Industrial Engineer · phase 1 of 16 · noun

Remote I/O / Expansion

I/O installed away from the controller and connected through an industrial network or expansion bus.

The Explain card

Plain English
Remote I/O lives away from the controller, out on the machine, and connects back over an industrial network or an expansion cable. The program reads it the same way, only later.
Example
A packaging line puts a small I/O block at each station. One Ethernet cable runs back to the panel instead of two hundred sensor wires.
Why it matters
Remote points cut wiring cost and let the panel stay small, and they add a network to the list of things that can fail. A lost connection puts every point on that block into its fail state at once.
Hook
One cable instead of two hundred, and one cable to lose.

Word knowledge

How the word is built, where it came from, and what it sits beside in memory.

In a sentence

The case packer lands the infeed photo-eye on Remote I/O at a 1734-AENT adapter so the ControlLogix can read it over EtherNet/IP.

Why these words
  • Remote Latin remotus, moved back, from removere marks the hardware as sitting off the local rack, so the phrase is about place
  • I/O English computing slash pairing of input and output, from in + put and out + put names the field points that hardware still serves to the scan
Where it came from
Origin
English industrial compound from Latin remotus, moved back (from removere), plus the computing slash pairing of input and output; Expansion is Latin expansio, from expandere, to spread out
Entered the language
1980s
What changed
Remote meant moved back, then far in place, then operated from a distance after remote control. Computing in the 1950s glued input and output into I/O. PLC catalogs of the 1980s paired them once a second rack could sit on a scanner, and Expansion kept the older bus-cable name for that off-rack hardware.
How it is spelled
Pattern
I/O writes two capitals with a slash and no spaces, as A/C and R/W do
Pattern
Latin re- plus motus yields remote, sitting with demote and promote
Pattern
silent e after a long o, so remote sits with note and vote
Breaks the pattern
I/O keeps a slash and two capitals even mid-sentence, never IO, I-O, or i/o
Breaks the pattern
the phrase stays two tokens; Remote-I/O is a drawing error, and RIO is the spoken shorthand

Spelled like

  • A/C
  • R/W
  • demote
  • promote
Broken into chunks
  • re
    • remove
    • return
    • rewind
  • mote
    • demote
    • promote
    • emote
  • I/O
    • A/C
    • R/W
    • I/P
  • put
    • input
    • output
    • throughput
What it sits beside

Same subject

Same shape

  • local I/O
  • remote control
  • remote access
  • expansion rack

I/O family

Local versus remote pairs

Slash pairings

  • A/C
  • R/W
  • I/P

Expansion names

  • expansion rack
  • expansion bus
  • expansion module

Where it sits in the deck

Phase 1: PLC Controller Hardware

The box itself, from processor and rack to the modules that plug into it, because nothing else in the deck lands until you know what a PLC physically is.

Neighbours in this phase