Welcome back to The Automation Podcast, the world's
number one industrial automation product and technology show.
Thanks to you,
our audience of highly skilled automation professionals. Thank
you for being a member of our audience,
and thank you for tuning back in this
week. Now for those new to the show,
my name is Sean Tierney from Insights and
Automation. And each week, I invite a new
vendor or customer or user on the show
to talk about products, technologies, and solutions.
And if there's any graphics, this is more
of an interview style recording today, but if
there's any graphics, we'll we would always call
those out for those of you who listen
because we know,
over a quarter of you, even on YouTube,
listen to the show and not watch it.
And so, we we appreciate you all, whether
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there, just reach out to me because I'm
the instructor.
So with that said, today, we have Drew
on the show. I'm looking forward to talking
to him about a
wide variety of topics. But because it's Drew's
first time on the show, I'm gonna ask
him. Drew, if you don't mind, could you
please introduce yourself to our audience?
Sure. I am Drew Allen. I'm the CEO
of Grace Technologies. I took over in January
2021.
Our history,
kind of family history,
is quite lengthy in the automation space. My
grandpa was a regional sales manager for Allen
Bradley in the seventies and eighties for,
Los Angeles.
My dad is a former Rockwell guy as
well. I did not follow in those footsteps.
But,
I started going to China with my dad,
at 13,
which gave me kind of a really interesting
viewpoint
of how products get made.
And, after living overseas for a while after
college, I ended up kinda moving back to
Grace, took over a lot of, sales roles
and responsibilities, and then kind of culminating in,
taking over CEO in January 2021.
Well, congratulations
on that. Anybody who's a a regular viewer
of the channel knows that over the last
twelve years, we've covered Grace, especially on the
news shows, some of their technologies that they've
come out with over the years.
And, you you guys all know me being
a former,
Rocco Automation,
certified specialist.
I was, working for distributors. I was,
you know, you know, came across Grace quite
a bit, and they're always at all the
big shows as well.
So if anybody's going to any of the
upcoming shows where Rocco will be at, you'll
probably see Grace there. But in any case,
Drew, I wanna thank you for coming on.
And that that is an interesting background. I
know we have a lot of things we
wanna talk about today.
Before we jump into that, though, could you
give the audience the, website for your company?
You can find us a couple different URLs,
but, main one would be www.graceport.com.
Okay. Great. That's the one I always remember,
but, that's actually not the name of the
company. But I think a lot of us
came to know your company through those bulkhead
connectors, which are so user friendly. If you
need an Ethernet jack, you don't wanna open
up the enclosure, and you're right there with
it. And but you guys do so much
more than that.
In any case, I did wanna start the
conversation off talking about
safety by design, and you guys have so
many different products that deal with safety. Right?
So, seeing, you know, is the panel hot
or cold, right, just from the outside, just
looking at the outside of the panel. You
know, we have we don't even have to
open up the panel, of course, if we
have the bulkhead connectors and so on. But
can you what can you tell us about
safety,
by design here in the twenty twenties?
So I got three different threads I wanna
pull on. Okay. So so first,
safety by design really came
came to be,
as part of NFPA 70 e, I think,
about ten years ago.
In one of probably the the 2013
or 2010 revision.
And they started to put a safety by
design section into that 70 e document. And
that was really the first time of, like,
thinking,
maybe we can actually make equipment,
safer for the electrical worker.
And, you know, when we kinda saw that,
it also played into,
it it played in with this thing called
the risk control hierarchy.
And so the risk control hierarchy, you know,
is this pyramid. Right? And at the top
of the pyramid, you can eliminate the risk.
The second is kinda substituted a lower risk.
Third would be engineering controls.
Fourth would be admin controls. And then fifth
is PPE. Now oftentimes in industrial facility, what
we jump to first
to protect the electrical worker or the technician
is we jump to PPE as really the
first line of defense where 70 e really
says you should start at the top of
that pyramid and
reduce and eliminate the risk as really the
the the top kind of order of control.
And that actually lines up with a lot
of our experience in the industrial field and
kinda gets into a little bit of the
genesis story of Grace.
So Grace actually started off as a Grace,
technology started off as Grace Engineering and Integration.
And we were a Rockwell system integrator,
and we were working on a friction friction
fit weld or retrofit for John Deere.
And the,
guy at John Deere was tired of reaching
his arm around 480
volt bus bar in order to access the
Slick 500.
And he goes, can you just, like, create,
like, a port on the outside of the
panel that I can plug my laptop into
to be able to access the PLC?
And my dad has this pretty stringent no
nose policy.
And he's just one of these guys who
will always figure it out.
And, and my dad's like,
sure. We'll figure it out. So he goes
ahead, creates a prototype,
and delivers the prototype. And then two weeks
later,
the customer calls up and goes, hey. Can
I get another one of those gray sports?
And, and that was kind of, like, the
start of the product line. And so we
actually kinda started doing safety by design
without,
you know, without a sort of theoretical
NFPA 70 e backbone because 70 was not
a thing back in '93.
I I think maybe it was technically a
thing, but no one knew about it. It
NFPA 70 e actually started as an offshoot
of the I triple E, PCIC committee.
PCIC being the petrochemical
industry conference.
And DuPont had a, DuPont and some of
the other petrochem companies had a big hand
in kind of starting to assess this arc
flash risk.
And so when we look at a control
panel from a electrical safety perspective, we're typically
looking at two specific risks. We're talking about
shock hazard as well as arc flash.
You know, if,
most people I talk with have had some
sort of exposure to shock,
a lot of people still,
are surprised to hear about arc flash.
