Automating Australia with Jasmine Quick (Linkedin Live)

Continuing Season 3: Nikki and Ali G (along with a guest appearance from Courtney) take time to speak with Jasmine Quick, an Industrial Automation Engineer at GPS Electrical Services in Melbourne.

Sometimes working long shifts, Jasmine is no stranger to the engineer lifestyle. She talks about going through school in Australia, VM's, converting whole sites to new programs, and software.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of Automation Ladies. This time we are Hey, I'm struggling. I don't have any sound. Hi, Courtney. We have everyone. Uh, we're in the process of everybody joining and figuring out that they're here and Courtney dropped off. So it looks like she's in her car somewhere. We may or may not see her again, but, yeah, today's guest, we have Jasmine Quick joining us from Australia, a day ahead in the future, 8am on a Friday, and here we are recording and are live at 3 o'clock central time.

It is a small, large, world when it comes to the, industrial automation community. And we've been making more friends in Australia. So we're super excited to have you on. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Uh, quickly before we get into the interview and also to give, Courtney, maybe a little more time to see if she can join.

Ali, it's been a while since you've been on the show. How are you? Yeah, what's going on? I'm good. I was gonna say speaking of other friends in Australia, Phil [00:01:00] has just said morning guys, in the comments. And, there are actually like hats in Australia, from us. I don't, magic, you know, I think it was like, what fair was that?

Like we gave someone at a trade show. ICC. So inductive. Wow. Okay. From Sacramento then. Okay. But yeah, no, I'm good. I was just on a call with someone from Sacramento, like 30 minutes ago. We are everywhere. We are everywhere. All over the world. And Courtney, hey, can you hear us now? Yes, I can. I disconnected and put my headphones in.

And it's not coming through the headphones, but I got sound, so I'm not going to complain. Where are you? Uh, I'm outside of TechLabs. We can talk about that another time. Do you not want to talk about TechLabs today? Oh, I'm cool talking about it. I just don't, it's a lot, it's a big pile of stuff and I don't want to steal the thunder here.

Okay, let's talk about that in the new year then. [00:02:00] There's a lot brewing with FastOne and TechLabs and PCE and all of us because we can't stick to doing three things at a time. It needs to be four or five, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're here. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for letting me in.

And Allie, and those of you that are listening on the podcast later and not watching the live, Allie's got a really great, bright, like a vibrant blue PCE hat on and a matching shirt. Was that, on purpose today, Allie? Yeah, I have this like wall of hats and there's like 10 of them now and I just pick them and I found this shirt earlier and I was like, I have a hat like that.

So I was like, yeah, I did that on purpose. Nice. I like it. Jasmine, do you have any hats for your company? I have a beanie somewhere. I haven't seen it in a little while, but yeah, I'll get I'll get you a hat. Thank you. Well, I guess since you are the guest of honor, thank you so much for being here. Standard question and then see where this [00:03:00] goes, which is can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

And maybe who's there with you? How you got into industrial automation? So to start with, this is my baby Susie. And I'll put her down now. She doesn't like being picked up like that. I love Susie. So I'm, an engineer for GPS electrical services. We do industrial and electrical engineering, mostly around Melbourne and some further Victoria and a couple points of state as well.

Crazy big, actually. And so I work as part of the maintenance team there as well as a qualified electrician. So I kind of float between, but I much prefer the engineering work. And I think I've made everyone aware of that. And so I got into industrial automation by kind of fell into it through high school, and had to do a set, year 12.

I had to do a set two of something because I didn't want to do the uni pathway. And because my dad's an [00:04:00] electrician, I just kind of picked it there, got some work experience at one of the local manufacturing facilities. And as part of that, they put me in their automation team. And I distinctly remember the manager just giving me, a 17 slot control logic chassis in a laptop and saying, take this home and do something with it.

I was like, I don't, I don't even know where to start with this. It gave me a little bit of training and like, all right, here's how you get online, create a new project. And it was like, take it home. And I'm like too many options. And then just continued from there, finished my apprenticeship, joined their automation team.

And then after a couple of years as an automation technician in just that one plant, I joined GPS and now I get to work for a whole bunch of places. And it's been really interesting. I've been learning a lot. Especially a lot of ignition. We've been doing a lot of that lately. It's been good fun. Very interesting.

So what did that first manufacturing plant that you worked in, manufacture? Uh, so they make plasterboard, gyprock. Uh, plasterboard and cornice and yeah. So [00:05:00] they had two production lines and a couple of supporting plant processes and. I used to think that was big just because the factory itself is big because shiprock is a big product and then I've been to a few other of our clients now and I'm like, there are 7 or 8 production lines here or more and like 30 something robots.

I'm just like, this is candy land. Nice. How have you found like communication with like operators in the plants? Like, what's your experience like that been? For the most part, it's been all right. At my first company, I had a bit of protection from my dad used to work there. So people didn't try anything weird.

And then by the time any new people were coming through the team, I was established in the team. So there was never any friction from that side. And they're all good people anyway. And even in working for GPS as a contractor, and you're going to a bunch of different places. I find people don't tend to give me any sort of weird issues at all.

There was one company I was doing a bit of maintenance for. Took a while for them to learn that the woman [00:06:00] responding to maintenance calls was the electrician and not sanitation. Because they were all on the one radio channel and it all sounds the same. But once they learnt that, then they were all so pretty cool.

And every now and then I'll go back there to come for another shift and they're just like, hey, how's it going? So yeah, it's always been pretty good. I've always worked with pretty good people. Yeah, I found that, a lot of them, are willing to share, but, you have to, you know, share information.

