Oh No – What’s this? Reactor accident? No, I forgot to switch reactor power monitor from intermediate to power range. There will be a number of these ‘Procedure Violations’ by the time the software is finished. Right now, I have working equations for the primary and secondary sides. Things appear pretty stable during normal operations. […]
Read more "7/6/17 Oh No"Update on the new annunciator lights: The LED lights will not work. Even grouping 3 and 4 together, they still don’t emit enough light. So the fallback option is to use a relay and an incandescent 6.3 volt bulb. Did some testing and the LED Driver board will fire the relay and a status LED. […]
Read more "6/26/17 – Annunciator Lights Update"The new lights did not work any better. I put them directly to 5 volts, through 1 diode and then 2 diodes. All of them still burned out after a number of hours. Bought a standard 6 volt bulb (screw base, 0.3 A). If I used the current base resistor of 1K, light did not get very […]
Read more "6/11/17 Annunciator Lights – Still Have Issues"While writing the simulation software, some of the annunciator lights would stay on after exiting the program. After about 10 minutes of coding, I restarted to check what I just did. Glanced at the panel and the usual annunciator lights were not on. Checked my code to see what I did to mess up the […]
Read more "6/8/17 Hardware Failure"After making the A/D mods, I finished checkout of the convertors and switches. Determined values for all of the fuses and got them installed. I have started on the software – got the initialization part written.
Read more "5/28/17 Hardware Completed"I’m using potentiometers and the A/D convertors to simulate flow control valves, turbine speed, generator loading, etc. Plus 5 volts on one side of the pot and GRD on the other side. Middle tap goes to the A/D card. Well… turns out there is a resistor voltage divider on the A/D card. Putting the pot […]
Read more "5/24/17 Design Change"Shout Outs! 1) Raspberry Pi – The core of my project. Definitely a solution looking for a problem. It has been rock solid. 2) AB Electronics UK – Supplied the I/O and A/D cards. Great Tech Support. 3) Express PCB – Their design software is very easy to use. Quick two day turnaround on the […]
Read more "5/19/17 Shout Outs"I used a number of articles to refresh my nuclear power plant operations memory. I would suggest reading some or all of the articles listed below. I found all of them on the internet. 1) The Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor Nuclear Power Plant (Westinghouse) This manual provides a complete description of a Westinghouse PWR. It […]
Read more "5/18/17 Reactor / Plant Reference Material"Finished wiring the lower Switch/Rotary panel. Remaining work for this panel is to wire the ribbon connectors and decode which I/O lines go to which switches.
Read more "5/15/17 Wiring The Lower Panel"The other part of the project is the graphics where current values are displayed. A mockup of the plant is shown. I’m using Zelle Graphics to display a GIF picture I created in Microsoft Publisher. I wrote a quick python program that would allow me to position/change text on the GIF picture until things lined […]
Read more "5/11/17 Simulator Plant Graphics"
Nuclear Pi 