Special machines and custom projects
On the introductory page of this blog I invite companies or individuals to submit articles that may be educational or interesting. This article was submitted by HXRT, an Australian manufacturer of rubber track. (www.hxrt.com.au) Though not strictly related to automation, …
One of the first fields I got involved with in automation in the early 1990s was metal forming. Presses, slitters and rollformers with their associated unwinds, cutoffs and punches were a big part of my business for the first few …
In designing automated systems the first task that needs to be accomplished is to determine what type of process will be taking place. Often when making this decision we go with what we know: if building an assembly machine I’m …
The first machines I programmed when I started my old company ACS were primarily packaging machines. As I have mentioned previously I teamed up with NAS early on, becoming their de-facto controls department. In the beginning we built a lot …
A few weeks ago I covered robots and robotics a bit and it was recently brought to my attention that I hadn’t covered much in the general motion control field. Maybe that’s because most of the applications I have worked …
Everyone remembers where they were during significant historical events for some reason. Ten years ago today I was in Memphis at the USDA cotton classing facility. We had put in a conveying and testing system about a year before and …
Despite being an Electrical and Controls engineer I often have to do mechanical design, albeit on a basic level. Whenever I need to fixture something, for instance on a vision application or other inspection, one of the first manufacturers I …
One of the first applications I wrote about on this blog back in January 2011 was a Rocker Arm Cover gauge that used a number of LVDTs to calculate a plane and its intercept points. In that blog I concentrated …
Early in my career I became in involved in material handling systems more often than any other kind of project. For one thing, they were generally pretty simple from a controls perspective, just turning conveyor motors on and off, moving …
As I mentioned in my previous post, this week I am in Tucson again on a 3 week job assignment. I was supposed to be here Wednesday but ended up getting a short trip to Casa Grande added at the …
