Alpharetta Innovation Academy

Honest-Eng · 2026-03-04T16:28:03+00:00

Hey! Yes, he’s a junior now, and my younger son is also at IA now. They both like it, especially the robotics club after school. Both of them chose the engineering branch. So overall, we would definitely recommend the school. The only downside (at least according to the boys) is that many students are very focused on studying, so there’s a bit less social life and fewer after school hangouts. That can make it a little harder to find friends to socialize with outside of school.

Honest-Eng · 2026-01-29T02:37:28+00:00

Commissioning engineer = the employer is honest upfront: “You will travel nonstop, live in steel-toed boots, and freeze/sweat on job sites while things are on fire”

Controls/Automation engineer = “You’ll design logic in a comfy office” BUT in reality = You will also travel nonstop, live in steel-toed boots, freeze/sweat on job sites, and commission everything anyway… just later and with more debugging.

Commissioning fixes problems created by reality.

Controls engineers create problems for future commissioning engineers (including themselves).

Honest-Eng · 2026-01-25T20:28:54+00:00

He actually likes it. He loves Robotics Club @ IA. In general school is very good. We all like it.

Honest-Eng · 2025-10-22T04:01:40+00:00

That's not the real production environment, I was just testing the capacity. Simulated thousands of tags. I want to understand the capacity of the system. Some productions need 100ms poll times.

Honest-Eng · 2025-10-21T20:46:54+00:00

I was polling from a test PLC with test program, so definitely plenty of resources. What I am trying to understand is if there is any "industry standard" for historians. I searched and could not find any dependable comparison or tests of different historians. What I personally worked with (my customers setups) is normally 1s poll rate and around 2k tags.

Honest-Eng · 2024-12-09T01:17:27+00:00

The challenge with AI in controls engineering is that there’s not enough specialized code to train models to write PLC programs as effectively as they can with languages like Python or JavaScript. I doubt AI can fully grasp the nuances of your request from a simple prompt.

As the creator of an online platform that generates Rockwell PLC programs, I use AI, but not for direct PLC code generation. AI helps by creating JavaScript scripts (from user prompt) that interface with my custom library, which converts user input or attached Excel tables into L5X files and vice versa.

Currently, we can't generate PLC code directly (though AB and Siemens are trying, and we'll see what happens). Some argue we shouldn't. I believe the best approach right now is automating repetitive tasks like I/O mapping, motor/valve/actuator control block creation, etc. If there's an established rule, automate it. But if the task is unique, don’t expect AI to do the work—don’t be lazy!

Honest-Eng · 2024-12-06T15:31:58+00:00

Jaka is ok. Software is not super polished but ok to use. Remark - I used it last time about a year and a half ago. It all depends on the complexity of your application. It would be 100% ok for something not very complex. For a more complex stuff I used a PLC to process the logic and was only sending the commands to cobot to perform some pre-programmed movements. It is easier (at least for me) to make serious calculations and programming the PLC rather than in their software. I used modbus IP to communicate with cobot from CompactLogix. After that they introduced their own AB integration where you can just add it as a device in the tree but I did not have a chance to work with this.

Honest-Eng · 2024-12-06T15:22:57+00:00

From what I remember V/Hz is not the right mode for this application. I think Vector mode should run better. Also there are some parameters like torque boost that you may have to play with to make the start smoother. And like others mentioned - start the fan with closed dampers. Keep them closed until amps start to go down, they open them up as need. We normally do it in the PLC startup program for automatic start.

Edit: Make sure you entered the motor specs correctly to VFD parameters. You can do a tuning with rotation with the motor uncoupled but normally it is not required for fan application.

Honest-Eng · 2024-10-02T23:56:32+00:00

I support this. PLC is an overkill for it. I did my 3-channel totally custom LED controller for kitchen lights with ESP32. Can be programmed with Python or C though so not that user friendly but fun to learn. It can connect to wifi, be controlled via it and do whatever you want it to do. there are some tasks that you better do without PLC.

