anyone else try to put humor into their programs?

[Peter Nachtwey]

way back over 40 years ago there was a programmer that gave our address as

wASH INgTON. He was referring the the St Helens ash that was all over.
Also, he had a message that said "May the forrest be with you". We were automating sawmills.

 

[JaxGTO]

Once I did a conveyor system using motor starter. When you hit start I made the startup sequencer play 'shave and a hair cut, two bit'.

Have also been bored on startup and made haunting laughs play on Halloween, jungle bells on xmas and happy birthday on the operators bday.

 

[thingstodo]

It might be funny ... but not for sure

I had a co-worker who was stuck on site commissioning for too long .. by himself ..


On a setup screen buried deep in the ControlView HMI, there was a button that was black text on a black background ... so you had to hit it by randomly clicking around. You could not see it.



That displayed a warning to 'Never press that button again'


So of course, the operator clicked around until he did it again.


Next step - the warning changed to 'You were warned!'


5 second delay


Full screen message 'DEATH RAY ENABLED'. Blinking White text/Black text on the entire screen Red background. Until you hit ESC to exit the screen.


The operator hid in the corner of the room for the rest of his shift. Out of sight of the ControlView screen. He was very scared. For REAL. (though not the most experienced or resourceful operator that worked there)


He reported to his supervisor in the morning (it was a night shift) and asked that their OSHA committee be brought in to investigate.


The supervisor knew who had done it .. had grown up with my co-worker .. and called him to tell him that he had 'caught' one. BUT .. any other supervisor in the plant may have reacted much differently. I doubt that anyone on the OSHA committee had heard of the hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. Or seen the FAR SIDE cartoon (or any of the many other examples) that reference enabling the 'DEATH RAY'


My co-worker never had anything similar in any future HMI he did. Though there was a lot of humor in the PLCs, comments, etc.


My own experiences are far less entertaining, sadly.

 

[ojz0r]

For my own amusement i usually call temporary void varibables "BITBUCKET" or "BYTEBUCKET".


And then once i put the following code in some function block:

IF GW >= 1.21 THEN
    FLUX_CAPACITOR := 1985;
ELSE
    GREAT_SCOTT(!);
END_IF;

 

[ianingram]

So, we did a job at the chicken processing plant.

The chickens hang upside down as they go through the scalder and then the pluckers.
I couldn't help but put up images of before/after images of the chickens that are animated when the line is running.

 

[busarider29]

Many years ago I was working with an ICOM software interface from Allen Bradley's DH485 (Data Highway) to a Windows Visual Basic control. I noticed in the documentation for the interface they sarcastically referred to the Allen Bradley communication protocol as "Data Sidewalk"

 

[busarider29]

Not so much control related but....

Years ago at a previous employer, myself and another engineer played a bit of a 'cruel' joke on another Engineer, we'll call him....."Bob".

Bob had a 'bad' habit of stepping away from his laptop on the plant floor and leaving it open. So myself and another engineer collaborated together and wrote a little program and installed it on Bob's machine. We named it something inconspicuous, to make it look like a Windows process, so that it wouldn't be all that easy to find in task manager.

The program would launch at any paste command from the user. (Copy-paste, Ctrl-V, etc). So anytime Bob would enter a copy-paste, the program would cancel out whatever Bob wanted to Copy-paste, and a pop-up message would appear on the screen - "Bob likes boys".

That was back when I was a bit younger (a couple years out of college), and admittedly, a lot more immature.

 

[bob1371]

My daughter and her friend started working at my plant but were on 3rd shift. I changed the background images on their HMI's to a Disney theme starting at 11:30 pm and had it change back at 6 am.

Last job I left all the programs used an AOI labeled Blink and would have Blink_250, Blink_500, & Blink_1000 for a blinking bit at 250ms, 500ms, & 1000ms. One of the controls techs was a Blink 182 fan so I added Blink_182 to each of the 35+ machines throughout the facility. He saw it about 3 months after I left and of course I left a description so he know who it was.

 

[mylespetro]

So, we did a job at the chicken processing plant.

The chickens hang upside down as they go through the scalder and then the pluckers.
I couldn't help but put up images of before/after images of the chickens that are animated when the line is running.

I audibly guffawed when I saw this

 

[TheWaterboy]

Had a set of valves that need to be really thought about before manipulating or you wind up deadheading a long pipeline.
There was no reasonable way to predict or prevent bad things from happening if someone did the wrong thing as the previous valves were from a different system many miles away.
So that dialog came with a text pop up warning about the earth opening up and swallowing you you if you choose wrong.

If I were to go back there and had the inkling I was going to change it to something like this.



The chicken one is great!

.

 

[PLC Pie Guy]

I had one silly one a few years back where I put an image of Donkey Kong and Ditty all beat up with bandages in the corner of the HMI and says game over whenever a VFD tripped in cabinet. Its still there and only a few people have actually ever seen it. They thought it was pretty funny.

 

[L33er]

Years ago, we had an operator that pace his work by looking at the HMI production counter. Once he had enough for the day, he stopped.
Since we were troubleshooting for an intermittent problem, we need to see the machine in run mode more than what he'd liked, so we added a fuzzy logic to his counter, by the end of day , he was running an extra 15% work without knowing it. We laughed our *** off.

 

[parky]

Not funny related but we had a packaging machine where operators had to weigh in chicken pieces by hand, the sauce was dispensed automatically, the machine throughput was 32 packs a minute (large 2kg packs) it also thermoformed the packs. There was a message display above all lines these gave the current ppm & totals for the shift, the operators should easy manage 32 ppm but they complained if it ran above 26, they would miss packs so a lot of waste, this was discussed at a management meeting They wanted me to remove or cover the display, however, what I did was when the ppm reached 26 or 27 (a little pseudo random) I held the ppm, but it would populate the scada data with the correct ppm. we ran the machine at 32 ppm & no complaints.

 

[dmroeder]

If you pay attention to pylogix packets using wireshark, you will realize you are being rick-rolled.

 

[I_Automation]

Years ago, we had an operator that pace his work by looking at the HMI production counter. Once he had enough for the day, he stopped.
Since we were troubleshooting for an intermittent problem, we need to see the machine in run mode more than what he'd liked, so we added a fuzzy logic to his counter, by the end of day , he was running an extra 15% work without knowing it. We laughed our *** off.

I did something similar, but if the operator was watching the ONE's digit when it didn't count I thought he might get suspicious, so every other x9 to x0 I SUB'd 10. Also I only did a counter display DINT, not the actual production count and could disable it with a bit. This got 100% more running