Responsible for Automation Expo

After several experiences of exhibition participation, though I have lost the fresh feeling, the demonstration product is still much meaningful for me. It is the first equipment whose electrical design and software had been developed by myself. Fortunately, the product development had been launched earlier, especially for the PC software which had also showed in the last exhibition with the different communication version. On the other hand, the servo press itself which is the protagonist of this exhibition had been also started to be developed last year, although it hadn’t passed the formal functional and quality verifications currently. Thus, I want to test some critical function among the preparation of this exhibition, including the external communication which would be applied along the time in the demonstration process. By contrast, the entirely control of the machine had been launched merely three months ago. In the beginning, my daily work focused on the electrical design which I had to issue the diagram earlier but I was really good at. I had spent much time on referring the previous design and arrange the structural configuration into what is suitable for this demonstration.

However, the parts had been imported late, so the assembly progress had been delay also. In the schedule, I was supposed to test the demonstrated motion since July, but finally I had taken over the machine on the mere ten days before the exhibition. The main control of the equipment would be written in the PLC which simply consists of the basic program with the few pages in HMI and both of them I had finished last month. Initially, I faced the problem from hardware including the motor and external control module. The motor problem was just a joke because there was a mistake from the assembly. But the problem of external control module I exactly couldn’t find out the root cause, eventually I could do nothing but change the external control module. Next several steps, we conducted more smoothly, I had tried the communication between two machines and run the motion we would show on the exhibition. Another serious problems from the computer which had been installed the PC software to collect the data from servo press and show the chart and report. However, the PC installed the windows 7 lacked a large amount of essential framework library. I had really tried my hard time to install the different sorts of element with the bad quality network.

Finally, the demonstration had transferred to the exhibition hall as schedule. As well, I was responsible for the turning the machine on the preparation day prior to the launch of entire exhibition. Due to the experience last year, we knew more about the process of the exhibition preparation. The large parts of tasks in the beginning was the woodworking decoration, thus we only could supply the power to the machine in the last afternoon fastest. Unfortunately, when we uncovered our machine, we had discovered that several crucial components hadn’t been transferred here together, inclusive of the HMI. I had called to my colleague in the office who would arrive exhibition hall later. Next, we had encountered some program and woodworking decoration problems. The code had been modified and solved problems in the absolute short time, but the woodworking problems would be solved in the next early morning and finally catch up to the opening of the exhibition.

The advantage of the exhibition in Taiwan was that worker could be rotated every day. I merely required being in charge of first day which might face more unexpected problems. However, this year, the Marcom department had no only plan the Taipei exhibition, but also the smaller exhibition and seminar in hotel of central and southern Taiwan. Our product also participated above activities, but we only could demo our standard machine because our demonstration was necessary to be transferred to the Shanghai for another exhibition. The works in the central and southern exhibition were much easier because the show times were merely located in the break of the seminar. We had to tune the machine in each of the morning, so I had to move to Tainan the night before and lived in the same hotel. I had seldom visited Tainan and participated such sort of activities, so it was another very special experience for me.