Kara-Moon Forum

A new customer this time, but a large one and reportedly a good payer.

"Can you sort out a problem with a conveyer system for us ... Oh and can you get it done before the end of the month?"

That was a week ago.

Anyway, the boss goes up to have a look - it's several hundred miles away and it's a total disaster area. A group of motors and drive systems that have to be synchronised. A control system that was half-way through being upgraded when the contractor went bust. Logic controllers that none of us are familiar with, and programming software that apparently 'goes funny sometimes' on Windows 7. Interestingly all our office desktops and laptops are Windows 7 or 8. Mostly they leave me alone with my Linux machine, but that was no help this time.

The problem the customer was having in the first place (that required the upgrade) was that the conveyers would get out of sync when run at full speed and run at different speeds. This was due to the fact that the pulses coming from the various position encoders was more than twice the maximum that controllers were rated for - apparently nobody noticed that! Instead they tried to modify the software in some very umm, intereresting ways.

I do rather wish the bosses would actually ask me before saying we can do something.

So, yours truly spent the entire weekend (and bank holiday Monday) getting to grips with the programming kit and the installed program, then trying to un-pick it and restore it to something like the original might have been - I felt quite dirty having to deal with that crippled laptop.

As for the original issue? I spent the last three days making a set of simple frequency (speed) dividers and checking that the controllers were happy with the slower and more regular pulse trains. 20mm loss of position accuracy is quite acceptable considering the conveyers can stretch much more than that depending on temperature and the weight they are carying. At least they could now run at the same average speed.

I'm off to the New Forest Folk Festival tomorrow morning, so it's up to the rest of the team to get it all back up and running - and no, my phone will not be on. There would be no point. Sadly, there's no signal where I'll be staying :)

Seems you've earned your "folk fest break"! :;