Rick Haughton
I make industrial machines do what they're told. Then I go home and build tools that build tools, because apparently that's a personality.
- ECO-002 The Shop Floor Goes LiveAugust 22, 2026
- ECO-001 Two Sheets Added — the Procedure and the HistoryAugust 22, 2026
- AN-005 The Inverted Trojan HorseApril 28, 2026
- 1PLC and robot integration since 1999. Palletizers, conveyors, cells, and the occasional machine installed by someone who has since stopped answering emails.
- 2Started in GW-BASIC in 1986. Still write VB.NET. I've made peace with this and I'd encourage you to do the same.
- 3Systems thinker, compulsively. I can't touch a problem without first drawing the box around it, which is either rigor or a diagnosable condition.
- 4Currently building a memory system for AI. Turns out the hard part of working with a machine that forgets everything is the same as the hard part of a shift handoff.
EE / Automation
Panels, enclosures, wire management and I/O. The box everything else plugs into.
Open sheet ↗
Drafting
AutoCAD, DraftSight, Eagle. Drawings that survive the person who drew them.
Open sheet ↗
Field Service
Commissioning, startups, retrofits, and diagnosing other people's machines under time pressure.
Open sheet ↗
Electronics
Component level. Twelve years repairing amps and building circuits as a paying trade, alongside the panels.
Open sheet ↗
Acoustics
Studio isolation and room treatment. Where the room stops being a container and becomes a component.
Open sheet ↗
Robotics
Palletizing, material handling, cobots and cell design. FANUC, ABB, Doosan, Nachi.
Open sheet ↗
Programming
VB.NET, VBA, ladder, Propeller assembly. Tools that build tools, and a plug-in contract I keep re-earning.
Open sheet ↗
AI & Philosophy
Treating AI as an implementor that needs a spec, not an oracle that needs a wish. And the ideas underneath.
Open sheet ↗
Process Control
PLC sequencing, HMI design and closed-loop control. The screen an operator actually has to live with.
Open sheet ↗
Working With AI
The philosophy sheet says what I believe. This one is the procedure — seats, specs, and the corrections that hardened into standing rules.
Open sheet ↗
The Black Box
Every machine I ever worked on explained itself — every state a tag, every fault an alarm. Then I met one that wouldn’t. A field log, in eras.
Open sheet ↗| Rev | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| P | 1988 | Preliminary issue — not for construction. Two years as an electrician’s apprentice under Ted Selerski, Menomonee Falls. CNC machining at Custom Products in Butler. Center grinding on Mitsubishi machines at Custom Production Grinding, including offset work for cam throws. Three years assistant-managing a pizza place, and a long tail of odd jobs. I learned to pull wire and cut metal before I ever drew either one. |
| — | 1999 | PyroMatic. Panels, drafting on AutoCAD R13, and TIG-welding thermocouples that have to read true at temperature. Learned the trade from the metal up. |
| A | 2001 | Automated Systems International. ControlLogix over Sercos fiber to multi-axis servo. First time the drawing had to be right before the steel was cut. |
| B | 2002 | Hydro-Thermal. Sizing, installing and troubleshooting steam heaters in paper mills, food plants and pharma — and training their crews to keep them running. Process doesn't stop for you. |
| C | 2006 | Bevco. ControlNet, DeviceNet, startups. Also started repairing amplifiers on the side, which taught me more about grounding than any panel ever did. |
| D | 2010 | Field revision. Twins. Six years at home raising them. The drawing was set aside, not canceled. |
| E | 2017 | Return to service. Started again at panel wiring and worked back up. Nobody hands your old title back, and they shouldn't. |
| F | 2019 | Magnetek, leading a cell. First-pass yield, 5S, developing people for promotion. The systems thinking transfers further than expected. |
| G | 2024 | Quintec. Robotic cell controls design and PLC programming — back to designing the thing instead of building someone else's. |
| H | Current | RCH Automation. Brew City Robotics. Integration work, plus a memory system for AI, because apparently I can't leave a problem alone. |
Since 1999, across industries that share almost nothing except that everything in them is expensive when it stops.
| Industries | Paper & pulp · food processing · pharmaceutical · military munitions · machining · heat treating · cryogenics · foundry (aluminum, steel, cast iron) · general manufacturing · international |
| Controls | Allen-Bradley SLC, MicroLogix, ControlLogix · RSLogix 500 / 5000 · ControlNet · DeviceNet · Sercos · DCS integration support |
| Motion & drives | Ultra 3000 multi-axis servo · PowerFlex · ABB robotics · FANUC, Doosan, Nachi · collaborative arms |
| Instrumentation | PID temperature control — Cal, Powers, Barber-Colman, Honeywell · thermocouple fabrication · calibration |
| Drafting | AutoCAD R12 through 2022, plus Electrical · DraftSight · Eagle PCB |
| Code | Ladder · VB6 and COM · VBScript gluing AutoCAD, Office and VB6 together · VB.NET · Parallax Spin and Propeller assembly |
| Bench | Soldering · DMM, logic probe, oscilloscope · regulated supplies, thermal controls and audio equipment repair |
There is no engineering degree in the revision table above. This is what there is instead.
None of it was assigned. Nobody set a syllabus, nobody marked it, and there was no certificate at the end of any of it — just a problem I could not solve yet and a book that might help. Get the book, work it through, check as you go.
Which is the same thing I was doing at fourteen with two thousand lines of BASIC out of a magazine. Forty years later the method is identical. There is just more shelf.
Every drawing has a block like this — the things that didn’t fit anywhere else but that somebody ought to know before they start.
Get in touch
Automation work, controls integration, or you just want to argue about whether ladder logic is a real programming language. All three are welcome.
Email GitHub
A panorama sweep that assumed the world would hold still. It did not. The algorithm made exactly one bad assumption and then committed to it, with total confidence, all the way across the frame.
Which is the whole argument for stating a tolerance: every measurement carries one, whether or not anybody wrote it down.
SCALE: NONENOT TO BE USED FOR FABRICATION