I hate when this happens to my umbrella – IOTW Report

I hate when this happens to my umbrella

Sunday, 26 January 2020, 4:00 BFH Uncategorized 25

ht/ chris cassone

25 Comments on I hate when this happens to my umbrella

  7. Bad_Brad
    JANUARY 26, 2020 AT 6:54 AM
    “Never purchase an umbrella manufactured by Boston Robotics. Those people ain’t right in the head.”

    …I program robots for non-combat uses, arms, gantries, and autonomous vehicles.

    So I can assure you from the standpoint of “it takes one to know one” that NO programmer is right in the head.

    …and ALL of the programming in ALL of the devices you use, and are used around you, are programmed by people like me who are not right in the head.

    And every “decision” every device makes, from your car heater to the autopilot on a Boeing 777, is someone’s preprogrammed best guess at trying to take into account every possible circumstance and operator error possible, often by a GROUP of people who never talk to each other, and frequently by people who have never and will never USE them.

    Many of them are H1B visas from countries that hate us.

    And all the physical circuits are made in China. Even our own military admits they don’t know what all they have in them.

    …think of THAT as you are on the highway next to that Tesla in self-guide mode while looking up at the Airbus 380 coming in for a landing over you…

    …trust me, killer umbrellas are the LEAST of our worries…

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  8. @ SNS.

    Me and one other guy here in town take care of a 5K HP natural gas fired turbine that runs a pipeline compressor. It’s normally controlled from Houston who tell the automation that runs it what they want it to do. I.E., start, stop, set an outlet pressure etc.

    When it shuts down a timer starts in the PLC (industrial control computer)that will vent the gas off the compressor so it’s not sitting there loaded for possibly days. This used to be set for 5 minutes. But the way they were starting and stopping the thing multiple times a day we asked the manufacturer to increase that to 12 hours so we didn’t lose as much gas.

    They tried.

    Now it will vent sometime between 5 minutes and 12 hours after shutdown. No predicting when it will do it. And they can’t find that timer in the logic. It’s been that way for years now.

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  10. Lowell
    JANUARY 26, 2020 AT 8:39 AM

    …I bet the guy who did the original programming isn’t there any more, and he used logical structures and naming conventions the new guy isn’t familiar with.

    Everyone can bend a cotter pin, but not everyone bends a cotter pin the same way. That’s kind of what programming PLCs is.

    I’ve worked on systems that came, from the factory, with different subroutines WITHIN a main that were CLEARLY written by different people, and then yet ANOTHER guy had to cobble these different subs together into a working ladder somehow, without knowing anything about what the OTHERS were trying to do.

    That’s where I come in. I have to integrate this into a full factory line and make it both work and relate to the OTHER parts of the line, and since it’s for a factory, I have to use lots of pretty colors and flashy bits on the interface for the operator, because the English labels ain’t gonna work.

    ONE guy was either very, very old school or just a dickhead who didn’t want anyone understand his work, because while the system supported the semi-cognizant labels everyone ELSE used IN THE SAME PROGRAM, this fellow chose to label HIS the way you USED to have to for older systems with memories to small for colloquial labels. So where ONE guy would call a pump output something obvious, like “TURN_ON_PUMP”, the OTHER guy would call it “O:5[2]”. You could sometimes back into it by figuring out what was wired to what, but in the internal processing, a rung full of references like “XIO N7:14/6 XIC N16:2/3 OTE B3:42” does not lend itself to quick and easy understanding if you aren’t familiar with the machine and/or the program.

    And your guys probably are looking at something like that. Instead of VENT_TIMER going to VENT triggered by SHUTDOWN, it probably just references an integer it built somewhere else that goes to an analog output array instead of a discrete relay and is conditioned on another half-dozen things, and some guy in Houston who may not even speak English is looking at this semi-pictoral 2D representaion of a thought process and trying to comprehend what’s what in the doubtlessly limited time he’s given because your generator isn’t his only one.

