The eighth Monday. Waking up in the morning seem a little difficult today after a 3-day holiday. Back to the same 'ol routine.

Seriously, life feels like a big program code! Even when I'm half awake, its automatic! Are we turning into a robot? I hope not.

Anyway, today I learn about two new device. The touchscreen PLC and the door sensor. In the morning its about the touchscreen PLC. Yes, you read correctly. TOUCHSCREEN! Like an iPhone! Well not that sophisticated but close enough. Mr. James just asked me to go through the software so I was not able to power it up and test the touchscreen feature. Too bad. Here's the device. Looks like a tablet PC from this view. Feels like you can surf the internet with that thing!

After lunch I was given the door sensor to test out. We are waiting for the green light from the customer for us to install this device so in the meantime Mr. James asked me to familiarize with the settings and features. Nothing out of the ordinary, its just like a proximity sensor with a brain. The relay is to simulate the door opening and closing. My workstation is quite a mess today because of a BIG display device occupying almost 3/4 of my workstation. Its the big black rectangular thing with white wording.

I just realized that the internship is actually your bootcamp prior to the REAL working life later. I discovered many of my weaknesses through fieldworks and when dealing with customers. I get to test my determination level to the max when installing inverters or troubleshooting a pre-installed ones. This is the time that people forgive you for making mistakes. This is the time where guidance is all around you and readily available. I don't think you'll have all of that after graduating later. 

There's plenty of daily situations that I can use to brush up on my weaknesses especially interpersonal skills. A  skill highly on demand among employers nowadays. Like one of my favorite quotes, "Humans cannot achieve PERFECTION, but there's always room for IMPROVEMENT" I guess I have to really utilize the last few weeks to improve on my weaknesses as much as I can. Indeed, internships can TOTALLY change or enhance a person's personality, way of thinking and of course, intelligence. But that's not all what internships can do to you. To me, at the end of it you'll become a completely different person!

Oops, this is getting too long so I'll stop right here. By the way, I saw on the news that our convoy to deliver goods and supplies to our brothers in Palestine was attacked by our arch nemesis, the Israeli Army. It seems clear that MERCY is not in their dictionary, and so does HUMANE. Maybe they have vocabularies like ARROGANCE, HATE and VIOLENCE on the first few pages of their dictionary. Let us all pray for the safety of our convoy and our fellow brothers in Palestine. I will do a "Solat Hajat" tonight after Isya' prayer. Its the least I can do.

No office work today so this is going to be short. Went out almost 90% of the working hour today.

Something peculiar happened in the morning. BLACKOUT!! Even the restaurant where I had breakfast nearby was affected! According to the neighbor, the blackout started since 12.30am last night! We are helpless without electricity! No internet, no fax, no light and no air-con! Lucky the phone was working. I was lost and don't know what to do because I can't power up anything! Now I realize why big big factories suffer HUGE profit losses because of no electricity. Was at the office until 10.30am but the electricity still did not recover. I wonder what had happened at the substation..

Feeling unproductive, we went out to the Sungai Besi factory to install the photo sensor I mentioned yesterday and to solve that inverter dilemma once and for all. Mr. Alex was there when we arrived at the factory. His task is to install the two sets of photo sensor and I was asked to concentrate on the inverter problem. Recall that the inverter is unable to deactivate when the switch at the inverter is in "OFF" state. The proposed solution was to bypass a relay that connects the switch with another brand new relay to isolate the signals coming from the PLC.

Mr. Alex had taught me how to connect the relay and in fact I have tested his teachings on Day 28 of my blog. Diligently wired the relays inside that dust-infested control panel. Fortunately for me, there was no cockroach in there or otherwise I would freak out and embarrass myself in front of the workers! Occasionally doubted my understanding but Mr. James came and enlightened me with the answers. Did a tiny mistake but later Mr. Alex came and fixed it.

Turned on the big machine to test the new solution. I was very anxious worrying that it might not work. About one minute after the machine runs, its time for the inverter of interest to run and test the new solution. Amazingly it worked! The motor runs and stops when it is supposed to! Problem solved! What a relief! I can sleep well now..

Went to Old Town Kopitiam in Puchong for a drink. This time Mr. James INSISTED that I order a meal. Wow, Thanks Mr. James!!

Still waiting for the visiting lecturer to visit me. Mr. James say that he still did not receive any calls from UNITEN. I just hope that this is not going to be a surprise visit because like I said before, me and Mr. James are like, "macam biskut chipsmore, kejap-kejap ada kejap-kejap tinggal habuk je.." On the other hand, its almost three weeks since my collie left the company. Still waiting for a new collie to assist me in my fieldwork and to fill that loneliness void in me. There's nothing I can do but to wait for both events to occur. The wait is sometimes mentally painful.