Now people
who have experienced arc flash, they're
evangelists for keeping people safe.
And so
we, you know, at Grace, we really have
tried to come up with solutions that keep
people outside of that cabinet.
If you or somebody you know needs training
on CompactLogics,
ControlLogics,
or really virtually any Allen Bradley
programmable controller released over the last, say, forty
years, then I wanna share with you what
I'm working on right now for release in
early twenty twenty six. And, you know, if
you've been following me, you probably know I
release a new course every year. But for
2026,
I decided that I was gonna refilm all
of my Ellen Bradley PLC courses and release
two new courses on the Legacy PLC five
and slick 500. And this all came about
as I'm here in my physical training room
in the Berkshires
working on new labs for 2026 for the
in person courses. I'm like, this is a
perfect time to update all my Allen Bradley
online courses.
So if you are already enrolled in one
of my level one and two or what
I call my extended courses, just know that
you're gonna get these new courses completely free
of charge. And if you ever bought a
mega bundle or ultimate bundle, that's what comes
in those courses are the extended edition. So
you're gonna get the new courses completely free.
And if you're a new student
who comes in and buy the new course,
you're gonna get the old one as well.
And I'm doing this for those people who
maybe they're servicing old control logic systems with
control net, and they're using, like, version 20
of the software. Well, it looks a lot
different and operates a lot different than what
version 31 and above does. Right? So in
any case, I do wanna share that with
you. And, again, if you know anybody looking
for either in person training or online training,
please send them my way. And with that,
let me get you right back into this
week's episode of the automation podcast.
In
ULNEMA
land,
a big difference is between ULNEMA
and IEC
is where really where the
the safety protection is. Right? And so in
The US and in Canada, we consider the
enclosure
kind of the the main mechanism for ingress.
Whereas in Europe, the device itself, so like
a contactor itself, is, you know, is designed
to actually have the ingress.
You know, there's there's upsides and downsides with
kind of both approaches,
But,
ultimately,
we we figured we're gonna try to keep
people outside of the cabinet, as much as
we can and and keep people away from
voltage.
And that was really how we started.
So we, you know, our first product line
was Graceport. And what we figured out very
quickly was we would create a standard number
of SKUs,
and
then we would get asked for another SKU,
and then we get asked for another SKU.
Well, today, we're up to, like, almost 20,000
unique combinations that we've created,
and we just really innovated, and we can
build and ship,
a brand new Graysport that we've never created
before in two to three days.
And, you know, we just have really, really
fast lead times, so we found that engineers
really want what they want very quickly. Yeah.
And so we just wanna make we wanna
be super easy to do business with. Just
configure what you want. We'll build it for
you. We'll ship it out, as fast as
possible. And that was really kind of our
our claim to fame and our initial product
line.
And so you've got this kind of convenience
and safety play. Right? The other thing is
is
if you're a engineer, you don't necessarily have
to have an electrician standing by because the
door is not open. Whereas off you know,
so your payback period on a Graceport is
pretty dramatic and extreme.
Imagine you have an eight hour kind of
troubleshooting or programming session,
and now you're able to do it with
one guy instead of, well, one guy plus
a electrician standing by. Not really I mean,
I love electricians, but you're not adding a
lot of value,
at that at that point of the process.
So that's kind of the grace part.
Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. No. I was
just gonna say, I think we all have
seen them. I know if anybody out there,
if you're using Rockwell, you've probably seen them.
And, you know, as technology has changed over
the years, you know, more USB
c, more Ethernet. You know, you still need
power in a lot of cases to plug
your laptop into. But, you know, I think,
you know, starting maybe twenty five years ago,
you know, I started hearing as a PLC
guy. I'm like, Arc Flash, what's that? But
it's it's a serious thing, and I know
my customers I've worked with implant.
They all had to go through the training,
and it was serious. And they all had
to line up, and my sales guys were
all over the PPE and trying to make
sure they had the right vendors to sell
the right products to the to the right
end users. And it was it was a
huge deal, and a lot of people actually
changed their products. It's MCCs and VFDs.
Those products actually changed
to mitigate arc flash and to try to
add layers in there to protect those who
may open the door to the MCC. So
there's a protective layer between them and the
bus, and it just just really changed our
world. And, you know, I think, you know,
safety first. Right? But if you can do
something where you don't have to get all
your PPE on, right, and you can actually
work on your control system, whether it's putting
the controls in a separate cabinet or having
other things, a lot of times you can't
avoid that with a, you know, a high
horsepower VFD.
You cannot you can't put it in its
own little small enclosure. It needs to be
in that big enclosure with the, you know,
the four eighty volt or whatever. And, there's
a lot of current there that could that
could, you know, in certain cases, cause problems.
That's why I always love and I gotta
say, I think it's Bernie and Les is
the, cartoon,
which I just love. If you guys have
never seen that, you gotta go to graceboth.com.
It's a great comic strip series that,
that shows, like, kinda the old ways of
doing things and the new ways and then
the funny ways, which nobody would do it.
Like, people standing on top of people and
and silly things like that. Well, Sean, you
wanna know you wanna know the genesis story
of that? Oh, yeah. Please. Yeah. So,
so we're on a family vacation,
and, you know, the the company had kinda
just started up and, you know, but at
at the time, it was just being an
entrepreneur. Right? It wasn't like startup go raise
money in the nineties type of situation, right,
especially in the Midwest.
And, and so dad was having a hard
time communicating what the Graceport did. Right? Like,
it allows you to connect the piece PLC
on the inside of the cabinet, like, through
the outside of the cap like, it was
a it was a hard thing to describe.
