We remodeled a Lab and initially I got in trouble for being in the construction zone. If it was done right, I should have been working in one area while the construction crew was there. My work really would not have interfereed, but no, everyone had to wait until the major renovations were done.
1. So "they" plastered the tip of the handle of a shutoff valve into the drywall.
2, They were making the doors open out. Opening so they would not slam into the face of someone in the ghallway in an emergency was one of the specs. I caught this BEFORE they completed the wrong doorway.
Finally, someone wised up and decided that a walk-thru was in order before the renovations were complete.
After they were done, the HVAC guy (an employee of where I worked) diganosed the $5000 air to water heat pump was bad. He asked for my help and I had to help him without getting caught by my micromanaging boss. After some troubleshooting, I told him to replace the tstat wire which he did with some grumbling. AC worked and I didnt rat on him. N one, but me and him knew that the HVAC unit did not have to be replaced.
Because I knew about the renovations, that was part of my inputs. It turns out when remodeling, no grommets were used in the metal studs and a short developed. He didn't argue about by dx.
The contracor tat built the building did some STUPID stuff. 36 air to water heat pumps..
1. With a set-back time and individual timer overrides the t-stats.
2. Building has a massive power factor problem
3. Building had massive outside air leaks.
4. They put a door on backwards which I exploited a few times.
5. To build an isolated concrete pad, they poured everything and then broke up the part the part that needed isolation and then poured that part.
6. They put two heat pumps in one lab with two separate thermostats. Really stupid.
7. They put 3-wire 60 Amp services to about 8 pieces of equipment that needed 4 wire.
8. No one really mentioned that the building was 208 rather than 240. The diffusion pump heating elements had to be changed.
9. We were supposed to have a "cooling loop". A 6" 90 F HVAC loop, as it turns out was suppsed to be the cooling loop. This rain at low pressure. Then they tried to add a booster pump to push this water through a 3/8" line at 80 PSI. The equipment needed 60F water or ground water. So, we ended up dumping lots of water down the drain just for cooling. It gets messyer.
10. People layed out their labs and then found out that there were large support columns where ther equipment was supposed to go.
11. They did the machine shop really close to right. They brought a high voltage feed there and put the breaker box in the shop.
12. The HVAC drain lines and the suspended ceiling conflicted. There wasn;t enough slope, so their was always a water leak.
It says something for HVAC - "Holiday, Vacations And Comp time.
My expensive mistake was not asking for help for a $100,00.00 budjet computer system upgrade from PDP-11's and x-y recorders when there was Windows 3.1 with 8.3 filenames and a crappy memory model fr the PC and the MAC with 255 character filename, a flat memory model. The software chosen was labView which was developed initially for the MAC and was in constant flux during development. I bit off more than I could chew in a linear fashion. I was managing a programmer too.
Both he and I didn;t know Labview. He wrote the software all under instrument simulation since I designed it that way.
I did a lot of proof of concept stuff and the instrument programming. Software worked for 17 years before radically upgraded.
i wanted to use a SMU, but I was told no by he powers that be. so we ended up with a "slower" system.
The SMU and the use of a server for data storage was adopted at the last upgrade that I know of. The PC was the obvious choice too.
The initial design plan was to have real time output. That turned out not to be possible because of set-up time. The printers were Laserjet 4m's and 4m plus which was a nice printer.
The other major issue was that we essentially had an embedded interface to a monochometer with the PDP-11 and there were no monochometers with a controllable interface. During the development of another system which used a DSP lock-in, monochometer and a really nifty I-V converter designed by me and layed out by me. The only in budget choice I had was to try to develop a motion control Labview vi with really cool stepper drivers. I was unable to complete that project.
I would have had to develop motion control vi's and develop an ORG sensor.
I did develop , machined and programmed a filter wheel which we did not have to use. I also developed shutters, of which one I used. So, the $1000.00 USD in hardware that I set aside is controlling one single shutter and I doubt my ex-employer has any clue how to replace it.
An IEEE-488 monochometer with a built-in filter wheel became available for $15,000. Results were inferior to what we had.
I had tow major issues:
1) The MAC RS-422 could not electrically interface to the RS-232 stepper controller without some help.
2) My I-V converter worked perfectly on devices made in house, but would not work correctl with large area calibration devices. I was sweating bullets.
a) My output stages would not drive the capacitance load.
b) I learned the hard way that that a few PA across a few milliohms causes a huge offset.
I was unable to complete the Zero check and zero correct circuitry and I did not allow for potentiometer nulling. I managed a 40 pA DC offset which didn't matter. The primary measurement was AC measured by the DSP lock-in.
I gave my boss, at the time the following "The technology to do the upgrade isn't quite ready yet. He said "tough", the money is. We had to do it.
