Debug and Startup
After spending the last four or five months finishing the book and working on my new company website I have taken a short job doing debug and startup on some machinery. The picture above is from a machine I worked …
Author: Frank
Electrical Engineer and business owner from the Nashville, Tennessee area. I also play music, Chess and Go.
Operator Assisted Automation
Automated production lines and cells often have stations that require operator interfacing with the equipment. Typically this is due to the extreme costs that are associated with manual loading of parts into a machine. Parts may be too large or …
What do you Want?
Well, I can’t help you with that, but… Believe it or not, until a few days ago, I really had no idea why people came to my website. I wrote a few months ago how I had been able to …
Process Types
Processes may take various forms in automated production. They may be continuous as with the mixing of chemicals, synchronous where operations are performed in unison or asynchronous where operations are performed independently. Manual and automated tasks may be mixed to …
Troubleshooting and Debug
The first thing a lot of engineers and technicians do when trying to isolate a problem on an automated machine is go get their laptop and use programming software to see where the issue might lie. In some cases this …
Death of a Website
Well, its not really dead, but after having a developer make a nice professional site for me last year for my business, I replaced it today with a WordPress site so I could manage it myself. In last week’s post …
Magnetostrictive Sensors
Several of my topics in the past have dealt with gauging and measurement. Most of the systems I have worked on in the past used LVDTs, encoders, optical sensors or machine vision when it came to accurately measuring the physical …
The “Other” Automation…
This weekend my wife and I had lunch at the Rainforest Cafe here in Nashville. If you haven’t been there, it is a theme restaurant where you are seated in a jungle setting and served by a “Safari Guide”, i.e. …
Technorati and Firepole
As part of my business plan for the new year I will be working on upgrading this site as well as my business site. This blog will continue to cover automation-related topics and remain free of commercial links; I really …
Anatomy of a Photoeye
One of my first projects when I was in engineering school was to make a coin counter that would detect the size of various coins as they rolled down a ramp and total up the denominations. The circuitry was fairly …