RE: [ATM] Making glass blanks

["Timm Simpkins" <poduck@poducksworld.com>]

A power outage large enough to reset your computer isn't as common as it
used to be.  It's also not that detrimental to the annealing process as one
might think if the software is set up properly, unless the outage is over an
extended period of time.

Almost any computer with simple software could be run in dos mode with an
autoexec.bat file that runs the program automatically.  If the software is
programmed correctly, it will automatically restart where it left off.

I don't understand the big issue about compensating for power outages
anyway.  If the outage is long enough, it wouldn't matter what type of
controller you were using.  The process would have to be restarted anyway
since stresses would already be introduced into the glass.

Truthfully, the cheapest method consistently available would be to take the
temperature and pass the voltage generated through an analog to digital
converter and then from there to the computer.  Circuits to control relays
with the parallel port are very common and easy to come across.  As long as
the software was set up to read the temperature and then switch the relay on
and off when necessary, it would be virtually identical to a temperature
controller, and could be made for probably half the cost or less.

I could design software that could do everything necessary and it could run
on an old 286 computer.  Almost anyone should be able to scrounge up an old
computer like that from free to $50.  Also, anyone who can read these
messages already has a computer, so if necessary they could use the one
they're on to be the controller.

As for Vladmir's concern of creating pollution on the power net, it
shouldn't produce much more pollution than an electric furnace.  I'm not
talking about cycling the power by the millisecond.  After doing some
research, I don't think that cycling will be much of a problem as long as
the elements aren't allowed to cool so much that thermal breakdown would
cause premature burnout of the element.  As long as the temperature
differential is kept within a few degrees, it should be fine.

Anyway, the possible advantages that arise from controlling an annealer with
a PC are many.  While I plan on making a simple program that can be set
precisely for a wide array of conditions originally, and probably graph the
temperature curve, there is also the ability to modify the software for any
number of additional tasks.  Alarms are also very easy to program into the
software.

I will get this to work somehow, and when I do all the information will be
made available to everyone.


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