And so he ended up picking up a
comic, like, how to draw a comic.
And so
he ended up actually creating this, like, kind
of this guy, like, on a operating table
with, like, a port on his belly, you
know, and, like, wires and, you know, and
and there's a couple more revisions of that.
That actually is relatively,
good,
you know, he's relatively good at drawing. I
I've I've told this on a couple other
podcasts as well, but my,
my great great grand
grand uncle on my dad's mother's mother's side
was Samuel Finley Breeze Morse who invented the
Morse code.
And so everyone knows him for that, but
he was also, like, quite an awesome artist.
And so
his,
there's kind of, like, this thread of, like,
art and design kind of in my family.
And so dad got that gift. I did
not get that gift.
So,
but, anyways, he kinda started this drawing thing,
and he finally figured out, like, a really
good cartoon. And so he ended up putting
that up on his displays at automation fair.
And so people would come up and say,
well, what do you do? And he was
just able to just point at the display.
And that was really, like, one of the
first big kind of, like, marketing things that
we figured out was, like, how to communicate
that message.
But, yeah, we we have Bernie and Les.
They're getting into trouble all the time, and,
they're they're really fun. We have an entire
Slack channel where everyone in the company kinda,
like, submits ideas. So I would open that
up to your listeners of, like, if you
guys have ideas of what you think Bernie
Lush should get in trouble with, like, give
us give us some ideas, and hopefully, you
can learn from their mistakes.
Well and I think a lot of I
think a lot of the episodes
have to do with the and I'm gonna
say this wrong, but PSEDs?
Can you explain that a little bit? Yeah.
PSEDs.
So we start with the grace port. And
for product businesses, the hardest kind of crossing
the chasm
is going from being a single product business
to being a multiproduct
kind of family business. Yeah. And we knew
that there was additional ways for that we
needed to protect workers. And and so we
we kind of started doing some research, and
we ended up figuring out that, hey. We
need to alert people that voltage is really
inside of this cabinet. And so,
about fifteen years ago, maybe a little bit
longer,
we ended up, releasing the r three w,
which is our voltage indicator. And that was
our first kind of, you know, foray into,
the voltage indication space.
And a lot of, a lot of our
growth has now come from that PESD business.
And,
we've come up with a lot of different
variations.
There's really three different flavors of products.
We have our voltage indicators, which are really
for voltage presence.
That addresses the need for the mechanical worker
in addition to the bump,
try, or jog test, whatever your terminology is
that you guys use in your facility.
Everyone knows I mean, you're you're a PLC
guy. Right? So,
when you are pressing a green push button,
or
a green button on an HMI screen, you
don't exactly know what you're testing. If there's
a permissive in the system,
maybe there's an interlock that's open, you really
you just you don't have a you don't
have a good sense of of what you're
testing, but OSHA does require you to do
that bump test, that try test. It's just
no one would trust it.
And that was really the initial kind of
foray was, let's provide additional verification
for the worker that, hey. There's power present
or not there for mechanical lockout, tagout means.
And then we started,
getting how can we do full electrical lockout
takeout without opening up the panel door? Now
when I say electrical lockout takeout versus mechanical
lockout takeout, let me define those. Mechanical first
of all, there's a lot of different lockout
takeouts.
You've got mechanical, electrical,
thermal, gravitational, hydraulic,
pneumatic.
There's, I think, nuclear lockout takeout actually, as
well. So there's a lot of different types
of lockout takeout.
Mechanical lockout tagout is really
my hands are not gonna come in contact
or I'm not gonna enter the arc flash
approach boundary
of that piece of, you know, electrical equipment.
So I'm doing mainly mechanical work. Maybe I'm
changing out a bearing or something like that
or clearing a jam in a
machine. For electrical lockout tagout, it means I'm
entering into the arc flash approach boundary of
the electrical equipment.
I'm also,
likely gonna be putting my hands on conductors.
And and that really requires,
that re that kinda jumps over from really
an OSHA standard to NFPA 70 e.
And 70 e article one twenty requires a
live dead live check. And so we figured,
how can we do this? And we ended
up partnering with a company called Syntos.
Little known fact about Syntos.
I believe this is still true, though. I
think Amazon's giving them a little bit of
a run for their money.
Cintas has the fourth largest fleet on the
road. They're the world's
the largest,
industrial,
laundry business in the country.
And,
unfortunately, they had a
pretty serious fatality,
in one of their facilities,
about
fifteen years ago. That really changed the way
that they started,
that really changed their culture of safety in
their,
across their company.
And it was due to a lockout takeout
mistake.
And so they decided
they decided
we gotta get serious here. And so they
reached out to us, and we actually ended
up co developing
a voltage indicator kind of on the left
side. And on the right side, we came
up with safe test points that allowed them
to do a fully metered,
test outside of the cabinet.
And then that kind of ended up morphing
into our safe test point offering. What's cool
there is we put a 102 k ohm
impedance on the back end of that circuit.
So at 480 volts,
you're limited to about 2.3 milliamps of max
available current,
which is below OSHA's definition of a shock
hazard as well as you're below any sort
of arc flash hazard.
And then that really shifted into our CheckVault
product line.
And that CheckVault was really a combination
of,
the voltage indicator and the test points,
kind of as a two in one instead
of having two separate units.
And that product has just, you know,
gone, you know, thermonuclear. I mean, it's been
super, super successful product.
And, you know, what's incredible to us as
the company building that product,
sales are nice, but, like, we know that
every one of those installed
is keeping someone safe.