    So he half-asses something, calls it good, and hopes it doesn’t kill you. He probably made very small changes for that, since working on something you’ll never see may make you timid about it.

    And after that, when you complain further, whoever runs the programming department probably blames poor Ethernet infrastructure on your part causing communications lag, so it’s not HIS problem, but now FIXING it is beyond the scope of the contract BUT if you want him out, for a kajillion dollars plus expenses, maybe he’ll send a low-level guy with his phone number…

    You get the idea. It ends up not being irritating enough or cost effective enough to pursue further, so there it is.

    …And I haven’t even got to machines like a bottle line I work on from Italy where all the OEM program comments are in Italian, but I’m again well into TL:DNR territory, so that’s a different story for another day..

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  16. Anonymous
    JANUARY 26, 2020 AT 10:28 AM
    “Can’t relate. Punched card era…”

    …I came in towards the end of that. My father worked for the computing department (wasn’t IT then) of a larger insurance company when they had just decided to add room-sized computers to their repotorie, and he was a young account standing around with a smart look on his face when someone said “we need to train people, wanna do this new thing called programming?”, and his new career was born.

    I don’t remember everything, but I did learn some of the PL1 they used with his particular system (still have the book he gave me), and that there were NO video screens of any description, it was punchcard in, line printer out, and changing those really cool vacuum-sealed reel to reel tapes on those giant cabinets that slid glass doors up and down over the tape when you installed it automatically, in a very clean room that smelled like ozone and sounded like relays.

    I suspect that thing doesn’t have the computing power of a modern calculator now, but it was really, really cool in a Dr. Strangelove, Apollo 13 kind of aesthetic way, and I think it’s a shame that all that just turned into an easy way to be a dillhole on Facebook.

    …oh, well, progress must progress…

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  19. …I don’t get that precise @Bad_Brad, mostly I’m doing material handlers and pick-and-place robots. You probably need quite a bit of attention to detail, a very high level of tooling maintenance, and considerably tighter tolerances than I would have to deal with typically. I can usually consider it a success if I don’t take out the guard getting the load there.

    You have my respect, but I don’t envy you. God bless you for being patient enough to keep it dialed in.

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  22. Material Handling programming would probably be duck soup to a CNC man, @Bad_Brad, since you’re likely doing your plotting in Cartesian coordinates anyway, and 90% of the moves in PNP you set up in WORLD mode, just because it’s the easiest to teach the robot and understand in program. I don’t know if you have different EOAT for your CNC jobs, but the tooling is the tricky part since Fanuc neither knows nor cares what we hang off their wrist joint, so all the actuation and protection has to be set up by the end user (me).

    So most of it is moving from x1000y2000z3000 (with additional axes depending on the # of joints of p,r, and w) to x500y3000z1000, with tooling actuation at the first stop to grip, and actuation again at the second stop to release.

    Because it’s an articulated arm, there’s limits to how far it can reach with how heavy a load, and keeping everything in alignment for linear WORLD moves is sometimes too much, so JOINT moves are needed to achive some positions, but Fanuc makes that relatively easy too, as long as you realize that somewhere you got into in joint isn’t somewhere you’re getting OUT of in linear, unless you want to see everyone laugh when the robot slams to a stop instead of doing your pretty move. Also, you get too straight, then singularities can become a problem.

    Still I like Fanuc for general diagnosis because you can name things what you want, AND show the program on the pendant as it runs, so it can TELL you which sensor your operator knocked off. Most problems are field IO problems, the robot itself is pretty robust.

    I also have some delta robots that look like spiders that can pick object locations identified by a vision system very quickly with suction cups, but you’re not gonna move anything very heavy with THOSE. But still, the programming is by and large Cartesian, with the vision system simply supplying the XY axes.

    …its making it work around multiple shifts if transient foreign workers with hammers that’s the tricky part…

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