Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Tuesday, June 9--Bob Pierce on “Manufacturing Automation powered by VFP – Part 1.”



Our next meeting will be Tuesday, June 9. Bob Pierce will present “Manufacturing Automation powered by VFP – Part 1.”

Smooth-On Inc., with $50 Million annual production recently moved into a much larger facility to accommodate our growth.  It was decided that we take the opportunity to modernize the operation using automation controlled by Visual FoxPro.  In our process we use 600 chemicals to produce 1400 formulas that go into 6000 finished goods that are sold globally through our distributer network, and ecommerce.  I will explain why VFP was selected for this project, some of the pitfalls of that choice, and the complexities of interaction with pumps/valves/ mixers/sensors in the real world.  There was quite a bit of planning and advanced preparation. But not unexpectedly a lot of nuance we didn’t anticipate and a number of things we missed altogether.  Although the process is not complete, we are well on our way; In Part 2 I will discuss further developments including full formula automation and automation of the pack out process.


1 comment:

Olaf Doschke said...

> I will explain why VFP was selected for this project, some of the pitfalls of that choice

I can only second that. In the past 15 years I worked on the similar topic, but with very low focus on the automation aspect of a production facility. A software I reimplemented and maintained for Beiersdorf AG is also about the development of formulas, the figures of chemicals used and production formulas are much higher than here, but my VFP9 based software only supports one device category: electronic scales.

> I will explain why VFP was selected for this project, some of the pitfalls of that choice

I can support the "pitfall" aspect with some bad experiences made:
1. We used the commtools, but in the past few years got problematic with all USB to RS232 adapters used.
2. Another very problematic case was Windows detecting a Microsoft Intellipoint serial mouse from the scales communication, which made the mouse pointer swirl around, if scales are set to lower baud rates. The worst part of this was accusations our software was faulty, while it was a Windows bug. Fortunately a very good customer side technician found out the real culprit.

I would like to get contact with Bob Pierce to discuss such pitfalls and suggest a move to .NET, we have more stable results of scales automation with a windows service based on C# and let VFP applications communicate with this service via interprocess communication with named pipes.