Industrial Press has said they are interested but they have quite a few projects ahead of mine that they are working on. Since I have not done much work on the manuscript over the last few months I have been trying to find a way to complete the book and move into the final phase of getting it into print. Early on in the process I advertised for some editing help and publishing advice and was not terribly impressed with the responses I received. If someone is going to edit a manuscript their e-mail at least should be grammatically correct and free of misspellings… it should also be succinct about what the editor has to offer in the way of experience and possible improvements. Since the responses I received were so disheartening I have gone it alone since almost a year ago.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before but an excellent resource was at my fingertips the whole time. My daughter Mariko is a reporter and does some editing work for several newspapers in San Diego. She is familiar with my business and field and has actually worked on some of my projects as a teenager…

Mariko and Joe with our Howmet/Alcoa conveyor in 2005

She has taken over the editing duties for the Primer, which I would say is now pretty complete as far as content. I am not really a writer, I am just an engineer with a deep interest in all things automation and manufacturing business related. I believe Mariko will be able to improve much of the presentation of my material and provide a more objective view of the book. She has even taken it upon herself to submit the manuscript to McGraw-Hill who has expressed some interest already.

As I mentioned before, I don’t know why I didn’t think of getting her involved earlier. It is great to be able to work with someone who knows something about what I do and can improve the wordsmithing part of my book. It also doesn’t hurt that she is my awesome daughter!

Calibration Instruments

Calibration is a comparison between measurements – one of known magnitude or correctness made or set with one device and another measurement made in as similar a way as possible with a second device.

The device with the known or assigned correctness is called the standard. The second device is the unit under test (UUT), test instrument, or any other name for the device being calibrated.
Calibration can be called for:

• with a new instrument
• when a specified time period is elapsed
• when a specified usage (operating hours) has elapsed
• when an instrument has had a shock or vibration which potentially may have put it out of calibration
• sudden changes in weather
• whenever observations appear questionable

In general use, calibration is often regarded as including the process of adjusting the output or indication on a measurement instrument to agree with value of the applied standard, within a specified accuracy. For example, a thermometer could be calibrated so the error of indication or the correction is determined, and adjusted (e.g. via calibration constants) so that it shows the true temperature in Celsius at specific points on the scale. This is the perception of the instrument’s end-user. However, very few instruments can be adjusted to exactly match the standards they are compared to. For the vast majority of calibrations, the calibration process is actually the comparison of an unknown to a known and recording the results.

Calibration is used in automation in most process, chemical or instrumentation-related industries. Automotive, Pharmaceutical and any other industries related to manufacturing usually also require periodic calibration of devices.

To improve the quality of the calibration and have the results accepted by outside organizations it is desirable for the calibration and subsequent measurements to be “traceable” to the internationally defined measurement units. Establishing traceability is accomplished by a formal comparison to a standard which is directly or indirectly related to national standards (NIST in the USA), international standards, or certified reference materials.

Quality management systems call for an effective metrology system which includes formal, periodic, and documented calibration of all measuring instruments. ISO 9000 and ISO 17025 sets of standards require that these traceable actions are to a high level and set out how they can be quantified.

In 1989 I got out of the service and entered the Electrical Engineering program at the University of Tennessee. I had a list of the top 50 programs in the country, narrowed it down to the top five based on where I wanted to live and chose Knoxville after taking a visit.

School was pretty hard. I didn’t have the math and science background so I spent a lot of late nights catching up. The last couple of years actually seemed easier to me than the first ones because they dealt more with the meat of the subject. I graduated in 1993 with my Bachelor’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering and was very proud of what I had accomplished. My first job out of college was for Stephenson Controls. I learned a lot from this company who sold control components and did a lot of applications work. I learned PLC programming on the Omron and Eagle-Signal platforms and helped people and companies put together control systems. I also learned just how much I still had to learn.

My next job was for an Allen-Bradley distributor. I started in sales but ended up being a product support specialist for vision systems, control components and motion control. For four years in these two companies I went to a lot of product training seminars and training sessions at the manufacturer’s facilities. I also visited lots of factories in a sales and applications role. This sowed the seeds of starting my own company in 1996 because of all of the plants that needed packaged controls solutions rather than individual components. My company quickly changed from being a small panel builder and project house to a full-fledged controls company and machine builder.

After closing my company in 2006 and going to work for a very large custom machine building company I met a lot of very good engineers and saw how projects were handled on a large scale. This was a great experience for me and again led to starting my current company. I also started writing my book about a year and a half ago after thinking about all of the things I learned after graduating from college that they simply don’t teach in standard engineering education.

