George Halldin, Enclosures Engineering, Fuzzy Logic and Part 2 of the Paint Controller Projects

George Halldin incorporated Enclosures Engineering in 1994 for fabrication of rubber and plastics parts. Later on, George would get into the painting business similar to the work done by K&H Finishing of San Jose. Thomas Nguyen went with George to Enclosures Engineering and as was his position at K&H Finishing, Thomas became manager for painting and other operations. He built up a prosperous business painting electronic enclosures such as computers and cell phones, including RF shielding. George contacted Gary Johnson (http://wb9jps.com/Gary_Johnson/Home.html) at LLNL in late 1994 for a controller for the paint flow, particularly a Fuzzy Logic (FL) controller since George knew of Gary and my development of such a controller at K&H Finishing. Gary was more interested in LabView (http://www.ni.com/labview/) projects as he is an expert at LabView development and so contacted me to see if I would be interested in helping George at Enclosures Engineering. So I met with George at a coffee shop in Fremont near his company headquarters. I explained to George that although I had developed a FL controller for K&H, we ended up with a Proportional-Integral controller for controlling the paint flow. However, I still had the FL code in my back pocket, so I told George that I would be happy to make a FL controller for him. Enclosures Engineering had two painting lines, and so would need two controllers George said he had plans to sell the FL controller to other painting companies, particularly those in Asia, as that was where many cell phones and computers were manufactured and he figured that they would need controllers to minimize the use of the expensive copper infused paint for RF shielding. George need the FL controllers yesterday, or ASAP, so I suggested that I would use microcontroller modules from Z-World as I had done for the K&H project, in order to be able to provide the controllers more quickly than if I had designed my own controller board. However, I didn't want to fabricate a special voltage-to-current module as Gary had done for the K&H project. I wanted to be able to purchase all the necessary boards from Z-World. Later on, if George wanted to pursue his idea to sell the controllers to other painting companies, I planned to design my own single board computer to cut costs and simplify the assembly of the controller system.

Accordingly, I purchased two sets of Z-World modules including two "Little Star" model PK-2200 Z-180 based microcontroller boards, two 12-bit model EXP-A/D12 Analog-To-Digital and two 12-bit model EXP-DAC2 Digital-to-Analog boards from Z-World. Even though I had the basis for the software, it still took me a couple of months to package the modules and power supplies in aluminum housings and get the software and systems operational, ready to install and test at Enclosures Engineering starting at the end of February 1995. There were some minor problems that cropped up over the next few months and we, Thomas and I, ironed them out and the project was complete at the end of August 1995. I provided a manual for the systems with the FL control statements as follows:

// rule 1

   "ZE","SN","ZE",

   "ZE","ZE","ZE",

   "ZE","SP","ZE",

// rule 2

   "SP","SN","SP",

   "SP","ZE","SP",

   "SP","SP","MP",

   "MP","SN","MP",

   "MP","ZE","MP",

   "MP","SP","MP",

// rule 3

   "LP","ALL","LP",

// rule 4

   "MP","LN","ZE",

   "MP","MN","ZE",

// rule 5

    "SP","LN","LN",

    "ZE","LN","LN",

    "SN","LN","LN",

    "MN","LN","LN",

// rule 6

    "SP","MN","LN",

    "ZE","MN","LN",

    "SN","MN","LN",

    "MN","MN","LN",

// rule 7

   "SN","SN","MN",

   "SN","ZE","SN",

   "SN","SP","SN",

   "MN","SN","MN",

   "MN","ZE","MN",

   "MN","SP","MN",

// rule 8

   "LN","ALL","LN",

// rule 9

   "MN","MP","ZE",

   "MN","LP","ZE",

// rule 10

    "SN","LP","LP",

    "ZE","LP","LP",

    "SP","LP","LP",

    "MP","LP","LP",

// rule 11

    "SN","MP","LP",

    "ZE","MP","LP",

    "SP","MP","LP",

    "MP","MP","LP",

where for example, for Rule #11 the rules are read as; 

If the error is SN and the error change is MO, the output is LP,

if the error is Zero and the error change is Medium Positive, the output is LP,

etc, and 

SN means Small Negative, 

MP means Medium Positive, 

LP means Large Positive,

Z means Zero, etc.

The control loop runs at 50 times per second, so the error change is for a 20 ms period. More information is available in the manual I wrote for the controller software, not included here. I billed George $3595 for the two systems. I had hoped that George would want to pursue his idea of selling the FL controllers to painting companies around the world but I never heard from him and since I was busy at LLNL, I didn't contact him to follow-up on the idea. 

The FL controller ran well for several years to control the paint flow for Enclosures Engineering until one of the units failed. Early in 2001 Thomas Nguyen contacted me, telling me of the failure and asking me to repair one of the controllers. I went to Enclosures Engineering and found that the battery had died on the PK-2200 microcontroller board. The Z-World microcontroller boards had battery backed-up memory for the program storage and one battery had died after many years of service. Also the PK2200's were able to use EPROM for program storage. So I purchased an EPROM programmer and loaded my FL program on their two PK-2200. I billed George for $463 but was never paid for my time or materials for repairing his controller boards although I billed him several times in the following months. However, we were to discover that not paying me for my work was a minor transgression compared to George's later misdeeds. As I write this, his later misdeeds weigh heavily on my mind.

Then on the evening of April 4, 2008, my wife and I sat down to watch the local news on TV and I was startled and shocked to hear the announcement that George Halldin had died in a fire at his Fremont facilility. Later I learned that George had been killed in the fire and it was suspected that he took his own life. I decided to remove other information that I had learned about George. I had always thought that George was eccentric, but never imagined the news that I read about him later that apparently caused him to take his own life.