Ben Hutcheson
Senior Control Systems Engineer at Alliance Automation
Albury, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Hutcheson is a Senior Control Systems Engineer with around 15 years’ cross-industry experience—spanning oil & gas, mining, aerospace, steel and manufacturing—combining electrical engineering foundations with hands-on software development. He designs, commissions and upgrades PLC/DCS systems (Schneider, Rockwell, ControlLogix) and builds automation tooling in Python, including a PLC language converter and process simulation systems tied to Grafana/InfluxDB. Ben has led multidisciplinary commissioning teams, implemented high-performance vision and streaming solutions (Python/OpenCV, Kafka) and improved OT resilience via virtualization and graph-database-backed workflows. An active contributor to the Apache PLC4X project, he enhanced Modbus support for varied address formats and complex data types, extending industrial IoT interoperability. Known for a pragmatic focus on safety, maintainability and knowledge sharing, he thrives on turning legacy control systems into robust, testable modern solutions.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Sydney
Stackoverflow
3reputation
0reached
5answers
0questions
Github Skills (13)
modbus-tcp10
regular-expression10
javas10
data-parsing10
java10
modbus10
network-protocol9
protocols9
develop9
plc4x6
apache-kafka6
rest6
plc6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
apache/plc4x
Jul 2020 - Jan 2023
PLC4X The Industrial IoT adapter
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:32 reviews, 393 commits, 138 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Ben's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the Modbus driver within the PLC4X project, specifically by adding support for various address formats and data types. They implemented new address formats similar to existing ones (e.g., 400001, 000001), extended support for additional types such as strings, and made corresponding adjustments to the code, including adding new templates and modifying existing ones for data input/output. These changes streamlined data handling and extended the functionality of the Modbus driver to handle more complex data types.
pythonadapterfirmatamodbusindustrial-iot
hutcheb/acd
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
Rockwell ACD Tools
Contributions:1 release, 33 commits, 4 PRs in 2 months
unzipatsdrone-ciacdrockwell
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