Route to enter the industry

J

Thread Starter

Jimmy

Hi, I'm looking at getting into the automation / control systems industry but sure of what I need to learn and how to get my foot in the door. I'm UK based for reference.

Most jobs seem to be looking for people with PLC experience, which seems a bit chicken and egg. I've had a look on ebay to see if I could pick up a cheap Beckhoff unit and a few different modules but for a bus coupler, one DI, one DO, one A,I and one AO would be a £3-400 min! Too much.

I've been curious for a while but I have been working a bit with an external contractor at work who programs our Beckhoff controllers that we use for I/O between some control panels and our software I've started to become more enthusiastic. I like the idea of the mix of mechanical / electrical and computing. I have much more interest in the physical world than the virtual one!

I think I've got a good starting point of knowledge but not sure what else I need to learn / practice before applying for jobs and how best to sell myself, getting the to a interview is always the tough first step! So I'm looking for advice on these fronts.

A quick bit of background / my current knowledge.

I am currently working as a developer for simulation software (job title is simulation engineer, Fortran and a little C++). I've gained a little experience with modbus (talking to the beckhoff controller mentioned earlier) through this role and a tiny bit with OPC. I didn't get to code up a OPC interface as we have a third party dll, it was just a case of setup all the dam DCOM!

Previous to that I was doing fluid dynamics research and previous to that disease modelling (Matlab).

I hold a current 17th edition wiring regulation certificate, (its the U.K electrical regulations for wiring).

My weakest point is probably electronics where I've only done some basic hobby work / experimentation to teach myself something on the subject like getting a microcontroller (AVR, using C) to flash leds, listen for button press, UART over RS232, set up a basic PWM to dim a led. I'm aware of voltage to current conversion methods, basic DAC but have not implemented anything personally. Designing a full on D/A circuit would be well beyond me, my knowledge here is pretty high level.

I've an rough overview understanding of but no detailed knowledge or experience about RTOS.

My mechanical knowledge is pretty good from personal hands-on experience and the work simulating machinery / processes I currently do.

So if anyone can give me a shove in the right direction what knowledge I should concentrate on and best way to move in to the control systems / automation field I'd be grateful. U.K specific advice double points.
 
B

Bruce Durdle

The first requirement for anyone wanting to work in control systems or automation is a good understanding of the systems to be controlled - ie, the mechanical/chemical/fluid mechanics aspects of the thing that the electronics/pneumatics/PLC/?? is hung on to. I have seen some very good programmers make some glorious cock-ups because they ignored this fundamental. You've been doing some modelling so have probably found this out already - it's hard to model something if you don't know how it works.

Component-level electronic design is not an issue - most control work involves putting different modules of some sort together. The main issue is interfacing - getting manufacturer A's flingle to connect physically to manufacturer B's doohickey (without blowing up either, and making sure they both understand the language). These can be software, hardware or a combination. At a higher level you may have to get a boxes containing n=both hardware and software elements to talk to each other.

You need electronics/electrical knowledge at two extremes. At one level, matching circuits is simply (usually) a matter of Ohm's Law and making sure that sources and loads are matched for voltage and current-handling ability. At the other end you get into the detail of data communications, which can be quite a complex beast. There's not much need to get involved with stuff in between.

With a good background in software/computing, you could do worse than read up on the IT requirements of control systems as opposed to standard data processing applications and then use that as a starting point for extending your skills into making things happen in the real world.
 
Thanks for the reply.

> The first requirement for anyone wanting to work in control systems or
> automation is a good understanding of the systems to be controlled - ie, the
> mechanical/chemical/fluid mechanics aspects of the thing that the

That's good as my degrees are applied maths, so all physics and mechanics understanding the system.

> You need electronics/electrical knowledge at two extremes.
<snip>
> At the other end you get into the detail of data communications, which
> can be quite a complex beast. There's not much need to get involved with stuff
> in between.

Like debugging a RS232 signal?

> With a good background in software/computing, you could do worse
> than read up on the IT requirements of control systems as opposed to standard
> data processing applications and then use that as a starting point for
> extending your skills into making things happen in the real world.

During lunch today I did have a quick surf and started to uncover the basic architecture of some systems, distributed and centralised. Most of the information I found was fairly vague unfortunately.
 
You have an IT qualification and software programming experience, so while this isnt everything you need to be an automation engineer it should be enough for you to get a foot in the door.

If your current employer doesn't have this type of role available or wont consider you for that role then your best target is one of the major automation suppliers. (assuming they have a presence in the area where you want to work). Target companies like ABB, Emerson, Rockwell (Allan Bradley) Siemens, Invensys, etc. If these companies don't have engineering offices near where you live then you will need to try smaller systems integration companies.

Organise your CV to emphasise your programming skills, hardware skills, experience with PLC's etc. Go for the junior positions first - no one will (or should) hire you for a senior engineering or software development position. But good software skills are hugely important in DCS and PLC programming.

Persistence pays. Your first job might take a while to find.
 
B

Bruce Durdle

Debugging communications is a good example of what I meant by getting two systems to talk to each other. Problems can arise because the baud rate. parity, stop bits etc don't match, and if you look at the posts on control.com there are quite a few which relate to people trying to find the right byte order or other detail. Another issue is decoding the results when you do get data - as an example, a few years ago I as involved in getting a densitometer to talk to a SCADA system. We managed to get the serial comms going once I persuaded the software guru that the reason we were getting back the message we had sent was nothing to do with reflections (which he became obsessed with) but everything to do with having the computer receive port listening while it was transmitting on a 2-wire RS-485 line. Once he turned off the receiver during transmission, we got good data.
But then to make sense of the results we had to figure out that the numbers were in fact given as absolute pressure in kPa, and absolute temperature in K, rather than the gauge bars and degC we were led to believe by the manual.

So there can be hardware and software (and dare I say it wetware) issues to sort out. But we still had to appreciate that what we were looking for were numbers that made sense in the context of gas density measurement and temperature/pressure corrections.
 
You have more than enough experience/knowledge to get a foot in the door.

I started in the industry last year with just a diploma in automation engineering and a certificate in plc/hmi programming. No experience besides school. It is going well and I know people in the industry who started with less than what I did.
 
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