And so I found, they know, they're extremely valuable in, like, even design. And that's one of the things I learned early on was just, If you're going to design something for a process and really huge companies, including you know, Procter and Gamble will have their operators like come to the factory acceptance tests and look at the equipment and say what they want and they'll like work, you'll have like engineers work with them and change the screens to make them like what they really need, not what or what they're used to versus whatever it is that, yeah, we want to say, you know, Or that matches our PNIDs or whatever it is that we're like doing.

Yeah, we can do it as clean as we can and then [00:07:00] they should be the last ones to actually like say bless it. Yeah, definitely need them, need to have them approve what they're doing because otherwise if they're going to use it, if they don't like it, they either just won't use it or they'll do their best to defeat it so that they can use it the way they need to.

So. And they will defeat it they will defeat it and if you design something you need to know that and you should work with who's going to go your stuff Like because if you don't care about that, that's kind of crazy and yeah, because they're going to do exactly that like it's not going to live out It's full life because you didn't try to teach how to actually use it and show those people respect that they're gonna yeah Take care of my machine, please like you can even ask them that like, can you please?

 Take care of my machine. These are all the ways it can break if this is up to you Like, please, I wanted to, uh, you mentioned. So in year 12, so we speak about school a little bit differently in the US. And I also, I grew up in Iceland partially before I came to the US. So we [00:08:00] also do things differently than here.

But do you have a primary school that goes through year 12? Or how do you section those? Like schools off and when can you choose to stop schooling and what are the options you mentioned? You didn't want to go to uni. So that would be like going to college. We call it in the U S um, or university in some cases, but can you tell us a little bit more about the education system just from your perspective in Australia and is going your route kind of common, or is that something different that you chose kind of just.

Based on, I guess, your dad, you having seen that option? So in Australia, the schooling's split up into primary, which is prep, so about, ages of, four or five, sometimes six, through to grade six. And that's all your primary school. And then you have your secondary, which is years seven through to 12.

 And that's when you start getting more of your elect, you get, you can start picking more of your electives from like year nine, year 10. And then it used to be when I was going through the school, years 11 and 12, you had two streams, you had [00:09:00] VCE, Victorian Certificate of Education, which was if you're going through to a university pathway, and you would complete all these big exams at the end of year 12, and you would get, what they call an ATAR, so University Entry School, and you had to have a certain number to be able to get into certain courses, depending on what the university set, and then there was VCAL, which is what I did, and Victoria Certificate of Applied Learning, which is much more your vocational route.

 Not every school offered that at the time. Um, I changed schools at year 11 and the school I changed to offered that BCAL option. And I did BCE for one year and absolutely hated it. Decided I don't like math and so I go be an electrician and do a lot more math and then I hate that. And I'm going to be an engineer and do a lot more math.

Make it make sense. But you still have to like math to be an engineer or an electrician. You have to put up with it, probably, but. You gotta put up with it, but for the most part, it's all working out. It's nothing like super crazy complicated. But yeah, so, in year, yeah, in year 11, year [00:10:00] 10, you kind of pick which pathway you're going to go.

That the default pathway tends to be the VCE, which is kind of the default assumed because everyone wants to go to university. And yeah, so VCAL is much for if you're going for a trade route, for girls, it can often look a lot like a hairdressing or an animal care, or I think there's a, uh, we're becoming more and more common for your more traditional construction type trades, but I was definitely the only one in my past going for any sort of, construction type like that.

 Think the last one to go that route had been a couple of years before me and she went and became a mechanic. So one, like a couple of years before. Yeah. I was at an all girls Catholic school, so very, they weren't drilling it, but when you're surrounded by that environment, you don't tend to really consider other options.

So, but yeah. And then, so your tertiary sector, which is your university or your tafe, which is your vocational trades, [00:11:00] TAFE comes up to, from a cert two, typically to a, an advanced diploma. And often an advanced diploma can be used as a pathway into a bachelor's, so in the university side, if for whatever reason you didn't complete the traditional pathway of going through VCE and straight into a university, that's a way that you can get into those courses if you didn't follow that traditional pathway.

Very interesting. Yeah, we have people from, um, I want to throw up a few comments from all over the world. We've got Saeed from Libya. Hi, thanks for joining. Whenever I see the number of countries that listen to Automation Ladies, I do minus one because I know Iceland is my mom. You can't not count your mom.

Well, I mean, I know she's just listening because it's me. That's a fan. My mom's a fan, too. She also technically works in the industry. My mom does not. Houston. Hey. She's we're neighbors [00:12:00]sort of but we're still like an hour away from each other. If not more I'm probably more when there's traffic even because Houston Metro is huge I was talking to Caleb about that about just how like if you live in Texas Visiting a friend is worthy of four hours of your time in a truck to drive all that time And like I'm from Not that and so like not from texas anyway And so i've lived in cities like chicago where my friends won't come visit me if it takes 45 minutes to get to me So they're there's no way that I love you enough to visit you by driving 45 minutes each direction Where in texas they'll just do like us Which is amazing because everything's so spread out So if you want to go see everything that's there you're gonna drive a lot.

And so they just love driving Everyone has to love driving in texas And ideally, you have a white truck that that's service truck Marlene says that [00:13:00] means they're not dedicated alley. Yes, when I moved to the Bay Area, I lived in the East Bay and a lot of people that I worked with lived in the city in San Francisco.