No pictures today so this is going to be brief. How I wish that "No Camera Allowed" sign doesn't exist!! How am I supposed to describe what I saw in the factory with bare words! Its too bad that I can't take photos of myself when I was working and upload them on Facebook. And one more thing, how am I going to prove to the lecturers during the presentation later that I've been into all those factories!!

As mentioned yesterday, we went out to inspect and install a new inverter. I went to two factories today. Around 10.30am we went to a label and sticker manufacturing factory in Cheras. Once there, one of the factory officer guided us to a control box where a faulty inverter is located. Plenty of labels and stickers of famous brands are being made here. Eventually we arrive at a very long conveyor that has many sensors, motors and relays along the way. The old italian inverter appears to be overheating so we want to replace it with a new japanese inverter but first we must make sure that it is compatible. The interior of the factory is fully air-conditioned so the work environment is quite comfortable.

Unfortunately for us, we were unable to figure out the terminal connections of the italian inverter because the manual is not available so we went back couple of hours later but will try to solve the problem some other day.

Then Mr. James took me to Old Times Kopitiam near The Mines for lunch!! I was quite awkward to order anything because none of the meals on the menu is below RM5.00! Even the basic nasi lemak with chicken costs RM7.90! Since I'm here and hungry anyway, I ordered the normal nasi lemak and soft drink. Thanks Mr. James!!

Then we went to a three-story pharmacy in Puchong to inspect a faulty door sensor. Mr. James did all the inspection so just I stood there and watch. I wouldn't know what to do anyway. After the inspection is done we went back to the office. Arrived at the office at 4pm. But there's another job for me. I was asked to install two sets of photo sensors at the same Sungai Besi factory I mentioned last week. I went there ALONE but this time the journey was smooth. No more wrong junctions. 

I was supposed to wait for Mr. Alex to help me with the installation. After just five minutes setting foot on that factory, Mr. James called me to say that Mr. Alex is unable to come so I just delivered the sensors to the person in charge and went back home. 

Week number SEVEN! Here we go! Hey, wake up! Its 6.30am! Go and iron your clothes NOW! That tiny voice inside my head won't stop bothering me until I get off that bed! Half awaken, went to the cupboard and took a set of attire and went to the ironing board. Sometimes life feels like a big computer program. The 5 senses act like an input device while the hands and legs outputs the preprogrammed tasks. The brain is obviously the central processing unit. Can somebody come and program my brain to be like Mr. Einstein?

Alright, enough with the nonsense. Today has got nothing to do with inverters, AGAIN! No fieldwork today, just another day in the office. But tomorrow I will definitely go out, according to Mr. James. In the morning I did some filing work, then Mr. James gave me a set of gadgets consists of a switching PSU, weird-looking rotary encoder and its best friend, the counter. Whenever you see a rotary encoder, there's definitely a counter connected to it. Supposedly, when the rotary encoder rotates one unit, the counter will count one unit and resets when it reaches a certain preset value. I may have discussed this on the early days of my blog post. The setup is shown below:

What a funny looking encoder! At first glimpse one may think this is the code-manipulator-thingy of a safe! In fact, it looks just like one! But beware, your eyes can fool you! Ok back to the story. The reason why the switching PSU is needed is because the encoder can only accept 5VDC as input unlike its best friend which can consume the household 230VAC like a hungry beast! In short, when everything is connected properly, the counter will reset when the encoder completes one revolution. 

After lunch Mr. James asked me to play around with the Panasonic PLC. He asked me to program the PLC to control some input device and outputs to a relay. Before he went out, he asked me to connect the photoelectric switch and the relay to the PLC. With the help and guidance of Mr. James I managed to connect them and start work on the programming. The setup is shown below:

Initially I only used a single switch and relay to simplify my program and to start learning slowly. Mr. James went out at 2.30pm so I have until 5.30pm to experiment with the ladder diagram and the PLC. Again I would like to stress out that PLC programming is totally different than PIC18 programming. There's no "code" for a specific task, only "symbols" that can be either ON of OFF. Not to mention the limited types of symbols a ladder diagram can have (sometimes less than 10 symbols) unlike the 77 instructions of a PIC18. For beginners, its tougher than the MicroP subject! But I slowly learn and managed to do a simple input-output program that works.

