I have been an electrician for 5 years and a software developer in the energy sector for 3-4 years now and im doing industrial automation on the side for now.

From where i sit, the biggest issue i see when IT people treat historian data as the "source of truth". No concept of deadbanding, scan cycles or accuracy classes. They build alerting on top of data that have been compressed multiple times before it hit the cloud and they wonder why operators often discard them.

What do you guy do when the "IT guys" comes and ask for "alle the data"? what do they often get wrong and what would you want them to understand from the OT side?

Was offered a role for I&C Engineer with a MEP engineering consulting firm.

What’s the work like? I’ve only ever been in manufacturing automation/systems integrations (PLCs, SCADA, Collab Robots) so I’m hoping to get a little insight.

Thanks!

I have been doing this long enough now where I am in the "too scared to ask" camp.

In the context of a sequence that does something e.g. fills a tank with water.

Permissive: is the tank empty/are you resuming from an interrupted fill

->Disables start button if not true

Interlock: the pump has a fault on it

->Disables start button if true

->If the sequence is running stop

Fault:
a critical process condition that has gone wrong, stops sequence

-> High level sensor is triggered

Alarm:
a non-critical process condition, does not stop sequence

Filling is taking a long time but I don't want to stop, just alert the situation to someone

It seems to me that a fault condition should also exist as a permissive, e.g. you faulted on high level, you can start because you are at high level.

Both a fault an alarm will end up in a log.
What do you do with an interlock?

I normally add an alarm to alert if a sequence has not ended correctly, but then you still have to do some investigation to match oh the thing faulted then my sequence stopped.

What I have done in the past is treated interlocks only as thing the inhibit a start, and used faults as something that stops, not using permissives and alarms, in the context of a sequence.

Can someone smarter give me some insight in how to think about these 4 buzz words

Title says it all. I'm looking to see if anyone has had trouble installing KS2000 on their Windows 11 system, and if they were able to resolve it. I've gone and added the required windows features like HyperV, installing from an admin account, and modified the registry to disable incompatible services. Every time results in the same issue, the install bar fills completely and then the system just hangs on the full bar.

I don't want to write all the steps I've attempted, incase it discourages someone from suggesting something that I may have overlooked.

Thanks

Does anyone know of a (straight M12 4-pin A-Code male)-to-(straight M12 8-pin A-Code female) cable? Or connector?

I want to connect an IFM (LR8000) level sensor to a LUMBERG (RKF 4/0.5M) receptacle. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

I have a bank of g120 drives connected to an SSI absolute multiturn encoder everything works untill a power cycle the drive it resets the position back to 0, any ideas on something I'm missing?

I'm comparing options for small XYZ automation project and the old recommendations still seem to be Yaskawa, Mitsubishi, Omron, SEW, Kollmorgen, and Rockwell. What I’m less clear on is how people are choosing now when EtherCAT, cabinet space, diagnostics and multi-axis coordination matter more than they used to.

Would you still default to the established PLC-matched platform or consider something more specialized like Elmo Motion Control or Copley?

Thought you guys might enjoy seeing this one. The cabinet is really still beautifully laid out even after all these years and being de-termed.
Never had the privilege to work on one of these myself. Not even sure what the programming interface would be.
The IO modules are super cool. Cast metal casing and they rock in and out of the rails simply by pushing down on the little red tabs. Wish things today were this well built.

Hi,

Can a Siemens MTP400 Unified Basic (6AV2123-3DB32-0AW0) communicate directly with a Siemens LOGO! 8 12/24RCE (6ED1052-1MD08-0BA2)?

I'm using TIA Portal V19 and I can't find a LOGO! communication driver in the HMI connections.

Has anyone done this successfully?

Thanks!

Currently an electrician and have been working in industrial controls for a couple years. And I think I want pursue automation work full time. Bought a micro850 and have been doing some small projects on my trainer set up at home. Thinking about going back to school for electrical engineering technology degree. Is it worth it to pair up with my electrical license?

Posted here a while back about a small Modbus tool I built because I was tired of opening heavy clients just to read a few registers. Been chipping away at it since, and serial/RTU came up a lot in that thread (thanks u/MostEvilRichGuy and u/Automatater) - that's in now, along with a few other things.

Repo: https://github.com/CraftParking/ModbusLens

What's new in v2.0.0:

• RTU/serial support - Connection Settings has a TCP/Serial switch now (COM port, baud, parity, stop bits)
• Server mode - can run it as a TCP slave, so you can point your own PLC/SCADA program at it and test without real hardware
• A small scripting tab for test sequences (write X, wait, read Y, repeat) - can target either a live connection or the local slave simulator
• Trend graphing, tag-based alarms, CSV logging

Still just me building this around my own work, so a couple menu items are still placeholders. Grabbing the EXE from Releases works, no install needed.

I am an chemist at a University who relies on a nitrogen generator with a Allen-Bradley Micro830 that is now giving me a blinking fault light. The manufacturer of this lab asset (Proton OnSite) was bought-out years ago, so there is no support. I can probably fix this thing if I could just find-out what the error is. I've tried downloading Connected Components Workbench (CCW) Standard Edition from Rockwell's website, but it won't let me download until I "request a location". I tried to add my location, but I can't do that because my University isn't already in their database. I can't find a way to enter my address.

My understanding is that this software is free and unlicensed. I just need it to read the fault and determine if I can fix my equipment. Can someone please guide me through how I can obtain access to this software?