So what did I get out of engineering school? Probably the most important thing was an engineering approach to defining and solving problems. One of my professors would take fifty percent off of your score if you did not write “Given:” and “To Find:” at the top of every assignment and clearly define the information you had to work with and what information had to be deduced or researched.

I also developed the habit of keeping engineering notebooks which were required for every class project. I still create one for every project of any size and often end up going back to them for solutions to particular problems.

One of the important elements I received after college was product training. College taught a lot of theory and design skills but completely ignored the components that make up a machine or system. Simple things like relays and motor starters, din-rail mounting systems, the NEC and NFPA were not covered at all. More complex things like commercial vision systems and intrinsic safety were also not part of the curriculum. Much of this is not considered necessary in the university environment but is often covered in trade schools. This is left up to the graduate to learn however they can after getting into their first job. Unfortunately if one goes straight into a factory making some specific product the opportunity to learn the full range of products available is simply not there.

The other critical part of the engineering discipline is accuracy and attention to detail. When initially defining and designing a project selection and sizing of components and detailed drawings are extremely important. The project I am currently working on was not specified accurately on the front end and now the project is paying the price by having servo motors and test equipment replaced, sensors added, I/O points moved and mechanical assemblies redesigned and replaced. These things obviously cost a lot of money in labor and hardware but also make the schedule slip. This makes the customer understandably upset and can lead to further financial penalties.

This can be further complicated when the information exchange between the customer and designers is lacking. If the project is not accurately defined on the front end the project can become a loser from the start. The quoting process can be laborious and time consuming but if the writeup does not go into great detail it can lead to more cost overruns, delayed schedules and rifts between companies. Extra time spent on the front end of a project can pay off tenfold by the end.

My wife builds control panels for a large OEM. She is constantly having to red-line drawings due to mistakes by the designers. Some of these errors are due to lack of attention but many are due to lack of training and standards. When the same mistakes are made over and over the source is usually one of these. This is also why engineering and specification work is usually checked by peers before being released for production. All too often this is only paid lip service by engineers who pre-load the “checked by” and “approved by” boxes with their peer’s or bosses’ initials for a cursory glance in the interest of “saving time”.

Engineers who are accurate and detail-oriented often end up migrating into other aspects of business management. This is often due to the focus on solving problems and the approach to project management. Personality is also a big part of this. Just because someone graduates from an engineering program doesn’t mean they have the temperament and patience to focus on every detail of a design.

“…oczy podciagal sie naprzod. Staral sie zamieniac kolejne uderzenia bolu w energie psychiczna, ktora doczekal sie zadnej reakcji. Slyszycie mnie…”

You get the picture. These are very long and come from a variety of sources. There are a huge number from people trying to sell Ugg boots, electronic cigarettes, pharmaceuticals and website optimization services. Plenty of porn stuff mixed in there too.

The sad part to me is when I get spam from automation or industrial-related companies. An example is from a conveyor company who posted on my “Build Your Own Conveyor” topic. The spam filters caught it because the comment was as follows:

“Great blog right here! Additionally your site a lot up fast! What web host are you the usage of? Can I am getting your associate hyperlink in your host? I desire my website loaded up as fast as yours lol”

This is typical of a lot of spam comments but in this case it actually came from someone promoting the usage of their wheel conveyors. As someone who has pride in their site and wants feedback from people interested in my topics this is the saddest case of all. I have also received spam like this from Six Sigma/Lean Manufacturing companies and Project Management related sites. With just a little tweaking of their wording into a topic-related post it would have made it through the filters and gotten some free publicity for their company in the form of a backlink.

From reading up on spamming apparently this stuff works in a lot of cases. WordPress does a good job of filtering it out but I imagine a lot if it is just automated to go out indiscriminately to millions of sites. It is sort of depressing to think about the mentality of the kind of people who do this though.

As part of the control process it is necessary to use various types of temperature sensors as inputs to either stand-alone temperature/process controllers or system controllers such as PLCs and DCSs. Following is some of the information I have so far included in my book.

From The Primer:

There are a variety of devices that can be used to measure temperature. One of the most widely used is the thermocouple. A thermocouple is a junction between two different metals that produces a voltage related to a temperature difference. Thermocouples are a widely used type of temperature sensor and can also be used to convert heat into electric power. They are cheap and interchangeable, have standard connectors, and can measure a wide range of temperatures. The main limitation is accuracy; System errors of less than one kelvin (K) can be difficult to achieve.

