Hey everyone!

I've been working on a personal project called Panel Master, an affordable CAD software for designing electrical control panels.

https://panelmaster.app/

It lets you arrange components using real-world dimensions, quickly make changes to your layouts, and generate technical documentation in PDF. You can also export designs as SVG for use in other programs, or generate DXF files with cutting lines for machining mounting holes.

It includes a fairly extensive library of generic components, which I'd like to keep expanding based on what users need.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and any feedback you might have!

Edit: I've created a subreddit for Panel Master, where you can follow updates, share your designs, and discuss ideas or suggestions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PanelMaster/

Source - Stronpoint Automation

JiB, Jug in Box sidepicking palletizer for increased case rate applications

This is my first self employed project.

I drawed electrical plan with EPLAN. PLC and HMI programming. All with AllenBradley..

I’ve seen more downtime caused by labeling, grounding, or terminal mistakes than by the PLC itself. Curious what kinds of “small things” have bitten others in the field.

Sausage machine coating the skins with alginate before packaging

Since I’m now retired, I’m organizing some of my stuff & came across these artifacts from my past.

I worked for system integrators & we had to interface to & program devices of all kinds. This was mainly pre-internet when it was difficult & time consuming to get info on cables & pinouts. My company was reluctant to buy factory cables so we often made our own.

So first of, yes I know nothing is labeled, but it’s all in order. I’m waiting for my terminal block jumpers and then I’ll label each. This controls some very old brooders. A friend went to help me and he did the wiring on the door. It’s my first panel with plc that I built.

Hi everyone,

We built this fab automation demo on Sodero, a platform I co-founded. I’d like to show you how it works and hear your thoughts.

I’ve worked in robotics and automation for many years. In some projects, I’ve seen hardware built before the design was fully settled. Engineers then had to integrate and debug everything on site, often under tight deadlines. Changes at that stage could take a lot of time and money.

That experience led us to a software-first approach: build and test the control software in simulation before moving to real hardware. We call this Reverse Digital Twin.

In this demo, the control software runs with a physics simulation. Controllers send commands to the robots and devices, and receive their status in return.

For example, the mobile robot uses simulated RGB-D camera data to find its position and plan its movement. It then sends motor commands to the simulation to reach its destination.

We can test the software this way before connecting it to real equipment. We still need to test it on the actual hardware, but I belive this approach reduce risks a lot because we can validate the system correcetness at least.

Using our existing platform, an LLM agent, and our MCP server, we put this demo together in less than a day. This included the models, device setup, and task logic.

Would this be useful in your projects?

Started the day thinking “yeah, this won’t be too bad.”
Fast forward a few hours: two people crammed into a cabinet, wire everywhere, knees on concrete, and that one signal you swear you already landed.

Industrial automation isn’t glamorous, but when it finally powers up clean… totally worth it.

One of my colleague had went for an internship in a company, There someone asked him why only 4-20 mA is used as an signal in any industry.

Why not any other range like 4-40 mA or anything else Current is used because voltage has issues of drop etc. but why this specific range!

I'm a final-year process automation engineering student in Azerbaijan, aiming for a career in this field. Besides the tools we already use (LabVIEW, TIA Portal, AutoCAD Electrical), which certificates or skills would make me stand out globally? What do employers actually value on a resume for an automation engineer role

I planned on using a shield ground bar(picture 1) to terminal the cable shield to ground on my analog signals coming from field wiring to the plc. The field side Analog signal will terminate on terminals then the shield will be clamped to the bar. Then the other side will go from the terminals to the PLC. My question is how would you do the other side? Would you out another ground bar on the other side to clamp that cable to ground? Or would you just land the shield wires on terminals and connect the 2 cables together?

What do you use to clip off pins on these things?

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of marketing on using electric actuators instead of pneumatic. In some applications, it does make sense, but I've been thinking a lot about what other people are considering when designing a new system.

For repetitive linear motion, what normally makes you choose a pneumatic cylinder over an electric actuator?

I’m thinking about things like cost, energy use, speed/force, positioning and maintenance, but I’m more interested in how people make this decision in real applications.

What tends to be the deciding factor for you?

I design burner control systems for a living.

Basically almost every burner, boiler, or air handler company at some point has gone to Honeywell and said make me a flame safeguard the works the way I want.

This has lead to there being a ton of various top level models. Worse still is that the final digits in the part number can give a wildly different behavior with in the series. See the rm7890 for examples.

Worse still is there is practically no one at Honeywell to call for information. A lot of models are not listed on the website but are in catalogs. Big issue when looking for a data sheet.

The external sales representatives will often only know the one or the their big customers use and not the depth of the product line. All those people have retired.

Had a shop with a dead XP-based CNC system, no install media, and a USB stick with nothing but the runtime folder from a previous operator.

I rebuilt the environment from scratch inside a fresh XP VM, patched dependencies manually, rebuilt registry paths, and got it stable enough to pass a serial COM handshake to the controller.

No dongle cracks — real USB passthrough. No OS image — just forensic folder structure + stubbornness.

Machine’s back online. Client’s running production.

The whole goal here was to preserve the toolchain without replacing the machine. Would love to connect with anyone else working in legacy control systems, serial comms, or runtime virtualization.

I'm trying to come up with a laner/diverter for bottles/jars and I'm curious how these function?

Are these all pneumatic? How is the timing done?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh3OMq45Mvc

I am a Technical Manager at an Ice Cream Cake plant and I do all of the PLC and controls work for the lines. I have a mechanic who has a lot of controls troubleshooting skills and some basic PLC skills in the Allen Bradley environment and I will be training him to help me with projects and troubleshooting on the lines. The plant manager asked me to make a list of skills that he needs to be able to perform on his own at the end of the three months to show that he will be able to perform the job if we give it to him full time. To be honest it never crossed my mind to make a list since I was looking for over a year to find a skilled PLC tech and failed. This is the list that I have so far. What other things should I list that a beginner PLC tech should be able to show after three months?

Perform tag searches using the find and cross reference feature.

Rung editing and testing.

Understand XIO vs XIC bits.

Troubleshooting card and drive communication faults.

Going online to a PLC without knowing the IP address

loading an IP address using bootp or IPconfig

Understand linear star vs dual nic and how to use it.

Adding a debounce timer to a photo eye or prox.

loading a VFD program file directly from the PLC

Troubleshooting in the RS logix500 environment.

Understand the difference between the legacy programs in the SLC series vs the controllogix series.

Understanding the difference with firmware versions.

Loading HMI files using a PC.