And,
that's super exciting. And I know for our
team and for myself,
there's a lot of joy and pleasure that
kinda comes from
knowing that, hey. We are really making, you
you know, we're really making an impact in
the lives of these electrical workers across these
facilities that literally build our world.
Right? I think oftentimes, we we think about
just the technology, but, like, these people who
these companies we're working with are the world's
most important companies. And, like, our lives as
humans would be vastly, vastly different without these
companies in them. I mean, you know, whether
it's it's companies like Nestle or Procter and
Gamble or Yeah.
The automotives. I mean, it's just
Petrochem, you know, tire and I mean, just
across the board, our lives just would not
be the same without them, and so we're
excited to be a part of that,
that journey. What's you know, it's very easy
to install typical install locations.
It's a 30 millimeter push button knockout.
Oftentimes, it's gonna go on the load side
of an LV,
piece of switchgear, LVMCCs,
drive cabinets, as well as control cabinets. And
so we have a lot of people who
put one on the line side, one on
the load side, but that really depends on
your lockout takeout procedure, where you're doing the
lockout takeout procedure, where you're requiring verification.
Yeah. I think we should probably, for the
audio audience, this device, the check volt, is
not just indication.
Right? You actually have test points there where
you can
say, well, I wanna be sure that the
there's no voltage there. Is that correct? Yeah.
Correct. It it the the
voltage indication actually kind of halos around the
test point, which is pretty cool, which is
kind of a cool look. Everyone loves flashing
lights, and so this one, you have to,
like, lit up test points, which is really
fun.
Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, the seventy e
committee has been, they they put this in
their,
annex o,
which is their safety by design kind of,
best practices.
So it's been great to get a lot
of support from the electrical safety community on
this on this unit.
If you or somebody you know needs hands
on training with Rockwell or Siemens PLCs, I
want you to consider the automation school. Not
only are you gonna find that we're less
expensive than sending your people to the factory,
we're gonna be able to cover more content
quicker.
And we can even teach your students on
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if you wanna do a multi day engagement.
Now you'll find all the information about my
hands on training over at theautomationschool.com/live.
And if you have any questions, I wanna
encourage you to reach out to me. But
just keep in mind that what we can
do here is typically more than you'll find
other places because we have more equipment.
You know, anybody could put APLCs in a
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here you go. Here's a lab book. What
we can do is share, well, my thirty
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I have dozens of products from third parties
we can bring in and integrate in addition
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So, again, if you want to do hands
on training affordably
and you need quality instructor, please consider sending
your students to me. And, for all the
information and to get in contact with me,
please visit the automationschool.com
forward slash live. And with that, let's go
back to this week's episode of the automation
podcast.
Yeah. Yeah. We've, we covered it quite a
bit over the years.
One of the things that I think a
lot of us run into is the fact
that, you know, my wife is, you know,
as a principal
is is guilty of this as well is
that a lot of people don't realize where
manufacturing
happens.
So my wife, the other day, she was
frustrated. This is probably a year ago. She's
like, everything's made overseas. And I'm like, what
are you talking about? We just passed three
companies that make stuff that literally produce products,
and and it's you know, most of them
are subcomponents to a bigger product. But I'm
like, there are manufacturers
all around you. There are massive bakeries locate
located in the middle of towns, in the
middle of, you know, residential districts, in the
middle of Albany, New York where you would
never expect one to be. There are injective
molding machines. There are machine shops. There everywhere
you look, you're probably passing a manufacturer
and not even knowing it. It just looks
like a building with no windows. Right? And
so, they are extremely important. I
you know, whether it's medical devices or the
paper we use or, you know,
you know, a lot of testing goes into
those components that go into our cars. Right?
Because they're gonna last, you know, forty, fifty
years. Even the little, you know, window up,
down switches, those has to be tested, retested,
and engineered so they last a lifetime. So,
and and if any of the audience out
there, you guys have stories you wanna share
as well, please share them. But there is
manufacturing. I remember somebody says there's no chip
manufacturing
in The US, not potato chips, which I
do love, and there's plenty of that. But,
you know, computer chips, and I'm like, I've
been to Intel. I've been to GlobalFoundries.
I've been to all these different fabs. Micron.
We Yeah. Yeah. We have the nano, the
nano college right here in Albany, just an
hour away. It's like, we have a huge
fabs here in The US.
And, and, you know, so, you know, maybe
the mass market a lot of the mass
market stuff may not be here
right now. Maybe it'll come back. I don't
know. But, you know, all of the high
end stuff, a lot of the high end
stuff is made here locally and and even
some of the not high end stuff. I
I've walked into plants that were just making
plastic plates and plastic cups. So,
it's amazing what's made, and and, I think
our audience knows that. And I would love
to hear stories from them about things they
they have to clue their, their relatives and
friends into about. But these are important subjects,
and I appreciate you going over both the,
the check road, the PESD.
What does PESD stand for? I can't remember
Yeah. No. It's Gus, Permanent electrical safety device.
Okay. Okay. Good.
Yeah. And then we we talked about the
bulkhead connectors too.
Anything else you wanna talk about when it
comes to safety by design? Because I know
it's a big topic these days. I mean,
you know, so so, it's there's a lot
of you know, there's there's other devices that
we don't make that,
you know, that play into electrical safety by
design. You know, we have a panel outside
this door here,
you know, and that's got a a sequester
disconnect.
Okay?
That's a great safety by design innovation. Right?
All of a sudden, the control side of
that enclosure is, you know, 24 volt, you
know, touch safe.
And the power side is on in in
the sequester. So there's there's a lot of
ways to do safety by design. There's there's
ways to cover over terminals,
for switching of,
switchgear.
