OT..Sence of humor?

How many of you here have a little bit of a sense of humor and add a little hidden thing/page in you HMI creations?
If so what?..To start..on one of mine i put a self destruct button..i hid it well..(Made the goto button the same color as the background with no writing so it was "invisable"..after pushing the self destruct a countdown starts and after it finishes the bitmap i put on the screen looks like a brick was thrown through the HMI..(Broken glass)..
I also put a counter in the program to see how many times the button had been pushed and at last check it was up over 20..(been in service for almost a year)

One of the more "Risky" ones was by request.The morning start up guy said his job would be nice if a beautiful blond said good morning to him every day..So i put in a hidden page that can only be accessed between 6.00am and 6.05 am..If the button is pushed between these times and image pops up for 10 seconds..and then disapeers..This can only happen once per day between the times..The image changes daily for 14 days..To get an idea of the image do a search on the "women of walmart"...It not PC but the start up guy gets a kick out of it and when i need something from him its not a problem!!

anyone else? or am the only sick/twisted one here?

D

darrenj said:

anyone else? or am the only sick/twisted one here?

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I used a bitmap of the Hindenburg explosion for the background on an alarm screen once. Of course, that was a non-production machine.

I've also used that animated American flag (deskflag) that popped up around 9/11.

And then, there was the time I animated Tom's avatar in a touchscreen demo! That got his attention.

AK

You're not alone...

One of our old tube labelers has a little pneumatically operated swing gate to hold back the tubes on the infeed chute. I recently upgraded the controls on this machine, which included adding an HMI to allow adjustment of timers, etc...

I didn't know what would be a good decriptive name for this actuator to differentiate it from other actuators, so I asked one of the guys on the floor what THEY call this holdback. He pointed to the price sticker still attached to the hinge on the swing gate... "Oh, we call that the Rickels hinge.".

Rickels was a chain of home improvement centers in the northeast before Home Depot came to town and ran them (along with Channel) out of business back in the mid 90s.

I labeled the delay timer for that holdback the "Rickel Hinge Delay" on the HMI...

I have included some minor 'back door' tricks on a few machines that only I knew about. Certain key press sequences to select 'hidden' screens which were really useless to anyone but me.

I've been known to add temporary 'personalized' messages for people, like my boss, to get a laugh now and then...



-Eric

We did a welding machine with RSView messenger and enalbed the voice synthesizer and set it to a female voice so that whenever a particular operator logged in RSView Messenger would talk "dirty" to him.

We had a plant manager about ten years back that was a real moron when it came to the equipment, he used to wander through the area to make sure the machines were running and if they weren't he would go ballistic without finding out why - often they were just in the middle of changing parts. No matter how many times we would tell him to look at the monitor, he would open up the machine door to make sure he could see it doing something, usually aborting the operation that was in process. The operators asked me if I could do something about it, so I found the loudest alarm horn I could, mounted it immediately overhead the door, and programmed the PLC so that if the cycle aborted due to the door being opened the horn would sound. The manger nearly had a heart attack, and after he saw everyone laughing at him he never opened that safety door again.

Running pumps

We were doing a process plant, to show the client the full functionality of animated symbols on the SCADA, we had a guy in a hardhat mounting a pump true K9 style when the pumps were running, got a few eyebrows and a couple of laughs at least......LOL

Rheinhardt

I usually put a poem accessed from a button tucked away deep in the menu hierarchy labelled "do not press!"

When things go wrong, as they usually will.
And your daily road seems all up hill.
When the plant is down, and tempers are high.
And you'd like to smile, but can only cry.
When you realy feel you'd like to quit.
Don't run to me, I don't give a SH*$!

A few years back I wired all the fuse outputs (for solonoids) back to a spare block on the plc and wrote an alarm page for each fuse.

A fuse didnt blow for over 2 years then one day an operator said to me. they are good are these screens, the other day a fuse blew for the water solenoid and a screen popped up and told me that the spare fuses were in the stores on the bottom shelf 3rd box from the right, how did it know that.

I have seen a couple.


On a Panelview on a screw machine operation, whenever there was an alarm, the machine would display various messsages before the actual alarm would display for a couple of seconds.

Another was a packaging machine that a little vietnamese guy ran. We would ask him if everything was okay and he would reply, "It WOK OKAY!". So we had a dataliner laying around and decided to install on the machine so whenever the machine was running, it would display, "IT WOK OKAY!"

I did add to an HMI display a small face that would creep up and peek at you from various parts of the screen every once in a while. I got a few calls on that from the operators because they swore they saw something but it would never come back....

David

davidg68124 said:

I did add to an HMI display a small face that would creep up and peek at you from various parts of the screen every once in a while. I got a few calls on that from the operators because they swore they saw something but it would never come back....

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The truly funny part about a stunt like that is the amount of time you spend programming (and testing) it.

Has anyone ever put a "DO NOT TOUCH" button on a screen, and attached it to a counter? I've been to places where this would've been an excellent test of the operators.

AK

My former boss did exactly that on a machine he commissioned about two years before I started. The button was connected ONLY to a discrete counter, nothing else. He labelled the button "Maintenance Only" and instructed the operators that nobody was to touch it except himself.

Two weeks later, an operator stopped him and made the comment, "I don't know what that button does, but every time I press it, the machine runs better!"

He checked the counter later that day - over 100 presses in two weeks.

Interestingly, there is a moral to this story - I have personally seen operators begin pumping buttons COMPLETELY AT RANDOM when a machine dies on them. When I design my HMI's (the only thing hard-wired is the e-stops) I always make sure to present, and enable in the program, ONLY those features I want the operator to have access to AT THAT MOMENT.

This seems like the most basic thing in the world, but I've seen more machines than I can count where the ops can tie the thing into a preztel with any number of "manual" controls permanently available to them.

Alarm crash

We worked once at a Platinum mine, where we had a crytical water feeding system, supplying the refinery.

A mate that worked with me suggested we put in a little test for the operators, we had a button activate a whole list of virtual alarms(HMI). It was only active during 8 to 5 ( no midnight call outs). We actually did this to prove the opertors were messing around during the process. The button was well hidden beneath manual control pages.

First time it happened opertor control procedures changed, most manual control was moved up to a maintenance/technical level. Never had problems again.

Rheinhardt

I have the scada at a feedlot mill playing the robots voice of "Danger, Will Robinson, Danger" when a motor overload trips. Gets the attention of the operators who are not always looking at the screens.
Regards Alan Case

Eric Nelson said:

Rickels was a chain of home improvement centers in the northeast before Home Depot came to town and ran them (along with Channel) out of business back in the mid 90s.
-Eric

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Wow Rickels and Channel! Let's be honest Eric they were doing a good job of running themselves out of business before Home Depot came around, and I'm not a big Home Depot fan.

I once put in a Do Not Touch button on a touch screen that brought you to a screen that said I TOLD YOU NOT TO TOUCH THAT BUTTON!

I had an operator one time say i had a seceret program running on 2nd shift. so when we added a 3rd HMI I put a button that said 2nd shift. then password protected the screen. on the screen i put this is a test this is only a test. it took the first shift guy a couple of days to fig out the password. it was great

Actually, it did not take all that much to do, AK, I had just been through a VB course and tinkered around with it a bit, on my own time, of course.


David