Looking for leads/recommendations for a design engineer.

Comatose said:

Are you looking for a mechanical design or the controller? I have a lot of controllers that can do that sort of thing off the shelf with a small amount of scripting.

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• Are you looking for design only, or for someone to provide a complete, working machine?
  • There are advantages to doing it both ways. In my experience, design/build is easier and faster, especially with the supply chain issues we're having these days. With design only, it requires a lot of back and forth when a component isn't available. With design/build I just make it work. I did a design/build fatigue test rig for a customer last year and one of the major challenges was finding options that both worked and were available.
• How far along is the design? Are you asking someone to come in and make the other person's design work, or are you asking them to design it themselves. If the former, you'll need to provide information about what components have already been bought. Not everyone will know how to program every system.
• How large and expensive is it?
  • The smaller it is, or the more expensive, the less you need to keep it local.
• Do you have a good statement of work?
  • There is an art to writing these. You want to nail down WHAT the machine does while ideally giving the designer some creative freedom on HOW it does it. Don't overspec things. For example, don't require only paint if powdercoat would work and be better/less expensive, and vice versa.
• Do you have budget for this?
  • Engineering time isn't cheap, nor are components these days.
• Do you have specific requirements on what PLC, HMI, motor controller, etc. to use?
• What's your timeline?
• How nice do you want it to be?
  • For a given functionality, 'niceness' can vary a lot. Do you want artfully crafted HMI screens, or just something rough that works. Are you okay with bare mill finish aluminum, or should things be nicely powdercoated or anodized? For the fatigue test rig I mentioned above, the HMI screens were very rough, with a bunch of debugging info left in them because the customer was planning to continue tweaking things as they continued testing.
  • It takes time (money) to make things look nice.
• What's your schedule like?

david n said:

The controller side of things........

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Garwood said:

Ime, someone with strong mechanical abilities that can design motor control circuits, and write functional software is either:

1) Employed at a cutting edge tech company making $250k++ with no spare time.

2) A nutcase who doesn't shower or work well with anyone.

3) A drug addicted, gambling addicted, alcoholic deadbeat nutjob who doesn't shower or work well with anyone.

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garyhlucas said:

I am #1 and I'd love to hear about this 250K job opening.

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garyhlucas said:

I am #1 and I'd love to hear about this 250K job opening.

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