You can get,
a automatic kind of robotic switch that you
don't have to stand in front of the
door when you're switching. I mean, there's a
there's a whole plethora of items.
IR windows, for instance.
IR windows,
allow you to do infrared inspection without having
to open up panel doors. We also have,
we also have,
continuous thermal monitoring,
solutions
for MV switchgear. At Automation Fair, we'll be
releasing a LV,
monitor as well.
And
that actually I I guess one other thread
to pull on there
is
70 e makes this assumption
with electrical,
equipment.
It it's
either closed and guarded or, like, well maintained.
Okay? So one of the changes over the
last kind of year and a half, two
years has been NFPA 70 b, b as
in boy, is the electrical standard for maintenance
reliability,
I believe,
for electrical equipment.
It actually tells you how you should be
maintaining your gear, and that's been elevated to
the same level of standard as NFPA 70
e. Okay?
And
one of these things is just
one one thing that causes arc flash is
hot spots.
And so a a loose bolted connection can
cause a thermal runaway event in a pretty
dramatic way. And so, you know, even just
maintaining your switchgear now has become part of
that safety process.
Right? If you don't if you don't exercise
your breaker, by the way,
regularly,
you don't keep your switchgear clean. You don't
you know, there's this whole thing.
You're you're not gonna have reliable
safety results on the back end of that
process.
And so definitely check out NFPA SMDB. If
you guys are, you know, if you guys
are kind of new into this arc flash
world, there's incredible kind of consulting companies that
can that can help you out, train you,
get you started on electrical safety program.
I'd just do a shout out to Terry
Becker and Jim Pollard. They're fantastic.
But they're and the e hazard guys. I
mean, we've got a lot of partners in
that space and,
highly encourage you,
to be ahead of the eight ball on
both the 70 b conversation as well as
the 70 e conversation.
Yeah. And I'd love to know from the
audience too, how many of you guys are
using the the the heat cameras. Right? The
infrared or or heat sensing cameras. I think
one popular line is the flare cameras.
Very expensive, but they basically give you the
heat map of your of your panel or
your MCC or whatever. And what your product
does is it provides twenty four seven seven
monitoring of that instead of just doing it
on a, you know, on a regular, you
know,
scheduled maintenance. Alright?
But, so very interesting. I would love to
know what you guys are doing out there.
Also, if, any of you guys are going
automation, I won't be there. I'm actually going
to a different event right now.
Another very large vendor has invited me to
go to an event. So, but I'd love
to hear what you guys are doing if
you're going to the show this year. Just
and if you are, I'd love to know
what you find out. But in any case,
Drew, I wanted to talk about, some of
the other topics you had on the list,
of things that interest you both professionally and
personally. And I think we had a couple
of different things. I think, one of them
was, wearables. Another one was IoT. Correct me
if I'm wrong. But No. But
Absolutely. No. Look. I guess I'll jump into
the wearables first because I think, you know,
we've been talking about safety by design for
the equipment. We haven't really talked about monitoring
the worker.
Yeah.
Right?
And we're very interested in kind of this
interplay between,
you know, between the worker and the equipment.
And we we think that there's gonna be
kind of a lot of innovation as you're
able to now with new technology be able
to kinda monitor both things at the same
time, and,
there there's definitely a future kind of road
map there for us.
One of the products that we released this
year
is called PROXY.
We released it in February,
and we've seen just incredible kind of take
off on this product.
And it's a new it's a wearable.
Looks like this,
and you wear it on your dominant hand.
This senses voltage,
from a 120
up to 400 kV.
And it's,
it will light
and beep, but most importantly,
it will vibrate as you get close. So
if you're wearing it kind of under a
glove or something and you can't see it
or hear it, it's a loud industrial environment,
it'll vibrate on your wrist. We've we've noticed
a trend with with folks who we've talked
with.
Most of the time when people get shocked,
they thought it was off.
Okay.
Okay. I wanna know Gus stat. Yeah. Sean,
I'm sure you've never been shocked and thought
it was off. It's never happened before. Right?
Find out quickly it's not off.
So,
you know, this,
this product is fantastic for industrial environments.
It's,
it's really targeted towards the electrician, though maintenance
technicians can go ahead and wear it as
well.
And,
it connects up to your phone. You're able
to go ahead and, you know, adjust some
of the settings. So if you're working in
a, you know, thirteen five kV substation,
you can go ahead and change that setting
to that voltage level, which will kind of
expand the sensing radius.
You know, or if you're only working on
40 or 600 volts, you can go ahead
and drop that down into those kind of
typical,
environments.
It also has a full kind of cloud
dashboard and reporting.
And one thing I think is really an
important discussion here for
the safety
and risk folks,
in the audience
is
I use this analogy a lot.
Imagine you're a cardiac surgeon, but you're, like,
the local cardiac surgeon.
Right?
And then imagine that you're the cardiac surgeon
at Mayo.
Mayo, those cardiac surgeons probably have a higher
kind of mortality rate than maybe what the
local you know, your city. Right? Because they
get the hardest cases. But they're also the
best surgeons, and they're the most trained. And
so when we're when we're looking through the
data sets that proxy provides, it allows us
to really pinpoint who our highest risk worker
is.
Not the not the person who's necessarily doing
anything wrong.
Right?
They're they're doing potentially everything right, but they
are in the most risky job. And so
that allows us to now have leading indicators
of risk for the electrical worker, and we
can take mitigation measures against that that risk
indicator.
For instance, maybe instead of checking PPE once
a year, we're gonna do it quarterly.
