TJ McDermott; Yes, too many alarm messages can also be a problem. The ABB IRB 6400 S4c controller had several message lists, and a general list. And some alarms would generate a secondary message, or even a tertiary message; e.g. on a servo fault, each of the 6 axes would reply with a shutdown message. It took some time to sort through the alarms to get to the primary error.
Alarm history is vital when there is more than a handful of alarms to track. On the other hand, having a hundred alarms to sort through can be just as difficult as the intermittent one.
GlennA, I was working for a company that made simulators at one time. I was involved in a R&D project to track errors and predict faults. It was very interesting and an early application of AI in a real-time system. We acutally logged every fault, even intermittent ones. I learned about this working on satellites, actually. Having an indicator that just blinked is not really useful, you need to keep that information.
Intermittent or momentary faults can be very hard to find. On some machines, where possible, I added a latch to the alarm. Other times, you just had to watch for the error. One of the machines that I worked on had an air blow for spindle cleaning during tool change. If the air pressure dropped below the switch setting the machine Emergency-Stopped on low air. As soon as it stopped and shut off the air blow, the pressure built back up above the switch setting, and the error automatically reset . Machine operators were notorious for not paying attention, so the complaint was usually "the machine just stopped". Often the fix was just replacing the air supply hose with a shorter, larger diameter hose.
As energy efficiency becomes more and more a concern for makers of electronics devices, researchers are coming up with new ways to harvest energy from sound vibration, footsteps, and even electromagnetic fields in the air.
The government wants to study your brain, and DARPA wants to use similar information to give robots true autonomy beyond any artificial intelligence developed to date. Sound like science fiction? It's not.
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