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Most people use HMIs regularly in everyday life. For instance, when they’re adjusting the temperature controls in their vehicles or homes, they’re engaging a human-machine interface. In industrial applications, HMIs are often more complex interfaces capable of handling the volume and complexity of inputs and outputs necessary to operate industrial machinery or plant-wide operations.
In this installment of our "Practicing Technician" series, we will once again be working with a circuit reduction technique. This particular technique is quite useful for determining how changes in load conditions can impact on circuit performance. Until now, we have provided reduction techniques that are useful for fixed load circuit analysis. Thevenin's theorem can be used in cases where we want to see how load voltage, current and power are effected by changes in load resistance.
In the fourth part of our series on Tips For Practicing Technicians, we look at a simple technique that can be used to simplify circuit analysis when working with series and parallel RL circuits. One of the issues encountered by technicians who are working with parallel RL circuits is the need to work with values that are the reciprocals of the more commonly used standard units.
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are two of the ways tech changes the way we look at the world. Whereas AR enhances our experience by superimposing digital images on our reality (think Pokémon Go), VR creates a completely different reality with a simulated environment. While both are typically used in technology for entertainment, they can also help improve industries such as manufacturing.
This is the third in our series of brief articles discussing important topics relevant to electronics and electromechanical technicians and technician students preparing for today’s workforce. In this series, we will be discussing some everyday skills and topics for practicing technicians, as well as some areas that have been identified as “difficult to understand” by our technician students while performing general circuit analysis.
Everybody knows that increased automation on the factory floor dealt a severe blow to manufacturing workers everywhere. Now, white collar jobs are also about to undergo quite a few shakeups as automation begins to take over offices, schools, hospitals and research labs everywhere.
Electromechanical switches are devices designed and used as additions for electrical circuits. They register over current, over-voltage, reverse power flow, and frequency. All of this is done in order to reduce the risk of major accidents or flashovers related to the electrical system within a structure or in machinery. Essentially, they work by tripping the circuit breaker when a fault is detected.