We're gonna make sure that all their training
perhaps they need to go to some more
advanced training courses.
Maybe if we know that that's happening, maybe
we need to make sure that there's,
additional people you know, additional,
person standing by,
you know, or maybe a supervisor goes out
on a ride along a little bit more
frequently. There's there's other kind of procedural things
that we can do that really addresses that,
that can address that risk just so that
we're providing support to those higher risk workers.
I think we're all past the day of,
you know,
using
using numbers to beat people down. I think
we're all trying to really use numbers now
to build people up and to be smart
about kind of the risk and safety culture
that we're trying to build, in the facility.
I don't know, Sean. What other questions might
you might you have on proxy? I'm not
sure if I
I might have covered it, but go ahead.
Oh, no. I just could see that, you
know, some standard procedures having to change if
you like, you may not know you were
getting that close to that type of voltage
prior to having this watch like device on
your arm. And being able to look at
the all that data over time, you may
be saying, hey. You guys, we didn't realize,
but you can't cut through that spot in
the,
wherever you're working in the machine or in
the plant or in the power room. You
can't cut through there anymore. You're coming too
close to that that,
to to be in close to the to
yellow to the, to the voltage there. I
can also see too that maybe some barriers
aren't acting as they should be. So
maybe I don't know I don't know what
would go wrong, but if there was a
shield inside the enclosure that had it degraded,
you would know that because the sensor's picking
that up. Whereas, otherwise, you just look at
it, it looks great. Right? And so I
think that
by having that, by wearing that, and by
having that information available
historically,
you can might maybe,
you know, even just knowing that somebody was
in the wrong place, it's like, hey. You
weren't supposed to be in that area. You're
not rated that level yet. How come you're
seeing this high level voltage,
when you're not supposed to be working in
that area? So I can see that there's
a lot of things it can do to
keep you safe and to track who's doing
what, where, and when to make sure that
everything's going
according to the plan, according to the way
it should be. Right? And if you see
any,
anything that's not on the normal that you
would not expect, then you can sit down
with your folks and say, hey. Why did
this happen? Why did you get an alert?
We didn't we you weren't supposed to be
working on that part of the plant that
today. Why why did you get an alert?
We saw that you came close to some
high voltage. So I just think that's super
interesting. And for those listening, the the device
looks like a watch.
So, that's the size of it, and, so
it wouldn't be too cumbersome or in your
way. Yeah. We we, we actually so this
year, we presented at IEEE Electrical Safety Workshop.
We won paper of the year
on that. We co presented with a partner
in Tri City Electric. They're a top 20
electrical contractor
heavily in the data center space,
and one of our very early kind of
pilot customers.
They went ahead. They they rolled out, I
think, it was, like, a 100 or a
150 bands,
And for a three month pilot, in three
months, they were able to catch three near
misses.
A lot.
And
then,
unfortunately, there was a fourth incident. And,
a gentleman came into contact with four eighty.
He ended up having to spend the night
in the hospital. He's okay.
Right. That day, he ended up,
forgetting to put his band on in the
car. And so he he he he forgot
it in the car that day.
And so there was a safety stand down
meeting the following day after the incident.
And, you know, the owners and the management
of Tri City came in and said, hey.
We're really you know, we we really are
trying to keep you guys safe. You gotta
wear these these bands.
You know, and and some of the older
electricians
were kinda hemming and hawing. And
finally, the the union manager
got up and goes, no. Look. We're investing
in your guys' safety. You will be wearing
these every day.
And
the it's really I mean, that cost of
an incident,
even though it was just a single night
in the hospital between the downtime, you know,
the OSHA
fines and kind of all these things.
You know, it was a $250,000
event.
Right? And and those three other near misses,
that would have been a 700, you know,
$750,000.
The payback in three months was enormous,
right, by preventing any of those incidents.
We also ended up winning show stopper,
the show stopper were award at NECA, a
few weeks ago, which is total surprise, which
is really, really cool.
And so it's been just great to get
a little bit of, like, industry, like, validation
that, hey. What we're we're on the right
track here, and people,
you know, it's it's cool to be able
to bring technology that actually really impacts people's
lives.
Another kind of thing I think to think
about here is is
it's something like eighty percent of injuries happen
the first two or three years on the
job.
So,
you know,
when you start thinking about who to protect
with some of these devices,
we've seen a massive turnover and,
seniority
in industrial facilities and electrical contractors. Right?
A lot of a lot of the older
experienced people have left, and now there's younger
people, and it you know, they just don't
have the experience level. And so a lot
of the a lot of the units that
we have help make you both more productive,
more safe, but also it's more obvious.
Right? And,
and so if you're new, it's it's it's
good to have kind of that obvious factor.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And that's, I mean, that's industry wide. We
just have people like to retire when they
get old.
We can blame them. How rude. How rude.
So
yep. So in any case, I know there
was there another topic you wanted to cover
during today's show? I think we really did
a good job on covering those previous two
topics.
Oh, sure.
So on the IIoT front,
I led an acquisition,
in 2017,
that really
transitioned Grace from being a more mechanical,
analog electrical company into a fully digital business.
And
we we realized that there was a dramatic
need, throughout industry across all sorts of verticals,
across all different application spaces
that
they really wanna prevent downtime.
And
in you know, as as The US is
on its reindustrialization
journey,
we have to run these plants super reliably.
The CapEx expenditures are really, really high. Right?
And a lot of a lot of the
methodology
for,
plant reliability has been either just scheduled maintenance
or run to failure.
And so we're just gonna wait for things
to fail, or we might go around on
a yearly or a monthly basis and do
maintenance whether they need it or not. Also,
sometimes if you you know, over maintaining equipment
is also a bad thing.
