Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Pavel Masloff <[email protected]> · Sun, 27 Nov 2011 23:02:45 +0300

Hello Benjamin!

Thanks for sharing! Could you tell me what exactly do you do at BESSY?
What are the qualifications required to work at your lab? And the
responsibilities an engineer takes on?

You know, my situation is that I want to continue to work in this
area. I don't want to end up as a mere PLC programmer. It's not
exciting for me to live in this small shell of anorexic mediocrity, so
to speak, either. And I believe that one got to stretch to grow. The
problem is that I can't put my desires in words in order to apply to a
university. So I need to know what program, which classes to take, who
I will become, this sort of things. I think people who visit Tech-talk
are the only reliable source, who can help me figure this out.

>From what I can see in your message, a true Control Engineer must know:
1. Operating systems (including Real-time operating systems)
2. Programming languages (specifically domain specific languages)
3. Compilers

Have I forgotten anything?

Thanks again,
~Paul

--
Sincerely,

Pavel Maslov, MS
Junior Control Engineer / Power Pulsed Lab.
Efremov Institute for Electro-Physical Apparatus
St. Petersburg, Russia

On 11/26/11, Benjamin Franksen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Pavel
>
> I am not involved with the ITER project, but I am doing this stuff for
> almost
> 15 years now.
>
> Am Freitag, 25. November 2011, um 12:09:11 schrieb Pavel Masloff:
>>    - what did you study (or studying) in college and where?
>
> Mathematics and Computing Science. I did not learn much (if anything) about
> controls systems or real-time programming in the university. That came
> later,
> rather by accident, in my first job, where I worked two years in a research
> institute that was mostly concerned with robotics. I learned about VxWorks
> and
> RT programming there and that was how I went up at BESSY.
>
>>    - which courses/classes do you find had helped you in your current
>> work?
>
> Apart from the basic algorithm and programming stuff you learn in the first
> few semesters (and which really is a good background to have), for me the
> most
> useful course was probably that in operating systems. It helps to know about
> this stuff when doing control systems; first because most of it is very low-
> level and close to the hardware; second because the typical algorithms and
> problems you learn about when studying OS is similar to what you need for
> controls.
>
> The other really useful course was about building compilers, or more
> generally, programming languages. On the one hand, this is a topic I was
> always interested in, so I enjoyed learning about it. Apart from that, it is
> nowadays a common design pattern to structure solutions around domain
> specific
> languages; whether you only use such languages or design them yourself. It
> is
> a common misconception to think that building languages is something arcane
> and unusual. Any serious project sooner or later acquires at least some sort
> of configuration language, and more often than not this evolves into
> something
> more complex and powerful. If it is designed by someone who has knowledge
> about these thiongs, it won't as easily become an unmaintainable and ill-
> specified mess.
>
>>    - do you know any programs that provide sort of internships at national
>>    laboratories? (would be great if they were related to ITER)
>>
>> What are your thoughts about getting the required knowledge at university
>> (the other option would be working at a lab without getting a degree)?
>
> That's how I did it, mostly. As I said, I had a degree, but what I learned
> there did not really prepare me for the things I needed at work.
>
> Cheers
> Ben
>
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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System