Programs you are proud of.

[Ronnie Sullivan]

You have to get used to the fact that our work often makes some employees redundant.
The example I gave at the top made quite a few redundant.
Before, the employees had to carry the mattresses to the next station and king-size double pocket sprung mattresses are blooming heavy.
There was always some off from work with bad backs.

 

[JeffKiper]

I had the pleasure of rebuilding a old machine. It was a basic sequencer. The original programmer had the system as 1 big sequence. We broke them down into small manageable sub systems. Think 200 steps for an full machine sequence vs 6 smaller systems. This allowed us to find the slowest step of the machine and tweek it. Not fancy at all.

I gave each operator a notebook to point out what we needed to change. They started making suggestions and getting extra parts out. It became a game for them.

 

[Steve Bailey]

Not necessarily programs that I've written myself, but times when I've been called in to restore lost programs with out-of date or nonexistent documentation. One in particular where it was the only machine in the facility that could produce a particular part. The day I got it back running was the day before they would have had to cut a PO to a competitor to make some of those parts to meet production commitments.

 

[Ken Moore]

I worked for several Engineering firms over the years. Had to "fix" a lot of programs, that I did not write, but worked well, after I fixed them. I always felt great after a client always demanded that I be the one to return to their facility and fix another problem. I never had an un-happy client. That has always made me feel great about myself. Often times management would want to send a junior guy to one of my clients, and they always refused. So, I am proud of my customer service over the years.

 

[bulletin blues]

Once the company I work for let me get my hands on the Scada/HMI systems, I made up a screen of a particularly difficult production line we had been having issues with for some years. The problem was different operators, techs, management, all had different nomenclature on what the devices were called. This had to do with 35 years of upgrades, older equipment being shut down, then repurposed, renamed etc.

Certainly a proper naming convention is the key, but in this case, the older folks would call it what it used to be, the younger folks called it what it was now, and the techs would try to compare different versions of prints and programs to figure out what it actually IS.

For example, when a SOAK DRENCH SOUTH PUMP alarm was produced, I animated a picture of the 8 pumps in the cluster, with a GIANT ARROW pointing to the actual location of the faulted pump, with another GIANT ARROW pointing to a picture of the proper disconnect, with a GIANT ARROW pointing to the location of the MCC.

I have to admit, this line was troublesome for even myself after working with it for 10 years. There was a lot of NORTH PUMP SOUTH UPPER HEATER SOAK DRENCH NORTH PIT BLOWDOWN BOOSTER PUMP descriptions, and when you would go to look at it, everything looked like dirt. There was much tracing of conduit and fear of powering off the wrong pump.

I actually set out to just "idiot-proof" it for myself, but once I got the screens working, I was kind of a hero for a year and a day, amongst the operators, techs, engineers, and managers.

Then we tore it all out and installed a newer production line.

 

[glennz]

I worked for several Engineering firms over the years. Had to "fix" a lot of programs, that I did not write, but worked well, after I fixed them. I always felt great after a client always demanded that I be the one to return to their facility and fix another problem. I never had an un-happy client. That has always made me feel great about myself. Often times management would want to send a junior guy to one of my clients, and they always refused. So, I am proud of my customer service over the years.

My story is similar. I've earned and am proud of a 'can-fix-it' reputation, providing programs that solve long standing problems left behind by integrators, and in a few cases, OEM vendors. A local major client always asked for me by name and refused any substitutes.

At a plant where I once worked as a direct employee, I had a need to visit several years later in a consultant's role. One of the regular employees recognized me and commented to someone (paraphrased) "...when that guy worked here, whenever problem he worked on got *fixed right*." That was a proud moment when it got relayed back to me.

 

[drbitboy]

Buttons-buster

I probably this story before, but does genetic "code" count*?

My son was in Afghanistan, made it to Captain. One time on a trip to the motor pool, he was standing at the door behind someone else who, with no advance notice, thought they should get the vehicles now. The motor pool Sergeant sees my son at the door, and tells the other person something like "Wait here, I have to talk to that Captain. He doesn't waste my time."

* it's probably my wife's, though

 

[Zimmer]

Don't usually work on anything more sophisticated than a Siemens logo or S7-1200 or maybe a Schneider Zelio, but I'm usually chuffed for the day if I get an analog input, radar sensor etc. to scale correctly and display on a hmi.

 

[jorziredy]

I was still in school, had never worked with PID loops before and had never developed an HMI program from scratch, but they basically give me a Micro800, PanelView 800 HMI, and two Powerflex VFD's and told me to "fix it." Welp, I fixed it. I installed a 4-20mA float sensor, discrete low/high level floats, and an HMI with level/IO indicators and maintenance adjustments. Two years later when I left that company that system was still running with no issues. Still amazed that I got those Mirco800 PID loops to work efficiently.

 

[drbitboy]

... Still amazed that I got those Mirco800 PID loops to work efficiently.

It's even more amazing than you think: https://plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=130397

 

[Aardwizz]

My programs are my children, and like my children, I don't have a favorite.

Also like my children, after a year or so of living on their own, they never call or write to tell me how they're doing. Which is probably a good thing, meaning that they are self-sufficient.

Or dead. It's hard to know which.

 

[01101]

Mine was my first interaction with PLCs. We had a water tank to feed the condensers of three cooling towers. The float valve stuck, and the system ran out of water shutting down the system. After getting the system up and running I was given the task to repair it and with the help of everyone here I made a system with a float valve and an ultrasonic sensor to verify the water level and redundant water valves with flow sensors and automatic switching on failure as well as an alarm system to alert that a component had failed. Being self-taught I spent 3 weeks on this site reading past posts and learning how to scale the US 4-20 out and Modbus to talk to the HMI.

 

[hill831017]

- Built a standardized PLC application system which controls robots doing spraying. Base on this standard other application system were developed - surface detection and polishing.
- Variety of warehouse with different control source via TCP, UDP, TCP-on-ISO.
- C# and VBA coding linked PLC variants show on Excel.
- Create a simple OPC-UA window application.
- Variety of STL, XML handler for PLC program generation and Audit.

 

[ndzied1]

Not strictly a PLC program but still very proud of it.

I created a Delta RMC application that allows the customer to synchronize multiple adaptive sine wave type tests to multiple masters. Previously they had been using a single sine wave generator for each test.

These are hydraulic pressure tests running between 100-5000 psi at up to 8 Hz. When pressure builds, oil is required from the power unit. If multiple tests are running and all the pressure peaks come at the same time, the system runs out of oil. Previously, they had no way to synchronize and phase multiple tests. By allowing each test to be phase offset from a master, the peaks are spaced out and they can run more tests at the same time from the same hydraulic source.

This also takes advantage of adaptive control. Delta has sample adaptive control programs but all are for a single axis. Since this system can run up to 20 axes, I re-wrote the adaptive control program to be generic. All data is stored in arrays. This way there was only one program to write and debug.

I have to have a shout out to the excellent technical support at Delta Motion that helped with this project. At one point they even made a firmware change for me to help keep multiple sine wave masters in sync. It's now a part of the current firmware.

Also, pressure cycling at this rate is not possible without good design up front. These controls were retrofitted on existing hardware but whoever designed the rigs initially did their job right.