Went back at 5.25pm today. Traffic was amazing! The journey back took a record-breaking 35 minutes! Normally the drive back took about 50 to 75 minutes. Maybe because coincidentally most of the traffic lights are green along Persiaran Kewajipan. If only life is that easy.. 

No fieldwork today so this is going to be a short post. I saw this remote-control like device at the edge of my workstation and wondered what it does and how it works. Out of curiosity I took a photo-electric sensor and plugged it into the device. Teeeeeeet! The buzzer within the device beeps. Ooo so now I know what this device does! It is actually a sensor tester! The buzzer will beep if the sensor is working. Connected it to a faulty proximity sensor and the device is silent, as expected.

The photo-electric switch is actually a proximity sensor but it uses light intensity to detect distance or obstacles. The small red LED behind it will emit light when something opaque (light-impenetrable object) comes near the sensor. The sensor then sends the "ON" signal to the controller for as long as the object blocks the sensor. 

After lunch I tested a customer's Mitsubishi inverter just to make sure its not faulty. This is another variant of the Mitsubishi inverter I learnt last week or two weeks ago. But the manual is in Japanese!! Fortunately the programming is similar to other inverter of the same brand so it is readily available in the laptop. I wonder how the customer is going to understand the manual later..Anyway, here's the picture of the inverter. The input is 420V so I have to use the external transformer to power it up.

Still waiting for a new collie..Getting kind of lonely now. The dispatch boy is often away delivering stuffs to the customer so I have no one to talk to in the office. I'm still in full control of the entire workstation so I try to keep it tidy and organized. The catalog stack on the far side of my workstation is a mess so I tried to build a book stand out of unused styrofoam and box leftovers but I couldn't find an appropriate glue to join them together. Then I got an idea that is to use a very long threaded screw to screw it together! It worked wonders and I even label each section to ease the search of a specific brand of a specific product. Not sure Mr. James will like it but at least the customer can easily know what we sell and the appropriate catalog can be shown to them in an instant!

Finally recovered my energy and able to do two posts today. Had breakfast on the way to the office at KFC Petronas USJ 20 today. Quite a peaceful place to have breakfast and there was less than five customers dining in. I even updated my logbook there.

At 9:15am, some unknown number called my phone. I was quite reluctant to answer it because Mr. James was in front of me but I eventually answer the call. Turns out it was that guy with the 24krpm motor that came into the office yesterday! He called to ask about the inverter terminal connections. The conversation is entirely in English. I tried to maintain my composure and speak as politely and as clearly as I can. With the help of Mr. James I was able to answer all of his queries. Customer management skills I acquired during my previous job in COE Kiosk, UNITEN also proved to be handy in this situation.

A good engineer must not be good in technical work alone but in customer management as well. That call is one way to train me to be an all-rounded engineer.

Around 3.30pm, Mr. James gave me an inverter to learn. The Mitsubishi inverter. As usual the setup is shown below:

The user manual is very user-friendly. All the details are grouped together nicely with reference pages included. Ironically, I was not able to setup the inverter to use the external potentiometer to control the speed of the motor. The reason is that the Mitsubishi inverter is used for highly advanced and accurate applications so the descriptions are "not in English", metaphorically speaking, or incomprehensible at some parts. But eventually with the help of my collie we were able to solve the problem.

In the process of learning that inverter, a customer came in to purchase a proximity sensor. He looked at me and asked, "Trainee aa? You Form 5 is it?" Immediately I answered, "No no, I'm 22 years old" And he replied, "Wah you look so young!" still with the face of disbelief. Its good to have that kind of impression from people. So "young" but can service a very complicated machine. But that impression has it own pros and cons. The downside of it especially when I'm going to look for long-term jobs later is that employer will under-estimate my capabilities because I look so young and naive. They will go "This guy look so young, I don't think he can take the job". Then I will have a hard time convincing the interviewer later.

Whatever that is, I still have more than a year before I have to worry about that. Let's just put aside that issue and enjoy university life while it lasts.

Thursday already? I still felt like Tuesday! Still have that "Monday Blues" kind of feeling. What makes me nervous in this internship is that I don't know what to expect whether there will be any fieldwork today, what kind of assignments Mr. James will give me today, what to eat for lunch..everything is unpredictable. Its not a routine. Totally different from lecture week. The timetable is fixed, lunch hour is fixed, even sleep time is fixed. Its quite a challenge to change this routine-based mindset. But its a good thing actually as engineers have to work on odd hours and often given weird assignments.

