this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Software Controls Engineer, I develop tools and templates for automation.
Oh, man. A few years ago I thought about getting into that. Seemed really cool but also a bit overwhelming.
I love to make sense of how things are connected and flow in a system.
How did you get started? =)
I actually started as an electrician, I was installing hardwire motor control systems. I was terrible at running conduit though, so I only did that for half a year.
Was hired as an entry level Controls Engineer for a small company that does automotive manufacturing systems. They weren’t a great place to work mostly throwing bodies at problems, but it got me started and gave me experience.
Turns out I really enjoy PLC programming and made Sr Controls Engineer in 3yrs. It is a steep learning curve, less so if you have any kind of programing/automation experience. At first it was a lot of travel, part of that was just the automotive industry. Though most places put their new employees on site a lot to get experience.
Since covid remote work is more prevalent and a lot of my coworkers work from home when not onsite. Now I am in R&D, I work remotely and haven’t been onsite in over a year and half.
It’s a constantly changing field new technologies are being introduced all the time, it definitely keeps me interested.
Same here! Controls engineer with software background and BA in ChemE, just in the misguided company part of the growth spectrum, 3 years in.. Etc description all matches.
At a fork here though deciding whether I move to a bigger company (PENA) as a Sr or start my contracting life.
Too early to go mobile? How was the travel, I'm being offered lucrative contracts for 5-6 months at a time, but away from my partner. Talking with them and still thinking it over, but if you have any insight I would appreciate it. :)
So the travel was great for the first two years and then never being home started wear on me big time. It wasn’t so bad because I met my husband at work. We managed to either get sent to the same sites, or do office work remotely from the hotel room. But Automotive was stressful.
Switching to a larger company changed my life big time. Better benefits, more resources, less of the “we need all hands onsite, we can’t afford to let you stay home” emergencies.
That said I haven’t tried contract work, but I have known people who did really well with it. Taking a 6m contract and then having enough to take the rest of the year off. The contractors I worked with were always paid better than we were.
Wow, this sounds rad as a job and career.
How much has the tech in your field changed since you started?
Also, would you mind giving an example of what kind of R&D you do? Like where is the industry needing to head towards and what kind of things are you working towards.
Depending on the industry Automation tends to be behind technologically. It makes sense they want things to be stable and relatively inexpensive. So when I started in Automotive we were still doing new installations with DeviceNet. Around 2017 they started using Ethernet, which was a nightmare at first because very few people knew proper network management and frequently messed up the VLANs.
The programing is starting to shift to text based “traditional” programming vs. ladder logic. Ladder is definitely still a requirement right now but there are PLCs that can be programmed in Python. But Allen-Bradley is the most widely used PLC hardware in North America and only supports their own rudimentary text programming currently. More and more companies are seeing Software and IT as a potential Automation workforce.
*Edit: And with Inductive Automation’s Perspective using Web Developers for HMIs is now becoming more of a trend in big companies.
Currently I am working on standardization and templates for our hardware product offering. Last year I was automating our program creation, I created a tool to read a project’s parts database and spit out a basic PLC program based on the contents. This saves our Controls Engineers a lot of mundane text entry and configuration.
One of my the “cooler” things I have worked on in the past has been AGVs (autonomous guided vehicles). They were used in the Automotive plants to deliver parts to the assembly lines. The version that I worked on years ago followed tape on the floor and had proximity sensors to prevent collisions. Newer ones don’t need the tape and instead have homing beacons. I now do a lot of work in automated warehouses and they have AGV “spiders” that can run up tracks on the shelves scan and retrieve packages.