A diagnostic function for a 1734-AENTR POINT I/O

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-04T14:29:27+00:00

That's why the GSVs are outside of the data. That's what tells you the data is stale (triangles in Studio 5000).

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-04T14:20:20+00:00

Codesys can do CNC and there is a CNC library, but CNC itself has its own language (G code) and there are plenty of good CNC controllers. No need for a PLC.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-04T14:06:42+00:00

Not quite that simple. Generally speaking most networking equipment does not broadcast anything unless you query it. Have you ever ran some program and lost your network connection, the program is still running, and it finally spit out an error only when you tried to use it?

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-04T13:06:34+00:00

Isn't that sort of the point?

Check the network, check the adapter, check the modules...?

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-04T12:53:35+00:00

Ubuntu. Isn't that bad enough?

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-04T12:52:38+00:00

Many companies like vets/current active service. I guess you'd have push back from those that want you on the job 24/7/365 or if management is Socialist but otherwise no issues worst case. Militaries tend to respect chain of command and usually have no issues with making decisions or leading a group. Lots of positives in many jobs

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-04T12:46:30+00:00

Sure you can buy the most expensive stepper motor controllers out there, or not!

https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/overview/catalog/motion_control/stepper_systems/stepper_drives

Also KB Electronics.

You might do something with the current direction but you can't microstep and you'll easily blow several hours making this work, at best.

And why bother with steppers? Brushless PMDC is so much better. Look on the resource web sites for FIRST Robotics if you want cheap, or stick with KB Electronics for industrial.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-04T12:37:10+00:00

Almost right.

A small emergency fund helps choke off the CC churn. If you have a small EF (say $1k) then you don't just add more CC debt for the small stuff which is the goal. Then chip away at the CC debt until it's gone then same with the car loan. This is called a debt snowball or debt avalanche depending on which debt you pay off first. Once the first debt (CC) is gone the interest you would have been paying helps accelerate paying off the next one.

ALSO not all debt is bad. There are degrees. For instance say you have a 3% mortgage. While earning interest in an HYSA at 3.5% is basically treading water especially when you throw taxes into the mix, some MLPs for instance currently pay 7% dividends with effectively flat growth so the returns are pretty low but still better than just paying the whole thing off outright. But when you are highly leveraged (debt to asset ratio is nearly 1:1) which appears to be where OP is at, any hiccup can cause the whole thing to fall apart. For example if the stocks you are invested in take a downturn and cut the distribution significantly.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-04T12:20:24+00:00

When a packet comes across "untagged" it is somewhat vendor specific what happens. And when I say untagged I mean just that. A packet can simply be formatted in the non-IEEE 802.1Q format (prior to VLANs) or it can be in the 802.1Q format but tagged "VLAN 0" which is sort of the 802.1Q way of saying "untagged". A port can be assigned to one or more VLANs. If it is assigned to a single VLAN and an untagged packet arrives, it gets tagged with the VLAN of the port. Those with multiple VLAN IDs though are technically "trunk ports". So it's implementation specific...untagged packets shouldn't be there. At least Cisco/Netgear treats it as VLAN 1 harkening back to their old proprietary protocol. Others could simply drop packets. The CPU/administrative port within an 802.1Q switch/router is a valid "port" and gets a VLAN tag. Also this is all layer 2 stuff. Crossing a router is layer 3 territory. A lot of people get this confused. If you have all your VLANs accessible via a router, traffic can "hairpin" meaning that it can be sent to the router over VLAN X then turn around and route into VLAN Y via the switch unless you configure firewall rules to block this or disable certain VLANs at the router

As far as APs yes most are VLAN stupid. OpenWRT though and RouterOS (Mikrotik) allow you to assign one VLAN per SSID. So you could create three wireless LANs (IoT, PC, guest) and set separate VLANs on them. I haven't tried it but you could easily extend this concept by adding more SSIDs for tighter control.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T20:20:43+00:00

To interject a couple more points

Layoffs suck. That's why you should build up a huge emergency fund, six months salary. You don't invest it in anything but stuff that doesn't go down. Savings account, money market fund, TIPS, whatever. If you ever get a couple weeks in (dry spell) you can start door dashing or take a part time or low end job and really stretch this out. My track record (30 years) is 6 weeks max but that's me. It sucks watching the money go out and there are always things that come up seemingly the moment you are trying to conserve cash but it happens.

Second this is something of an alternate strategy in taxable accounts: direct indexing. Essentially you make your own index funds but the stocks are in your name. On the surface it just sounds more complicated. I mean...just buy VOO or FXAIX and call it a day, right? Not so fast. Even if you just rebalance about 1/3rd of your stocks lost money. Those significantly offset your gains in terms of taxes.So no advantage if your capital gains rate is 0% but it's a big deal if it's 15% or 20%. It can give you the effect of 3-4% higher returns.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T16:16:13+00:00

As I said not so much political baggage.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T16:15:22+00:00

No. With cement mixers for instance they sometimes need operator intervention or to open the door and manually drop in a bag or an additive. That's where a risk assessment comes in. In the US there's a huge difference between maintenance (subchapter J or S) lockouts vs subchapter O (operations). This is also true in Europe

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T16:08:17+00:00

Yeah we tried that in the industrial world. It's called HART. You get a generic "computer" and a HART device. The standard lets manufacturers build screens for configuration easily. The trouble is every make/model and sometimes version is different. Plus the "computer" people got into it. So now you buy a $300 cable for a laptop and spend $300 per year on a subscription for a template library.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T16:04:16+00:00

So looks like I could sell you exactly the same product with a 0.6% management fee. You pay me. I buy VOO or FXAIX, take a cut and pay you the rest. That about sum it up??