And there's 1 bridge that connects the 2 and it takes about 10 minutes to drive across the bridge when there's not a bridge and I did not get it. I was like, why? Why? Oh, people just don't cross the bridge. They will never come over to the city and I used to go to the city all the time to hang out with them.

And then, at some point, I got older and crankier, and some of those friends moved away, and I stopped going over to the city as much. Even though it really wasn't that far. And then Australia has a lot of desert and it can, maybe like Texas, like how far is, like, how far will you go for your friends, Jasmine?

 Well, I've flown up to Brisbane for one of my old best friends, but she's now moved back down to Melbourne. So. From south to just past halfway north. [00:14:00] Really? What distance is that? I'm not even going to understand kilometers either, so that's going to be fun. Let me match that. A drive would probably be nearly 20 hours.

Oh my god! That's where you fly? How long is that? The flight was like two hours. That's very true. Uh, two hours? That's, wow. Yeah. And then you mentioned your service area goes quite a bit, like, beyond Melbourne. How far forward do you drive for, clients? Yeah, for work. Sometimes we fly out, especially if we're doing a project.

We have a couple of some dumb projects in other states. But our typical service area is It's Melbourne, most, quite a lot of Victoria, actually. I've done times where I've, gone and filled in, shift at a meat processing plant, uh, three hours drive north of us. So right on the border of, Victoria and New South Wales.

That's kind of the farthest I've personally traveled for it. And when we do shifts like that, you get cut, you get put up overnight. [00:15:00] Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to be driving back three hours. Back and forth for every shift. It's for sure. No, there'd be quite a long way. That's typically the first time I've had to do.

I tend to stick within probably within an hour of Melbourne is my typical area of work. I just haven't really needed to go too much further than that in my day to day. When you do, how long are you out there for? What's the longest you have to do? We tend to do 8 to 12 hour shifts. Depending on what the client needs, especially if we're filling in.

When I'm just doing engineering work, I'm just in the office for roughly 8 hours. Sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less. I try to keep it pretty well even. But for maintenance shifts, it's, yeah, traveling. It'd be probably about an 8 hour shift to 12 hours. A lot of 12 hour shifts. A lot of manufacturing and, food and process just do, like a 12 hour rotating shift.

Do you sometimes do night shifts or days only? Uh, yeah, I've done quite a few nights, trying to do a few less of them because they make it an [00:16:00] absolute ruin of the rest of the week, but, yeah. Yeah, I've had to cover them before and at my old job, I was doing a solid rotating pattern of maybe like two days on, three days off, two nights on, three nights on and just rotating twos and threes and it was not fun, kind of painful.

Yeah, that sounds rough. And I think we found out now there's enough research to show that like, or not giving your body any kind of predictable rhythm as to when you're going to be awake and when you're going to be sleeping. It takes a toll on the health. So I'm glad you're not doing that anymore.

Yeah, I managed to really step back from a lot of the, Rusted support and mainly just the odd shift here and there when most of the rest of our team can't really cover it is there on the employer side. We need to just make it too expensive. Like, if it's expensive enough, then they'll just wait to actually have our people during the normal times that, you know, but sometimes there's going to be, there's going to be a lot of instances where you're going to [00:17:00] have to, I don't know, for me, I can see promising my people.

You know, something because they're going to get burnt out but I'm going to need them to do like some of these burnout type sessions where, you know, the customer needs this thing done and it's a big project and it's a big deal. And as long as I don't have those back to back to back to back on people, that's what I'm worried about is like not having to do that back to back to back. So, yeah, I recently just finished a project, where the install week of it was one day would be prepped for just seven till two and the next day we come in at 2am to actually start doing the changeover and then the next day was back to the seven to three to prep the next room and then the 2am start the day after that, um, just to fit in with the, um, we were changing over a post mix system for a client.

 And it was just when they said would be the least used, they would be able to shut off a whole bunch of bars so that we could just turn everything off. And it's just part of the job sometimes is you [00:18:00] have a pretty good time and it's pretty consistent, pretty solid, most of the work. And so every now and then you just go, look, I'm getting paid for it.

You can just do like a couple of days of a weird time or a hard start or something because it's not every time. Yeah, we have a comment from one of our listeners. Four on, three off works well. I used to have a rotating roster that was based around the fours and threes and that was all right because one week we would work six shifts and then we'd get a whole week off, one of the, every month and we quite liked that and then that management, that was at my old job, they decided they wanted us to match up our roster with the production guys because they wanted us paired up with the supervisors, and Not long after that, our team started leaving, we didn't like the new roster and we didn't want to be on it, but they just made it happen.

So, Oh, what's your favorite part of the work that you do and maybe what's your least favorite? I think it would just be the sheer variety of it. I'm learning [00:19:00] something almost every day. Thanks, Rob. Um, yeah, I'm learning something almost every day. And it's been really good. When you're working at the one place, you get to know how that one place has all of its processes work.

So that's how I got a lot of my Rockwell training and a lot of training on sequence logic and things like that. And then I've come to. GPS, where I'm getting, I've got a little bit of exposure to some Siemens programs, a lot of exposure to ignition, um, some more exposure to factory torque view in a machine edition and also coming in as a contractor, trying to work on someone's site edition and like how you get into their systems to be able to do things because you don't just automatically have access to everything and things like Modbus.

I learned Modbus earlier this year and. I can see why we like it. It was a bit of a pain working out how to address everything, but once I got that down, it was understandable. But yeah, just, I'm just enjoying that I'm just learning everything and there's just always more to learn. Always want to learn. My least favorite?

