all the while
sorry everyone it’s been a long time but i have been busy…i have gt placed in IBM nd TCS in the meanwhile. i got time to decide which one to join….if ne1 of u can help then i ll b grateful!!!
i m also preaparing for a seminar on swarm intelligence so pls pls if ne1 can help me then pls write a comment and i ll get back to you.
bye 4 now!
back from pune!!!!
yeah yeah…..i just came back frm pune in just two days!!!! what a whirlwind journey it was!!!! but never the less it was some very gr8 fun!!!!
i got my mp3 player nd i tell u it’s not much different from an ipod 
yeah i heard my bros shuffle nd i love my mp3 player so much more than that!!!! 
i got his PC too….poor soul i take everything 4m him…but then it’s not easy to b the big bro after all!!!!! the comp’s got 1 GB RAM nd a 160 GB HDD nd i m dying to use it!!!! i m gonna ultimately get a good graphics card nd some more RAM 4m my bro
neways the return 4m pune was so “beautiful” with a very pretty lady in the bus!!! she really was soooooooo pretty!!! no jeans, no exposure nd she was just so simply beautiful!!!!
but yeah not more than ma GAL!!!!
bye folks!!!!
c ya soon with some more happenings!!!!
i gotta start studying now!!!!! this sem it’s all fucked up!!!!
sandy!!!!
nature+love
That’s paradise i went to, on holi….yes!!! it is heaven.
on holi i took an almost a 300 km journey which included a ride through one of the most picturesque locations i hav ever been to. udupi to maravanthe or more popularly known as “turtle bay” because of the resort there was a gr8 journey. the population is sparse nd scattered thus nature is largely unperturbed and add to that some very very smooth highway, a gr8 bike and the person u love most sitting with u. U GOT ONE HELLUVA HOLI!!!!!!!
riding nd riding nd riding….wooh it was fun. on reaching maravanthe. as u can see in the pic there is a road with sea on one side a river on the other. this really was soooooooooooooooooooooooooobeautiful!!!!!! we had a wonderful time on the beach…colored each other like crazy….the ride back was even more fun except for the part that v were both exhausted nd mangalore was 110km from there.
mangalore was glittering when v reached with a “beautiful” crowd at Bharath mall….v relaxed at ccd. i bid good bye to her…then my return to manipal started. the climate was serene as if it were reading my mood…the day’s events were still lingering in my mind nd i so wanted to go back to mangalore but alas!!!!
smooth highway again nd i pressed on the accelerator 4 another gr8 ride back to manipal!!!
note:(for administrators of karnataka) guys the roads r good in patches make them better nd broader!!!!!
MECH+IT: the next gen alliance
When one thinks of an engineer the first picture that comes to our minds is that of a mechanical engineer with his characteristic safety helmet and khaki colored uniform. Much to the envy of other branches, the “royal mech” continues to be the heart of engineering. We in India though have remained quite oblivious to the advancements in the mechanical field and our development is largely being powered by a relatively new area of science, the INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. This new field though has also added a whole new dimension to the golden oldie mech. Yes, I am talking about a whole new era being dominated by an alliance of mech and IT. The situation is such that major parts of a factory are now being virtually run by computers and with the implementation of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) the day is not far when plants will be run almost entirely by computers with man being nothing but a “ceremonial head”.
The impact of IT is known to all and most of us have heard about the automation drive in various industries. I heard about it in 1997 when my dad who works at the Bokaro steel Plant started telling me that the plant being “computerized”. Well it hardly meant much to me then but my recent visit to the plant as part of my industrial training left me awestruck by the sheer ingenuity of man. As if the whole process of steel making was not enough the fact that most of its critical operations were being controlled by a computer was no less than an 8th wonder for me. Real time systems, master gates, unknown network protocols, robotic arms weighing the steel coils just by looking at it and many other aspects of this visit left me totally spellbound.
