As I sat here working I thought about your signature again: What is this talk of release? I do not release software. My software escapes leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake. What struck me is that most of my career has been in high-resolution measurement and robotic control. And I specifically remember two projects where this signature almost became truth. First was a big Sieko SCARA robotic disk sorter. This robot measured almost 4 feet at its longest extension and it could retract and move 180 degrees and extend out 4 feet in the other direction in just about 1/10 of a second. The thing was bloody fast! We of course built a plexiglass sensor tripped cage around the thing so no idiot would get it it's way. Well one did. He removed the plexiglass portion where he needed to work, jumped the sensor and leaned in slightly to look at an issue with a printer. He spent about a week in the hospital after the bump on the head. The next was an instrument down the line from the disk sorter. It was a combiner. It had a big chuck on it to pick up about 25 disks and it would move laterally left/right to combine disks into caddies for shipment. Of course it needed to be fast so we used the biggest NEMA steppers and drivers we could find. This thing could traverse about 4 feet in 1/10 of a second. It too had a plexiglass cage. But one day I was working underneath it looking at some issues with the conveyor, I was well clear but then I heard this scream and instinctively I hit one of the gazillion estop buttons we'd wired in. A young assemply worker had her hand caught between the side of the machine and the moving carriage. Crushed quite a few bones. Why she had her hand in there was beyond me. But of course it was the software's fault for not "knowing" that a hand was in the way and gracefully stopping. Sigh... Third was an instrument that spun silicon wafers to coat them for prep. It used a big servo motor for the spinner. They had to spin pretty fast. They would come in, a mechanical centering device would center them on the vacuum chuck, retract then they would lower into a bowl and the big servo motor would spin them up to a fairly high speed. Well those of you familiar with servos know they need to be tuned. Kd, Ki, Kp, etc. Usually you have to do it under load. So stupid me put a 300mm wafer on the chuck, centered it, lowered it in to the bowl, opened the protective lid, jumped the protection sensor and hit go on the tuning algorithm. That thing
