Tarkblog

There’s been a side project at work that’s been plaguing me lately. One of our customers obtained a multi gas analysis device a few weeks ago - a machine that costs close to probably 100k, asbestos I can tell.

Anyway, they wanted it “integrated” into our test cell system so that the data that comes out of it is captured at the same time with all of the other engine data. Naturally, this gets put on my plate to do.

First, our marketing guy comes and asks me when I can get around to integrating it. I say that I can start looking at it in a week or so, but I’m kind of busy. He tells me that it’s really low priority, don’t sweat it until I have some free time.

A few days later, another engineer comes over and asks me when I’m going to get around to it. He does this because our on-site customer is prodding him “giturrdun”. I say that I’ll get to it as soon as I have some free time. This seems okay.

So, I go and look at the machine. It looks all spiffy, but there’s nothing that really explains what is going on. What I need is a manual on what to do to communicate with it.Normally on gas analyzers, there’s some kind of voltage output that we can measure - or a serial port that spits out data every so often. There’s no real visible sign that this device had either of these. I tell the marketing guy, then he tells the customer, and the customer says he’ll look into it.

A few days later I get an email with some manuals. The manuals, which stink of being translated, poorly, from a foreign language, have lots of good information - like send XXXX command to get YYYY response. Great, but that doesn’t really tell me what I need to do for this application. I email back the manufacturer and ask them if they can just make me a little cheat sheet on what to do quickly to get the data out of the machine - you know, like a 5 step guide or something. He says he’ll have to get back to me.

A few days later I’m told that this particular machine doesn’t have serial capabilities, though they can be added for a cost. Instead they use some kind of Microsoft .NET based software to communicate with it over TCP/IP. There’s even a sample program on the computer system provided with the machine that demos how to do it.

Great, except that I’m not a windows programmer, so I don’t really know much about .NET other than what it is. I could probably read the code and understand what’s going on, but I’m not going to be able to come up with a slick program for it. On top of that, that’s beyond the scope of what I feel like I should have to do. I’m willing to write the code to import the data into our system, but I feel like I should be able to obtain the data in a relatively easy way, not actually write the program to extract the data as well.

So I try to explain this to the customer. He’s intent that they’ll get it sorted out. We’ve been going back and forth over lots of stuff and finally I’ve got him to understand that I can’t just magically make this work for him.

What’s amazing that how, on the first day when they installed this machine well over 3 weeks ago, I was directly asked “Caleb…do our test cells support .NET” to which I replied “NO”. The problem is, nobody understood what .NET was or is and in the course of 3 weeks trying to sort this out, everyone just forgot.

So the problem has disappeared for now. I’m sure it will come back again in a few weeks. I’ve explained that it would be pretty trivial to take the sample program that came with the machine and extend it to throw out the data values on a serial port so that I could write software to read those values. I said, however, that we don’t really have the facilities here to write that software, but I’m sure one of their IT people could do it.

My guess is they’ll just buy the serial option for the machine anyway, because it’s easier to spend a few extra thousand bucks and put the problem on someone else than it is to take the responsibility themselves.

This just proves to me that even though most of the people I deal with are well educated engineers, common sense usually loses.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2004 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.