Milestones. Or, How Pulseroller Hit 1 Million ConveyLinx Sold While I Chased My Next Left-Handed Guitar
Life, both personally and professionally, is filled with milestones. Life’s “firsts” often make up these milestones; some good and some bad: 1st Grade, 1st Love, 1st Breakup, 1st Car, 1st Job, 1st Layoff, 1st Marriage, 1st Left Handed Guitar. I could go on. Even though milestones are not limited to single one-time or beginning events; with humans, there is most often a quantitative component to them: birthdays, anniversaries, 5th left-handed guitar, 10th time watching The Godfather, 2nd marriage. Once again I could go on.
1 million of something often stands out as signaling a milestone whether it's making it all the way to 1 million seconds on your New Year’s resolution slim down diet (11.5 days) or you reach the “million miler” status on your frequent flier program; there is something inherently significant about 1 million of something. When feeling great, a person says “I feel like a million bucks!”. You don’t often hear folks say “I feel like a thousand dollars”, or for that matter saying “I feel like twenty bucks” when they feel really lousy.
In the fall of 2024, Pulseroller sold its 1 millionth ConveyLinx module. This is not only significant for Pulseroller, it is significant for the motorized drive roller global market. This milestone signals the global acceptance of networked-based controls for MDR based conveyors - a technology for which Pulseroller was the first to develop and introduce.
When ConveyLinx was introduced to the market back in 2008, it was an uphill battle on two fronts: we had to include features and functionality that did not exist while at the same time we had to bring it in at a price point that would allow the marketplace to give us a fair shot. Some of these features and functions required us to educate our potential customers to think about application solutions in new and different ways.
The first incarnation of ConveyLinx was only a ZPA controller that happened to use Ethernet connectivity between controllers. Other controllers on the market used RJ-45-style Ethernet cables to interconnect their modules, but they were not using Ethernet communications. However, to the casual and perhaps non-technical observer, ConveyLinx was like the other controllers. Because we had true Ethernet connectivity, we could take ConveyLinx where the other guys could not. Soon after its initial release, we implemented Ethernet I/P protocol on ConveyLinx and our controllers were opened up to connectivity with Rockwell Allen-Bradley PLCs. No one else had a single MDR controller that could commutate the motors and operate either by built-in logic or be totally controlled by a remote networked PLC. Today our ConveyLinx products can communicate with essentially any PLC in the world via Modbus TCP, Ethernet I/P, Profinet I/O, CC-Link IEF Basic, and EtherCAT.
Of course, it was not all sunshine and puppies along the way, and these innovations did not happen overnight. As soon as the lightbulbs started to go off in the heads of our customer’s engineers as to the product’s capabilities; we began to be flooded with requests to either change how something already worked or add a new option or feature. Any of you who have been involved in any kind of programming knows from experience that once you start to add programming to something that already works, you almost inevitably break the stuff that already worked in the first place. Our team was not immune to this either.
Early on after we introduced ConveyLinx, I recall one feature that had perhaps some unintended consequences. There was an installation with a large quantity of ConveyLinx controllers. One of the many innovative features of ConveyLinx is that you can configure a long line of conveyor by pressing the installation button on the most upstream module to cause all of the controllers to auto-configure. On this particular site, someone (probably on the night shift, right?) decided to press the installation button on the most downstream module and reconfigured the whole line to run in reverse. Needless to say, the customer was a bit upset and threatened to tear out all of our controls if we did not come up with a fix to keep this from happening again. Our development team worked some long hours and came up with a solution in a matter of a couple of days. This is what we now know as the Network Lock function that prevents this, among other things, from happening. As before, I could go on with revealing the origins of most of the features you see in today’s ConveyLinx and EasyRoll (and now EasyRoll+).
As the technology has matured, we do not receive nearly the number of requests for features and functions, but it has by no means stopped altogether. With the advent of 48V-based control and the performance enhancements it unleashes; we are still forging ahead with innovation in the motor roller conveyor world. Through it all, the fundamental design and architecture of ConveyLinx has remained constant since its beginning which is a real testament to the vision of the folks on our development teams worldwide.
Even though I am slowly but surely reaching the “getting up there” milestone in the aforementioned “birthdays” category; I have no doubt that I will not have retired away from Pulseroller when we hit the 2 million ConveyLinx modules sold milestone. However, it is still a coin toss as to whether we reach the 2 million ConveyLinx sold before I get my 10th left-handed guitar.
Play on,