I am a Control ( DCS & PLC ), Scada, Validation and Commissioning engineer based in Liverpool. Since qualifying in 1985 with a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, I started with a company called Aughton providing industrial control for industry. I left Aughton in 1988 and went to APV in Peterborough, the job was fine, but due to personal circumstances I found it necessary to return closer to home. The nearest I came was Instem in Stone, Staffordshire. I spent about a year there before I dried my wings for solo flight, launching my company Timtax Control in October 1990.

I am experienced and versed in a wide range of software and electrical systems in a wide range of industries and aspects of the control world, from fault finding / commissioning of electrical equipment and instruments through to process analysis and development of turnkey systems for production plants.

I hope this website give you just a taste of the range of skills that I have acquired over the number of years that I have in the control industry. I have only included projects for which I can produce graphics to maximise the visual impact of the site, rather than describing very verbosely systems for which I can't show you any graphics.

To people not involved with control engineering - it has come along way from Ladder Logic, most people not familiar with the industry might be surprised with what is involved in control engineering and how it now ( more and more ) seamlessly uses business tools and methodologies to achieve the desired results. Not only does control engineering use these systems such as SQL queries, ODBC, netDDE and VBnet and a bit of C++ ( to name just a few ) but it also uses them in a hostile ( REAL TIME ) environment - one that requires immediate responses from systems and no-loss transfer of data. With the consequence that older systems such as netDDE are being superseded by more modern and consequently more reliable data handling systems. Data ( Event, Alarm and Batch data ) is stored in databases either integral to the SCADA system, but badged by a particular manufacturer or are standalone - such as ACCESS, inSQL and ORACLE (*) etc. Nowadays data direct from the controlling computers needs to be made available company-wide on their intranet by the use of web-hosting interfaces and protocols, or remote access SCADA systems. Also SCADA and CONTROL systems have their own subroutine portals that allow code to be written in other languages ( or based on other languages ) and used to create special functions within the system. So the exposure to BASIC and C / C++ structures is far more prevalent than you might initially consider.

So when in my CV I mention experience with a particular skill, the above paragraph might shed more light on the depth of experience that I have on that skill, for example VBA has been used as macros behind excel which is used to store and manipulate batch data prior to it being used by the controlling ( bottom end ) computers for the particular recipe that is being made at the time. Please see the LinChr example on this site - which is an example of overlapping areas of code where EXCEL is used to store and manipulate control code prior to it's use in the bottom-end controller. So whereas many people might put a string of acronyms together on their CV and you don't have any prooof that they can deliver the goods, I on the other hand have done it in a control environment and therefore can do it in other environments.

In combination with the 'Downloadables' section of this website, I hope this technical review section shows you a personal who is comfortable with a wide gambit of software and is enthusiast when it comes to taking on software challenges in my own time. It is difficult to convince people over the telephone that I am comfortable with all forms of software. There are many aspects of software that are just too technical to describe to somebody browsing this site, so this site only shows you the taster of what I have been doing, both in my own time and directed by work.