I actually wouldn't know. I don't think I had a least favorite. Hardware, [00:20:00] software, sometimes people like one or the other I like hardware more than I like the programming and software and Most people are the opposite of me at least that I found in at least in engineering. I don't know why I definitely, I definitely do prefer the programming.

See, people are, yeah, okay. Yeah, because I mean, how often do you get into, a control panel to have to troubleshoot, I guess, because that's a good skill. And actually, you know, not everyone has both of those skills. And if you do have one or the other, you should, you know, try to learn the other one.

 Because they go really well hand in hand. Oh, VMs. Yeah, we use a lot of VMs. We do too. Well, integrators tend to use VMs a lot just because we can't have one laptop or slash machine have All of the softwares we need for all of the customers, even if you have, even if all your customers were one platform, they wouldn't all have the same like version because that is Murphy's [00:21:00] law and you're never going to have anything other than just like a giant cluster of platforms and versions.

And that's why people use VMS versus like in skater, a lot of companies use skater just to run their automation platforms are all of their servers for skater or historian or whatever. So there's two different ways to use VMs. But integrators use VMs a lot. And people don't know that going in.

 And I don't know that they teach so much VM stuff, like in mechatronics programs or like, Uh, I didn't have any exposure whatsoever, but I was studying chemical engineering, so they weren't going to show me that anyway. Yeah, did you see VMs Before your current job or before college or like, when did you ever first see that?

So I never actually finished college or university or anything for my course. I used to get entirely on the job training. So I've always seen a little bit of exposure to VMs. It was just a common way that in my old workplace, it was how they made sure, the laptops just had an easy access to the Rockwell suite.

And in my current workplace, yeah, how we [00:22:00] distribute having access to all of it. I managed to keep breaking my VM. So my boss has actually just been texting me saying that I hate them because they always crash. I'm like, yeah, I keep breaking it. I broke some too. I just spent several hours just re downloading Studio 5000 and factory talking.

You kind of learn to store everything. I learned early on that I had to have massive amounts of storage devices because I had to store these gigantic virtual machines. And then, yeah, and break them. And one time I got all. And this is the only time I ever did this and I'll never do it again.

I got, I was like, I'm going to have all the versions of Rockwell on this VM and it's going to be my mega VM. And then when I finally, and it was like a good VM, it worked well for me. And I finally load the last one. And I wasn't paying attention to memory. And I never do because I'm a data unconscious person.

Like a lot of people watch all the light data and I never care about the data usage. And so, I go and my own C drive on my computer blew up. So my [00:23:00] VM definitely blew up and it never came back. Like I had to completely rebuild a new vm and it was the saddest thing I've ever experienced with the virtual and it happened with Virtual box.

So I just have this thing against Virtual Box, but I shouldn't because it was me, , and because you could use VMware or Virtual Box. And I actually now with my company use Hyper VE just because it like. Is free with like windows 10 pro. So I just keep doing that Um, but I know that a lot of people love and swear by virtual or what is it vmware pro like the professional vmware?

 What do you guys use? And what do you like? But i'm, sorry that you've broken vms, but that is a very normal thing I've done it so many times. It's so sad. That was actually really good to know because I've been meaning to download one of those old packages of Rockwell, where you can download like a bunch of different versions of studio 5, 000, because I'm like, I keep going, and a version 20 and a version [00:24:00] 25, I'm currently running version 35.

I've got to be able to get into something.

Um, yeah, we're also using, VMware. I broke for a while and then I broke that VM and because I had a snapshot I had to completely rebuild it. So I just use the regular, workstation at the moment. For people who aren't watching, maybe I'll just explain what a VM is.

A virtual machine is like, we all have our computers and we kind of understand they have operating systems on them and you're like, oh, I have Windows 11 or I have Windows 10. Well, you can have something called a hypervisor that's playing. Multiple other computers outside of the one that's actually like your host or your computer.

So you can have a laptop that actually opens up. Other computers so that you can use softwares on those other versions and they don't have to be the same version as what you have so you could play windows 7 or windows xp or linux or you could play all kinds of different machines on your hypervisor so there's a software based thing that you can play other people [00:25:00] like your other Computers that and this is kind of how servers work, but, that's what a virtual machine is.

Sorry, just making sure that, we just say that in case. Yeah, yeah, you're on a rent or maybe make it just the point that that stands for virtual machine. I think a lot of people probably know, but in case. They don't, that was helpful. I know one example, in real life where running out of memory became really, really expensive, which was the recent Toyota shutdown in Japan.

 It was actually caused by their main system out of memory and their plan. I think it was more than one plant, in Japan was down for days and pretty big. Yeah, yeah, so the memory thing, small scale, large scale, people got to pay attention to that. Definitely not something I ever think about. I use a MacBook and I'm mainly Chrome browsers with.

All kinds of [00:26:00] extensions, which is why, even though Chrome is terrible and we use way too much memory, I will never stop using it. My husband hates it and tells me every time he sees it that it's the worst browser and I shouldn't be using it and it's hogging all my resources on my computer. And I'm like, I know.

Yep. That's what I do, though. That's my work. Yeah. But all I have to do is find the parts, not use them, not program them, not use them. Allie and everybody else deals with that. Yeah, memory wise, the most I can think of it is, does it fit? Yes, sweet, I've got the space. Or if I'm doing, like, a move function, move or copy, it's like, I'm not trying to copy, a whole, dint into something too small for that and causing a potentially critical error or something.

And that's kind of as far as I think about it well and then you also have to think of ram and that's the next level is like how slow is your computer and is that your fault or is there something else with the programs going on and I thought I was amazing because I made sure all my computers had like at least 64 gigs of ram and then Sophia [00:27:00] comes along and she's like mine has 128 gigs of ram and I'm like What kind of gamer system?

