Author Archives: John Rinaldi

How a Machine-level Historian Quickly Fixes PLC Issues Without IT Infrastructure or Recurring Cost

It’s 2:07am. Third shift is running normally. There are no critical alarms and no obvious [...]

The Sticker Price Illusion: The True Cost of a Protocol Gateway

I’ve been in the gateway business for more than twenty years and there is one [...]

Manufacturing AI is Only as Smart as the Data It Can Reach

I’ve been around a long time, and I can tell you that manufacturing AI is [...]

A Control Engineer Evaluates Modbus AOI vs Protocol Gateways For Integrating HV Breakers Into A Controllogix PLC

In this user story, a control engineer confronts a myriad of choices for moving a [...]

The Four Critical Requirements For A Machine-Level Historian

Personal preferences matter a lot to people and that includes equipment choices like a data [...]

Beyond the Algorithm: Why Standardized Data Models Matter More Than AI

What John Rinaldi shared during his Automate 2026 presentation on building scalable Industrial AI. Artificial [...]

Industrial Control Comes to the Data Center

There is revolutionary change in how we build data centers. Compared to what we are [...]

Monitoring a Modern Data Center From the Proverbial “Single Pane of Glass”

I have a colleague who loves the phrase “Back in the day…” and uses it [...]

How to Pick a Communications Protocol for a Data Center

If you’re a system integrator, it’s easy to burn three weeks of commissioning time and [...]

AI Data Centers Have a Communications Protocol Problem

I remember when data centers used to be quiet rooms full of servers that required [...]