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Chronicle of the process of moving from USA to Mexico
Monday, January 10, 2005
This coming weekend is the first phase of cutover for the project of which I am the site implementation manager. Over the course of two weekends we are replacing the guts of another vendors equipment that has been in place for about 13 years.
The port facility is currently in operation and so we MUST be back online on Tuesday morning (Monday is the MLK holiday) or else there will be some pretty angry truck drivers I suspect.
Trucks pull up to the big metal boxes and communicate with an agent in the tower facility. One of the metal boxes contains a call button, speaker and microphone. The larger box contains a bar code tag printer and optionally a bar code reader.
When the project is complete, 19 lanes like the one shown above will have been rewired internally and updated with new electronic circuit boards. The existing metal boxes will stay but the microphone will be replaced and printers will be added to some of the units not currently equipped with them. Existing wiring (which has been in place for 13 years) back to the computer room will be reused for the most part.
New Chassis Camera's are being added to the site. They use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to read the numbers off the truck chassis. The agents in the control tower can operate the cameras Pan-Tilt-Zoom with a joystick and the camera's are also navigated automatically by software as the system attempts to capture identification information.
We've learned the importance of properly sealing the camera housings since they will collect water if this isn't done. Fortunately in the units pictured below the camera itself had not yet been installed. Yesterday I was out there with my heat gun and silicone caulk to correct this problem.
In addition to adding the 17 new chassis camera positions as shown above we will be replacing another 17 cameras (a few of which are pictured below) that are up on towers or a bridge. These are called Rear Camera's as they are used to capture identification information from the back of the container. We will be renting a 21 foot lift to accomplish this and will also be renting work lights that will allow us to work at night if necessary.
Over the last several weekends I've had to do a lot of wrench and drilling work, thinks like mounting and connecting the power supply shown below. It's kinda fun, except when its raining or hailing.
We also have to connect up to some funky old telephones and patch them into our intercom system.
There are two different type of truck scales in use at the facility. On one of them we can't find the model number. The scale controllers are pictured below. We will probably need to reconfigure the settings on the scales and may need to write some code on the fly to make them communicate with our application software.
The 4 photographs below of cabling and video and audio switchers are from another installation but are similar to what is being installed in the computer room for this project.
When complete there will be 21 servers in the computer room. There will be 9 consoles that are used by control agents in the tower. Fiber optic connections will be used to connect the cameras and boxes at 14 lanes where the only visibility that the tower control agents will have is via TV screens.
It should be an interesting couple of weeks coming up. If it works out well, there could be a dozen more of these that need to be done around the country. If it doesn't work out, well we could always retry the move to Mexico.
The port facility is currently in operation and so we MUST be back online on Tuesday morning (Monday is the MLK holiday) or else there will be some pretty angry truck drivers I suspect.
Trucks pull up to the big metal boxes and communicate with an agent in the tower facility. One of the metal boxes contains a call button, speaker and microphone. The larger box contains a bar code tag printer and optionally a bar code reader.
When the project is complete, 19 lanes like the one shown above will have been rewired internally and updated with new electronic circuit boards. The existing metal boxes will stay but the microphone will be replaced and printers will be added to some of the units not currently equipped with them. Existing wiring (which has been in place for 13 years) back to the computer room will be reused for the most part.
New Chassis Camera's are being added to the site. They use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to read the numbers off the truck chassis. The agents in the control tower can operate the cameras Pan-Tilt-Zoom with a joystick and the camera's are also navigated automatically by software as the system attempts to capture identification information.
We've learned the importance of properly sealing the camera housings since they will collect water if this isn't done. Fortunately in the units pictured below the camera itself had not yet been installed. Yesterday I was out there with my heat gun and silicone caulk to correct this problem.
In addition to adding the 17 new chassis camera positions as shown above we will be replacing another 17 cameras (a few of which are pictured below) that are up on towers or a bridge. These are called Rear Camera's as they are used to capture identification information from the back of the container. We will be renting a 21 foot lift to accomplish this and will also be renting work lights that will allow us to work at night if necessary.
Over the last several weekends I've had to do a lot of wrench and drilling work, thinks like mounting and connecting the power supply shown below. It's kinda fun, except when its raining or hailing.
We also have to connect up to some funky old telephones and patch them into our intercom system.
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There are two different type of truck scales in use at the facility. On one of them we can't find the model number. The scale controllers are pictured below. We will probably need to reconfigure the settings on the scales and may need to write some code on the fly to make them communicate with our application software.
The 4 photographs below of cabling and video and audio switchers are from another installation but are similar to what is being installed in the computer room for this project.
 |
|
 |
 |
When complete there will be 21 servers in the computer room. There will be 9 consoles that are used by control agents in the tower. Fiber optic connections will be used to connect the cameras and boxes at 14 lanes where the only visibility that the tower control agents will have is via TV screens.
It should be an interesting couple of weeks coming up. If it works out well, there could be a dozen more of these that need to be done around the country. If it doesn't work out, well we could always retry the move to Mexico.
Sunday, January 09, 2005
It's a little late, but Happy New Year. I for one am glad to see 2004 come to an end as it was a difficult year from my perspective. 2004 started with Stan having some health related issues and then the owners of the nice yellow house on which I made an offer in Mexico decided they didn't want to sell after all.
We proceeded with Mexico plans anyway and with putting the house in Hayward on the market. It sold very quickly. The move to Mexico then hit a snag with our late in the game concerns about the very hot weather in Merida and whether we were really ready for such a radical change.
Having already quit jobs and without a home, we opted for "Plan B" which was to move to Denver where we had trouble finding a house we liked and also had some issues with job opportunities. After almost three months of sleeping in the basement of our rental house in Denver, compelling job opportunities presented themselves back in Alameda California.
All of our belongings which were shipped to Denver at considerable expense were redirected back to California without us ever seeing them on the Denver side.
Things are working out OK back here in Alameda but living in a rental house is difficult after owning a home for 10 years.
I think 2005 is going to work out better.
We proceeded with Mexico plans anyway and with putting the house in Hayward on the market. It sold very quickly. The move to Mexico then hit a snag with our late in the game concerns about the very hot weather in Merida and whether we were really ready for such a radical change.
Having already quit jobs and without a home, we opted for "Plan B" which was to move to Denver where we had trouble finding a house we liked and also had some issues with job opportunities. After almost three months of sleeping in the basement of our rental house in Denver, compelling job opportunities presented themselves back in Alameda California.
All of our belongings which were shipped to Denver at considerable expense were redirected back to California without us ever seeing them on the Denver side.
Things are working out OK back here in Alameda but living in a rental house is difficult after owning a home for 10 years.
I think 2005 is going to work out better.
