Discrete vs. Digital: Automation Tech Talk for 10/20/25

Shawn discusses how many so called “experts” don’t use the correct terminology when referring to Rockwell and Siemens Modules in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream:

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Link mentioned in video:

– Shawn’s Online Courses
– Shawn’s In-Person Courses

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Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey everybody. It’s Sean Tierney here from Insights and Automation. And I’m trying something completely new. I hope it’s working. I hope you can hear me. I’m actually in a different room here. What I’m calling studio C, which as I’m updating all my PLC courses, I need to I needed another spot to be able to, um, film videos.

And so I’m kind of looking off to the side because I need to get another monitor in here. But in any case, I hope you’re doing well. I don’t know if you guys are seeing my audio. I don’t know if you’re hearing my audio or seeing my video. I don’t know what the quality is, but hey, you get to try things out. I’m actually trying Restream instead of StreamYard because there’s some audio delays with the StreamYard that, uh, if you’re not using the webcams, audio or whatever.

So in any case, I just figured I’d just, uh, show you, uh, you know, test this out. And I wanted to talk to you about discrete versus digital. I o so I’ve seen some people who call themselves experts. Of course, you guys know I train for a living. I teach, uh, you know, Allen-bradley, Siemens PLC, HMI and SCADA and, uh, you know, there’s a lot of competition out there, a lot of people saying they’re experts and a lot of them actually share incorrect information.

And one of the not so, not so horrible information is shares when they’re calling Rockwell’s IO discrete IO. And of course, if you want to use the word discrete, fine. Right. I always use the word digital. And I’ll show you why I use that word. And I know even in Rockwell, there was controversy years ago, I remember seeing a, uh, a letter come out from Rockwell. I don’t know if it was rescinded or not, saying we’re going to go from one to the other or whatever, but in any case, it kind of came to mind. Uh, I was reminded of this. Let me go to my my screen here, but I recently, uh, partnered with Schneider Electric, uh, great company to cover their modicon edge. Io wants a new a whole bunch of io they came out with, and I think it’s really cool. I filmed, I think, a forty five or fifty minute, uh, epi