It it it leads to a lot of
failures.
And so we we went through kind of
our IIoT and reliability journey. And so we
released our
new vibration temperature node out at automation fair
last year. This is our VVTX.
This sits out on any rotating asset across
industrial facilities. We also work with OEMs.
They have specialized equipment,
and we're able to go ahead and and
monitor,
you know, vibration in three axis plus temperature.
We do a full four a transform down
the node. We're able to get about ten
years battery life on this. What's what's really
unique about us though is just that
with our relationship with Rockwell,
we've had a, we were able to develop
a
a gateway that was,
Ethernet IP based. And so we're one of
the only cloud optional kind of IoT companies
in this space.
And what we found with a lot of
controls engineers is they wanna go ahead and
have one of these types of systems, but
they wanna integrate it into their PLC or
into their into their SCADA system or their
HMI screens. And so we have a AOP
through Rockwell add on profile,
that you can go ahead and download,
and we've made it super easy to configure
wireless a wireless new network inside
of that AOP.
And that's been a really
cool, cool thing, and the results that we've
seen have been, you know,
enormous. I mean, it's like you catch one
of these downtime events and the whole project
just pays for itself. Yeah. And it's it's
great ROI. The other thing is is that
there is a
safety and reliability
piece together. Right?
There's there's a stat that was at one
of these conferences,
and it was, like,
80%
of,
80% of incidents happen during reactive maintenance.
So it's when it's like when the plant's
down and everyone's feeling pressure and the COO
is calling, hey. We gotta get this plant
running. We gotta get this plant running. That
people end up, you know, just naturally taking
some sort of shortcuts, and
they, you know, they get hurt. And so
if we can be a little bit more
preventative, predictive,
you know, and say, hey. Like, this is
what's going on. We've also added in some
defect classification
as well, which allows you to to to
kind of look at, the data trends and
say, hey. This is a bearing issue. This
is a bent shaft. And so we've kind
of developed,
pretty unique,
analytics,
sandbox.
And so that's been a really awesome kind
of product line to to see,
and we just we love working with companies
that have interesting applications and OEMs who, you
know, have a lot of equipment out there
that they want to,
be able to monitor maybe on behalf of
their customers as well.
Yeah. And the fact that you can integrate
it on Ethernet IP
is a big plus because if you have,
if you have Ethernet IP all over the
place, that's a great way to integrate it.
I also think and this is a little
off topic, so I apologize if I get
this wrong. But I I thought I remember
an acquisition you did where you had these
because you want these sensors. You don't wanna
be changing the batteries on these sensors all
the time. Right? And a ten year life
is phenomenal.
Right? But I also saw another,
technology I believe you guys,
acquired
that allows the heat differential between the actual
device, like the motor, and the ambient air
to power the sensors as well. Can you
talk about that? Yeah. That that acquisition was
called Perpetua,
and that,
that unit today,
it's quite a complex web of, certifications
because it's got all the intrinsic safety certifications.
Ah. So that today really only works with,
Emerson,
Rosemont transmitters.
Okay. We we we do have it in
our roadmap to kind of combine that into
our nodes to be able to offer an
additional,
additional power source that you don't have to
go out and change batteries.
The r and d team's still working, you
know, many one of the many, many projects,
but we do think that that's a pretty
compelling,
a a pretty compelling piece of technology.
And,
you know,
these thermoelectric
generators,
I think are gonna be a
huge kind of game changer across the industrial
facility and will allow a lot of different,
a lot of different sensors to be powered
at a much higher
refresh rate as well.
Yeah. And, you know, we're we're kind of
excited for that future.
You know, just hazardous location certifications are
are tough,
but,
we, we've been working on it.
So and you just don't actually sell the
products. Don't you have to go along with
these, like, a con a cloud based, condition
monitoring
solution as well for those who want that?
Yes. Absolutely. So we have a we have
a full cloud based kind of suite of,
you know, all the dashboarding and analytics tools
and the ability to go through and set
up assets and monitor those assets.
You know? But, you know, we think that
there's incredible value there, but we totally understand
our customers kind of if they go, hey.
We can't have cloud. I we go, no
problem. There's a control only integration available to
you. If you wanna go ahead and add
on the cloud later, if you want additional
kind of insights,
we're more than happy to go ahead and
add that package onto your,
onto your deployment.
Yeah. I can definitely see where this part
that's not the controls engineer's kinda gambit. Maybe
it's facilities.
In some places, the controls engineer doesn't get
they don't get into HVAC. They don't get
into facilities,
you know, freshwater and all that. Some places,
they do. Some places, they don't. So I
could see for that kind of,
person who's doing the,
kind of,
you know, the the site wide stuff that
that would be huge because they can put
this on the where they need, they can
put that on the the devices on the
motors they need them on, and they just
have it all go to the cloud. They
don't have to learn anything about PLCs. Am
I right? Absolutely. I mean, it's and
it's super easy to just add additional nodes
in. Right?
You know, on your on your PLC, you
would need to be able to,
create the visualize you know, you need to
create the visualization in the HMI screens. Right?
So if you wanna add additional nodes, there's
a little bit of programming to be able
for that to show up in your your
HMI,
whereas in the cloud, it's just immediate and
automatic.
We also will be running,
and releasing additional prediction models. We actually got
a Nice.
Million dollar NSF grant,
especially on bearing prediction.
And bearing prediction is a
relatively difficult problem.
It it you know, there there's
only a little bit of kind of,
information ahead of the degradation curve, and so
you have to pick this up really at,
like, the right point in time. And so
we've we've been developing models and testing out.
