Since 2001, the movable football pitch of FC Schalke 04, the famed German “Traditionsverein,” has witnessed many memorable matches. All those years, its mechanical drive system had been performing well, but an electrical system upgrade became necessary. Last summer, Dutch industrial automation company Kremer modernized the system using Beckhoff PC-based control technology and prepared it for smart energy management and predictive maintenance. Kremer has worked as a system integrator with the motion control and hydraulic control libraries of Beckhoff for over twenty years. Located in ’s-Heerenberg, the Netherlands, the family business with over 180 employees has the disciplines of electrical engineering, industrial automation, ICT, security, energy and technical management under one roof. Drawing on this, Kremer offers industrial customers a wide range of services, from consultancy and design to installation, maintenance and management. In Kremer’s portfolio, the movable pitch is one of the projects that stand out. The pitch lies on a large concrete slab that slides on sixteen tracks using a lubrication system. It’s pushed forward and backward by four hydraulics-driven gripper jacks, each clamping onto a beam. A quarter of a century ago, Kremer took care of the original installation, says Stefan Rasing, project leader Industrial Automation at Kremer. “Since then, we’ve been responsible for maintenance and control systems. While the mechanical system still performed well, original electrical components became obsolete, so we had to plan an upgrade.” The main control panel, including Beckhoff PLC, terminals and Ethercat infrastructure. Credit: Tim Rehbein/FC Schalke 04 New HMI standard While the upgrade was scheduled for the 2026 summer break, the project already started in September 2025. Rasing: “Yes, that’s a long preparation time. You have to imagine this was an old project from 2001. Documentation was hard to find; it was created partly on paper at the time. We had to go through our archives and also took a good look on site, below the pitch and in the control room.” Kremer upgraded the complete drive system to Beckhoff PC-based control technology, replacing the controls and implementing the Ethercat real-time communication protocol. For example, the Ethercat-capable CU1521 for Industrial Fast Ethernet/100 Mbit/s was used to serve as a media converter from optical fiber to copper and vice versa, for the data communication between the system and the main control panel. This module is designed for long-distance Ethercat transfers and high EMC loads on the bus line; both conditions apply to the expansive, energy-intensive drive system. Rasing in particular valued the Twincat 3 automation software. “It facilitates object-oriented programming and is open, so that we can easily adapt the control software to our needs. We used our custom library and applied the PackML standard for the controls. For the Schalke case, we also created our own new HMI standard using Beckhoff. That was a time investment, but it already paid off when we used it in another project. This went really fast, because we were able to partly generate – without programming – our application.” Bits&Chips’ Dutch state of semicon 2026 This article is part of the Bits&Chips special edition on the Dutch state of semicon, published on 23 October 2026. Order your hard copy of the special at info@techwatch.nl. Preventing misalignment A crucial feature for this project was the Twincat 3 hydraulics library. It is manufacturer-independent, says Thomas van Hengel, application engineer at Beckhoff. “We can control all brands of hydraulic components with this library. It’s completely integrated into Twincat 3 and provides function blocks for valve- and pump-controlled systems. It has a special hydraulic control loop for position and pressure/force control, including dedicated features such as I/O monitoring, the valve characteristic curve and simulation.” The hydraulics librar