DOC · REASONED INDEX
Volume 1 — the automation trade, told in full
Reasoned index: the structure and the reason for every chapter, not the full text.
Who is speaking to you, and why this book exists.
IN ONE LINE
The child in front of the black screen, the crooked road, the workshop, the sites, arriving at automation.
WHY IT EXISTS
It tells the reader who is speaking to him and why this book exists: it is the senior engineer the author never had.
CONTAINS
The map nobody hands you: what this job is and what living it is really like.
IN ONE LINE
The map nobody hands you.
WHY IT EXISTS
What automating really means, the difference between the two worlds (standalone machines and process plants), who you meet along the chain - who builds, who integrates, who uses, who repairs - and where you stand among them. The life cycle of a machine, from the quotation to service. And the reason the knowledge of this trade circulates so badly.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
What you carry with you, but above all what you carry in your head.
WHY IT EXISTS
The laptop, the meter, the cables, the software. But what really separates you from the others is not the equipment: it is how you learn when there is nobody to teach you. The knowledge that counts is not in the manuals, you build it yourself.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
The travel, the difficult customer, the service report, the hours that do not add up.
WHY IT EXISTS
What this life is actually made of. The difference between a company that grows you and one that consumes you is not how much documentation it has: it is whether knowledge circulates. Honest documentation as a shield.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
What you must be able to recognise even when it is not your discipline.
IN ONE LINE
You are not a mechanic and you do not have to become one, but you are the last person to look at the machine before it runs.
WHY IT EXISTS
Recognise, do not design: what moves, what can crush you, what has to be genuinely at rest. Safety, guards, interlocks, the padlock before you put your hands in. When a mechanical error slips through, they come and ask you.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
The cabinet is the place where you move blind if you cannot read it.
WHY IT EXISTS
The components inside and the drawings that describe them, learned together. The thread of the chapter: the cabinet lies - the symptom you see is almost never where the fault is.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
How a machine notices things.
WHY IT EXISTS
Which sensor for which problem, and above all why: the selection criterion, not the catalogue. And the reverse, from the failure side: the ways a sensor lies, and how to recognise them quickly.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
What moves the machine and how it is commanded.
WHY IT EXISTS
Cylinders, motors, servos, drives. How something is set in controlled motion, and how it is stopped. Unlike the cabinet, which lies, a motion system built well speaks: it tells you itself what is wrong.
CONTAINS
IN ONE LINE
Compressed air and oil under pressure: as much as is needed by someone who meets them every day.
WHY IT EXISTS
Valves, cylinders, pressures, what happens when the air is gone. And the lesson that closes Part II: you are the last link, so you have to be able to look at what is not your job either.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
The core of the trade: making a machine decide, and writing it so it lasts.
IN ONE LINE
What a PLC looks like inside and how a system is put together.
WHY IT EXISTS
CPU, modules, inputs and outputs, the configuration. A clean architecture never starts from nothing: it starts from the last machine that shipped, and along with the structure you inherit its limits too. Spare I/O is not a patch, it is a design decision.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
The criterion for choosing which language, and when.
WHY IT EXISTS
The state machine as the right way to structure code. And the truth no manual admits: under the pressure of commissioning you will betray it - and that is fine, provided you KNOW you did and you come back to fix it.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
How to write code someone else will be able to read in five years.
WHY IT EXISTS
Names, structure, comments, changing things safely. Writing well is half the trade; the other half is knowing when to stop. The sign that you have grown: when the curse changes from who wrote this rubbish to who changed it, it used to work.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
The panel the operator faces every single day.
WHY IT EXISTS
An HMI is not a shop window for data, it is an instrument for one specific role. Too much information blinds, and colour that should help, when it is everywhere, hides exactly what matters. An HMI is inherited too, and it ages worse than code.
CONTAINS
Where the machine meets the network, the risk and the customer.
IN ONE LINE
How machines talk to each other.
WHY IT EXISTS
Protocols, switches, addressing, what to connect to what. And the practical truth of every trip: the network gets you with the banal things, not the exotic ones - a duplicate IP, a VPN, a badly configured network card.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
Machines are connected now, and protecting them has entered the rules of the trade.
WHY IT EXISTS
Hygiene and orientation, not a treatise. It sits right after networks because that is where the problem is born: the moment a machine can be reached, whoever reaches it becomes part of the project.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
Safety built with the control system.
WHY IT EXISTS
Circuits, components, logics, levels. The chapter starts from an uncomfortable truth: safety always gets bypassed, and pretending otherwise would make these pages useless. The real difference is between the deliberate, controlled bypass and the forgotten one, which kills.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
The junior gropes for hours, the senior takes minutes.
WHY IT EXISTS
The difference is not knowing more: it is starting from the right point - from the end, from what you expect, not from how it is supposed to work. The method for excluding and verifying. And its honest limit: in most cases it saves you, in the intermittent ones it takes humility and months.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
CH 05 The electrical engineering of the cabinet CH 06 Sensors
IN ONE LINE
The acceptance test in the factory and the one at the customer.
WHY IT EXISTS
A FAT is not does the machine work yes or no: it is the moment the customer decides whether he trusts the people handing it over. The work you skip at FAT you pay for at SAT, multiplied. It closes the book on the author's hardest story: the handover where he was left alone, and held.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
The tools to keep open beside the book.
IN ONE LINE
Every word and acronym of the trade, explained in one line.
WHY IT EXISTS
To keep open during the first months, when half of what you hear in a meeting is an acronym nobody stops to explain.
CONTAINS
IN ONE LINE
The standards that actually matter, said in plain language.
WHY IT EXISTS
What they ask for, why they exist, when they concern you. Not the normative text: the translation you need in order to tell whether the problem in front of you is one the standard has already anticipated.
CONTAINS
IN ONE LINE
How you prepare your working computer.
WHY IT EXISTS
Software, virtual machines, backups, what to have ready before leaving. The wrong moment to discover a missing driver is the customer's car park.
CONTAINS
GOES WITH
IN ONE LINE
Where to go after this book.
WHY IT EXISTS
Resources, paths, how you keep learning once the book ends - which is the point where the trade really begins.
CONTAINS