From the Bucket

Someday I'll Teach You How to Program

There's a reputation that follows controls engineers around. Arrogant. Difficult. Convinced they're the smartest person in the room. I'm not going to tell you that reputation is completely undeserved. In this episode I talk about how the field builds that arrogance almost by design, what it actually looked like when I was inside it and couldn't see it, and why the honest answer is that it never fully goes away.

The Last Thing Dallas Taught Me

Every big chapter ends somewhere. This is where Dallas ends for me with miles of overhead conveyor, a burned motor, and a welding hood I hadn't picked up since high school. What two years in one place actually made me.

Your Machine, My Line

Every machine that comes into a production line has its own PLC, its own logic, and its own idea of how the world should work. As the system integrator, that's your problem to solve. In this episode, we break down the reality of integrating third-party machines into a line control system. Why fillers are the hardest machines to work with, why Ethernet doesn't actually mean access, and what it took to stop showing up to projects blind. From a bottle jam nobody could see to vendors who just said no, this is the dull work that determines whether a line actually runs.

Temporary (But Not Really)

The filler panel caught fire. It wasn't dramatic,just enough to trip the alarm and send everyone outside to stand in 110 degree Dallas heat. That moment pretty much sums up this entire project. This episode is about bad equipment, impossible expectations, and what you learn when software can't save you.

Ninety-Nine Percent

An experimental filler pushing 210 cartons per minute created one unexpected challenge: merging three lanes of cartons into a single line without collisions. What looked like a simple control problem became a deep dive into conveyor physics, compounding error, and the limits of mathematical modeling. In this episode, I tell the story of experimental filling line, the weeks spent chasing a perfect solution, and the lesson every controls engineer eventually learns: real production systems never behave exactly like the model.