After months of being out of the training environment due to the pandemic, September took me back on the road. In addition to standard training classes for Automation Training (Siemens and Omron), I was approached by a customer to do …
As part of an effort to bring more students to my training facility in Lebanon, Tennessee (near Nashville), I have started a new training course that I believe is one of a kind. I have been teaching PLC and HMI/SCADA …
Usually my work involves designing and building new equipment, or occasionally completely rebuilding and upgrading old machines. Last week I got an emergency call from an existing customer that their production line was down and they couldn’t get help quickly …
Last March I wrote a post on working in New England on a consulting project. Much of the post was about the travels during my days off from the project, describing what the area was like in the Winter. I …
As I prepare for a trip to Japan and China, I am reminded of the many machine start-ups I have participated in over the past twenty years or so. One of the things I used to enjoy about project work …
After spending the last several months working on some of my entrepreneurial ideas and teaching PLC programming classes, I just spent the last couple of weeks contracting on a machine and system startup/debug job. I feel very fortunate to have …
Not long after starting the original Automation Consulting in 1996 I met a machine builder in Knoxville who taught me a great deal about machine building. When we started working together there were only a few of us and sometimes …
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 …
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 …