What? I think she does camera stuff too. So it just makes sense to have just like insane amounts of Ram, but I'm just like, okay, I don't know. That was, that was impressed by that. I was like, I guess I need 128 gigs of Ram. Yeah. I'll be like, Oh, I have camera systems. I'll just be like that.

Yeah. I have to do videos. That's why I need all that. And gaming.

Jasmine, you mentioned earlier that you, when you went into a plant that had a multiple production lines and robots, it felt like candy land. Did you immediately feel excited about this stuff when you got into it in the beginning? Or did it take some time to kind of warm up and see the potential and get excited about it?

Now, I was pretty excited about it straight away, because it was, at the first time, it was just the novelty of, hey, I'm in an area with robots, and that was back at my [00:28:00] first job, which only had about 5 robots, and at the time we also had a fleet of 13 automated forklifts. So that was pretty interesting.

I would go in on a Thursday for, work experience. We'd be calibrating the navigation on the robots. And I'd go back to school the next day and say that I made multi million dollar worth of doughnuts, but it's a stretch. So that was always pretty cool. And then, yeah, once, when I started going to other facilities and there was one facility, I remember they, I think they're now up to They're one of the biggest clients of that robot company in the Southern Hemisphere.

 And yeah, just walking through their production line and every production line had at least three robots on it, just going super fast. They had one, of the production lines makes a really small little, product and they have those robots that hang from the ceiling with like, I call them spiders, but they're not spiders.

They've got the three arms that go down to a point. Yeah. And those robots were going absolutely flat stick trying to pick up all of this product and still missing them all. And every [00:29:00] now and then you get a leak in the air so you start throwing the product everywhere.

 So I always found that kind of funny just a little bit. Yeah, I was in a cheese plant once and like we literally opened a valve to a manifold and it was the wrong valve so a lot of milk spilled everywhere and we literally made jokes about spilled milk for like a long time. Did you cry over it?

Can't cry over spilled milk. Be like, there's a lot of milk to cry about here. There's a lot of milk to cry about. Allie came to visit me, uh, or she came to Houston, for business and to visit a friend. So we can call that a long distance, A trip to make to see a friend, right? For my accountant.

No, I, you bring your accountant into it. Now I'm feeling bad. Um, we found out that we had a number of more things in common than we even knew from the beginning. And one [00:30:00] of those things, I don't know that we discussed this specifically on this trip, but we both have roots in dairy plants. My grandfather, studied dairy, production in Denmark and worked in a dairy plant making butter, his whole life or his whole career.

And my parents met at a dairy plant, during a summer job one year. And Allie, you also have, what was it? Your grand grandfather? So my, my mom's like baby face. She's like the youngest of 18 kids, but her baby face was used on the butter tubs. So my, grandpa lived on the floors above and like below.

And then this is in Mexico, in Leon, Guanajuato. And like, they had a production facility going on underneath like it was everything's batch, right? And, they would sell, dairy underneath, you know, where they lived. And there was always people there and trucks coming in and out.

And it was like a true, production facility of dairy. Um, yeah. It was neat that, we both found out that, our grandpas, like, did stuff with milk. [00:31:00] Even more so in common, like, they literally both made butter. And on my dad's side, we come from dairy farmers. And so we would, have, you know, make the milk and put it into, I guess, very large containers.

Well, largest relative at the time, and then the dairy truck would come pick it up. And that's how my family would hitch a ride into town is on the back of the dairy truck.

But I, yeah, I've also been in a couple of cheese plants. And man, I love food and beverage. Mainly when you get to actually, when you get to sample the stuff that's being made or whatever. Although there is all kinds of food being made now that now I'm like, maybe I shouldn't eat it after this whole process happens, rather than, you know, pros and cons.

 I love the stainless. Yeah. Um, sanitary, just like the other stainless just everywhere. And yeah, relatively clean depending on which facilities you're in. Um, GMP usually. Yeah. Although I have to say onion cutting [00:32:00] places are not my favorite. Onion cutting. Think about Bear Mace. Think about a Bear Mace facility.

Like, or like Bear Mace. Like mace. Oh bear. Mace. Like pepper spray. like Yeah. Pepper spray. Yeah, like when that stuff leaks. How fun. How fun. Ooh, I did read an article about the community surrounding like a sriracha manufacturing plants. They would get like, there's just a lot of hot pepper in the air everywhere.

I've been to like, what is that Avery Island? Where do they make Tabasco in Louisiana? I've been there and it's really strong outside of the building. So Like really strong. You're like, wow, how do you work in this very strong pepper smell? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. So here, at least here in the US, like, food is popular in grocery stores now.

So you might buy like pre chopped onion in a tub or they'll sell it sliced or, or chopped to, you know, [00:33:00] food service to restaurants. Distribution, that sort of thing. And so I've been in a couple of plants where they were processing the onion and that was a lot of crying out over spilled milk.

We have, uh, Vlad from manufacturing hub joining. Thank you, Vlad. It was nice to see you here. He was asking, I guess, relating to the game or laptop, comments earlier. What kind of game and I know he games. Because the way they got their show started with streaming and all of that was, uh, streaming gaming.

So I don't know what Sophia plays with her 128 gigs of RAM, but, the only gaming I ever did in college was World of Warcraft, but she's probably like playing some other RPG. I don't know. Jasmine, do you play any games? Are you a gamer? I've actually just started playing a game with some of my old housemates.

