Industrial Controls to Embedded Controls Transfer 2

[nornrich]

All,

I know of someone who has 10 years of experience with Industrial Controls (PLC programming, control cabinents, 480V). He is looking to try something new and wants to jump over to embedded controls (PCB, microprocessors, low voltage). Does anyone else have experience doing this and if so what are the challenges to doing this successfully. Any advice will be helpful

Regards,

Rich....

Richard Nornhold, PE

 

[itsmoked]

Ouch. That is quite the leap.
I think it is a poor idea.

A lot of the stuff he wants to shift to is being shifted to cheap labor countries,(rapidly).

The panel stuff and PLC know how cannot be easily shifted overseas. There is a ton of interesting stuff in the PLC/panel realm. I would suggest he look at associated fields and enjoy expanding on the knowledge he has garnered over the last decade. VFD stuff, drives, DCS, instrumentation, wireless, are all deep parallel subjects skills/people are always needed in.

Keith Cress
Flamin Systems, Inc.-

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[skills]

I did the same thing this person is contemplating. I don't know I would advise it as a career move unless this person really likes starting over. As smoked said, this is the industry that has been exported to cheap labor markets and what have you. Challenges?? Well, building good relationships with board houses and board fab shops that will nurture/ tutor you in your infancy. Learn a good board schematic capture layout suite such as Protel DXP of Multisim/Ultiboard and study board layout strategy from some online sources and the engineers at your boardhouse. I wouldn't EVEN advocate doing this unless this person is very strong in basic electronic/ electrical design right now.
As regards embedded systems, remember this next statement. Expertise in Assembler, Basic, and C are really a must-have if you are going to produce anything much at all. If you were to settle on the Atmel AVR family you could use the AVR-Basic compiler for that and probably never need another language; but, that's a special case. I'd do it again even though itsmoked is right, I am just stubborn and what to do it ALL!!!

Circuit design and embedded systems are much easier to design today than 20 years ago because All the tools are so much more advanced and processors have more developed resources onboard so they come with functions I used to have to develop from scratch.

To ease into this, use one of the 3 new chips thats been developed that integrates Ladder Logic and basic intepreter as parralel sections of same controller. Here's one

http://www.divelbiss.com/products/p...C_on_a_Chip_Module/plconchip_mod-overview.asp

Here's an easier one to grasp.

http://cubloc.com/product/01_01.php

Each of these new products are to enable the plc programmer to buy a $30 chip and design a OEM controller; but, they allow you to tie I/O points to a independent Basic program as well. It's an entry point before you go entirely to Rabbit controllers with C langauge or an Atmel AVR with Basic.

Don't even start with Microchip, that's where I learned to cuss and spit, it is major crap to use the tools out there for that and nothing works as good as it sounds.

Pick an endeavor that is specific and stay with it until to are accomplished. Expect to work much harder for a year and you'll not be disapointed.


My 5 cents worth.

http://www.paragontechnicalsystems.com

 

[dpc]

I agree with Keith, if he is doing this for financial reasons, I'd think he would be better off staying with the 480V/PLC/Control Panel path. There's a pretty good market for people who can straddle the 480 V power world and the networked "smart device" world and keep things running. You'd be amazed at the ungodly rat's nests (sorry Keith - more rats) of PLC programs out there. It's like turning over a rock and watching the spiders come out.

If he just wants to do something different, then skills has some great tips. There's a big jump between programming PLCs and doing embedded system programming in C. He might want to take a programming class before he quits his day job.

 

[skills]

It is a signifigantly different world. Harder or easier, neither one really. If you learn micropressor development first, as I did, then PLC control development will always seem a bit 'off' maybe and you note the differences. If one has no programming language background at all apart from plc ladder logic, I would let it go myself, if however, you have a history of programming in Basic, Assembly, Forth, C, or you are content to forget trying to view microprocessor development in terms of your experience with industrial controls such as a PLC. Most folk can't leave things behind that they know and it kills moving on, some can pretend like there's no yesterday, that will determine whether one would fare well or not in many cases. A PLC is a machine that is meant to emulate relay control panels and many never seperate the logical operations from an allusion to the devices that spawned the associations. If this person is one of those, forget the notion of embedded development altogether.

Embedded controllers require attention to a bunch of messiness that the PLC OS shields the user from. If someone doesn't like thinking about the details, forget embedded development.

If he cringes when the PLC calls functions written in IL or stage or some other mnemonic code, absolutely forget any embedded development.

But, we are beginners at everything new we strive for and I probably always seem like a beginner to people!!!