OT-Anyone Ever leave "Easter Eggs" in HMIs

[I is a noob]

Think it would be hilarious or just go terribly wrong depending on the finder and context. Guys care to discuss?
or

 

[dmroeder]

I once put a button on our HMI that had the text DO NOT PRESS. All it did was beep our "going into automatic" warning horn. So it would beep for it's duration, then the machine would do nothing (since it wasn't actually putting it into automatic.

It wasn't an hour later someone called me and said "I tried to put the machine into automatic and it does not do anything".... "You pressed the DO NOT PRESS button didn't you"...

 

[OkiePC]

I have a smiley face that appears on an HMI for room temp control when the room temp is within 0.1 degree F of the setpoint. After I tweaked the controls and got the system to work really well, that smiley face appears all the time (except when it's over 100 outside).

I have several easter eggs in the video game I made for the G3, but in real life, very few, and all harmless ones.

At my previous employer, I had to make changes to some electrical drawings in cad, and the boss would not let me make all the wiring changes I wanted in a terrible relay logic circuit that we all hated. I make the little dots that connected all the electrical points together in the schematic into some spiral text that was basically a paragraph of highly critical venting (I ripped the designer a new one). When you print the drawing you can't see it, but if you open the autocad file and zoom in...

 

[Eric Nelson]

Also read this similar thread from a few years back...

www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=16067



-Eric

 

[rpoet]

I've put in several easter eggs that tell you "programmed by," "built by," etc... on one machine I built.

On another machine, I had a spare analog IN channel on a PLC, and I wired up a spare pot on the control console, and had it display % cowbell. We could tell at a glance if we needed more cowbell.

-rpoet

 

[Lancie1]

Eric, Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I had forgotten those good old days.

 

[Timbert]

Haven't inserted anything in the HMI, yet.

I did insert an entire section into a 90-page design document about emergency disconnect procedures in case the control system developed sentience and tried to annihilate the human race. The document was sent out for review by about two dozen engineers and not a single person commented on it.

 

[Ronnie Sullivan]

We are PLC programmers, by nature we are and have to be creative.
Spare time and creativity means we are compelled to put things in HMI's that don't need to be there.
I have put loads of 'features' tucked away in them.

One Saturday afternoon I was programming and needed the operatives to help me. I eventually found them all playing ***** and drinking beer. I took a photo and placed that right at the end of a long line of pages.

One of the operatives was eventually made manager and immediately stopped the Saturday afternoon ***** sessions.
They still play saying if the manager grasses them they will show the bosses the photo.

 

[Ronnie Sullivan]

What! p.o..ker is a banned word

 

[HJTRBO]

An engineer was telling me one SCADA system he worked on had an aeroplane fly across the screen every day at noon.

 

[kjacoby]

We have a machine that a previous programmer programmed 6 years ago. It wasn't until a few months ago that it was brought up to my attention, on a manual weld screen, the "cycle weld" button, when pressed, would say "AND THEN SHE ATE", instead of "initiate". I don't know how many times that button has been hit in the last 6 years without being noticed.

 

[JesperMP]

The only thing I do, when there are no alarms at all, is to display a smily face where the alarm banner is.

Like this one:

Another programmer in the same situation would display the text "Hooray ! No alarms !".

 

[I is a noob]

Never thought of a "Do Not Press" button but in its most basic and way i did consider a "Point Less" button. Kinda like the one in this vid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcSzq_6W1QQ

 

[max86]

I'm sure I'm not the only one that's noticed the easter eggs that rockwell themselves added into their symbol factory! Had me busting a gut...
ex, Flaming Moe, the artist formerly known as Prince,A duck (weighs the same as a witch) - I actually laughed out loud in the office at that one, and many more.

As far as our HMIs I haven't, but there are a few occurrences where "all your base are belong to us" may have made it's way into a few CAD drawings.

 

[rootboy]

The Paint shop timekeeper program in the Wentzville, MO GM plant used to wish me and my daughter a Happy Birthday each year.

That and at Shreveport, I added a bunch of SLNR taglines at the bottom of the HMI when there were no faults present. The operators liked it.

Also at Shreveport, I kept getting called out to the Tire & Wheel machine whenever the scheduling went down on EDS's end (the operator would call EDS up and tell them that they weren't getting any new data, and they would tell them to call me - while racing around to fix their stuff).

It didn’t take long to become apparent to me that EDS had me running cover for them while they fixed their stuff.

So, for the next model changeover, when I had to program new build data into the Uticor display, I added “Call EDS” to message 0.

Since message 0 never got called, it was just an inside joke between me and the GM Shreveport engineer.

That was until the next time their system messed up. When the machine ran out of data, message 0 got displayed.

So the operator calls EDS and tells them that the machine was down yet again, and they told him to call me. He said, “No sir. It says to ‘Call EDS’”.

Needless to say, I left the message in there.