Bokaro Steel Plant is an integrated steel plant, which means that it manufactures each and everything required right up to the finished product of cold or hot rolled steel. Except for the raw materials Bokaro steel plant even manufactures a lot of electricity to fulfill its needs. The plant has coke oven, sintering plant, blast furnace, steel melting shop, continuous casting shop, slabbing mill, hot strip mill and the cold rolling mill. Now I won’t give details on each of these but will talk more about the automation systems’ implementation in the plant. The plant has many levels of automation in its different departments. So while HSM has up to 3-levels there others which have only two levels implemented. Talking of levels of automation different companies follow different level of automation model. There are 5-level models, 4-level models and 3-level models. The beginning of automation is with level 0 where the actual mechanical instruments are coupled with electrical devices for automation and the higher levels are for the software control of these devices through the lower level devices of automation. Let us consider a 3-level automation which is currently being followed at Bokaro Steel Plant.
Level 1
PLC (Programmable Logical Control) level process control, including PLC, master gates and some plant-specific networking. Computer programs can be employed for operator to control production machinery. However, such programs are primary the customization based on some PLC interfaces provided by PLC vendor or automation company.
Level 2
Production supervisory system, plant-wide automation. Automation programs in this level are developed based on software engineering principle. The system may extract PLC data (through interactive communication with Level 1), accept operator user-input and laboratory measurement, as well as some pre-set manufacture data such as recipes for producing a given grade, chemical composition for a certain grade, etc. Shop floor production schedule can be produced, delay, event, part life, etc. can be tracked. Data from one production process (e.g. EAF) can be viewed in other process (Caster, for example). All the data can be saved into a database, such as Oracle or SQL Server. Components, applications or cub-package relating to process models (mill setup models, shape control, temperature prediction, etc.) are also integrated into this level.
Level 3
Level 3 primarily consists of business related reports, and integration of production database with the business database, etc. It can integrate multiple Level 2 systems. The data can be cross the plant boundary to be viewed in the whole corporate. If an automation system collects data into an enterprise database (Oracle, SQL Server, etc.), the database and the reports generated from this database belong to the Level 3. Those manufacture data in the enterprise database can be further sent to the corporate business database, which is not taken as Level 3 in general. Scheduling system, Material Flow, Manufacturing Execution System (MES) can be considered as Level 3.
Very soon the plant is also going to implement the ERP which is a very different level of automation where even decision making will be done by computers thus Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) will integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules. But generally most mechanical related companies use 3-level automation.
One of the most important aspects of any automation in the mechanical engineering is the Real Time Operating system. Unlike the conventional OS that we use on our desktop PCs real time OS is used for industrial control. The main difference is that each operation or task in case of RTOS is time bound i.e. it guarantees that the operation will be over in a specified time either deterministically ( hard real time systems) or generally ( soft real time systems) thus a system is a real-time system when it can support the execution of applications with time constraints on that execution. The classification is into a hard and a soft real-time systems based on their properties.
An example of a hard real time system is a digital fly-by-wire control system of an aircraft. No lateness is accepted under any circumstances, otherwise the aircraft will not be controllable. Cost of missing deadline is infinitely high, the lives of people depend on the correct working of the control system of the aircraft.
A soft real-time system can be a vending machine: the lateness of results means rise in cost. As it will take longer to treat a customer when the performance of the vending machine is degrading, less customers pay at this machine which results in less profits for the shop owner.
The key factor here is that the OS must behave in a deterministic manner under all circumstances.
An RTOS is valued more for how quickly and/or predictably it can respond to a particular event than for the given amount of work it can perform over time. Key factors in an RTOS are therefore a minimal interrupt latency and a minimal thread switching latency.
The main problem lies in the fact that hard real time systems are very difficult to make. The scheduling algorithms are very difficult to implement. Although theoretically it is possible but the implementation is very tough but in case of robots and all we have to use hard real time systems because even a fraction of a second delay in controlling a robot may result in it being unusable. In case of our test case the BSP they use Open VMS which is a soft RTOS for their functioning.
Before I delve into Open VMS let me first tell you a few things about the hardware being used for automation. Alpha servers 2100 and Alpha station 200 are used where in they have a 64 bit processor ( DEC 21064 AXP) and 128MB to 256 MB RAM. Now for us this might seem meager but the point is the 64 bit processors that we use today have a 32-bit ALU and by multiplexing it accesses this ALU twice in a cycle thus giving you a feeling that you are working with a 64 bit processor but the DEC chip used here has a 64 bit ALU itself. There are InfoServers and Virtual Extended Terminals(VXT) to access the server or client remotely. Along with this there are other hardware involved for networking viz. bridges, modems, hubs, optical fibres, repeaters and specialix (which terminates multiple network connections into one).
Now OpenVMS (Open Virtual Memory System or just VMS) is a high-end computer server operating system that runs on the VAX and Alpha family of computers developed by Digital Equipment Corporation, and most recently on Hewlett-Packard systems built around the Intel Itanium CPU. OpenVMS is a multi-user, multiprocessing virtual memory-based operating system (OS) designed for use in time sharing, batch processing, real time (process priorities can be set higher than OS kernel jobs) and transaction processing. It offers high system availability through clustering, or the ability to distribute the system over multiple physical machines. This allows the system to be “disaster-tolerant”. VMS also includes a process priority system that allows for real-time process to run unhindered, while user processes get temporary priority “boosts” if necessary. It works with DECnet of LAT protocols at data link layer and TCP/IP protocol suite for higher layers for networking and sharing of resources.
With shared resources, OpenVMS Cluster systems offer higher availability than standalone systems. Properly configured, OpenVMS Cluster systems can withstand the shutdown or failure of various components. Systems in an OpenVMS Cluster system can share processing, mass storage (including system disks), and other resources under a single OpenVMS security and management domain. Within this highly integrated environment, systems retain their independence because they use local, memory-resident copies of the OpenVMS operating system. Thus, OpenVMS Cluster systems can boot and shut down independently while benefiting from common resources. This results in up to 100% application availability when properly configured. OpenVMS clusters can provide full capabilities even when physically separated by up to 500 miles.
Just before winding up I would like to tell you about one other important automated part of the plant namely the SLCC or the Supervisory Load Control Centre which is a kind of centralized monitoring of all power coming into Bokaro Steel City through BSL and is used by the plant or the township. SLCC is in Kolkata where all data from SLCC, Bokaro are sent for analysis. SLCC monitors over 1100 analog parameters to give a complete control of all electricity flow under BSL. It also manages power failures and errors along with load management. It uses ECIL system and CDAC system which are based on client-server architecture. Redundant hardware is maintained where in two servers one primary and another secondary continually monitor around 23 network parameters of which 21 are redundantly copied onto secondary server which takes over full control as and when primary fails so that the complete system does not collapse.
This kind of sums up much of the IT participation in a steel plant although some companies in steel industry do involve higher degree of automation for more efficiency. Other areas like robotics, aviation, marine and even automobile industry are seeing higher and higher integration with Information Technology and Electronics fields to give products to man that existed in science fiction in the yesteryears. In years to come we will see immense collaboration of the two to give us state of the art defense equipments along with products of civilian usage. Robots that can operate on humans, missiles that can “see” images, small cars to F1 cars have some kind of automation, even huge Boeing and Airbus airplanes are being flown by computers. There is so much more and this field. Thus, The Mech-IT alliance is here to stay and will definitely go a long way in revolutionizing the way people lead their lives!
my upcoming MP3 player
ok guys this is my upcoming mp3 player. the looks r good nd i love it. not an ipod but definitely a gr8 bargain at it’s price.
neways wat’s the need….at the end u gotta listen to music na!!!!!
so here i present to u all my t-sonic 520.
TEST TEST TEST!!!!!
hi guyz nd gals i ll be writing a lot over here very soon. just hold on till these ppl at my college are thru with testing me.
till then take care, stay happy, love u all.
