The author of the site is an Australian Professional Engineer with an honours degree in Electrical Engineering (1989).
He first came across the concept of PLCs in 1986 in the Port Kembla Steelworks, with an Allen-Bradley PLC2 training module provided to the maintenance electricians to learn on. His first hands-on experience was the migration of a PLC2 controller to a PLC5, using DOS-based AI (Artificial Intelligence) Series software. This project leant on the LOTUS-123 spreadsheet application to migrate the tag address table into the new PLC5 syntax.
Since then, experience has been gained across various dairy induestries, materials handling, mining, food & beverage and water treatment. The basic training in Rockwell PLC and SCADA platforms has been leveraged to quickly adapt to Modicon, General Electric, GEC and Koyo PLCs, as well as CitectSCADA, Wonderware and Cmore HMIs.
Career highlights have included frantically cobbling together a tag menu in RSLogix 500 to provide rudimentary control when the PanelView died on the day of commissioning of a critical new dairy powder transport line in Surabaya Indonesia. This trip was marked by breaking up with the girlfriend by phone in the middle of this HMI fiasco, then being in the air on the way home from Singapore while September 11 was unwittingly unfolding on the other side of the world. Another memorable project was rebuilding a thyristor stack on an Ozone generator for a municipal swimming pool water treatment plant.
While generally very positive about the Rockwell-Automation product range, I do draw the line at the Stratix switches I’ve worked with. Basically a Citrix device with an AB badge, they are slow to boot and flash, non-intuitive, very hot and riddled with bugs, they are the sloppiest product I’ve ever worked with. Rockwell should not have been greedy, and maintained the relationship they had with Hirschmann, a far superior product for true Industrial Ethernet.
This nearly 50 years experience has provided insights into the evolution of automation since the 1980s, and the impact of AI is eagerly anticipated.
Many photos in this site have been taken by the author who maintains a keen interest in photography. It should be noted that some of these have been snapshots on the phone I had available on site, rather than the publishing-quality images I’d prefer to have taken with my trusty Minolta digital SLR.