You know, if there's listeners who wanna partner
with us to also help kinda validate some
of that information,
we're always looking for, customers to collaborate with
and,
you know, folks who are who are looking
to increase the reliability of their equipment.
Yeah. Especially for those who are driving. Can
you give the folks, the best way to
get in contact with Grace,
specifically?
So go ahead and find me on LinkedIn,
Drew Allen.
It's it's my name.
Also,
if you if you wanna send us an
email,
my email is drewa@gracetechnologies.com,
or you can email sales@gracetechnologies.com
as well. Someone will be in touch with
you, and we'd love to love chat, but
connect with me on LinkedIn. I I I
love,
I love, engaging on LinkedIn.
That's awesome. Well, Drew, I'm looking at the
time. Was there anything else you want to,
discuss in this episode?
No, Sean. I I just, you know, thanks
so much for kinda what you've been doing
in the automation space and your support of
Grace over the years.
It's, it's been cool to see what you've
built, and,
always great to sit down and just talk
kind of product and insights,
of what we're of what we're seeing in
the field, and, hopefully, we can do this
again sometime.
No. I appreciate it. And I, you know,
I think, I have fond memories of Grace
throughout the years and all those different ads.
The one that looked like I think it
looked like the game operation and then going
through all of the iterations as if things
would come out. And,
just, was really glad to have you on,
learn about the history of the company, and
learn about some of your products, which, of
course, we're we've all seen, here and there.
And, if anybody,
goes to Automation Fair, make sure you say
hi to the folks over at the Grace
booth. And, Drew, again, I just wanna thank
you for coming on the Automation Podcast.
Hey. Thanks so much, Sean.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. And,
just a reminder, if you need any online
or in person training, please contact me over
at the automation school dot com.
All my information is at the top of
the website.
And, don't forget, if you are already enrolled
in or buy my existing courses, right,
you will get
the new courses completely free of charge. So
for instance, if you're in, you know, POC
basic standard or extended or CompactLogix
level one or level one and two, you're
getting the new course I'm released the next
year free of charge.
And if you come late to the party
and you buy the new twenty twenty six
course, you're gonna get the old course as
well. I just had somebody today tell me
they're stuck on version 20, and that's why
I'm giving them the old course with the
new course is because
you're gonna have people out there servicing version
one through version 30. Not everybody's gonna be
using 31 through 38. Right? So in any
case, check that out over at the automationschool.com.
They sponsored this episode, which is why I'm
talking about it again. But in any case,
it's a big part of my business. How
I keep the lights on is selling online
courses and in person training,
which, I get some exciting stuff, coming for
that this coming year too. Also,
please check out I'm I'm launching the new
channel, the Automation Museum channel, and so please
check that out. I was publishing the videos
here, but I decided I'm just gonna put
them all over there.
We've not only had some interest interesting people
on the show, but we also interviewed one
of the design engineers on
the
Modicon o eighty four. That's right. What many
considered the first PLC ever, yet we interviewed
him.
And so interesting, he's the guy who did
the firmware. You know, he's the one who
made the the, you know, the processor, the
CPU inside the on the circuit board. He's
the one who made that speak ladder logic,
and it's been so interesting. He sent us
a bunch of his notes recently that we're
gonna incorporate into the Automation Museum. I already
have done all the research on how to
do the,
virtual museum, so I can scan in all
my stuff, and you can actually go there
and look at it detailed as a three
d model.
And, so that research's all done. Now we
just need financing. So I think over eight
months, we raised $200, and I wanna thank
the four people out there who donated. Thank
you very much. Really appreciate you guys. You're
the you're the cream of the crop of
the industry, quite honestly. But, thank you so
much. And if you guys wanna see that,
that interview with the the guy who designed
the monoclon o 84,
that'll be releasing on the new standalone
automation museum nonprofit,
YouTube channel and website.
I'm hoping over the holidays, I'll have some
time to work on that, but try to
do work on those things on Sundays because
it is a nonprofit. But in any case,
I wanna wish you a happy holiday.
This is it. This is the last episode
for this year. We already have several episodes
ready for next year and, probably skipped the
first week of the year. But, we have,
just a bunch of interesting people. I have
interviews from when I was at the Schneider
event. I've reached out to a bunch of
people at Rockwell. I gotta reach out to
my friends at Siemens. I know they had
a reorg, so I don't even know who
to talk to anymore. But, wanted to learn
about new things there because we've had Siemens
on quite a bit this year, talking about
all their great new products. And I think
there might be a new version of TIA
Portal out. I noticed a new product, a
new version of CCW. Actually, it's called, I
think, Design Workbench
that's replacing CCW, but it's it's not ready
for prime time. We'll talk about more of
that, Maybe even before the end of the
year on the, on on the other show,
the automation show, or tech tips or tech
talk. But, we're gonna keep that going too
into the new year. We get some new
websites planned.
We'll look we're talking to sponsors to sponsor
this show, and maybe I can off offload
some of the editing to somebody else because,
honestly, it takes a long time editing the
show. It's not just setting them up and
recording them. So in any case, especially when
the sponsor, we try try to go through
it with a fine tooth comb. But, yeah,
a lot of exciting stuff coming for 2026.
I'm looking forward to it, and, I hope
you guys as are as well. And, just
wanna wish you all a very, again, a
very happy holiday.
Merry Christmas. Happy New Year, and we'll see
you back here on the automation podcast in
early twenty twenty six. And with that, I
wanna wish you all good health and happiness.
Until next time, my friends.
Peace.