We play, For the King 2, which is like a similar to a D& D [00:34:00] type, online game. Awesome. I got a couple of, sessions into that and my old personal laptop just could not handle it. So I ended up working with one of my co workers and bought and built my own computer. So now I have a pretty flash desktop computer at home.

Did you ever play any, like, first person shooters? I played Perfect Dark. I used to try and play COD with one of my exes, but, um, I, I can't get, I don't have the hand eye coordination for it. I'm just kind of, like, shooting everywhere and hoping that I can. It's like That's funny. Somebody recently said to me that if you're in I.

T. and you don't play games, that's a red flag. Like, what? What are you? Controls and electrical is not necessary. I mean, it's adjacent to I. T. but not the same. Um, you have, you know, you do what layman would probably label as [00:35:00] I. T. sometimes. It's definitely coming back. We'll call it, before I started doing my old role, I didn't even know how to set an IP and that was one of the first things that my old manager ended up teaching me and setting up networks across the site because we're having all these dead spots.

 I crashed the network there a couple of times I was supposed to add a router into one of the switch rooms because it was a bit of a dead zone, and it was all through a managed switch and, I couldn't get there. Into the Manu switch through the corporate computer because they'd locked that all right down.

 And I was like, oh, what's the worst that can happen? Just plug it in and send it. And I dropped out the NAS over Christmas. Then I came in the next day and did it again. I'm much better about I. T. practices nowadays, but yeah, you gotta be careful out there. Like, I've seen people, uh, like, this was fun.

Someone, uh, I won't say where it happened, but, they changed. They, they didn't know exactly what they were doing with RS links and they were trying an experiment and. Instead of doing [00:36:00] the change of the IP address that it was going to be NATed to, they decided that they were going to change the IP address of the HMI to the exact same thing as the PLC.

And then they didn't talk anymore and everyone freaked out. But yeah, you have to be careful. What you're doing. And if something has an IP address and you might change it, like, don't even mess with that until you know what's going on. Because the IP addresses should scare people until they understand them.

So if you see them, leave them there. You see gateways and IP addresses like do not delete that stuff or take pictures of them. I don't know. If you're a new person to like it or controls engineering or, you know, any of that stuff, pay attention to that because You can't just be going out there doing stuff, and there's a lot of damage you could do.

And you need to remember where you did the thing that you did, especially if you are like, if you're super comfortable with, your own stuff, and then you go mess with, industrial networks, like, yeah, you're gonna cry 1 of the things I think. One of the things I get scared about most going to new sites for engineering [00:37:00] work is if I haven't had a chance to speak to anyone in their engineering department yet and be like, can you give me an IP address for my laptop so that I can get myself into your network because otherwise I'm like Yeah, because if you assume one, I mean, unless there's a DHCP server that can give you something, you should not go on there and be like, I'll just be blah, blah, blah, because you have no idea what they really did and like You might step on any kind of controller or another computer or a printer and then you're like why does I was getting addressed a the same address on my computer from a DHCP server as a VFD and I saw the craziest stuff I've never thought I could see and I don't ever want to see anything like that again and so you can do really bad things by duplicating IP addresses on networks with like DHCP servers and other stuff like Just be so careful, if you're going to do a static address, you need someone's permission.

And you need to give that, you need some IT person in the universe to give you that address. [00:38:00] Otherwise, like, good luck to you. Yeah, basically the worst I've seen from duplicates is that it just drops them both out and just won't communicate. I haven't seen it do any sort of crazy responses as a result of that so far.

What is your favorite thing that you're learning right now? That's a little bit new or, the thing that you can't. Get away, like, I don't know how I'm trying to word this. So, that's like, impressive. Yeah, that's exciting. If anything. I probably keep coming back to it, but ignition, to be honest, they really enjoying an ignition perspective, especially.

 We've been doing a lot of projects where we're converting whole sites from factory talks to ignition, as a site's new SCADA system or an entire company's new SCADA. And so we've been smashing out quite a few of those projects pretty well. We've got it. Working out how to really keep them to that ISA standard.

And still get a little bit of personalization from some labels and maybe a banner color or something. But when we're starting to have some [00:39:00] really good momentum with those sorts of projects, and it's just. I like seeing a project and we get it and within a couple of weeks, we've got it half built already, and then we just need to be allowed to get site to actually start, just commissioning a lot of it.

 I recently finished one for that company up in, North Victoria that I was talking about earlier. Um, we converted their entire site and. I worked with one of my fellow engineers to do a lot of the Refridge system and that actually ended up being a pretty smooth project. I really enjoyed that one.

We just took the old screen, put our new screen beside it, made sure it all functioned the same, but looked quite a lot better to be honest. And so I've been really enjoying those projects and just learning how Ignition works and all the sorts of tricks you can kind of do within it, especially if you have any sort of understanding of the coding language that they use.

I keep wanting to say Jason, but I don't really touch that part of it. I do scripting, a little bit of expression work, and dealing with the bindings and yeah, just pretty, pretty cool stuff that you can make it do. And we got into, like historians, uh, yeah, a little bit. It's quite a lot of [00:40:00] trending. For one of our other companies, I built, um, for an energy monitoring system, and they wanted reporting.

So every week they get a report that has some trends, the consumption of the week, the difference between that week and the last week. Eventually, that'll also have the difference between that time period the year before as well. So they can see whether they're going up or down about the same. So that's between those, you're a lot of historians and stuff and yeah.

