Visiting IPC WinterCom 2024
The IPC WinterCom event was held at the World Trade Center in Barcelona on Monday. I attended the meeting for the IPC-2591 2-17a Task Group as our next major product was to develop the SMEMA CFX Adaptor by the end of the year.
Earlier last year we were removed from the IPC-CFX Supporters page and after questioning why, an IPC staff member informed us that they were limiting the page to companies they knew are helping the industry with CFX installations and are also engaged with the task group - We thought that simply implementing the standard would be enough.
So the real purpose of attending the hour and a half meeting was simply to show my face and tick a box. I had hoped I would meet and greet the CFX A-Team. These are the people who regularly meet in-person to make decisions and move the standard forward.
However the meeting was more in the form of the general knowledge share of what the standard was and the progression so far.
Michael Ford from Aegis Software who is also the Committee Co-Chair of IPC-2591 gave the presentation and he did an excellent job in fielding questions. The main subject for discussion was CFX 2.0 which initially seemed a breaking change, however Michael assured us it was purely marketing and it would be backward compatible.
While it seemed a lot of effort to fly to Barcelona from the UK to attend the meeting on a start-up budget, I was able to visit the city for the first time which was on my bucket list and also visit a member of my family who lived there. I didn't know it then, but I also was pleased to see Michael for the last time.
About 4IR.UK British Systems
We are a Smart Factory solutions provider for the SMT Electronics Assembly manufacturing industry. We were founded in 2016 after the support of a seed funded Business Accelerator. We create hardware Adaptors that operate in more than 20 countries that extend the life of SMEMA based manufacturing equipment by providing solutions for production monitoring and supporting data connections to the Hermes Standard and the Connected Factory Exchange CFX. We also develop Software Extensions for the Low-Code No-Code MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform. The flexibility of off-the-shelf software combined with inside industrial experience means that 4IR.UK is ideally placed to anticipate and respond to a factory's changing needs.
