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#PlantLife – What would you say you do here?

My Mom always says that the first thing she thinks of when she hears me talk about my job at manufacturing sites is the famous “Chocolate Factory” scene from “I Love Lucy”. You’ve probably seen it: the job starts out manageable, with just one chocolate truffle coming down the line at a time. Lucy grabs it, wraps it, and moves on to the next truffle. She’s able to handle the candy wrapping just fine. Soon, however, the machine begins pumping out chocolates at a much higher volume. Lucy quickly becomes completely overwhelmed and desperately eats the chocolates or hides them in her shirt.
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Obsolescence and Aging Infrastructure – Call “The Guy! – Quickly!”

As I’m a controls engineer, I have been to a lot of manufacturing facilities for a lot of different companies — food & beverage companies, pharmaceutical firms, mills, and printing plants. Even though these are all different industries, they almost all have one thing in common: some piece of equipment has been there for a long, long time.
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High Performance Graphics – Are we going back to Black and White?

New graphics technologies give us some really stunning images of systems running on an HMI, and they look very cool.
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How to Improve on Ones Engineering Skill Set

Engineering. What does it really mean? Some may think it’s the application of a theory to create a new product or improve upon an existing one. Others may think it’s using mathematical or technical knowledge to meet a need or solve a problem. No matter the answer, knowledge (creation and retention) is the key to engineering. So how do Engineers go about improving their knowledge? There are tons of ways to accomplish this but they boil down to some core approaches. Let’s take a look at a few tried and true ideas.
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It’s 2am on Sunday Morning – Can You Troubleshoot your PLC Code?

Tips on writing supportable PLC code

 

I’m writing this blog article on behalf of the maintenance technicians and control engineers who get called in the middle of the night to figure out why the line won’t run. They didn’t write the code. They have had no need to study it closely. Now the line is down, people are standing around, the Plant Manager is getting impatient, and they need to figure out what’s wrong. Here are some tips on how we can help them out when we are creating the PLC code:
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