It was a decision taken by impulse. I was looking for a PITC (Profibus Certified Training Center) in order to get myself a certified Profibus trained professional certification and suddenly I had found one that was not too far away. At least I didn’t have to fly across an ocean.
I have been doing Fieldbus and Profibus related work since the early 2000’s. The first time that a Fieldbus catalog fell into my hands I was intrigued. The company that I worked for at that time was in the process interface business, with focus on the intrinsic safety interface technology.
I was used to employ thick catalogs that featured dozens of modules of different types in order to select the right one for the application that I was currently working on. In fact, I was proud of my ability to know by memory quite a few of the nearly 200 models available.
But this Fieldbus stuff was intriguing: instead of a thick catalogue, all the product line was listed in a flyer 8 pages long. It featured a couple of Fieldbus power supplies, which at that time seemed to be exactly like standard ones, a couple of junction boxes that didn’t seem particularly fancy and a boxy and boring looking terminator module.
So I started to find out what was this Fieldbus stuff, I downloaded one of the first versions of the Fieldbus guides at the Foundation’s website and after reading and then rereading it I said to myself that this was cool, really cool.
As you can surely imagine I’m a geeky guy. I learned DOS in a DIY 286 PC in the nineties, built myself my AMD 386 afterwards and was a proud owner of a 486DX2 while I was at the university. Then I fiddled with CAD software and 3D computer generated animation and did some robotics stuff at the university’s electronics lab. Eventually I got into automation and finally into process automation. I felt that I was leaving the geekiest part of me aside for a while and then bang!: Foundation Fieldbus and Profibus PA appeared.
Initially it seemed like playing with computers, but this was serious stuff: applications in the O&G industry, biofuels and petrochemical plants, distillation of coke byproducts in a steel foundry, food and beverage, water treatment plants… Now it was cool to be a geek.
As I gathered knowledge and experience through company trainings and real life experience I really got into it. Doing trainings and presentations on Fieldbus and Profibus technology became something natural. Usually I knew which would be the audience questions and already had witty answers and explanations for most of them. When new ones appeared I researched and asked to find the answers until I knew the replies. It was fun.
But since I was working for a company with offices all over the world, I felt pretty backed up by their reputation.
Eventually I left that company and started to work as a freelancer. Then I realized that I needed to certify what I knew, I had no corporate backup reputation anymore.
For most people this would seem like really obvious. But I had always preferred to learn things by myself. I’m not implying whether this may be a quality or a defect, it’s just the way I’m wired.
That was when I first contacted Profibus International PI by mail. The funny thing is that I had worked on really big Profibus and Fieldbus projects but I had never talked with people from PI.
After a couple of e-mails I got in touch with the people from the PITC located in the city of Sao Carlos in Brazil. They were doing certified training on Profibus technology, and they were located a couple of hour’s flight from where I live.
So I took the plunge: bought the plane tickets, got a reserve in a hotel near to where the PITC was located and went to Sao Paulo.
Sao Paulo’s international Airport of Guarulhos is somewhat far away from Sao Paulo’s downtown. And Sao Paulo’s traffic is, well, kind of intense.
Sao Carlos is located 250 km west from Sao Paulo, I took a shuttle from the airport to the Tieté central bus station, missed the earliest bus and arrived to Sao Carlos at three AM on Monday. The training started the same day at 8:30, so after a couple hours of sleep, a shower and some strong coffee I arrived to the Sao Paulo’s University Campus in Sao Carlos, also called USP or “uspee” as Brazilians pronounce the acronym in Portuguese.
When I got into the training center, it was nerdvana: these guys really have some hardware and software. The trainees were organized in pairs and each pair received a training case with a PLC, a couple of RIO nodes, a power supply, some testing tools and a laptop in order to follow the trainers in a 5 days, 8:30 AM to 5:30/6:00 AM Big Bang Theory marathon of Profibus theory and practice.
The other guys were all Brazilian; I was the only Spanish native speaker. Over the years I have got used to Portuguese, I can understand 95% of what they say, but that 5% difference sometimes can be really frustrating.
Brazilians and Latin Americans that work or study together have developed a solution for this issue called “portuñol”, which is basically a hodgepodge of really bad Spanish and awful Portuguese stitched together by glue. Surprisingly it works fairly well, especially when you talk geek.
So the course went on in a mixture of Portuguese, Spanish, “portuñol” and some English when things became difficult. I was lucky to meet colleagues from several industries, from tire manufacturers to mining maintenance and systems integrators, all very focused and professionally minded.
The PITC team was great, with precise explanations and good timing. The main trainer, Dennis, is an Associated Professor at the USP’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, he also runs marathons and guides you through the innards of Profibus telegram coding like Theseus in the Labyrinth.
Guilherme deals with the introductory installation related part of the training. Paulo deals with the, usually considered, complex Profibus PA stuff. Both also run a local start-up that develops Profibus related hardware and software.
This is an interesting example of how real life industry and universities can collaborate for actual business. They are not natural enemies, like most Latin American students seem to think, but in fact can become mutually dependent, one providing hardware and software updates for the lab and the lab providing training in the technology that is actually used in production.
I spent a wonderful week in Sao Carlos, the city is small for Brazilian standards (200.000 people live there) and with more than 20.000 USP students living there, it has a very trendy lifestyle.
I also enjoyed Brazilian food, unlike your typical restaurant where you are given a menu and then order a specific dish, Brazilian restaurants frequented by daily workers feature a buffet like array of wildly varied food, from fresh vegetables to various meat and chicken based dishes: you pick your choices, then they weigh your plate at the checkout and bill you by weight. Do not try these places if you are on a diet.
One of the best kept secrets of Brazil: they have a carbonated beverage called guarana. It’s the most delicious canned beverage I know. It would be a Coke killer if known abroad.
But the most enjoyable part of the experience was the people.
Although the country is not going through the best of times, Brazilians have the strange and enviable virtue of being capable to enjoy life even when things are not going really fine at all.
I also had to take the dust of my long ago unused lessons on binary and hexadecimal numeric methods, a fact that really made me feel a bit old. But as you know there is always an app for that.
In the fifth day I took the tests and arrived to the hotel exhausted, I had to take the return bus to Sao Paulo and then the plane back to Buenos Aires. I left the hotel at 4:00 AM and arrived to my home at 4:00 PM.
Yesterday I got the test results. I’m the first guy to get a PCI/PCE certificate with a course given in “portuñol”.
I’m planning to return next year for the Profinet training.
Hopefully my Portuguese will be a bit less awful. Just in case I’ll update the corresponding app.
Mirko Torrez Contreras is a freelance Process Automation consultant who enjoys sharing knowledge and cares about education. He’s also starting a freelance writing career, with the hope of avoiding family complains about too much tech talk at dinner.
You can contact PITC Brazil by mail: profibus@profibus.org.br (Silas will promptly answer your inquiries).
Paulo and Guilherme’s start-up website can be found here: http://www.toledoesouza.com/