Any circuit made of dissimilar metals will produce a temperature-related difference of voltage. Thermocouples for practical measurement of temperature are made of specific alloys, which in combination have a predictable and repeatable relationship between temperature and voltage. Different alloys are used for different temperature ranges, and to resist corrosion. Where the measurement point is far from the measuring instrument, the intermediate connection can be made by extension wires, which are less costly than the materials used to make the sensor. Thermocouples are standardized against a reference temperature of 0 degrees Celsius; practical instruments use electronic methods of cold-junction compensation to adjust for varying temperature at the instrument terminals. Electronic instruments can also compensate for the varying characteristics of the thermocouple, and so improve the precision and accuracy of measurements.

Thermocouples are widely used in science and industry; a few applications would include temperature measurement for kilns, measurement of exhaust temperature of gas turbines or diesel engines, and many other industrial processes.

The most common type of thermocouple in use is the K thermocouple (Chromel-Alumel). This covers temperature ranges from -200 to 1350 degrees Celsius. It is inexpensive and available in a variety of styles. J thermocouples (Iron-Constantan) are less popular than K due to their lower temperature range of -40 to 750 degrees Celsius. Other types include E, N, B, R,S, T, C, M and Chromel-Gold/Iron.

Thermocouples are not linear devices and the voltage curve must be linearized in the input instrument. Temperature loop controllers contain linearization algorithms for the most common types of thermocouples. Selection of the thermocouple type can be made by setting dipswitches or software parameters.

One note on thermocouple polarity: there is a polarity labeled + and – for connection to input terminals. Counter to the common thought that the red wire is positive in many DC circuits, red is always the negative lead for thermocouples. Not every thermocouple pair has a red wire, but when using the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) color code the red lead will always be negative.

Thermistors are a type of resistor with resistance proportional to its temperature. Thermistors are usually made of a ceramic or polymer material. They have a high precision over a limited temperature range.

RTDs, or Resistance Temperature Detectors also change resistance proportionally with temperature, but are made of pure metals. They are useful over a wider temperature range than thermistors but are less accurate. RTDs and thermistors may both be used with standard analog inputs and an excitation voltage because of their linearity, unlike thermocouples which must use a special input to linearize the signal.

Infrared thermocouples or infrared temperature sensors are used as non-contact methods of sensing temperature. They use the thermal emission from the target to scale temperature to a readable value.

In addition to this article I have also included a handy thermocouple chart in the appendix. This shows color codes and materials along with the appropriate temperature ranges for these sensors. Another great resource is the Omega catalog and website.

Just in the past week I have had three different vendors and other connections call me with opportunities. Since I am committed for the next couple of months I have had to refer them elsewhere. There are a number of other people contracting with this company also and I have discussed this situation with them, how do you keep your customers happy if you have to turn them down when you’re busy? There is no magic answer to this. Some have grown their company and added other people to handle the workload. Most simply have to follow a first come-first served policy.

As I have also mentioned in previous posts I am hoping not to be contracting much in the future. Consulting, project management and providing complete solutions is my ultimate goal. I am hoping to not get tied into specific projects full time but rather use other solution providers to help implement jobs. As an example this past week I had an opportunity to quote a small Omron training system. This is something I could design very quickly and use a mechanical and a controls company to implement. Though it might take six to eight weeks to build my involvement would be only at the very beginning and the end. This would free me up to do other things at the same time.

As a means to this end I have started a group on Linked In called the Tennessee Association of Independent Integrators, or TIAA. This will serve several functions; when I get calls like I did last week and can’t even go see the customer I can pass the lead off to someone I have confidence in and may be available. If I need to put together a small system I can quickly find an appropriate person or group of small companies to provide a total solution. This will also create an avenue for other small companies to network and share information. Many of these companies and contractors already know each other by name or reputation but may have never met.

Right now at least in this area there is far more work than there are people to do it. Independent controls engineers and panel builders in particular are hard to find. Some of the larger controls and engineering companies in the area are fillig some of the gaps but most can attest to the calls from recruiters looking for competent controls people.

I hope to create a list of good resources with their expertise both on this site and on the Linked In site. If you have an interest in joining this group (hey, free publicity!) please either send me an email or visit the Linked In site or the TAII page on this site.

I redesigned my company website to better reflect what I hope to do, you’ll notice that nowhere does it say that I contract. As a matter of fact, most of the books I have read and a consulting website and blog I sometimes read state that true consulting business should charge a weekly rather than hourly fee and work on a retainer basis.

