Custom Devices

Why this guide exists

Some of these start as personal projects on my own bench. A keypad I wanted and could not buy, a display that had to run on a battery, a control that had to work the way I work.

The reason they belong on this site is that the same problem shows up on customer machines. A machine with no room for a standard HMI still needs an operator to read something. A piece of equipment nobody makes a panel for still needs a control. When the off-the-shelf device does not fit, somebody has to build the one that does.

So this section is where I write down that kind of work — what I chose, why, and what did not work. The bench projects are the honest ones, because there is no customer schedule making me skip the parts that failed.

The articles

This section is new and starts with one article. More will be added as the work happens.

• Building My Own E-Paper Macro Keypad — why the keys need screens, why the screens need to be e-paper, and the three design choices behind a battery-powered Bluetooth keypad.

Also in progress

I have an ongoing project building an e-paper based industrial HMI — a display for machine data that draws no power while the image sits still. It is moving slowly, and I have been posting about it on LinkedIn as it goes. When it reaches something worth writing up properly, it will land here.

If you came here from the controls side

Most of my customer work is PLC and control system engineering. Three companion guides written from that side: TIA Portal, the platform I use for most customer work, Codesys, the platform behind much of the non-Siemens PLC world, and SIMATIC AX, Siemens’ text-based toolchain.

Working on something similar?

I am Yuriy Mosiyenko — I design and program industrial control systems, mostly Siemens, as a one-person practice based in Bedford, Nova Scotia, working with customers across Canada. If you have a controls project you cannot staff internally, tell me what you are building.