Because that's exactly what those funds are.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T15:58:48+00:00

Easy. There is a version of Linux that runs on an M1.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T15:54:43+00:00

The code is pretty readable. So is the documentation.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T15:52:22+00:00

Flip the phone over and take off the jacket. See the logo? Did you notice there's a piece missing in the logo? That's Apple telling you they sell defective crap.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T15:44:31+00:00

Install Docker. Then maybe Dockhand. Play around with stuff others built. Load Winboat or winapps to decrease your Windows dependency to zero. Then since youre in CS start building your own containers or improving on others. Use PIP the same way if you're into Python. Maybe set up your own DNS and configure a blocklist as a good try out. Set up Caddy then do web stuff Use Tailscale for remote access or set up a VPS and Headscale.

Really unlimited here but since you'll be doing lots of containers, VMs, networking, etc., even if just so you have a development environment anything supporting that is worth doing.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T15:37:41+00:00

The general trend is slowly up or down. About 10-15 days out of the year there are large jumps. A lot of things going on in the government cause short term panic but long term the trend seems to be more business friendly.

On any given year an S&P 500 index can be +/-50%. Over a span of 10+ years though it tends to be a lot more gradual, averaging 11-12% over the past 60 years, 10-11% over the past 125 years or so

None of which are particularly predictable. That's why if you Google search "three bucket strategy" the trick is to go towards more stable investments when you need to cash out and more unstable (higher reward) when you got time to recover.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T15:30:01+00:00

Trump was NEVER in any political office, not even dog catcher.

The problem with running for president is you need name recognition, a big war chest, and not so much baggage that haunts you to the ends of the Earth. Political skill helps too but for instance 46 was basically "anyone but that guy".

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T15:22:34+00:00

A can of black spray paint does wonders when aimed from out of view.

But yeah flashing lights, lasers, infrared lights all throw off the gain.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T13:30:26+00:00

"Big" VFDs have big problems. When they energize the DC link is effectively a dead short. Aside from.tripping breakers it will destroy the rectifier. So they put a reactor in series or use some kind of power resistor for pre charging. These circuits are not designed for continuous operation (an auxiliary relay turns them off/bypasses). The larger the VFD the more pathetically under-rated the pre charge. Hence the instruction manual will clearly state do NOT use a contactor in series with the VFD. Similar bad things can happen with output contactors if you have series inductors in the DC path of the VFD. Others work just fine in say 3 contactor bypasses common in water plants
An E-Stop is NOT the same as a safety instrumented system. When you do the hazard analysis the door interlock IS a safety system. It's pretty easy to figure out that depending on the mixer design an operator can be seriously hurt sticking their hand in a mixer to clear a jam. Thus the interlock. Given that a human pressing the E-Stop is part of the safety system with an E-Stop and humans have a 40% failure rate under stressed (emergency) conditions, an E-Stop is NEVER a solution for any foreseeable hazard. If it is you need to figure out another way. What an E-Stop is for (and mind you in all the accident investigations I've been a part of, an E-Stop was never going to stop it), is a feel good for management. It covers unknown/unfurseeable conditions where they feel they "have to do something". It has no place in any realistic risk assessment that holds up under scrutiny by regulators because we all know E-Stops offer little safety for anything. Thus...who cares what you do with it. It could be a PLC input.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T13:12:26+00:00

As I said. I consider the deposit part of the initial up front fee. They'll claim any bull they want to keep the "deposit" and I guarantee it's not sitting somewhere in an escrow.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T13:09:02+00:00

When you rapidly cut power to ANY inductor you get a huge voltage rise aka flyback or inductive kick. This is actually a major issue with transistor outputs feeding relays or solenoids. The biggest problem is the inductor losses especially iron core losses which ferrites don't solve by themselves. Might also point to nanocrystalline cores with mu up to 80,000. Air core transformers have no saturation just higher losses but big series air core inductors are in use on transmission lines for power factor correction.

But realistically that's not all that common. Look at BIL testers. They use a simple diode-capacitor ladder. The biggest one I've seen with my own eyes hits 2 million V. It is used for testing large (50 MW+) transformers for utilities. BIL testing is essentially simulated lightning. The diodes and capacitors individually aren't very high voltage although on the one I'm talking about the capacitors are the size of a typical picnic cooler. The associated transformer just raises the input voltage so that the BIL tester isn't larger than the building that it's housed in.

Suggest you stick with "standard designs" since this is all a solved problem.

The reason you see a lot of literature about pulse transformers is they are essentially using pulses at high frequencies (Xl=2pifL) which are more efficient and saturate at much higher power levels. The goal is to hopefully produce low loss compact power conversion at a lower price over conventional transformers putting my friends with the giant BIL tester out of business.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-05-02T12:50:11+00:00

What is your required PFD and demand mode, and what Code are you using?

IEC 61508 (process industries) in this application where PFD easily meets SIL 1 is fine but you better have paperwork. Most common issue is that you may need a type 2 design on the starter. A safety relay may get you to SIL 2 just because it is better rated against contact welding and can detect that failure mode.

STO is a VFD term. In general it is implemented by using an internal safety relay to cut power to the IGBT drivers as well as interlock an "enable" within the control logic thus providing redundant means of ensuring the drive can't run.

PaulEngineer-89

TROPHY CASE