In the morning I did some troubleshooting to the inverter. But today I learnt something new about RELAYS. This type of relay has four "contacts". I think I have discussed this somewhere in my blog. But this time I learnt how to use them to access specific functions of the inverter. Each relay has two types of contacts, the "normally close" and "normally open" contacts. To access a specific function in an inverter when the inverter is powered on, connect the "normally open" contact so that when the relay receives power, the contact moves to the "normally close" contact and turns on the feature that is accessed by the relay. You may not understand this but nevermind. I'm just recalling what I learnt this morning. The relay that I used looks very close to this:

In the process of learning that, I discovered that I have made many silly mistakes before. Remember the drawing I did yesterday? There's a mistake in one of the measurements. Then I discovered I copied something wrongly, and did not learn some important things from my collie. When asked a simple question from Mr. James, I answered wrongly. 

Mistakes, humans are prone to it. I realized that when you have made a mistake and say to your boss "But Sir, everyone make mistakes...", you can get fired! Yes we all make mistakes but the question is, "How often you make them?". Mistakes can be costly to the company. It can humiliate you as well. I seriously hope that I will not damage any inverters or other expensive components due to improper or incorrect wiring. 

After lunch Mr. James brought us "jalan-jalan" around Puchong, Bukit Jalil and the outskirts of Shah Alam to deliver some stuffs to the customer. Before the trip ends, we revisited the rubber manufacturing factory in Shah Alam to inspect a faulty inverter and a set of proximity sensor. I have visited this factory before on Day 1 of my diary. There I saw a motor about the size of a Perodua Kancil. Its huge! I wonder how much power is needed to run it! There's also a gear system attached to it.

That's it for today. Went back at 6pm and it was raining. The statement "asal hujan je KL mesti jam" in Day 7 of my blog is true! The trip back took longer than usual, about 1 hour 10 minutes!

Feels great to have survived the first day! Starting to get used to everything. No more "What if I'm lost in the highway" dilemma. Now I know where are the places to eat, pray, convenience stores and petrol stations. Best of all, everything is nearby! Its very convenient to work in this part of Puchong. Slowly I'm starting to develop a map of Puchong in my mind. 

As soon as I entered the office, me and my collie were given an assignment that is to troubleshoot a faulty customer's motor driver. Remember the servo motor I mentioned on my first interview? We are revisiting that problem. Forget the motor, our task is to troubleshoot the faulty motor driver. Firstly disconnect the CW (clockwise) ports of the faulty driver, connect to a working driver (the small silver box), connect that to a power supply and a brand new stepper motor (the smaller motor). Then both drivers are turned on but the rate of speed change of the motor is not uniform. My collie suggested that the root of the problem is in the faulty driver's internal circuitry.

Not long after that, we are asked to troubleshoot a newly arrived factory counter device ordered by a customer. First and foremost, we read the instruction manual and figure out the circuit connection and the required power supply. Then we started to connect the main power supply, proximity sensor and the solid-state module. Allow me to explain each device one by one. First up, the counter. The counter is the normal counter that some of you have come across in Digital Logic Design Lab. It has two outputs that will turn on or off depending on the preset counter value (at what counter value you want it to turn on). We connected the proximity sensor to provide an input signal to the counter so that the counter will start counting when the sensor is triggered and when the preset limit is met, the appropriate output will be triggered. The sensor has 3 wires, black, brown and blue. Black is connected to the signal port, Brown for input voltage and blue for grounding. Thirdly, the solid state module. It is actually a relay that provides the needed 12V for the output of the counter. I can't recall the exact function. Will explain later.

After lunch Mr. James invited me and my collie to go for another fieldwork (Yay~). This time its in an air conditioned factory in Shah Alam to troubleshoot a touch-screen PLC machine (sorry no pictures, no camera is allowed!). I learnt that the programming method is almost similar to programming a PIC18, you must have the interface software, serial cable and/or USB cable and the PLC machine. Users are able to download and upload a program to and from the PLC. But the programming is different than what I learn in MicroP Lab. Instead of using assembly programming or C++, the ladder diagram is used. Quite complicated I would say. But I was there just to observe the maintenance process. Still far from competence!

Then Mr. James brought us towards the west side of Selangor as far as Pulau Indah to deliver some stuffs to the customer. Mr. James was driving, at the rear seat it feels like "balik kampung" seeing the rural landscapes of Klang and Pulau Indah. Its good to have such view as it relaxes your mind after all that hard work. At the end of the trip, Mr. James "belanja us makan at mamak restaurant". (pardon the english!) Thanks Mr. James!

Time to prepare for tomorrow. Still have not finished writing yesterday's part of the logbook..need to stop procrastinating! But what the heck, its been a great day! There's still tomorrow and the day after..