was a bit of robot programming, which should have been extremely simple. A robot picks up a part from a vibratory feeder, deburrs it, and puts it in a tray with little nests for the parts.

No damned reason on earth there ought to be 1500 lines of code.

The programmer decided rather than teach each individual point in the tray, (48 each tray) he’d write a complex algorithm that calculated the position of each nest.

Problem is, the nests are injection molded plastic, and most are warped, improperly assembled, or just plain fucked up.

So it makes more sense to teach each point individually, since the calculations were full of little circumlocutions that compensated (or tried to) for irregularities as well as the original calculations.

All in all, it should have been maybe 250 lines of code. I’m going to correct that, as soon as the customer can afford the downtime for me to do it properly. And it will run.

I spoke a bit about this to the maintenance folks, and they lit up at the idea of learning to program robotics; they were a bit apprehensive but I did a ten-minute primer at one of the cells as to how robots work, and it removed all trace of concern. Robots- especially Fanuc robots- do not have to be complex. I have taught robot programming for fifteen years and it’s not that big a deal, if you pay a little bit of attention.