This is my goal and within a few years I think I’ll be able to make it a reality but until then I will probably end up doing a lot of contracting and hourly work. Right now I am working on a fun multi-machine startup and design-on-the-fly job about an hour from my house. It is in the opposite direction of my office in Nashville so I am not able to go to my office during the week. I have a receptionist and administrative assistant as part of my office setup though and they handle most of that part of my job while I’m gone.

I am actually contracting through a controls company to a custom machine builder. There are a lot of other contractors working there, especially in the controls department. Most of them are pretty much one-man companies who contract regularly but some are through technical services companies like Aerotek. A lot of them are ex Wright Industries employees like myself. Despite all of the bad news about employment over the past few years it hasn’t affected the controls, electrical and mechanical engineering fields, at least not around here. I get calls from recruiters regularly looking for good engineers and I know of none that are looking for work.

I imagine this job will probably be done sometime in mid-May and then I may have to take a trip to the customer’s plant for a few weeks for install. This is pretty much the cycle I followed in the old Automation Consulting Services and at Wright Industries, so it is a comfortable position to be in right now. At the same time I hope to start picking up complete system jobs of my own as a project manager and consultant within the next few years. Until then, contracting is fun!

In a previous post I discussed templates as they relate to PLC programming but there are a number of tools and templates that are helpful in laying out a machine or system. When a project is quoted to a customer by applications there should be a fairly detailed description of the system, what it will do and how it will do it. After receiving a purchase order an excellent tool to start with is a timing chart. This can be done in a software package like Microsoft Excel and should include a sequential list of all of the motions and activities that the various actuators and devices will perform.

Timing Chart - Step 1

As you can see from the above diagram all of the items start at the same point in time. The template I use allows the designer to link the start of any motion to the completion of another motion, similar to a Gantt Chart.

Actuator and Timing List

After entering all of the durations and dependencies into the above table it is easy to determine the cycle time of the machine. Hopefully the machine has been quoted correctly and motions haven’t been left out… this is often where omissions in the applications process are discovered.

This is also the point at which the mechanical and controls engineers can agree on actuator and device names. Because the mechanical designer often fills this chart out without controls input differences can arise in the correct name for a device; as an example extend and retract versus advance and return versus raise and lower. In general I am a proponent of describing the motion of the tooling rather than the movement of the actuator; an air cylinder may retract to raise a lifting mechanism for instance. Sensors are also usually defined here.

Controls may also want to add activities that a mechanical designer may not know about such as communications delays in barcode readers or vision systems or processor and scan time issues. As with most cooperative activities, communications between project team members is crucial.

Another useful tool that I use extensively is an I/O list. After naming and defining all of the motions and devices these must be assigned to I/O points on the controller. Since most of the systems I design use PLCs and HMIs or computer based operator interfaces, the I/O list is usually in a rack and slot type format.

The I/O list I use goes far beyond a simple assignment of actuators and sensors to points. I use a list modified from an Excel spreadsheet used at Wright Industries that generates AutoCAD descriptions, creates tagnames and descriptions for HMI Pushbuttons and Indicators, automatically creates some of the faults, messages and alarms, and even generates PLC code for import into a prepared template. This saves a tremendous amount of time on the front end of the design process since once a tagname or description has been generated it never needs to be typed in again but can simply be copied.

IO List and Tag Generator

Excel lends itself to designing your own tools because of its capabilities to concatenate text and write VB and other Macros to accomplish tasks. The ability to format cells and fill series also saves quite a bit of time. Not to mention the fact that nearly everyone in the automation field has it installed on their computer!

Other tools that I use in preliminary design include Microsoft Visio for flowcharting, MSProject for scheduling, AutoCAD and MSPaint for graphics on HMIs or layouts, and a variety of other spreadsheets for electrical loads, mechanical stresses and BOMs. All of this before even beginning to program or draw!

The other important use of these tools is to share information between team members. It seems like jumping straight into design or programming if you are working on part of a project by yourself would save time and give you a head start but that is simply not so. You never know when you will need to share this information with others, including the customer, or have a member added to your team. Even if you don’t have prepared tools such as those described above it is a good idea to document your design elements as you go using spreadsheets, text documents and graphic tools. I promise they will save time in the long run!

I has now been about 14 months since I started this blog and I’ve covered a lot of different subjects. I try to make the content as automation-related as possible but it is getting more and more difficult to cover subjects that I haven’t already discussed.

