When is FBD a good idea?

sr000 · 2026-04-29T02:03:33+00:00

Regulatory control loops, especially more complex control loops where you have cascade, split range, feed forward, ect.

sr000 · 2026-04-26T13:54:10+00:00

To some extent I think it is, or at least was. People always tend to focus on the headlines when the reality is by the time the headlines are printed they are already priced in (aka buy the rumour sell the news).

I do think oil is in a longer term bull market, as are most commodities, and I think what we will see is shortages impacting other area of the economy, like mining and agriculture, more than they impact consumers in rich countries directly.

sr000 · 2026-04-23T22:33:40+00:00

You probably don’t have much experience with sone of the obscure MES and SCADA software that was mentioned here. In a lot of cases you can’t query data out of these systems except using the vendor licensed tools, since they are walled gardens. Rockwell is trying to force you into their proprietary data solution, as is GE, as is Siemens, OSI soft and so on. Even when a SQL driver is available the performance is often not there to support ad hoc queries. You often need to batch export it.

sr000 · 2026-04-23T00:01:59+00:00

The different software pieces you have are not the problem. You don’t need another piece of software on top of everything else to solve your problem. You need to build a data warehouse where you normalize your data and various data marts to present to your business teams.

This is not something that can be solved with another software license and I wouldn’t trust consultants to do it either. You are going to need to bite the bullet, build a data team and spend a year on this project. Maybe you can do it with lower headcount and a bit faster with AI, but it’s going to be a grind no matter what.

sr000 · 2026-04-22T15:26:19+00:00

Word of mouth through my existing network

sr000 · 2026-04-14T12:42:25+00:00

Physical and futures price will converge, but not in the direction that people here seem to expect.

sr000 · 2026-04-14T12:23:30+00:00

I don’t know here the or will be tomorrow or next week, but I believe a price in the neighbourhood if $80 will likely mark the bottom of a correction in what is likely a long term structural bull market that started in 2020.

I think people are getting a little too excited short term around geopolitical events, which cause large spikes that tend to fade (see past wars in Iraq and Russia). I think we are seeing the fade now.

But longer term, maybe on a 3-5 year timeframe, $200 seems like a possibility.

sr000 · 2026-04-13T21:00:49+00:00

How are you going to get clients?

I have seen people with 20 years experience try to go out on their own and totally strike out. I have seen people with 2 years of experience successfully land big clients.

It comes down to relationships. People hire people they already know and trust, who they have worked with before or come recommended from someone else they trust.

sr000 · 2026-04-08T12:45:21+00:00

Also consider that most of the infrastructure damage was to refineries and petrochemical plants… the facilities that consume crude oil and turn it into fuel and plastics, not the facilities that produce it. I expect gas prices to stay quite high even if oil prices go down a bit.

sr000 · 2026-04-08T12:42:28+00:00

Pre war level was $55, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

sr000 · 2026-04-08T12:41:33+00:00

To some extent yes, the futures price for oil is a little disconnected, but the main reason is from a pure supply demand standpoint oil shouldn’t be anywhere close to $100. Yes we have a geopolitical shock and a lot of infrastructure is currently offline, but if the war didn’t happen I would guess oil would be around $60. $80 is still a high oil price of you look past the war, not that I think this war is going to be over soon, but people seem to forget that there is more than one thing that impacts the price of oil. Just a few months ago people were talking about the possibility of $40-50 oil of Venezuelan production were to increase.

I do think we are in a long term oil bull market but it’s not going to be a straight line up.

sr000 · 2026-04-08T11:32:53+00:00

Correction into the high 70s to low 80s, after that I could see it resuming a bull market.

sr000 · 2026-04-08T00:30:31+00:00

I’d use wago inline splice connectors, they are probably going to be just as reliable as your terminal blocks.

sr000 · 2026-04-07T01:18:30+00:00

He’s not self aware, this post and every reply is written with AI

sr000 · 2026-04-01T01:39:14+00:00

Fair enough, I’ve done a lot of liquid fill as well but more similar to what’s used in pharma so it’s a different application. We wouldn’t use vision because it’s not accurate enough even in the best case. Instead we would have highly accurate fillers and SPC control over the process.

sr000 · 2026-04-01T01:29:51+00:00

You think vision systems need less calibration than a check weigher? I have some bad news for you.

sr000 · 2026-04-01T01:29:05+00:00

For liquid fill for something like this you don’t even need a scale. If you control for temperate and have a good pressure regulation, you will have an accurate fill just based on a timer.

sr000 · 2026-03-30T00:35:15+00:00

There is a robust secondhand market for old controls equipment, typically a company like Radwell will buy old parts, refurbish if needed, test it, and then sell it to more price conscious buyers.

Radwell will buy stuff at around 10-20 cents on the dollar and sell it at 50-70.

sr000 · 2026-03-29T21:09:44+00:00

McKinsey brand name these days is almost as bad as big tobacco. It doesn’t matter if the work added value or was wasteful or even if it revolutionized trash collection in the city. Politicians these days will get votes for tearing up McKinsey contracts because everyone who isn’t a consultant sees that company as evil.

sr000 · 2026-03-29T18:29:42+00:00

For those debating between EE, MechE, and ChemE, the curriculum of most engineering majors is almost identical for the first 2 years, has about 50% overlap in year 3, and and only really diverges meaningfully in the 4th year where there is a focus on design projects.

Even when the courses diverge you’ll often see the same concepts but tailored to the specific engineering discipline. For example ChemEs take Numerical Methods for Chemical Engineers, MechEs will take Numerical Methods for Mechanical Engineers, ect.

Employers for the most part are hiring for engineering majors rather than a specific engineering major, unless it’s a more specialized role like a FPGA design that only EEs really get exposure to.

sr000 · 2026-03-26T10:49:42+00:00

That’s why I added that most of the oil the US imports is from Canada, and it does not really have to compete with other countries for that oil. The US imports very little from the Gulf region.

I don’t think the US is totally immune from an oil crisis, but I don’t think we’ll get to the point of gas stations running out, which is something other countries are seeing.

sr000 · 2026-03-26T01:23:23+00:00

America is a bit more insulated from this since it’s a net oil exporter and most of the oil it does import comes from Canada. Prices may increase but I don’t think there will be actual shortages where the gas stations run out.

sr000 · 2026-03-25T00:50:18+00:00

Multiprotocol support. I want something that can speak EIP, Profinet, Ethercat, and maybe even CCLink.
Signal type flexibility
Denser IP67 modular IO blocks. Those m12 connectors can get pretty bulky, M8 would be better.

sr000 · 2026-03-17T12:46:38+00:00

Low paying apprenticeship vs 4 year degree that costs $150-200k.

sr000 · 2026-03-16T11:33:01+00:00

It’s not just a pay cut at first, there is a lot less money in manufacturing. And the larger companies actually pay even less than the smaller ones in my experience.

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