Easter Eggs --- what are yours?

JHarbins post

I have "Long Haired Freaky People..." hidden in everyone of my projects

Click to expand...

in the Redlion Graphite thread got me to wondering: What easter eggs,if any, do you hide in projects?

I put a button that when pressed displays "This Button Does Nothing" on my HMI projects. I've borrowed from Ron and put
BST XIC 2B NXB XIO 2B BND OTE Question in several programs.

you could upgrade the button thing with message box with timer that says:

The program will now selfdelete in xx seconds...

We used to hide a picture of our company president with his phone number in the help files on our HMI's.
I don't think anyone ever told him either

MartB, you should have do that with his wife' picture and number...

One machine we built was commisioned shortly after the owner of the company had passed away. That machine has a screen with his picture and a dedication to him. Another machine we built was an automated version of a old manually loaded and unloaded machine we have. The newer machine increased output by some 30%. The operator at the time was very numbers oriented and was loving the fact that he would push the envelope of breaking a record daily but his vision wasn't the best and from where he worked he couldnt see the HMI, which had the cycle counter, well enough to make out the totals. I added a hidden screen that I showed him how to get to that had a gigantic counter on it he could see from across the room. He was a night shift guy and that screen would be displayed every morning.....funny how the other shifts never even asked how to get to the screen...

I built a machine that had an C-more Micro HMI for setup, and if you held certain combos of the Function buttons, it would display the names of the fabricators, the PLC programmer, etc...

I also built another machine that had a spare 0-10v analog IN channel, so I wired it to a pot that I mounted in the panel below the HMI. There was a display on the HMI that showed %Cowbell from 0-100%. We had a boss that was fond of saying, "I need more cowbell!"


-rpoet

One of our system intergrators added a "scada police" to one of our HMI's. If someone tried to do something wrong (i.e. try start a pump manually, when its in auto) then the police car would flash up.

Unfortunatly the management didnt find this funny and it was disabled.

I had an operator ask me to create a screen on one our SCADA machines that showed a picture of her motorcycle. So I put an invisible button on the main menu screen that only she knew the location. Its always a good idea to keep the operators happy.

on request of a few operators on a production line we put in a timer and a message on the main text display which instructed a colleague of them he was on turn to take coffee for them.
obviously he didn't do that too much

Once made the scada application for a waste water treatment plant.
There were lots of tanks and bufferpits.
In one of the tanks on the screen, once a day, a drop would fall from the top to the bottom.

Never had any feedback that it was discovered

balash said:

MartB, you should have do that with his wife' picture and number...

Click to expand...

Laughed my *** off!

Oceansoul said:

One of our system intergrators added a "scada police" to one of our HMI's. If someone tried to do something wrong (i.e. try start a pump manually, when its in auto) then the police car would flash up.

Unfortunatly the management didnt find this funny and it was disabled.

Click to expand...

Yet Microsoft got away with this for years with their "Illegal operation" message. So many grandmas calling their grandsons worried the police were coming to take them away for computer crime...

I wanted to know who kept resetting my stats on a HMI over the weekend shift so I changed the reset button so it changed the screen white and then started a 0 - 100% progress bar with terms like "Clearing Cache", "Contacting Langley for Authorisation Code", "Initiating Thrusters", appearing above it...

The final message is "Stats Reset" and it just goes back to normal... sure enough a young lad came to me on the Monday morning telling me how he had seen my message over the weekend and at first was scared but then thought it was funny.

A self-confessed culprit... ;-)

Two stories, both third-hand accounts (not mine):

1) An engineer for a client used to work on conveyor systems. On one HMI he added an animation for one of the motors. If someone pressed the correct sequence of buttons on the screen, the motor would burst into flames.

Apparently one time an operator did this and called maintenance because he thought the conveyor was on fire. Hey, it's on the HMI, so it must be happening!

2) A previous employer (biotech) had a iFix SCADA system. iFix automatically installed a screensaver which was a black background and the word "iFix" bouncing around. Apparently when they were initially rolling out the workstations in the operation areas, someone replaced the default iFix screensaver with one that replaced the dot on the "i" with a spinning head of one of the operations managers.

I guess he wasn't too happy about it. Mind you this was in a GMP / validated environment to boot. They had to initiate a Change Control process to revert it!

One story from me.

Many years ago I modified a system for a customer, where we used some IO in the existing PLC system, which was not previously used.
A short while after we were ready with the job, the customer called and asked:
Where do I Put the coffee and cake as it says in the HMI panel???

I could not answer it so I went out to the customer to see what happened. It was true that the HMI panel wrote: I want some coffee and cake.
It turned out that when the system was filled in a very specific way, then wrote HMI panel the message.

Some of the IO that was not previously used were used to set a alarm the HMI panel, and those IO was used now. :nodi: