What Is This Site About?

Controls Overload is a collaborative question and answer site for controls, automation, motion, and industrial robot programmers everywhere. Ask a question and have it answered here. See a question that you know the answer to? Be a hero and answer it!

That's it, no pretty pictures or fancy flash videos to take away from the true purpose of this site - to ask, to find, and to get answers to questions. All are equally important!

This site is not for computer based programming languages or databases, StackOverflow.com has that more than covered, and is proof that this concept works! This site is for Integrators, Designers, Manufacturers, Vendors, Engineers, Electricians, Maintenance, and Clark Griswold, who needs help running 200 strands of Christmas lights through a Micrologic PLC to get them synced to Joy to the World, and who then finds an HMI on ebay and thinks it would be cool to be able to select different Christmas carols...

This site is currently in Beta mode, email me with any ideas or questions - Jeremy (at) controlsoverload.com

Is This Site For Me?

This site is for you if:

• You need to have proprietary software and matching firmware to program what you are working on, and sometimes desperately,
• You have ever programmed a PLC with a laptop on your knee, with your head inside an air conditioned electrical panel, just to get out of the mid-summer sweltering plant heat,
• You have ever spent hours chasing encoder noise faults, grounding and re-grounding, and re-routing cabling,
• You have ever taught a robot to pick, place, weld, paint, de-mould, spray, throw, take a picture or putt a golf ball,
• You have ever made offline changes to a program and downloaded it, without uploading and making a backup, and now the machine won’t run,
• You have ever plugged into a data higway network, taking down the master controller on the network,
• You have ever added a blank HMI screen to an application, just to screw with someone

How will this site help me?

If you fit the description above, this site will help you make more money.

Keeping It Clean?

No solicitation or promotion allowed, and don't ask for it. Ask questions based on your needs, problems, desires or fantasies (controls related of course). Answer questions based on your expertise, not just because you sell a product or solution that might fit. If you want help offline and like the answers a user is giving, contact them through their website listed in their user profile page.

Speaking of profiles, you don't need one, but once your question or answer gets upvoted, and you start getting rep points, you will wish you had! Use your companies website when updating your profile. If enough companies start contributing I will post a list with the combined highest rep from all of the users for that company, and put the top 10 in lights for bragging rights. (Providing I can get the data out)

What are you waiting for? Tell your friends, tell your boss, or hide it from everyone you work with so you can be the super star.

Check out the frequently asked questions (FAQ) for more information on how to use this site.