Work Experience

Summer 2001

STEP Placement with A.C. Plastic Developments Ltd.

About the Company

A.C. Plastic Developments Ltd. is a small engineering company based in Buxton, specialising in plastic fittings. The workforce consists of about seven people, and the atmosphere is very friendly. The company had a number of computers in the workshop, using MS-DOS to run proprietary software in order to facilitate communication with large lathes. These lathes used a standard RS232 interface, but each used a different proprietary protocol to control program Input/Output. There was also a PC in the office for managing the accounts, correspondance, and also allowing Internet access.

The Placement

The brief of my placement was initially quite vague; my line manager wanted to know what options were available to him before deciding upon which route to take. Put simply, I was to network all the PCs in the workshop and the office (both the same building) and also create some form of database for the machine programs (up to this point engineers had to rely on memory to retrieve old programs). Furthermore, I was asked to look at the existing way in which Internet access was set-up and see if there would be a better way of achieving this. There were many additional tasks I was asked to carry out whilst working there, mainly computer based. As my co-workers had limited computer knowledge it was up to me to prioritise tasks and organise my own time effectively.

My Solutions (This bit gets quite technical - sorry)

Initially I saw the physical networking of the computers as my main priority (i.e. purchasing network interface cards and cables). As the company is small, it was left to me to order hardware as I required it, so long as I was able to justify my decisions if questioned. There was some delay in all of the equipment arriving, as it was ordered from a variety of places, so in the meantime I occupied myself with other tasks (such as finding Windows 3.1 drivers for an old plotter).

Once the networking hardware arrived, I began installing it, and running cables. I decided it would be more cost effective to make my own cables, particularly as shielded cable was required in an environment with so much electrical noise. 10/100MBit network cards were used, with a relatively inexpensive 100MBit switching hub, as this provides greater flexibility and expandability. Due to the hybrid nature of the network (running a variety of different Operating Systems), I experimented with several network filesharing protocols, including SMB, NFS and Novell. I eventually settled on using SMB, as most of the PCs on the network were either using Windows of MS-DOS.

At the conceptual centre of the network I placed an old 386-SX/33 running Linux to provide access to the Internet. I set up IP masquerading so that any PC on the local network could access the Internet, yet all the PCs on the local network were protected by the Linux PC. I also enabled "on-demand" dialling, so an Internet connection would be established automatically if and when required. It was also set up to handle all of the company's incoming and outgoing mail, automatically establishing a connection twice a day to receive mail, and queueing and sending mail as required.

Finally, I designed a small piece of sofware to handle to company's large number of lathe programs. The software allowed pictures of products and multiple lathe programs to be grouped together into one main "product" along with any other miscellaneous details. This was to facilitate easier retrieval of lathe programs by the engineers at a later date. I designed the software in Visual Basic, building on the directory structures the engineers were already accustomed to. This way, they could populate the database gradually, rather than all at once. I also added a facility to the software to allow it to send and receive data to and from the lathes. This involved much trial and error, although added a great deal of value to the program as a whole.

Summary

I believe I benefitted from the placement a great deal, in particular by improving my time management skills. In the placement, many of the decisions concerning the work I was to undertake were to be made by myself, based on my technical knowledge of the tasks, so the job gave me a good feeling of responsibility. I also had to think a great deal about communicating technical concepts and ideas to non-technical people effectively, and I think this was one of the greatest challenges.