...sometimes you gotta do it yourself.
I spent the week baking in a 105°F metal box outside a grocery store retrofitting new control panels to replace the 20 year old control system they can't get replacement boards for anymore.
The program I wrote is universal, and requires configuration using a built in LCD display and keypad because the default settings are generic and are right a bit more often than a broken clock. Out of 3 systems, I configured two myself, and let the contractor do one. I then got tied up trying to work around some site IT/networking issues so we wouldn't leave the site without any visibility to what was going on, since they get pretty nervous at the thought of losing an entire aisle of food. I left the site after a 12 hour day (which followed two 17 hour days) without going through to check his work. He's a super smart guy, but it seems he winged it instead of following the setup instructions I wrote, and his lack of familiarity led to some details missed. Now I'm 800 miles away and from the data I have access to I can tell there's almost 2 dozen settings he didn't set, or set incorrectly. About half of them are modifiable remotely and individually, but the others can only be changed remotely by writing an entire default settings table, custom made for that specific system. Since I don't have record of what settings he might have had legitimate reason to change from the original documentation, it's more risky to do that at 12:45am local time than it is to just wait until morning with my fingers crossed that my company doesn't end up footing the bill for about half their inventory of meat and poultry.
I spent the week baking in a 105°F metal box outside a grocery store retrofitting new control panels to replace the 20 year old control system they can't get replacement boards for anymore.
The program I wrote is universal, and requires configuration using a built in LCD display and keypad because the default settings are generic and are right a bit more often than a broken clock. Out of 3 systems, I configured two myself, and let the contractor do one. I then got tied up trying to work around some site IT/networking issues so we wouldn't leave the site without any visibility to what was going on, since they get pretty nervous at the thought of losing an entire aisle of food. I left the site after a 12 hour day (which followed two 17 hour days) without going through to check his work. He's a super smart guy, but it seems he winged it instead of following the setup instructions I wrote, and his lack of familiarity led to some details missed. Now I'm 800 miles away and from the data I have access to I can tell there's almost 2 dozen settings he didn't set, or set incorrectly. About half of them are modifiable remotely and individually, but the others can only be changed remotely by writing an entire default settings table, custom made for that specific system. Since I don't have record of what settings he might have had legitimate reason to change from the original documentation, it's more risky to do that at 12:45am local time than it is to just wait until morning with my fingers crossed that my company doesn't end up footing the bill for about half their inventory of meat and poultry.
