Control Engineering

Unexpected Problems Faced Head On!
August 25, 2007

Much has happened since my last entry. It started with 4 days in the hospital after being hit head-on by a 4-wheeler while riding my bike (on a designated bike path prohibiting motorized vehicles). Don't remember a thing about the incident except someone saying an ambulance was on the way. I got CAT scanned from head to toe and then emergency surgery in the middle of the night to repair two broken bones in my lower left leg. A few lacerations, stitches, fractured vertebrae but the leg is the serious part. Just glad to still be with you......

Unfortunately, this happened the first evening of a strategic drive system retrofit at a grain elevator - we had taken a major system out of service and had to return it to service! My startup partner did the best he could, but I hadn't prepared him to do it alone. I consulted with him while in the hospital. When I checked out of the hospital on Saturday my wife was able to drive me to the job site. There we were able to park next to the electric center so I could help without getting out of the car. The client even found a long ethernet cable so I could handle monitoring and PLC changes from my car. What can I say, they were a very understanding client, and the system was up and running the next day.

So, for the next few weeks my office is my bed. Fortunately, again, we are well networked. With our office IP telephone system, calls ring thru to my bedside as if it was my desk; all transparent to the caller. I plug my notebook computer into the telephone and my usual office desktop appears. Makes one grateful for keeping up with the technology.

Back to the project. The city was able to make some progress with the problem pump station's obsolete controller (referred to in my last entry). This progress has been only enough to limp along, not enough to cover them during severe rains. This has set in motion an emergency request to get this pump station changed over to the proposed new controller. Of course, there is still the Phase 2 install portion that has not been awarded. We made a proposal on this portion at the City's request and they are considering how they can award it and maintain compliance with public bid laws.

Regarding the master plan, we had a series of conference calls involving the new primary consultant, the data center and Verizon. This was predominately technical in nature, so the consultant could become fully aware of what was existing and what additional services were available if needed.

Finally, we switched the data center co-located SCADA servers to use the high end firewall services offered by the data center. We had budgeted to do this once the project was completed. With the delay in completing, the limited firewall we had implemented for use during development proved inadequate. We believe unauthorized users were using services on our servers that caused high bandwidth usage which we have been charged for. It has proven more cost effective to have implemented the full firewall from the start.

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