It’s been ages, but we’d done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers “lacked artfulness.”
So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.
The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.
I can’t stop laughing. Did you tell him, or did he just sit there grinding more and more pepper into your lap?
My wife and I went to an Italian restaurant in Vegas a few years ago. The waiter asked if we wanted Parmesan, pulled the tiniest cube of cheese out and held it up like a magician, and then never broke eye contact while he grated it. It was unnerving.