lol that's awesome smile emoticon Basically what I'm doing is
just through a 1 hr basics of PLC. I'm pretty sure I understand
it already but I'm hoping there will be _some_ tidbit of
"something" that I might be missing.
For example, already in the first few minutes, the fact that in
relays there's a slight "sweeping motion" that cleans the carbon
from arcing is something I didn't know before.
I'm trying to find the "inbetween" stuff like that. Not sure how
else to describe what I'm looking for.
In short, the perfected stuff to me is easy enough: You go from
drawing, to prototype to production to troubleshooting as it
were. But then there's the annoying bits - fault tolerance,
hardening, and such. That's the stuff that interests me.
Communication protocols between proprietary platforms then? I
remember phone modems and hooking up to computers utilizing
different text formats... Getting something useful on my PC when
I hooked to an old Commadore 64 BBS was interesting to say the
least.
Then i got a job at Jersey Central Power + Light for a little
bit and I got to flex my modem muscles hooking into monitoring
devices for oil tanks. That was fun. There was something magical
knowing I was directly accessing an always-on system that had
enough redundancy built into it that it just COULDN'T really be
killed by ANYTHING I did to it. It let me do what it let me do
and that's ALL it let me do. Part of why I'm going through all
of this is that I've been researching cognitive systems from
various different perspectives, finding mechanical analogies
that work and ones that don't.
I don't really know what my "end goal" is, but I've noticed the
more I investigate systems that I'm less familiar with, the
better an overall comprehension I get. That's one of the things
that always impresses me with engineering over pure scientific
theory. Spherical cows are fine when speaking of esoteric
concepts, but then you need milk and Bessie is cranky because
it's been a cloudy day... It's refreshing talking to someone who
"thinks engineering" by the way. My field has always been more
computer engineering and really, human engineering truth be told
(managing people's emotional states primarily so I can get the
job done effectively, whatever it is), ,and it's a messy job
where each situation has its own unique peculiarities, even if
they follow similar tendencies. Ah - mental connection made.
The problem you mention with electromagnetic coupling is
functionally similar to a Race condition in programming or
circuitry.
Something as simple as scheduling errors can cause this or as
dramatic as chip manufacturing issues, especially in the case of
overclocked video cards where a race condition can lead to
melted solder. I love Excel. even though I've done various
types of programming, nothing beats Excel and access for
all-purpose "get it done", especially when coupled with VBA or
whatever they're using to automate them. Excel is my baby.
That was my "big thing": when they titled me a "Systems Analyst
II" it was because I went from a bored temp copying and pasting
the same stupid formula over and over again, into learning VBA
and Excel, asking for more work and found myself creating a
whole complicated system integrating data from all sorts of
messy sources into a gigantic single reporting spreadsheet that
pumped out reports to thousands of reps in the field on their
laptops.
They HAD to hire me because nobody could possibly understand how
I did it tongue emoticon
After a few years and deciding to move to Florida, I had to
train a handful of people on it, and they used it for many years
after that for many other products, at least 'til 2010 that I
know of, and I left the company in 2002, so I was pretty proud
of myself smile emoticon Curious question: the issue of low
power relays continuing to function even when technically "off",
can you see how it might analogize to water pressure in a primed
pump that's no longer being actively "pumping" but yet still has
water flow? I keep wanting to tackle visual studio - I never
cared for the interface and haven't had a reason to as of yet,
outside of hacking someone else's stuff to make it do what I
wanted... but it's on my long list stuff I'll try if the need
arises.
