Mercedes-Benz - The Journey

During the tight lock down of covid having just been slightly lift for work to resume and interprovince travel lift again, I relocated to East London with 4 days’ notice to take on a new Role a Mercedes-Benz in April 2021. This were the original new Deadly Covid strain in the world had just been identified. Heavy lockdown was still in place and mask were still required; social places were still closed. Eventually when lock down was full lifted, a few months later. Great its time to go out were ever local pub any were to meet people, as life revolved around late nights in the lab and laving the plant at 10-11pm on Fridays and traveling home.

Life start out with the Just in time Project ETags or nicknamed Edge Factory Software, many names were through around, but nothing perfectly stuck, So ETags more used.

In 6 months My colleague myself had put to gather and setup and had in production a working Edge Factory units spread through out our plant in the roofs and in supplier plants. Some devices were then distributed to Kecskemet in the EU and updates to existing plants in the USA which we had some form of existing presence with the product already.
This project presented many challenges, in which Typescript and with inference was push to the edge, we present with many different technical challenges and security p[policies of variables companies, which we had to cater for when integrating.

I found myself, driving home at the last minute to picked up additional old card flashing devices to speed up the process, as I got dump in the morning with 25 devices to setup and flash with  our code, to avoid sitting there over the whole weekend. As the process was very slow one sadly. At least with switch with 25 devices and getting 25 short cables from our IT supplier we  Flashing all the initiate devise by 11pm that night, we could remotely flash and setup 25 devices all that the same time. This many little further updates going out, as we found some bugs in tested, before landing in production.

With remote working, my colleague and myself had interesting relationships, I was in the plant most while he worked from home. So at times, I find myself in the plant, check on few things with regards to colleague, who sitting in another town regarding devices in production, that things were working as expected.  During my period at Mercedes, we had no incident of down time of protocol failures that we needed to attend to with any devices.

During the last months of this project while still in the labs testing protocols and setting up devices, I was getting the Early Fault Finding Project which ran in Sindefling and Bremen Production Plants and assist them in managing all there 11000 robots and counting on hand.

The project Originally started with Robert Bladowski (Bremen), I believe trying to solve his own jobs problems better, probably in like 2004 period, after which it then got outsource to 2 IT houses by decision of management, before being  in sourced again to myself. The last out souring IT Company, I realized sponsors the World Cup Ruby and signage was all around the stadium field enclosing LED display boards. The original Reports error count and week reports highest error count reports, my understand was originate from Robert. Sindefling, with Joste Kron feature additional SAP integration for tooling and robot configuration.
The project was then handed over to myself, From Roland Popkai, which Retried shortly after final migration was completed, but before last finished polish deployments into all other plants were realized. I then work together with these colleagues on improve FFE, Robert slipped me old KUKA messages manual, in which I realized all the issues and flaws, realizing, all the problems and improves going to need to be made. Between our team, we wanted to push this project quickly and push this project forward to assist in the work we did, improves to the system and bugfix, typically 1 line exchanges, i.e Log Details, view the detail messages. Great in my mind, then design and executed it myself. From there I continue to add many features for myself to understand the current technical space, Protocol in use, versions, extra. As our few of the current hardware software state was rather date and didn’t feature this information. From there start to add and migrate more robots from legacy, UDP/TCP to MQ as we then had visibility.

Knowing that I would potentially end up working with the Robotics and would be using my own software and had colleagues in the Production line supporting the Robots, gave me opportunities during all the migration to add and improve the software freely as seen fit, in between all migration issues extra to draw more value from things and provide greater clarity.

Sadly by the time the Project Came finished all personal I had start with around the world had moved on or had retried, Roland wanted me to take from himself I believe.

Each Report ended up with 3 version V2-Perofmrance improvement and V3- Ideal after migration. There were additional 5 internal PHP schema versions, were more variants of hidden queries to deal improves in the V3 restructuring after the final migration.