when we start putting the applications on top of it. a utomation is really what most people equate with IoT. So the industrial IoT now isn't so much the barcode and the passive low functionality r FID tags. It's the smarter active IoT devices, which we used to call embedded computing. We now have embedded computing that allows for more automation.

TB: right.

DE: Industrial IoT is embedded computing that is connecting up the information associated with your various machines up to the cloud. In the cloud we can now take all that information, take that data and mine it so that we can find potential vibration issues or quality control issues long before that would typically show up. We can have that repairman show up at your house and say I'm here to repair your refrigerator, and even though you didn’t call refrigerator repair, your refrigerator called.

TB: So the whole whole predictive maintenance or predictive diagnostics driven by the IoT communication combined with what you called your data science application, to let the refrigerator have its own voice, right?

DE: Yes, that's really a great benefit of having IoT in the home and IoT in manufacturing. Think about your cN c machines today. You're going to program it on a P c , usually. You're going to then upload that into the machine itself, which will then execute it after you've set it up so that it can start the process. a ll that's automated. So you got auto-milling, you got auto-cutting, all kinds of things that you can have with automation. a nd all you've done is told the machine what to do. That's really a phenomenal step and you can have that in your home shop. You don't just have to be a big industry guy. You can do the same thing with additive manufacturing and 3D printing.

You can have a small 3D printer in your house. You can buy these commercially for a couple hundred dollars and manufacture parts on demand. You don't have to stamp them out. They're not as cheap as a single instance of a part that was stamped out thousands of times. The cost of the die and equipment gets very, very expensive and typically you only make money after you make several thousands or millions of them from stamping. With the 3D printer, now you can say “Okay I need something that looks like this and I need three of them.” Each one is going to cost you not the pennies per but maybe it's tens of pennies per, but you only have to make three instead of three million.

That’s less capital and is much faster. You don't have to go get dies or other capital items. Now you can start designing these things. You have this just-in-time manufacturing, just-in-time capability to get parts for whatever it is you need, as long as you've got the proper form for the file that allows you to print it out. For just-in-time manufacturing or just-in-time repair, instead of stockpiling thousands of parts, you stockpile enough material, and a 3D printer that can print those parts when you need them. a utomotive knows this and most of what you have on a tractor or vehicle can be 3D printed.

This is part of that Internet of Things aspect where you are digitizing and creating true automation. My vehicle knows something's wrong with it and sends a message. We diagnose it as we think this part is being worn. If that's a printable part, we can send off to have that part printed and have it ready before the part fails in the field, then schedule maintenance and get it repaired and replaced.

TB: So through IoT every item has a “voice.” Pair that with an automated analytic comparative for that specific part, and you have an active feedback loop that can be monitored. a nd everything has been digitized.

DE: correct. and that feeds directly into having your digital twins, that feeds directly into having your smart things. Just because you have something that's smart, doesn't mean it has to be like a human where the intelligence is in the thing. Most Internet of things devices are smart not because the intelligence is in the device itself, but it's smart because of what's happening up in the cloud with that data. This also gets back to that cybersecurity issue and that privacy issue with all of that data.

That's the big danger of having all this data. We recognized this danger very early on at MIT. It continues to be an active area of research that I work on. h ow do you secure the data and the infrastructure? a nd this is really what cybersecurity for me is all about. It's not just “ h ey make sure that you use the right tools,” although I consult with certain companies on cybersecurity and cybersecurity companies themselves about how to make sure they address many of these things.

Previously, data was just something you had. Google understood this. Marketing companies have understood this for decades since they were founded. Most people and companies are just starting to come to realize that data is the crown jewel. really, it's the crown jewel for just about every company on the planet. Because with that data, you can do predictive maintenance, you can do predictive customer wants. You can figure out ways to upsell your customers, market to new customers, improve your revenue, decrease your costs, all kinds of things.

TB: h ow do we extend that discussion to industry and the data that's being captured? I guess you could say we have to protect the idea that I'm making this unit of one for that individual consumer, or the intellectual property contained in the design being sent to the cN c machine or the 3D printer. What other kinds of corporate impact do you see in industry, from the cybersecurity agenda, that's being elevated everywhere?

DE: I think you just hit on the IoT, the main topics where the big one is, of course, data is the big change. It's a big game changer. So how do you protect it? That's the biggest, absolute biggest change. You have to protect that data. It's not just don't use it for nefarious purposes. It's keeping other people from accessing it. So that's one aspect of cyber security.