And SQL, I had to learn SQL for that job and going back into my own code to try and fix up anything is, it's a time, but it works. So that one, yeah, I learned a lot doing that one as well. Like I had to learn how to use SQL for that. And I'd come across that for a couple of other projects before. But that time really building my own scripts and not just interrogating someone else's database.

Yeah, it's definitely a database work, having that knowledge and being able to use it in this context. I think it's really helpful. Our [00:41:00] last interview with Naomi Pittman. She also, she started out in it, and then she became a master electrician. And the fact that she can work with databases. I think adds 

a helpful skill, but that's also really helpful across, like, all kinds of other. Jobs, if you're like an analyst or a project manager, product manager, it's something that I used to work with. And then we decided to build an engine that would just convert natural language to SQL. So that we wouldn't.

Like, not everybody would have to know how to write the queries. Oh, neat. Yeah. Uh, we called it conversational sequel. And, but that was probably about that was several years ago. Now. I'm pretty sure that, like, generative AI can just do that without any kind of. Without all the work that we put into,

have you, are you playing around at all with chat or any of the other, AI, things that are out there. No, I haven't touched any of the AI. I [00:42:00] kind of. I don't really know how I would apply it to my work. I do mostly ladder logic programming, so I don't know if it's at all helpful for that. And with how customized every project is, you get your base template, but then your, everything is always so specific to what that client specifically needs.

I don't know how helpful it would actually be in the end anyway. But I'm also saying that as someone who's never actually tried to use it for my work, because I also enjoy just the process of building my own programs and stuff. So. Yeah I would definitely not say that it would be useful to you for, building things instead of you doing it.

I think the last good use case I heard was somebody using it to check their syntax when they're writing C sharp code or, sometimes it can be a help, a helpful thing, especially, I guess, if you're maybe you're more of a beginner. And to instead of having to go back to another person or ask for advice, it's, it can be helpful, but I think like formatting a report, and I, one of the, that like Nikki sold me on chat, GBT was how it could take, it can't just take [00:43:00] and do stuff that you.

Ask it to do from scratch, but like it's amazing at like taking stuff if you already have all the technical data, or the technical like meat of something and it's just really crudely just either listed or, you know, you can just take really bare information that is factual and ask shot GPT to make that sound.

 Like more language, you know, more like a paragraph and so I found that that's actually pretty useful just to make reports and documentation not so because engineers are just like their reports look like they're I've noticed this for my whole life engineers like. PowerPoints are black and white with letters because they're like these are the facts and so they have all the facts and I'm like so what about the border and like it should be blue on green who gives a shit like let's do the facts so we need those facts and everyone can join can like Produce the facts on our end like the technical people can produce all of these like raw information especially like maintenance teams and stuff like need a little bit [00:44:00] more information or Reasoning maybe a report like a write up of why you did something Just listing the things you did doesn't explain why you did it.

And so you may get questions later or your management's getting questions or the, maybe a manager will take a report and look at it and try to explain something to a customer and just have no context and then just be able to say this super dry stuff that doesn't say why anything happened. And so it just becomes this like.

Really helpful tool to get engineers and technicians to vomit technical details into a language document. Yeah, yeah, like make it languagey for all the people that need it to read like that way because they can't read the stuff that we give them and understand what's going on and that bridging that gap is like something that I've found and like I'm going to continue to tread these water because at first I was like this can't help me this is useless.

 And now I'm like this could help me for this reason. It's more like how do we communicate, super dry things when we have [00:45:00] to in like a proposal or a report, like, if you're going to try to explain to the customer, they gave you some money to explore something.

Is your report just going to be like a list of stuff you found? Or are you going to be like. These are the reasons I looked through all these different things or, you know, we explored this avenue because of, you know, it's influenced on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, anyway, chat, dbt can really help you it's almost like bridge the gap between technology or tech technical dry data.

And like, yeah, that it is a language model, right? So it's supposed to sound like a novel. And actually when we used it, that's what it did. It just made me sound because we were doing a proposal. And so it just made my firm sound like We wanted this so bad. Like this is not just you know, a proposal.

 This is just not RFQ. This is our symbol to commitment and it's just, it just sounds good. So there's value that can be had there. Cause the people that are reading it, not necessarily engineers, like it depends on the reader. If you're going to go sell something to another engineer, then he's going to love she, or he is going to love.

Just the data and the bottom [00:46:00] line, but if you're going to sell to other people, like it's not going to always be the black and white sales that you want to do. So, same thing with just like making your customers happy and having different kinds of customers who an operators don't necessarily want to see a bunch of equations either.

They want to see the point, but a clear point in a written style language, they don't want to see your ladder logic. They don't know what that means and they don't care. Like they don't want to see pictures of like the tanks and like. Flowery language, literally flowery.

And it makes it, it just, I don't know, it helps people, I think, into into a segment and we'll say, uh, allergies did, uh, chatty prompt is, let's see, I'm going to say, here's a bunch of information and make non engineering.

 It's what kids do in school, like to make reports, right? And put a table in there and describe what's going on in the table. That skill is missed [00:47:00] on some engineers. They just didn't really want to do it. They're like, well, who cares if I have a table or a name?

It's like, well, you want to have a table of contents reference. I don't want a table of contents. Who cares about that? Okay. You don't have to, but other people are going to want one. So on your HMIs and things that you're designing, that's part of the work you mentioned that you guys are doing the ISA standards, is that the ones where like, most things are gray and you're not using a lot of color unless it's meant to point something out.

