Week number NINE! Here I come! Waking up today seem too easy. Maybe because I purposely slept early yesterday, a few minutes before 11pm. Traffic was fantastic! I was already halfway when the time is 7.35am so I decided to re-fuel and had breakfast at Petronas USJ20. That Petronas station is pretty convenient for me. Everything is there. Fuel, toilet, convenience store, ATM, KFC and even a drive-through Touch-and-Go kiosk!

I was expecting a new collie today but to my dismay, I was wrong. He was supposed to check-in NEXT Monday! On the bright side, the whole workstation is still MINE! Anyway, in the morning I was asked to test the external keypad of a Hitachi inverter. The setup is shown below.

The external keypad is connected via ethernet port and cable. The reason why the external keypad is used is to make the keypad easily accessible by the customer since the inverter will be installed in an enclosed control box and frequent modification of inverter parameters is required.

Around 10am, me and my boss went out to Serdang to service a faulty machine. We arrive at a three-story office building near South City Plaza. The office is doing CD packaging. I'm not sure what else that company is doing. Anyway, we went to the faulty machine at the back of the office to troubleshoot the machine. The machine looks something like this:

Sorry for the fancy drawing skills. Was using Power Point to make this picture and this is the best that I could come up with. But fret not, its very close to the real thing. Only the colour is completely different. The name of this machine is "Infrared *something* Heater". It is used to shrink plastic protecting a CD box. When the plastic is heated up it will shrink down to the size of the CD box.

The problem is that one of the temperature controllers is faulty. The red LED was supposed to turn off after the thermocouple connected to it expands up to the preset temperature (the preset value was 200 degree Celcius). But the LED turns off immediately after we power up the controllers!

I opened the control circuitry enclosure and Mr. James start to take some measurements while the machine is running. He says that one of the contactors did not receive any voltage supply when it is supposed to. He figured this might be the problem but he needs to know where the problem originates. Took about 15 minutes before a miracle happened!

Mr. James asked me to trace the thermocouple cable from the control circuitry. But it was impossible to do that because all the wires leads to the interior of the machine! I touched lightly on the wires and tried to trace the wire inside the machine but my efforts were futile. Was at the brink of giving up but Mr. James stopped me and asked to power up the machine and test the controllers. To our amazement, the faulty controller WORKED!! Oh my God, a miracle has happened!! It turned on continuously when the controllers were activated and shuts down after the thermocouple has expanded sufficiently like it was supposed to! Turns out the problem was the wiring. I accidentally fixed it when I was tracing the thermocouple wires. Came out of the office with a smile on our faces! What a miracle!

I still get that "Wah, you look so young!" remarks from people I meet. After fixing the machine an Indian lady worker asked me, "How old are you?". "Twenty-two", I replied. Then she said, "Awak sangat kurus..saya ingat awak umur tujuh belas..". I giggled. Wow, 17! Maybe because I've shaved my "not so visible" mustache and beard. Otherwise she might have replied "lapan belas" like the others do. Hehe. But I'll take that as a compliment since looking young is THE trend nowadays.

At the end of the fieldwork Mr. James took me to Pappa Rich restaurant nearby. The name of the restaurant is well deserved since the price on the menu is not for those with shallow pockets. Char Kuey Tiaw was priced at RM8.90! Since it was lunchtime and I was very hungry, I ordered Nasi Lemak Rendang Ayam which cost RM8.90. The meal was fantastic! Very nice sambal and rendang, crispy anchovies just the way I like it and the chicken is cooked to perfection! What a great lunch! Worth every penny! Looking forward to re-visit that restaurant soon to test out other dishes. The curry mee looks scrumptious! Oh my, I'm hungry just by writing this! Anyway, Thanks a lot Mr. James!!!

We were supposed to install the Hitachi inverter pictured above after lunch but that did not happen because the factory is busy so we will visit that factory some other day. Went back and I continued "playing" with that inverter by connecting the potentiometer and a relay.