RS Components First To Market With NFC Timing Relays From Schneider Electric

Designed for large variety of industrial uses, innovative product enables users to wirelessly set and control timing relays from smartphone or tablet

RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc (LSE:ECM), the global distributor for engineers, has announced that it is the first distributor to market with the high-quality NFC timing relay from Schneider Electric, which offers control and monitoring of a timing relay via NFC (Near Field Communication) using a smartphone or tablet. The product is ideal for maintainers, machine and panel builders and OEMs, in fact anyone that currently uses a timing relay to control simple on/off switching tasks.

Widely used in industrial processes, time delay relays (TDRs) provide simple, reliable and economical control and enable time-delayed switching to start a motor, control a load or affect a process. NFC technology, which is increasingly being integrated in consumer devices such as smartphones and tablets, is also becoming more important in the industrial IoT by providing new options for users and manufacturers, especially in the automation industry.

The new NFC timing relay is part of Schneider’s Zelio range and comes with 28 timing functions. This allows engineers to reduce the number of individual references for their designs or installations, thereby significantly improving efficiency. The time-saving copy and clone function of the mobile app allows fast and easy configuration of the timer relays. Further savings in time are delivered by the store-setting option that allows repeated use.

There is no manual configuration required and this can be done easily via a smartphone app. The mobile app provides better accuracy with precise time setting, up to a millisecond, so there is no more parallax error and no more calculation required. Control and monitoring of the timer is achieved using the diagnostics feature, which allows users to check the time lapse and input/output status. Security is provided via the password protection for all settings to prevent others from changing them, either accidentally or maliciously. The relay also offers very high accuracy via automatic setting by providing a maximum 0.2% error in timing, which is significantly better than current or traditional solutions that allow an error margin of up to 10%.

The Schneider Electric Zelio NFC Timing Relay is now in stock at RS in the EMEA and Asia Pacific regions.