Control systems are the part of a machine nobody sees until they stop working. We design them, build them, and commission them. When a vendor says the problem must be your installation, we go find out what actually happened.
Enclosure layout, ladder logic, terminal schedules, wire numbering and bills of material. Component selection sized for the actual duty, with short-circuit current rating and heat rise worked out before anything gets ordered.
Allen-Bradley, Siemens, Automation Direct and the small controllers OEMs ship on packaged equipment. Logic written to be read by the next person: meaningful tag names, commented rungs, and alarms that name the fault.
Writing them, and auditing the ones you already have. Most control problems on running equipment are a sequence that was never fully specified, then implemented three different ways by three different people.
Drive selection, parameter setup, acceleration and current limits, and the handful of faults that account for most of the service calls. Speed control, network control, and diagnosing whether a nuisance trip is the drive, the motor, the load or the cable.
BACnet MS/TP and IP, Modbus RTU and TCP, and the hardwired points still doing real work. Getting a controls package, a chiller, a drive and a building system to agree on what a setpoint means, and mapping the points so a technician can find them later.
Load calculations, feeder and overcurrent sizing, panel schedules, transformer and disconnect selection. Starters, contactors, overloads and soft starts, and the interlocking that keeps two devices from fighting over the same load.
Temperature, pressure, differential pressure, flow, current, power and vibration. Choosing the sensor, placing it where the reading means something, and scaling it so the number on the screen matches the number on a meter.
Emergency stops, safety relays, door and guard interlocks, permissives and lockout provisions, wired so the machine fails to a safe state.
Point-to-point checkout, loop verification, functional testing against the written sequence, and trend data captured while the equipment runs. The results are written down and handed over.
Bringing older machines onto something supportable: replacing obsolete controllers, recovering lost logic, redrawing schematics that no longer match the panel, and migrating without a shutdown longer than the plant can take.
Repeat failures, intermittent faults, and the arguments that come with them. We instrument the equipment, capture the conditions at the moment it failed, and write it up so the conversation moves onto measurements.
As-builts that match the panel, O&M material somebody will actually open, and point lists, I/O schedules and network maps handed over in a form your own people can maintain.
That's the standard the rest of the work is measured against. A schematic that doesn't match the panel costs the next person a day before they stop trusting it. Everything we hand over is meant to be followed by someone who wasn't there.
