What You Need to Know About EtherNet/IP Training

I am a big believer in training. All kinds of training. The way you can make sure that I’ll never hire you is to say, as some have, “I haven’t read a book since high school.” That’s anathema to me as I invest in lots of books. I have two big book shelves at the office and two more at home. They are filled to the brim. I have a special shelf above my desk at home for the influential, life changing books that I couldn’t live life without and a pile on my desk that are the to-be-read set.

I also attend a lot of training seminars. I have a very eclectic set of interests. I attend scuba diving seminars, marketing seminars, technology trainings, and lots of presentations at trade shows. I’m interested in a lot of things.

Years ago, when our company was tiny and we had no money, I still made the investment in myself. And it was massively profitable. I remember a presenter saying that if you have the greatest product in the world and no one knows about it, you’ll go out of business. But if you have a lousy product and market it well, you can make enough money to hire someone to fix the product. He was saying that marketing is a point of leverage in a small business. I took that to heart, and it made a huge difference to RTA and who we are as a company.

This fall, our next training seminar is going to be focused on EtherNet/IP – an in depth, multi-day, deep dive into EtherNet/IP. This isn’t for anyone that wants a surface look at the technology. It’s for the serious student who wants to know all the details: everything from how you conceive an EtherNet/IP product to how to get it certified to keeping it up to date in the future.

This seminar is for serious software engineers that are planning to build an EtherNet/IP product or must support current products. It’s going to be hardcore – that means we’ll probably be looking at C code, talking about operating systems like Linux and Windows 10, and discussing different TCP/IP stacks and what the requirements are for a TCP/IP stack in an EtherNet/IP product. There are specific requirements that a TCP/IP stack must meet for the product to pass EtherNet/IP certification and we’ll be talking about that in detail.

Even if you have been developing or supporting EtherNet/IP products already, you’re sure to learn a lot you didn’t know. Do you understand Quality of Service, how to really build a fully complete and Allen-Bradley compatible EDS (Electronic Data Sheet), or the four ways that you can integrate your EtherNet/IP device with an Allen-Bradley PLC? If you know it all and have nothing else to learn, then you should skip this seminar, but if you’re missing some of this, you’ll want to be in Milwaukee October 29-31st for this training.

To my knowledge, there is no other place to get a deep dive on EtherNet/IP like this. Every once in a while, the ODVA (Open Device Vendor Association) offers a course, and it’s a good day of training, but that’s only 8am to 4pm with a long lunch break. Best thing about it is that it’s free.

Well, there’s no free lunch. You get what you pay for, and when you attend this session, you will learn EtherNet/IP from one of the prominent experts in the world on EtherNet/IP, our own Mr. X whose name will be revealed when you arrive. Mr. X has personally built over 100 EtherNet/IP products in his career. He’s written EtherNet/IP source code that’s used in thousands of products from robots in automotive facilities to RTUs in waste water plants to valves on forty million-dollar pharmaceutical vats.

We party hard at RTA – we do have a bar and a beer refrigerator – but this isn’t going to be party time. You’ll want to come with your “pencils sharpened,” to use a really old, archaic, and obsolete expression.

Want to know more? If you’re a serious student and either don’t know much more than how to spell EtherNet/IP or if you’re an expert who’d like to complete your education, you need to be in Milwaukee in October. You can call us at 262-436-9299, or contact us to get more information!