The other aspect because everything is going digital, everything's getting networked, is if you assume that your firewall is going to work you need to make other assumptions. You have to have defense in depth. More than likely the IoT device that you've installed to monitor your machines or otherwise help control them and in your machine on the manufacturing floor is not very secure, if it's got any security on it at all. In fact, a lot of these have zero security. You need to protect that and need to understand that you have to protect that. You can architect your network so that it's isolated, or not connected to the Internet directly. You can make sure that you've got a lot of extra rules and limitations but you need to get over this trust but verify and go to a verify and continually verify security approach.

In my past experiences, I've been able to see lots of interesting things happening on networks. a nd these are interesting things that you say, “Oh well, why would that be interesting? You just have this piece of the company talking to this piece of the company.” It's like, “Yeah, but this piece of the company should not be talking to this piece of the company.” a nd if they do talk, it needs to be a particular conversation. a nd it's not sending customer data from one to the other. Why is this piece of the company getting that customer data? Probably because that piece of the company has been compromised and it's being externally traded out of that piece of the company in some way. We've got to see that all the time. You can't just say put my firewalls on the outside and I'm good on the inside.

No, everything that you have in your network and on your network, particularly because it's a Bring-Your-OwnDevice world, is a potential access point for the bad guys. Sometimes we do this to ourselves. So, data exfiltration is a huge problem. One way that data exfiltration happens accidentally is that somebody will set up a cloud service, a cloud database, because they needed to share something with some other group for the purposes of a business deal or project. They load a bunch of data up there. It's not secured. It's shadow IT. Nobody knows about it. It doesn't get registered anywhere. They forget to shut it down or they forget to secure it and suddenly they get this big data leak. humans will do whatever is the easiest thing for them to do. So you need to make security easy for them.

Just like we have made passwords. So when I was in college, you know, this was the early days of computing and you could hack stuff more easily and you would get a thousand or billion different attempts at guessing passwords before things shut you out. You just sit there and run a password cracker on the administrator account just because you want to give yourself more privileges.

You can't do that today because of all these requirements for how your password should look, rather onerous. Nobody ever remembers their passwords today. You use a password manager. So the more we move to things that automate security, like single sign-on, password managers, and two-factor authentication, the better we will be.

We can do that with machines as well. as we start doing more and more of that two-factor authentication, continual authentication, automated security, we are able to stop things. Suppose I set up a database so you and I can work together. Oh wait, the network won't let me do anything with something because it's not authorized. I can't connect to it therefore it's not part of my network. I need IT involved. So that's how you really stop a lot of these human issues.

Password manager, single sign-on are just two examples of things that we have done right and need to do more of. If we move to that approach where we verify before we trust, and that's really what single sign-on and password protections are for, verify before you trust, and when you don't trust and continually verify, you end up with much stronger security. It is unfortunately not a concept that a lot of security people understand or fathom or agree with - old school is not always the best.

TB: What is on the horizon that everyone concerned with the Internet of Things needs to have on the radar today or needs to start investigating today? What technologies are out there that are going to be rolling down the pipe that you can discuss?

DE: a s an example consider rFID versus other technologies which may have been superior in different aspects, like Surface acoustic Wave (SaW), rFID has won the mainstream battle because traditional silicon based rFID technologies have improved. It is standardization, just good enough, and then that evolution of capabilities, improvements in designs, adding more functionality to capture an ever increasing set of possible applications with one set of technologies. We've seen this before and we'll see it again. We talked about computers, mainframes to workstations to desktops to laptops to phones to IoT. at every step of that evolution, we moved to the next one because the functionality of the current one has achieved such a level that it can support that next level layer. That next layer has a level of capability that can support usable functionality. That's really where we're at now. We're sitting in that evolution phase. 10 years ago, I would have said we're going to have active communications for passive tags and vibration sensing and just energy scavenging.

That technology exists as capable and possible today. Nobody does it. If they do it, it's all very niche applications. It's not to say it will not happen.

TB: right.

DE: When do we reach the point where I need a very small piece of silicon that has everything integrated into it and I can drop it in and I can communicate with it at three meters, and it gives me at least an ID and maybe some other information and it's secure? We can do that today but it's probably at least another decade before we get to a tipping point where we actually do that.

TB: and cross the chasm to mainstream, right?

DE: Exactly. Because you need to get over what everybody else is doing today. Part of it is just what is everybody else doing? One of the reasons SaW failed is that it was great in areas that nobody cared about at the time. Now, it's becoming more and more relevant but it's no longer here. So we've taken the existing technology, the passive UhF technology for example, we've added more functionality to it and more security to it. We've been able to improve its range, keeping its cost about the same, maybe even dropping the cost a little bit and that has expanded the range of possible applications that can use it. You say “Well, but who needs all this security when you really only need an identifier for retail products?” Yes, you only need an identifier for retail products, but you add all this other functionality and now it can go on all these other more commercial products.

