Hi Bob, I have been to the Grampians - stayed overnight at Halls Gap - Lovely spot! Yes, Omron showed us Ethercat on a visit from Oz earlier this year - I have also seen it at the Hannover trade show (Beckhoff Stand etc). Looks good. It appears the Omron ethercat will initially be Motion Control, hopefully general purpose I/O and a general purpose master will be added to the range. At the moment, we are using third party Ethernet IP remote IO, and third party ethernet IP VSD's ! Although I think I may use profinet and smart slice on the next project. What about adding an Ethernet IP master to the smartslice range? We are spending this weekend nursing a 'sick' SCADA server PC, which sufferred multiple BSOD's earlier in the week and last weekend. It has been reloaded from scratch, and is running great, we hope. I am from Hawkes Bay - we grow great wine here! Think we should arrange a swap! (One day we should have a MrPLC get together) Hope the surgery is a success, I wish you both well from our team here in NZ. Unfortunately I too have some bad news in my family on the health front - not looking good. Tim.