Week 13
Another really busy week!!
Last week I spent a heap of time reviewing a design for an aluminium smelter. Basically, they've got a big crane 'thing' that refills all the big pots of liquid metal. Right now this is done/controlled by an operator, but they want to make it automatic - Less chance of stuff getting missed, less chance of damage, etc etc.
The crane works using a bunch of switches (relays) that turn each other on and off in the right sequence to do things in the right order. No processing, no computer - Purely hardwired, which is amazing! For me, at least - The more experienced Engineers used to do everything like that, aha. Anyway, automation requires processing, so we need to take that design and add a controller. This involves finding the electrical signals we want to bring in as inputs, and those we want to control as outputs, and wiring them up.
To do that, we need drawings of exactly what we want - That's what I spent the first couple of days doing this week. Adding red pen to the existing drawings to indicate the changes we actually want, to be done more professionally/properly by a draftsperson later.
Second half of the week, new project! This one is working with a SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) System - Something I've actually worked on before, exciting! These systems are how pretty much any 'plant' monitors and controls their equipment from a central location. It's essentially a run time environment, with graphics/behaviour/roles/permissions/alarms/logging developed as needed, that runs on your machine and communicates with external processors and equipment.
What I was doing was helping set up some brand spanking new machines with the right configurations for an existing SCADA system. Had to get them to talk, so lots of changing firewall settings and IP addresses and such. Did lots of modifications to the SCADA to make it work nicely on the new hardware. Set up partitions for recovery environments and backups and such. The coolest thing for me though was actually modifying the registry to completely disable Windows for the user account - So, when you log in, you don't get a Desktop and Taskbar. You get the SCADA environment, and that's it. But like, you can't just do that - What if you need to update the machine or access a backup file? So in the SCADA system, behind a password, you need to add a backdoor that manually starts the relevant processes and lets you get into Windows if you need it. Messy stuff!
I felt really good at work this week - I think because I've actually got experience working with SCADA systems, I can be more to my boss than just a "yes man." I can actually challenge his thoughts and provide a different perspective. At one stage we were discussing something and I caught myself saying, "I don't think that's right mate, I think it's actually _________," and I sort of went on autopilot then because I was too busy thinking, "Wait, what am I doing." I'm actually at the point now where I can be a member of the team, and it sort of took me by surprise, because I haven't ever had the confidence in my own work to do that yet. Really cool ;D
Question for Computer Whizzes, if any happen to be reading
I have installed a piece of software that automatically generates backup images of my C Drive at regular intervals, and stores these on a spare disk. They have also provided a disc image that is supposed to be a recovery environment. I imagine the idea is I boot into this environment if the C Drive were ever to fail, and it would give me the functionality to restore my system. However, no matter what I try, I can't get the machine to boot into the environment, whether I've burned the recovery image onto a USB or a disc (will probably eventually be its own partition on the spare disk). I've no reason to think the image is faulty, and I've every reason to believe I've screwed up something because I don't do much of this sort of stuff - Anything I might have likely stuffed?
Haven't spoken about my home-life much lately, mostly because I've settled in to the new apartment and not much is happening. I'm majorly hating the lack of daylight atm though, has made it so hard to go for a run after work or generally do anything outside.
Think I'm due for a rental inspection soon, I'm sure my tenancy agreement said after three months and it has been longer. I'm not even concerned - I left this morning for a trip back home after work, and I looked back as I walked out and thought, "Wait, does anyone live here?" Honestly could probably clean up and leave the place with all my stuff within a couple of hours ::)