On Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:33:18 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com proclaimed to the world:
Peter, thanks for this response. I want to continue, but will need to do this at a later time. I don't have any major disagreement with anything you have said. It's ironic that your experience quoted is in the lumber industry as the only major problems I have had with hydraulics in one of my designs was in a similar application back in the early 90's. It involved a very similar project, automating an operation that produced fence posts and the company hired me to design and build a system to sort incoming precut timber, debarked and fed via conveyor into a peeling operation where they hand sorted the stock to be fed to the peeler set to the largest post possible for the stock. Eventually the sorting operation was to be automated using visual inspection systems and X-ray scanners. There were to be eight peelers for different size posts. We completed the first stage, which was to automate a single peeler using one of the first PLCs, the Atcom
- I actually loved that little PLC and the SNAP programming language. I had little problems with the programming side of the job, but did have lots of hydraulic woes. I spent weeks arguing with the supplier and ended up having to switch to his control valves and working around their limitations.
We never got past the single peeler automation and the conveyor/sort system. The project was scaled back because the company had no infrastructure to move and make use of the chippings being produced by a machine that worked at 10 times the manual rate. The added cost of waste disposal stretched their budget. I felt it was short sighted as they had one of the east coast's major paper mills within 60 miles of the facility and a contract to supply all of the fence posts supplied to Lowes. They could have leveraged that into supplying landscape timbers.
The visual inspection and sorting system was going to be challenging for me in the early 90's. A big gamble that I could produce a working system. I had just started researching what was available at the time. It would have been an interesting gamble.
I have not kept up with the wood industry but I wonder if there is not a lot of opportunity still in my area.
Anyway, give me some time to look at this better and I will comment some more. My major concern with models is this. Students in many fields are now being taught science and engineering using computer models. HS chemistry and physics classes now do not even have the equipment to carry out basic experiments. They learn about inertia, mass and motion on a screen instead of bricks, roller skates and pulleys. Does this new approach develop the mind's ability to model on it's own. I know models help me understand aspects of systems quickly, but without the real life experience, I don't know this would be true.
For me to defend or abandon this position, I need to investigate the modeling being used a little better.