Being an engineer I tend to be very rigid in my thought processes, call it analytical, or anal or whatever. So for instance, even when I am on vacation I have tried to make sure I post at least one blog every week, even if it is just about whatever automation related things I see on my trip. As I’ve mentioned before, I really have no idea how many people read this blog regularly, but I doubt anyone is eagerly awaiting my next post or even notices that I post every week. I do get comments fairly regularly but the overwhelming majority is from evil spammers who are just trying to get more people to buy their Ugg boots or Viagra. I am pretty sure most of these are just automated posts. They must work on some level though since they keep appearing from many different locations… the WordPress spam filters do a pretty good job of keeping them out though.

This week I had thought about covering something like PID control or extremely low voltage relay and pushbutton contacts but then I decided to create a new category which I am calling “Life”. I had already created a category called travel that I posted some kind of non automation-related things in, but I am going to use this new category to talk about…. whatever.

So this week is the sixth week since I started my new consulting company. I have bid a few jobs, worked more on the Automation Primer, done a small PLC commenting job and generally done a lot of networking and advertising. I knew when I started back into working for myself again that I was going to have to do a bunch of contracting and other non-consulting jobs at first. Next week I start contracting through Automation nth, a local controls company, to Automation Tool, a local machine builder. I will be doing startup and debug of some automotive related machinery. This is the enjoyable part of my job, I get to play with the big toys that I usually have spent many months designing. In this case someone else has done the boring tedious part and I get to have all the fun!

I will also be spending at least four weeks straight out of my new office. This creates some logistical issues which will hopefully be tempered by the administrative staff at my office complex and my fancy call forwarding, IPad and IPhone. I am determined to not grow this company beyond myself as the only technical person.

Now that there is a pretty large quantity of technical subject material on this site I feel a little better about posting other kinds of subject matter here and not necessarily posting every week even. If anyone does have any other subjects they want to cover (except for Ugg boots and Viagra) just leave a comment or send me a message. Even if it’s just about Life!

This week I made my first sales trip for my new consulting company. I returned to Knoxville where I had my old company ACS for 10 years and paid a visit to several old customers and friends.

If you have read through many of the articles on this site you have seen references to NAS, or Nalle Automation Systems. Back in 1996 when I started my company one of my earliest customers was Bertelkamp Automation. They are a distributor of motion control, pneumatic and aluminum extrusion as well as various other control components. When I started out I was only about a block away from Bertelkamp and used to build control panels and do small integration jobs for them and their customers. One day when I was in their front office I met Tom Nalle. He had recently left his job at International Paper and started his own company. We got to talking and it turned out he was in need of some controls help, he had been using a guy who still worked for IP and couldn’t devote the time required to his projects.

The first job we worked on together was a marker packaging machine which I referenced here in a previous story. Before we knew it NAS had hired several more employees and so had I to keep up with all of the work. To make it easier I moved my company next door to NAS’s facility and subleased part of the building. We cut doors in the wall and operated as NAS de-facto controls department until about 2000. During this time we did a lot more than packaging; we were the largest vision integrator in Tennessee for a while and built a lot of inspection, assembly and material handling equipment.

As time went on NAS eventually ended up moving to a larger facility several miles away, concentrating on only packaging machinery and developing standard equipment. We continued doing integration and inspection and started building small machines ourselves. We always kept a great relationship though and several of ACS’s old employees still work at NAS (hello Larry R. and Mark P.!)

I hadn’t talked to Tom Nalle, the owner of NAS since I closed my company and moved to Nashville in 2006. This week, along with visiting some old friends at Bertelkamp and Keisler, I had lunch with Tom and his operations manager Sam and toured their facility. They now build only standard packaging equipment and infeeds and their products have evolved quite a bit over the years. Where they (and ACS) used to build almost everything out of aluminum extrusion, their baggers and sleeve wrappers are now much more robust and built on a stout tube steel frame. NAS has had a patent on a low temperature seal blade for a number of years and their business has grown substantially.

NAS has retained most of their original employees and has now been around for 16 years. It was like returning home to see all those old faces from my past! As I mentioned in a previous post, networking is the key to my sales efforts for my new company. When talking to Tom and Sam over lunch Tom said his sales efforts have been substantially based on that also. Most of his sales come from references from people who like his equipment rather than standard marketing advertisements. Of course nowadays you have to have a web presence, but most contacts come through word-of-mouth.

What a great trip! And it actually ended up bearing fruit immediately as I picked up a small job from Keisler while I was out there. I would encourage anyone looking for quality packaging solutions to contact my friends at Nalle Automation from the link above or giving them a call at 865-777-9477. Tell them Frank sent ya!