TB: On a pallet in the warehouse for instance?

DE: Exactly. You add a bigger antenna and integrate it in, you get longer range, etc, etc. That's all from one silicon design, maybe one or two tag designs integrated in, you get economies of scale, it's cheaper and it works. It's good enough. Whereas I take that single piece of silicon, today it's still a niche capability. There's not many people that know how to do that. There's a small number of silicon designers that can do that. The technology doesn't quite give you three meters, it definitely gives you one to maybe one and a half meters today. But if you iterate on that enough, you can get to that three meter and beyond capabilities still from a grain of sand. You can start integrating in the security functionality and everything else that you want. But now you have this grain of sand instead of a tag which has an antenna, large footprint by comparison and integration problems. With a single piece of silicon a lot of those issues go away.

That's really one piece. So there's those types of technologies that are in the lab that just can't get enough momentum in the marketplace, that even though they clearly will provide a lot of benefit the incumbents do a good enough job and these competitors don't have enough value-add to be able to overcome the competitive advantage of what everybody else is already doing.

I think that active battery powered tags are really where a lot of the innovation is happening because everybody wants to go to the cell phone today. It's because the cell phone is the computing device. We were talking about this before, mobile computing.

Why is mobile computing so big? It's because it is the computer for a lot of people. If you go to a Third World place, like Brazil, most people can't afford a computer but they have a smartphone. It may be a low-end smartphone but it's a smartphone. More and more in the US, regardless of your income level, you have a smartphone. That is your gateway to the Internet, that is your computing device. You do everything on that computing device which enables more interaction with the world around us, that whole smart cities thing.

Now, in a chemical plant, you can be using something like Wireless heart, which is a fairly secure industrial grade ad hoc networking system protocol and systems that are used for it. It works great, but your cell phone doesn't talk that language.

In the smart city, you need to have the devices talking to smartphones. So that means you're going to use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). That means you're going to have NFc (Near Field communication (NFc) is a set of short-range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of 4cm or less to initiate a connection. NFc allows you to share small payloads of data between an NFc tag and a smartphone). That means you have something visual like a Qr code. all of that feeds back into your cell phone. So that's why we're seeing some of this bifurcation. Industry has slightly different protocols that they use that are not cell phone friendly. That is starting to change too because of the value of smartphones in the work environment, even in the manufacturing environment, and the costs associated with something like a Wireless heart versus a BLE. Wireless heart is more expensive usually, by a lot. BLE, providing the same functionality, not necessarily the same ruggedness that you might get from a Wireless heart device, but will last almost as long and overall cost of ownerships going to be less because they're a lot cheaper. It's three or four to one last time I checked. It's cheaper to use the BLE, making it friendly to your repairman, your workers, particularly if it's a remote location. I don't need to bring something special, just my cell phone.

I can talk with NFc, Qr code, Bluetooth to all the devices in the remote facility and I just need my cell phone. We're definitely seeing a move towards those types of commercial products with clear winners. It's whoever can talk to the cell phone. I'm starting to see that on the industrial side as well where it's traditionally been more customized or targeted protocols and devices for the industrial setting. We are still always going to have those. But that is definitely changing particularly from a wireless perspective.

ScaDa devices are really an interesting mix. a lot of ScaDa devices out there are 30, 40, 50 years old. Most hopefully that's starting to change as people have realized cybersecurity is important. But now you have all these legacy systems that need to be secured. how do you secure those? There are products on the market and ways to do that. But it costs money.

ScaDa is in industrial plants - chemical plants as well as power plants and water maintenance. If you've got ScaDa devices working, generally the approach is they work. Let them be. Don't screw up what works. Just maintain it, manage it. With IoT we put all these things on the Internet. Those data devices were not designed for the Internet and a lot of them are being put on the Internet through a Windows XP box.

TB: IoT means you secure your data because everything's going to be talking. Everything's going to have a voice and you never know when there will be some information that provides a tip to someone or provides a competitive advantage out there that you didn't mean to be in the unsecured domain. Even intellectual property I suppose for manufacturing processes.

DE: Yep. That's a great summary.

TB: It's a great wrap right there. Daniel, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us.

• Provide reliable, low cost, ink code marking.

• May be mounted in any orientation.

• The sealed ink system allows discontinuous operations with immediate start-up of comparable previous impressions.

• Can be modified or made to order for your particular marking application.