Author Archives: John Rinaldi
Intermittent Failures: The Reason Control Engineers Have Gray Hair (And How Historians Help)
My life on the factory floor consisted of working at two massive consumer products companies, [...]
Sep
Securing Modbus Networks: 12 Best Practices for OT & Industrial Cybersecurity
Modbus was designed in 1979 with no built-in security, no authentication, no encryption and no [...]
Sep
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 [...]
Aug
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 [...]
Aug
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 [...]
Jul
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 [...]
Jul
The Four Critical Requirements For A Machine-Level Historian
Personal preferences matter a lot to people and that includes equipment choices like a data [...]
Jul
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 [...]
Jun
Industrial Control Comes to the Data Center
There is revolutionary change in how we build data centers. Compared to what we are [...]
Jun
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 [...]
Jun