Still has everything from when it was made in '85. Please excuse the red shop rag. The foam in the programmer slot is beyond expired, so I'm having to remove it.

Literally the only damage is the screws that hold the serial port into the programmer, and the foam in the programmer slot.

My chiller is ModbusTCP and I am monitoring some data in my FT:Optix project.
The core PLC is a Studio 5K project.
The thought crossed my mind of relaying some chiller data to the PLC.
I’m guessing it’s possible via a custom script but is it possible via a mapping function. Mapping Chiller:x into PLC:y

I know there are various options within Studio 5K for ModbusTCP but these are more work arounds and this isn’t that critical.

Just went full time at the facility I interned with in college. I work in our maintenance department for the facility and they are allowing me to specialize in Controls and VFDs for the plant. I understand controls and VFDs pretty well the area I lack most in is Understanding the process of the facility. I work in the Pulp and Paper industry and was curious if anyone had tips or advice for an up and coming EE who wants to build a career in controls. Anything Helps. Thanks!

P.S.

Work mostly on Allen Bradley Products

My main area I lack in controls is the networking side of it

I have an application where I have a siemens s7-1200 looking after a process that also has some human involvement.

The humans need to install some accessories before each time the process takes place. It is critical that the correct accessories are installed each time. At the moment, there are several layers of manual checking & documenting by different people before running the process - which is a pain!

I'm considering proposing streamlining the process by having the operator scan the accessories by RFID (with basic rfid sticker) or barcode/qr code as they are installed. This can then be displayed on an existing HMI for easier confirmation or possible automatically crosschecked against the plan.

Anyone have any recommendations on most straightforward hardware to use? System has its own private TCP/IP network so bonus points for making use of that! Thanks.

I'm currently replacing a Kinetix 6000 drive, and I'm running into some issues.

The new drive powers up fine, no errors show up. It's showing as enabled and no faults in Logix.

The servo will home after a power cycle, but will not home again after that.

These are for two feed screws, so I swapped the left and the right, and the problem followed the drive.

The only difference I can find is that the old drive is a "Series A" and the new one is a "Series C".

Did someone order the wrong drive? Or am I missing something glaringly obvious? Anyone have any experience with these?

Pic for reference. The top is the old one, bottom new.

I graduated as MechE and immediately started full time as a manufacturing automation/controls engineer with a large German energy and industrial automation company for about two years now. I’ve learned a lot and it is a highly regarded company but I just got offered a Instrumentation and controls engineer with a engineering consulting/construction firm, not as highly regarded in the automation world but it is a ~20% salary increase.

What should I do here?

Hello All,

I am onsite for my first startup as a small business. What was meant to be a simple panel swap for a shot blast machine has gotten complicated. Essentially I have a panel with 23 motor contactors, and I am just controlling the timed startup of these motors. I have a few inputs that are blipping (I can count them with counters in the code). Here is the weird part, the blipping stops when several of the motor contactors are turned on. The panel is feed with 480VAC **From a CAT Generator**, and then I have my 3kva control transformer creating 120VAC, and all the controls in the panel are 120VAC. This was required to interface with some existing IO. Why would pulling in multiple coils stop my inputs from blipping off momentarily?

I have even gone so far as to wire a spare circuit breaker directly to an input and it blips off occasionally when the system isn't running. Again, it doesn't do it when the motor contactors are pulled in.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Hello,

I'm new to Beckhoff PLCs and this is my first time working with a safety PLC.

I'm trying to connect an Emergency Stop switch to an EL1904 safety input terminal, but I'm having difficulty understanding the wiring.

I understand that a Category 4 safety circuit requires a dual-channel (redundant) E-Stop, but I'm not sure how each contact should be connected to the EL1904. Even after looking at the example wiring diagrams, I'm still confused about the actual wiring.

Could someone explain the wiring method or provide a simple example diagram showing how to connect a dual-channel Emergency Stop switch to the EL1904?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Probably was asked before, and honestly I feel like the only answer is going to be that I cant do anything with a macbook but, i wanted to try my luck. I just started my internship at a factory, they manufacture machinary for meat products, etc and there automation uses mostly Inovance products. And.. well i have an m4 pro macbook and cant download codesys. i installed windows 11 on vmware fusion but i doubt it would work because of the drivers that are needed so on so forth. I thought maybe i could try openplc? the thing is i have no experience or info on any of this honestly. im fairly educated on computers though, and ive been using linux for a long time wine on top of that but really i was just fairly good at research and could find what i needed, i cant on anything plc related.

is there any way i could use this macbook for this internship or am i going to have to borrow a windows computer no matter what?

For those of you in automotive, is it normal for automation people in the field to have to do all of the mechanical side of things too? For instance, on part verification systems you have to build the brackets, mount the sensors, then do all of the wiring and programing.

Or when it comes to those, you have to do all of the PM's on them, but also fix all of the mechanical issues as well. Trying to figure out if it's just an industry standard that Automation / Controls people are just a maintenance mechanic with a laptop. Nothing wrong with that, it's just not my bag of beans. I'm trying to figure out if I just got a crap company or if I need to just avoid this field all together.

I'm used to and can see controls doubling up as electrical SME's or doing the complex electrical troubleshooting, but not all of the mechanical too.

I should specify that I'm really looking at internal roles, not contractor or SI type roles.