HMI for Legacy Equipment

During my tenure at Lear Corporation, I worked extensively with legacy equipment. Despite being old, these machines were generally robust and reliable. At this stage in my career, I was getting into industrial control, undergoing an intense learning process in PLC, robot, and HMI programming—key skills required for my new role in sustaining processes.

I was always looking for ways to improve machine performance. One particular piece of legacy equipment was used to rivet metal and plastic parts, but its setup process was both dangerous and complex. The machine lacked an HMI for manual control, forcing operators to remove guards and manually actuate valves—an inefficient and unsafe procedure.

I took the initiative to repurpose an old HMI from a decommissioned machine in the factory. The integration turned out to be more challenging than expected—the HMI model was outdated and deprecated, and the existing PLC wasn’t suited for the buttons I needed. I had to reprogram and adjust the logic to make everything work seamlessly.

Completing this project and seeing its impact on the process was incredibly rewarding. This was my first improvement project in a live manufacturing environment, and it taught me not just HMI programming but also how to identify opportunities and develop practical solutions. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the habit of documenting my projects back then, so I don’t have real pictures of this one.