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 …
Author: Frank
Electrical Engineer and business owner from the Nashville, Tennessee area. I also play music, Chess and Go.
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 …
Happy New Year!
Hard to believe, but its been almost two years since I started this blog! I really wasn’t sure what this was going to be when I started. I had begun writing my book in about September of 2010 as a …
Emergency Stops and Guard Circuits
Before the implementation of safety standards as defined in the machinery directive and OSHA the single channel circuit on the left was often used for most machines regardless of the hazard level. In the 1990s several events led to the …
Pneumatics Chart
Well, I finally finished all of the pictures and tables for my book and I thought I’d share one of them here. I must make a confession: I use pneumatics a lot, specify components for systems, troubleshoot machines with air …
McGraw-Hill, Reviewers and the Final Manuscript
In last weeks post, I mentioned that I had made a trip to New York to meet with McGraw-Hill. I had already planned a trip to Philadelphia for the A-B Automation Fair, so I made a grand tour of the …
Panel Layout and Electrical Design
I had planned on writing a bit about my meeting with the publisher last week, but I received a comment on a post from about a year and a half ago on Controls Specifications. Doug asked me to cover a …