Finally…
It took about three months from when I was told my manuscript was accepted, but I finally got my contract Friday. As you can see from one of the proposed covers, the title will now be “Industrial Automation: Hands On”…. …
Author: Frank
Electrical Engineer and business owner from the Nashville, Tennessee area. I also play music, Chess and Go.
CE Marking and the Machinery Directive
Last week I covered some of the US safety standards that apply to to machine building. As Tony mentioned in his comment on the subject, not all machines stay in the USA. This week I am going to discuss European …
Safety Standards
When designing machinery for automated processes, one of the most important factors to consider is the safety of the personnel who will be using the equipment. Of secondary importance is the protection of the machinery itself. Due to the movement …
Custom Machine Builders
Sometimes its hard to come up with topics that I haven’t already covered in this blog. I have already discussed custom machinery in various different topics over the last couple of years, but today I decided to just do a …
Pressure
I know, everyone probably thought this was going to be something on pneumatics or hydraulics, maybe something on pressure switches or proportional valves, but no… today I’m talking about job related pressure and stress. It comes with the territory, industrial …
Vision Guided Robots
This week was my first experience using vision and robots together. I have integrated many vision systems in the past and also done a number of robotic applications but this was my first time using vision to guide the robot. …
Motion Control
Following is a subchapter on motion control from my forthcoming book. My philosophy on writing these articles is to cover the topic very generally since the book is intended to cover the entire field of industrial automation including business systems, …
Learning
Most people in the field of automation like solving problems and are naturally curious. Even when we get older I like to think that we can still learn something new every day. As shown in the diagram above, many of …
What’s in a name?
The project I am currently working on is the first one where I have had to simultaneously program machines with many other engineers. I have certainly worked on teams before where there were multiple programmers on a line, but this …
Engineering Philosophy
Yesterday I had some time to kill while my car was in the shop so I brought my notebook with me to do a little brainstorming. My wife and I had discussed some of her work situation in the morning …