Control engineering changes face

摘要

When I came into industry - and it wasn't really that long ago -there was no such thing as an HMI. Instead we built huge control panels, full of flashing lights and big levers to pull. And if you were really lucky there was a deafening alarm that you could sneakily set off to panic your colleagues. Each panel was a master piece of the wireman's art and looked like something from a Thunderbirds film set. It took ages to design, longer to build, was completely inflexible towards future changes and (killer blow) cost a fortune. There was considerable irony in the fact that a PLC the size of a Filofax could run a big, complex plant or machine, but you needed a panel of epic proportions to see what was going on. So it was inevitable that the advantages of solid-state electronics would be implemented and that HMIs (human/machine interfaces) would be developed.