 Is that the, yeah. A lot of that through, especially because a lot of the old factory talk standard was you have a blue background or some other bright color as a background and then every everything has a bright color for it's every single status rather than just if it's just in fault. And so it's been a bit of a learning curve just.

the transition to this much more muted style, but still highlighting all the key info. But now that I've gotten used to that style, I like it a lot more. It's just a bit more calming on the eyes. [00:48:00] Do you find that operators also respond to it pretty well? Some of them like to look at a screen and see a sea of green because that's how they know everything is going working really well.

Others, um, also, are also liking the more muted style where it's just. It draws your eye to the fault, and if there's no fault, then everything's fine. So it really depends on the operator what they're used to, and what they're willing to adapt to. Right, which again, comes back to Ali's point earlier of getting the operators involved in the commissioning process, because they're the ones that have to use the product.

So they have to be happy to use it. I guess I don't know anything about Australian electrical code, but as we have some friends in Canada here, and I've seen some work done in Europe, but there's probably differences in Australia as well between what colors are used to done for certain things. Are there any notice of like.

Particular discrepancies that you know of between Australia and other [00:49:00] places? For HMI stuff? I don't think so. It tends to be a pretty standard. The ISA is an international standard for color scheming and stuff, and font sizes and font types. And it's a really intensive style guide, for actual electrical work.

 We do have set colors for, um, the active and neutrals. But when you get below 50 volts, it's very much up to basically your own discretion. Yeah. Below 50 volts. AC and, or something DC, 50 volt DC and another number AC. I can't remember off the top of my head. It becomes, um, extra low voltage and that's got its own section in the standards, but it's also, color scheming wise is yeah, just up to your own, choice.

 But for your low voltage, so your regular, like. Um, 240 volts and 415 volt systems, three phases are red, white, and blue. You used to sometimes have people use a yellow instead of the white, but that's now being phased out because yellow and green are your grounding or your earthing colors. So they're like no more [00:50:00] yellow as a phase because you don't want to get that mixed up.

 And your regular 240 volts or your single phase systems are red and black, or blue and brown. Basically, depending on who supplied the end appliance, really. Yeah, well, it looks like we're getting close to an hour here. So this has been a very fun conversation. I'll ask, I guess, our kind of closing question, which is is there anything cool that you have coming up?

Is there anything we should expect to see from you and where can people, you know, connect with you, follow you if they want to follow your journey, and see what's going to be coming up for you in the future. Coming up, uh, I don't think I've personally got anything, just continually working on projects, 

working over, working a maintenance job over the Christmas period. Um, so yeah, I'm starting at 6am, start an hour's drive away. Why do I do this? Um, the world thanks you for keeping things going. Keeping things being made while the rest of us are on holiday. It's at a chocolate factory, so at least it'll smell nice.

 [00:51:00] But, um. It's so you're really Santa's helper in disguise. That's you can follow me on LinkedIn. I tend to react to stuff, like, just reacting to posts more than anything on there. With the occasional actual personal update. I'd say follow my Facebook, but that is nowhere near professional. Um, and a lot of just, you won't see anyone else.

Don't even mention it! What Facebook? But yeah, so, feel free to add me on LinkedIn. Um, follow our company. Just the last little shameless plug there. If you want to tell us, um, yeah, tell us about GPS. Yeah. Do a, do a bigger plug for DPS and your boss. Uh, yeah. So hold on, let me pull up the LinkedIn.

So GPS electrical services. Yeah. We're, an electrical and industrial, contractor based around Melbourne. We do mostly food and beverage industry, but we are also doing food and beverage, a bit of other manufacturing, some. Pharmaceutical work, and [00:52:00] I'm blanking so hard right now. I'm sorry. I mean chemical oil and gas.

Uh uh, not, not, not, not really. Utilities, oil and gas, utilities. No, I think mostly just the food and beverage and the pharmaceuticals. Packaging maybe. Yeah. Yeah. But most places have a packaging facility and we can do maintenance there. Um, and yeah, we do electrical installations, electrical maintenance, 

industrial programming, uh, we can do Rockwell and Siemens and we're learning at some Mitsubishi, um, so we do have quite a variety across all of our teams. Very cool. Where can you, where can you service? Do you service all of Australia, like Melbourne area? We typically do Victoria, but we can do all of Australia, most states, if not all states, because we have done projects across several states, so.

Okay. Yeah. Do you think maybe you'll be coming to Folsom for an Ignition community conference at some point in the future? It's [00:53:00] a long time, but I know people make it from Australia, or maybe there will be an Ignition or an Australian conference since you guys have inductive automation in Australia now.

Yeah, we do actually have inductive automation in Australia, so that would be quite interesting to see. But otherwise, I will try and make it. That would be quite cool. I'll have to maybe see how I go. Yeah, yeah. Well, we hope to see you in person at some point in the future. Sounds like you're interested enough in the space that as long as you keep learning new things, you'll be sticking around for a while, right?

Yes. Yeah. One of my favorite parts is, yeah, just the constant learning. So I don't plan on moving around or leaving anytime soon. Yeah, that's good. That's great. Sounds like you've had a good experience. And I personally, this is also my favorite thing about the industry is that you have the opportunity to keep learning every single day.

If you want to, there's definitely no shortage of things, to get under your belt. So thank you so much for joining [00:54:00] us. Really appreciate the time. I hope you have a great rest of your morning and a good Friday. And a weekend and. For those of you that caught us live, thank you for joining us.

 And for those of you that heard this recording, I don't know it'll probably be after Christmas and in between new year. So, yeah, happy holidays to everybody. And thanks. Bye Jasmine. Nice to meet you guys too. Bye. Bye.