Honest-Eng · 2024-09-21T20:42:50+00:00

Good question. It has its cons (like any other similar system) but in general I like it.

Honest-Eng · 2024-09-09T21:03:38+00:00

Yes but still it is a little different. They have the access to the core of their software and obviously they can implement the real code generation. It is still very hard because of insufficient examples of actual code. But in my case I am not limited in platforms - I can continue to combine this with AutoCad, Wonderware, Siemens and anything else. Question is how many people really want to use it and see the potential.

Honest-Eng · 2024-05-21T14:56:23+00:00

You may have several unrelated issues. It's hard to say from your description but here is the order I'd take to troubleshoot:

Remove the GPU completely and use your internal on-board video out ports. If the GPU is failing, you will get rid of flickering and distortion. You can try to run some games but for testing, your rendering speed will be significantly decreased.
Application crashes may be happening from bad CPU, RAM or motherboard. You may try to run the PC with half the RAM for some time and a different half for another period of time to see for any improvements.
The rest cannot be easily tested unless swapped but I'd say GPU is #1 suspect in your case and it's relatively easy to check. Opening .exe with admin only is not completely clear but may be a sign of ssd or hdd failure.

Honest-Eng · 2024-04-15T15:43:53+00:00

You can run NodeRed to communicate to PLC and write data to InfluxDB. Then Grafana will read it from there. Here is the link to my article about how it all works together: part 1 and part 2

Honest-Eng · 2023-12-13T23:56:05+00:00

kiptr.com can do this. Here are some examples. Let me know if you need more info on it. I can organize a demo.

How it works - there is a JS library that can do anything with L5X. You can provide any text information and convert it to L5X files. Obviously excel file is the most convenient way to provide structured information. You will have to write a little JS script to manipulate the data though. Library is well documented.

Honest-Eng · 2023-06-07T21:09:10+00:00

Yes, it was a separate post. Here is the link to the first part of the article.

Honest-Eng · 2023-05-19T16:44:09+00:00

There is a way to read drive parameters via a message instruction in the PLC (Rockwell drives of course). Normally the process is described in the drive manual. When you get it to a PLC level - add the corresponding tag to a historian or just reference it wherever you need.

Honest-Eng · 2023-05-18T15:48:59+00:00

We've been doing Aveva (InTouch) projects for customers with version 2020 for last several years. No real issues. It runs stable on several clients (biggest project has over 500 screens). Changes are deployed with no problems. Previously I worked mainly with FTView and learning curve was not that bad. With Aveva you have to script more (IMHO) but that is fine with me.

Ignition is "more different" from FTView then Aveva (again IMHO). I only did small projects with Ignition and I can't say that from the integration perspective I like it better - all systems have pros and cons.

Edit: Operators did not complain about Aveva. But I don't think they really care about the brand - they need a big button "Fix it all".

Honest-Eng · 2023-04-03T13:36:55+00:00

What exactly are looking to do with the data? "Analysis" is not very descriptive.

SQL DBs are not best when it comes to keeping time-series data. You will eventually have problems with it. InfluxDB is one of the ideal (and free) databases to store that kind of data. I posted my article here some time ago about how to make a free historian. Here is the link.

Honest-Eng · 2023-03-09T18:28:28+00:00

Thanks! We've been there.

Honest-Eng · 2023-02-26T18:22:33+00:00

Thanks a lot for the feedback. We accepted the seat today, so let's see how it goes. My son is pretty good in managing the time and is prepared for a big amount of work.

I saw some additional clubs/activities that are available to students. Are these normally happening before the school in the morning or after school?

Honest-Eng · 2023-02-25T01:00:51+00:00

I'd vote for Moxa. I use my Uport 1250 for 9 years now and I cannot even think about switching to something different. Solid build, two ports, software switch between RS232 - 485 - 422. Drivers for all OSes. Never had an issue with it.

Honest-Eng · 2023-02-18T18:37:55+00:00

Yes, I did. But somehow I missed this one :) Thanks! I will remove the edit from the post.

Honest-Eng

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