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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #385 – An Interview with John Davis

#385 – An Interview with John Davis

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Welcome, John Davis! He is a sales engineer who owns/runs Paul Davis Automation, a rep company in Cleveland Ohio focused on the industrial automation space. John also uses his hands-on sales experience to develop accessible industrial electronics for his company Three ML, LLC.

This week notes will be a bit different. I was able to take notes that are roughly timestamped! Let us know if these are useful or accurate. They are links where relevant:

  • Mechatronics
    0h 2m 58s
  • John is a Manufacturer’s rep
    0h 4m 7s
  • Chris had written about the difference between sales and mkt rep
    0h 4m 52s
  • Distributors
    0h 6m 51s
  • John’s first sales experience was in retail selling bicycles
    0h 13m 29s
  • How do you make money?
    0h 15m 4s
  • Amazon affiliate is a type of “affiliate marketing”
    0h 17m 8s
  • Ladder logic
    0h 24m 5s
  • Relay logic
    0h 24m 34s
  • PLC software
    0h 25m 56s
  • Fiberglass plant
    0h 28m 55s
  • Automation is key
    0h 30m 57s
  • manufacturing in us, germany
    0h 31m 55s
  • cost of switching/upgrading
    0h 33m 58s
  • Shampoo, hamburger buns
    0h 36m 38s
  • Push the button story (which I may have mis-attributed!). Here’s Sam’s product I mentioned.
    0h 38m 51s
  • Most installs are incremental upgrades
    0h 40m 8s
  • Rockwell encompass
    0h 40m 36s
  • Encompass partner producs
    0h 41m 15s
  • Industrial networks
    0h 43m 56s
  • Different types of real time
    0h 48m 53s
  • Ethernet Industrial Protocol (IP), Profinet, Ethercat
    0h 49m 18s
  • RS485, ModBus
    0h 51m 3s
  • three-ml
    0h 53m 42s
  • The line between value and problem solving
    0h 54m 17s
  • Industrial raspberry pi
    0h 57m 16s
  • Industrial IoT
    1h 0m 37s
  • Medium voltage switchgear
    1h 2m 20s
  • Monitoring bus bar temp
    1h 3m 16s
  • 7M electricity bill / month
    1h 4m 33s
  • Machine Pix twitter account
    1h 5m 56s
  • Vendor relationships are important
    1h 6m 20s
  • Daemon, which inspired DC Darknet
    1h 9m 7s
  • Going into sales
    1h 12m 27s
  • “There is no specification for how to do sales”
    1h 18m 13s
  • Reach John on twitter at @johnprdavis
    1h 20m 0s

Comments

  1. Cristian G says

    March 26, 2018 at 6:23 am

    Great podcast.

    Why is the playback line so small? Is there a way to increase it?

  2. ben686 says

    March 27, 2018 at 11:39 am

    Great episode!

    Also, anyone interested in this space, I strongly recommend the current episode of the AfterOn Podcast.. where, Rodney Brooks is interviewed and they talk all things industrial/automation and the future of tech!

  3. Ido Gendel says

    March 28, 2018 at 6:41 am

    Time stamps! Thank you! 🙂

  4. IslandMarmot says

    March 29, 2018 at 12:24 pm

    Really enjoyed the podcast. I like the guest interviews.

    For anybody interesting in Industrial networks I recommend taking a look at

    https://www.fieldcommgroup.org/

    I’ve found the site a good resource for researching material for presentations etc. on the advantages/disadvantages of using 4-20mA loops against “Smart” transmitters.

    As a representative of the late “baby boomers” (I’m old enough to remember 3 to 15 psi loops) I think I should stand up for my generation and protest. We’ve been advocates for digital process and control systems for decades. Standards have changed and new standards created to allow for this change and I hope that I’ve seen the last major project that uses 4-20mA instrumentation as a go-to technology.

    The reason we are grumpy is that your generation will no doubt get to do what we wanted to do all along.

  5. EngineerZ says

    March 31, 2018 at 8:52 pm

    Nice episode, I work in the utility industry so this discussion was a little closer to my day job. I have worked with some really good manufacturers reps and I appreciate the important work John’s business does.

    FYI, not sure if this is covered in any sort of standard (e.g. IEEE, ANSI, IEC, etc.), but generally speaking voltage classes are broken down as follows, at least in the electric utility business:

    Low Voltage (LV): 120 – 600 V
    Medium Voltage (MV): 2.4 kV – 69 kV
    High Voltage (HV): 69 kV – 230 kV
    Extra-High Voltage (EHV): 345 – 765 kV
    Ultra-High Voltage (UHV): 1100 kV

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