With the start of 2013 we take a moment to anticipate what changes lie ahead for our industry and what impact they will have in the new year and beyond.  Have you considered the impact that Serialization will play?

When it comes to it, the human body perhaps represents the epitome of closed loop control.  No man made process comes even close to it, at least not for now! 

PIDs – A psychologists perspective.

Core pieces exist in almost every controls project. As we have discussed before, standards are used to keep these pieces consistent from system to system. Given a baseline of information, an exact procedure is followed to produce the various outputs required for the project. In 1995, Avanceon automated that process around the tools and technologies of the day through a software tool we called AutoGen. I/O lists and PLC rack layouts were among the information put into a MSAccess database to generate the documentation, drawing and controls outputs, the latter of which centered around register based PLC code and corresponding HMI tags. Over the years we have updated the output to be compatible with more modern technologies as well with ControlLogix PLC code and object creation and configuration directly in the Galaxy. However, the core design based around the I/O point limits the potential impact this tool can have on a project.  As the technologies and architectures have changed, we needed to upgrade our AutoGen tool to allow us to maximize our efficiency.  Thus producing, AutoGen 2.0.   

            This will be my last post on The High Performance HMI Handbook. Hopefully, I piqued your interest, and maybe you are thinking about using bar graphs, trends, and simpler, grayer graphics. That is wonderful, but there is more in the book that I’m not discussing. For the integrator, discussions of Overview Screens and Alarm Management are probably of interest. For plants with HMIs and control rooms, some of the later sections on control room layout and situation management are worth checking out. It is worth having in your engineering library.

If you’ve been following along at home, you’ve seen three posts coming from my experience of reading The High Performance HMI Handbook. I’ve talked about my knee jerk reactions and two ideas from the book that the authors convinced me of as I read. Today, I’d like to cover one more topic. I want to talk about the usage of color in HMIs

In my first post in this series, I briefly discussed my experience of reading the book The High Performance HMI Handbook, the initial skepticism I felt and how I started to come around to their ideas. In my second post, I discussed their approach to using a bar graph with some simple indicators to make reading analog values very intuitive and quick to interpret. Today, I want to talk a little bit about trend graphs. Not the most riveting topic you say? Hear me out. I think some well planned and well placed trends are worth their weight in gold.

If you are a Startrek fan, the term “Holodeck” would sound familiar to you.  It was depicted as an enclosed room in which you could simulate reality. People with arms and limbs (peripherals) and objects could be simulated with exquisite detail.  The space farers would design Holodeck programs, that they could share with others, for training & diagnostic purposes, or for solving crime scenes – or so they let us believe!

There are many professional certifications available from organizations such as ISA, ISPE, IEEE, ASQ and AEE, to name a few.  As a professional in the automation field, most of these certifications hold some appeal, as they deal at least tangentially with the work I do.  But since I’m limited both by time and brain power, I felt it was important to target the right certification for me, and to do it justice.

In my last blog entry, I put forth my reasoning that standards are a very important, yet elusive, part of any automated environment.  This entry discusses what I feel are some of the most important pre-requisites for getting to that happy place.