The Mastering the Machine Workshops are a series of lectures and hands-on lab exercises with the goal of training students on system integration, design, and programming in industrial automation. In last week’s post, the process of learning industrial automation skills …
In 2013, I created a document called Mastering the Machine, a 26 page e-book about planning and building a machine or production line with an emphasis on documentation. I had just started my business again after spending 6 years working …
This post is the first in a series I am writing about a project I am working on, hence the “April 2017” designation. As most of my regular readers know, I have spent much of the past several years teaching …
Today’s post is in response to Barry Brock, who asked: “I have been doing machine modifications and automating/upgrading machines for many years . I really am at a point of starting my own business and would appreciate any advice getting …
The following story is from my book Industrial Automation: Hands On (McGraw-Hill, 2013). I wrote it to illustrate how a machine or production line is concepted, purchased, designed, built and delivered. This is a pretty typical description of the procedures …
Hello from Atlanta, Georgia where I am about to teach a 4 day class on Siemens’ TIA Portal. I have been away from home for two weeks trying to finish up my project down at American Beverage Depot in Miami …
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 …
Over the past several years I’ve had the privilege of working with quite a few machine building companies. I’ve seen how they operate from the inside; some more successfully than others. In a series of guest posts while I was …
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 …
When I was at Wright Industries, one of the companies that we often competed against for projects was ATS Automation. Though Doerfer and Wright are very large as far as custom machine-building companies go, ATS is a much larger organization. …
