“20 years of Service”

Almost 20 years ago I resigned from Ceeco Machinery.  Next year will also mark 30 years of Service to the Wire and Cable industry. 30 Years is a long time for anyone. As I approach the 30 year milestone I have been asking myself what keeps us going ? Money, Pride, Integrity, Suffering, Sweat, Tears the list goes on and on but maybe it is just to feel alive.

Whenever we work on a project we become alive, our minds open up to new ideas. In my life an opportunity is another door opening for us, we don’t know what is on the other side but we open that door and step through the door frame. What we find on the other side of the door is typically something new and exciting. Not everyone wants to go through the Door first. The idea of not taking that first step has never occurred to me.

I am thankful for my father who understood that digital electronics was the future of industrial automation. He persevered when others simply could not do the work. He passed this onto me and he was there to answer all of my questions. When I worked at Ceeco Machinery and I had a difficult control problem to resolve we would discussed it over the dining room table and we would find simple solutions to my control problems.

An example of my fathers in depth knowledge was in Siemens S5 programming, how to multiply two registers without the Math functions at your disposal. Never mind that these Siemens Math functions added a considerable amount of scan time to cycle. He simple created a function block that shifted the input register to the left 4 times (SLW 4) and called it x16. The program instruction took 3 lines of code that added no relevant scan time to the program. We also created a 1000 step ramp added the function block and we had a 0 – 16000 ramped reference. By Tuning the drive to accept 16000 as 100%  (instead of 16387 = 100 %) we had an accurate drive speed reference all with 16 Bit processing.(1995)

Today we take it for granted that all our programming functions are available and that the processors are executing at 6 uSec. Not too long ago program execution times were measured in mSec.,  a lifetime in the computer world.

Interestingly we teach our future generations to be unafraid of the digital world, we teach them to encapsulate it with both hands as the ideas are limitless and all because one of us decided to step through the Door Frame.

Rick Nieuwenhuysen

President, CEO
REWIRE AUTOMATION INC.
March 4, 2019