Jobs in the automation field
As part of my preparation for moving back into the consulting world I recently signed up for a series of classes and certifications through Purdue University on Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing. These classes lead to certification as a green …
This is the loading station of a machine that was one of the last jobs I did with my small machine building company. It is a precision hydraulic press for torque converters. During the years of 2005-2006 we had acquired …
For the last twenty years or so I have worked in the controls, machine building and systems integration fields, generally involved with automation on some level. I understand the controls and machine building part, they are pretty self-explanatory and descriptive …
This picture is from about 1999 when my small company was primarily a panel shop and controls integrator. At this time about half of our work came from NAS who built a lot of custom packaging equipment (they build mostly …
As I travel on business I realized that it is more difficult to post when on the road. All of the familiar patterns are broken as I don’t have a ready plugged-in and booted up computer to sit down and …
Most people who work around electricity are familiar with multimeters. They have been around since the 1920s and used to only be available in analog form with a moving needle that pointed to several scales. Originally multimeters only measured current …
The process industry has used P&ID (Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams) for many years as a method of describing the relationships between piping, instrumentation and system components. Usually this is applied to chemical, batching or fluid transfer projects and is nearly …
*Note: This post was written in February of 2011. Since that time I have written a number of other posts on ladder logic you may find useful. These are listed below for your convenience: Ladder Logic 102: Organization (October 2012) …
It seems like there is a constant battle between mechanical designers, electrical designers, maintenance technicians and engineers over just what a properly fabricated control panel should look like. If it were up to mechanical, the panel would be the size …
Back when I was in engineering school one of the requirements for nearly every class was to keep an engineering notebook. Typically it consisted of a bound book with graph or engineering paper where we would keep a chronological record …
