You are browsing the archive for February 2011.
This week’s theme at Engineer Blogs is our favorite class. While the notion of ever sitting in a class again (except something fun, like a foreign language) makes me want to gouge my hand out with a dull pencil coated with hydrofluoric acid, I do have a lot of fond memories of classes I was in.
I grew up in a family of engineers, so I’m used to the way engineers think. It wasn’t until I was older that I began to appreciate how lucky I was to grow up in a household where problems were normally handled in a straightforward manner, and most discussions were highly logical. In college I found it mentally exhausting to spend time in soap-opera-drama circles of people, and it baffled me that some people in the world go out of their way to speak in code. I mean really, who has time to parse every sentence for additional meaning?? So when I see people who are not familiar with the engineering mindset interact for the first time with a set of techies, I just have to smile a bit. In particular, people trying to TEACH engineers. For instance, in undergrad I took a basic statistics class. The teacher was a lovely [...]
As someone who has been tinkering with electronics for some 30 years, I’ve seen a few changes to electronics and the effect on the embedded system design. Once there was a time when I was soldering in Z80s (an 8-bit microprocessor), PIOs (programmable input/output) and RAM chips as well as erasing EPROMs in a UV box. However, I question if today’s engineers have lost touch with the changes and the basic principles of electronics. Back when building my Z80 systems, it was normal to be making a embedded system, rows of Eurostyle cards all lined up. Now we have moved forward into the world of system-on-a-chip; Atmel, Microchip and tons more all have all you need on a single chip. There are even more new trends starting to appear, like the mbed and Arduino systems. A lot of the hard work of designing and setting up a system-on-a-chip is now [...]
One of the best pieces of advice I received from a fellow engineer was to keep all my engineering books from university. He explained that the books you used to learn a topic are usually the easiest for you to go back and reference if you need to. But beyond that, most engineers have a set of essential reference books they keep on their desk. I haven’t really been in the industry long enough to specialize or have established as large a collection as I would like but here are a few of my favorites so far for mechanical engineering, and why. I hope all you engineering readers or even non-engineering readers will post with the favorite books you use in your field. Machinery’s Handbook This is the standard every Mechanical Engineer has been using since it was first published some 30 editions ago in 1914. The subtitle reads “A [...]
I’ve been reading more about entrepreneurship and starting businesses lately. Mostly in auxiliary reading about personal finance, but also in my reading about technology companies. One of my favorite sites, Get Rich Slowly, has lately been talking about a book called “The Millionaire Next Door”. In fact, just today, Robert Brokamp of the Motley Fool interviewed one of the co-authors, Thomas Stanley. In the book, they highlight a large percentage of millionaires are business owners. I’m not using this as a basis for the idea of starting a company (many many companies fail)…I’m just saying that it’s added motivation to take that leap. So why not start up a technology manufacturing business? Why not go out on my own and make something? Well, I’d still like to someday. In fact, I already have an incorporated business in the state of Ohio, Analog Life, LLC. However, this is more small time consulting [...]
Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), of which I’m a license-holding member, publishes a bi-monthly magazine called Engineering Dimensions. In the September/October 2010 issue, a letter to the magazine caught my attention. Since online access to the magazine is restricted to members, I’ll quote the reader’s feedback in its entirety below: -President Seems to Support Discrimination- I read with surprise and disappointment our newly elected president’s avowed intention of supporting the concept of sexual discrimination (“Women in leadership,” Engineering Dimensions, July/August 2010, p. 3). However, her suggestion that our profession should support sexual or any other type of discrimination greatly concerned me. This is antithetical to our long and proud history of objectivity, neutrality and fairness. In fact, it calls into question our claim to professional status. Her first sentence–”At a time when women represent only 10 per cent of all professional engineers in Canada, there is a ray of light in [...]
The above video gives an idea of what places like Walmart would like to do with RFID, and this type of item-level tagging is what has been driving the market. RFID has been in use long enough that this sort of thing ought to be available, but it’s not. Why? Let’s start with RFID: it works like a barcode. You have a scanner that reads the barcode using lasers. In order to read the barcode, you need a line of sight: the scanner has be able to “see” the light hitting the barcode. RFID is similar, except it’s using a frequency of electromagnetic wave different than the range of visible light. This frequency doesn’t require “line of sight” because objects that are opaque in the visible frequencies will be transparent at the operational frequencies that RFID systems use. This is because RFID tags use antennas to capture and modulate electromagnetic [...]
It has been my pleasure to read the excellent posts on Engineer Blogs since its inception – and I’ve been following the posts on tinkering and its place in engineering education with particular interest. I’m excited to join Engineer Blogs as a guest blogger, and I thought I’d join in by sharing a bit about my experience with tinkering. First of all I’d like to point out that “tinkering” means different things to different people. To electrical engineers like our own Paul Clarke and Chris Gammell, it may mean playing around with 555 timers and Arduino controllers. To a computer science major, it may mean learning a new programming language. To engineers on the mechanical and aerospace side, like myself and FrauTech, it may mean something different. As a little kid, I played with Erector sets and Tangrams. But no matter what flavor of hobby you get into, the activities [...]
During the course of selling your soul for pieces of silver, there may come a time when the powers that be request that you sell out just a little more of yourself. Yes, they give you underlings. Soon, you will discover that all the skill and pride that you’ve carefully nurtured over the past many years will vanish in mere months. Where once you took pride in your ingenious cleverness, now you take care of babysitting disgruntled ex-peers who look upon you as an obstacle to their inventive genius. The complex computer modeling of the nano-world is replaced by Gantt charts and bar graphs. You start attending meetings, lots of them. Meetings with the boss. Meetings with your peers. Meetings with underlings. Food starts to taste funny; the flatulent co-worker seems to smell less; staring at the sun directly is no longer a problem; underling complaints seem to sound like [...]
A profesor I once knew began a conversation with, “What classes are you taking this semester?” I responded, “I’m taking a class on teaching, a-” “Teaching?! Why are you taking a class on teaching? You don’t need a class to learn how to teach. You just do it.” The irony of this is that this professor was considered one of the worst teachers in the whole department. Chris’ post on a ‘tinkering class’ got me thinking (again) about what is really a good way to educate people. And despite some of the comments on Reddit, Chris is actually on the right track for some of the more current thinking on approaches to STEM education. So what do you want from someone educated in a STEM field? Obviously they have to have a certain amount of background knowledge, they need to have problem solving skills, they need to be inquisitive and [...]
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