Remtron held their roadshow at the Boomerang Hotel in Mackay, Schneider Electric equipment on the tables, familiar faces around the room, and the kind of conversations that only happen when you get a group of industrial professionals in one place without a specific agenda.
Worth attending. Here’s what stood out.
The vendor conversation
Remtron are one of those distributors that actually pick up the phone. If you’ve got a Schneider question and it’s not their department, they’ll point you to the right person rather than leaving you in a support queue. That reputation was confirmed by everyone in the room who’d worked with them, and it counts for more than a polished product demo.
The evening featured representatives across the Schneider and AVEVA product range, including PlantSCADA, IoT connectivity solutions, and licensing support. If you’re running Citect or PlantSCADA and have questions about the upgrade path, Remtron are a good starting point.
The more interesting conversation: dozers on stockpiles
The discussion that stuck with me wasn’t in the official programme. It was about automating emergency stop systems for coal valve closures on stockpiles, specifically preventing dozer operators from being engulfed when reclaimer equipment operates.
The problem is spatial: a dozer needs to know when it’s entered a zone where a reclaim valve is about to open, and stop or alert before it gets into a dangerous position. GPS receivers integrated with PLCs via Modbus, using polygon-based positioning logic, can solve this. The PLC calculates whether the machine’s GPS coordinates fall inside a defined hazard polygon, and triggers an interlock or alarm if they do.
It’s not a new concept in mining automation, but it’s underutilised. The technology is available on most modern PLCs and GPS modules, the maths is straightforward, and the safety case for implementing it on high-throughput coal stockpiles is hard to argue against.
If you’re working on a project where personnel and mobile equipment interact near reclaim or loading infrastructure, this kind of positional interlock is worth putting in front of your safety engineers.
Thanks to Remtron
Good evening, useful conversations. Looking forward to the next one.