Some sports are essentially the same as they were when the Ancient Greeks held their Olympic Games. Running, jumping, throwing, swimming, wrestling, still pit one contestant against another in a simple to comprehend contest.
Other sports though are heavily dependent on the latest technology and need a team of experts working as hard behind the scenes as the competitors in the field of play. An obvious example is Formula 1 where the difference between first and second can be thousandths of a second.
More sports are also poised to go down the technology route too. Taekwondo is looking at ways to replace the four corner judges with strike detectors similar to fencing, while goal line technology will almost certainly become the norm in professional soccer.
But technology really comes into its own in training. From club level amateurs to international superstars, training is becoming more scientific and more technological.
Common to much of this new regime is the need to collect performance data quickly, analyse it almost immediately and feed back the results to coach and athlete. Usually several parameters are being measured and combined to produce sophisticated information; such as power output, calorific burn rate, initial acceleration, etc.
Put like this it’s not so different from an industrial control system, where multiple data streams are monitored and constant calculations update records and displays – and where required, activate alarms!
When you think about it, the demands of professional athletics and manufacturing are very similar. High performance is a given, and failure is not tolerated. Whether striving for Olympic gold or increasing production yields, the athlete and the production engineer face similar challenges. Each is trying to get the most performance out of their equipment, and each face relentless competition.
CC-Link, with its “non-stop” features, is a good choice for meeting these challenges. It offers a number of features to maintain top performance. Some of these are standby master controllers and redundant loop cabling. A failed device can be removed from the network and replaced without impacting the operation of the rest of the network. And, unlike an athlete who must train for long hours every day to maintain peak performance, CC-Link can be up and running in a few minutes without the need for complex programming.
See for yourself what CC-Link can do at www.the-non-stop-open-network.com
