You are browsing the archive for April 2011.
One aspect of design work I didn’t learn about in school was the interaction with vendors. No one ever told me I’d have to interact with real people (*gasp*) on a regular basis in order to find out about new parts. I mean, when it comes to new parts I’m assuming that right at this moment there are students at my alma mater still using the same LM741 I used. No, not the same type or the same pin layout. I mean the exact same 741. That’s how I feel about most college kids finding out about new technology. It’s just not in the cards for most college students to be up to date on components, nor does it really need to be (fundamentals first!). So when I began work and started interacting with vendors on a regular basis, I found out how useful they are. They tell me about [...]
Talking about documentation is probably something you enjoy about as much as sticking your hand down the garbage disposal with the latter having the advantage of being far less boring. But if you don’t document, you’re in a lot of trouble. A good drawing is like a good friend. Sure it requires a bit of work upfront. You have to tend to the relationship, find the things you have in common, or in this case slave over an overworked computer yelling at your CAD program for why it doesn’t recognize the table you just inserted five minutes ago and won’t let you add a new row to it. But in the end an assembly drawing is priceless. When that guy is on vacation (or in a coma) was the only one who knew what that fitting was correctly torqued to or what generic part you ended up using when the [...]
That, to your left, is detective-turn-teacher Roland “Prezbo” Pryzbylewski from HBO’s The Wire. If you have seen The Wire, then you know the phrase “jukin’ the stats”. If not, rent it, buy it, steal it, do whatever you have to do to see it because you’ve missed out on one of the greatest dramas ever to grace a TV screen. In short, The Wire is all about Baltimore in the early 2000s and is centered around Baltimore crime, police work, and city politics. One of the recurring themes in the show is the phrase “jukin’ the stats” which is how the police manipulate the numbers to make crime rates appear to go down. Now, I know I’ve gone far off field so I’m going to bring this back to engineers and engineering. As engineers, we tend to be very good at everyday math. Also, we probably like our data to be presented in [...]
Hardware engineers everywhere in the world all have to deal with that black art know as Electromagnetic Immunity or Compliance (EMI / EMC). These are the nasty radio frequencies (RF) that blast and affect other equipment or your circuits. So in this blog I look at one time when the going got tough, we just added a little wiggle. The project I have in mind is a product that drives ‘something’ with a 400V DC square wave at around 200+ watts. The product contains a Power Factor Correction section (PFC) that takes in our normal supply voltage and using a continuous mode PFC circuit, boosts the voltage and regulates it to 400V DC. Now I’ll not go into how a PFC works, but the key point here is that the circuit has a large inductor used to store and boost the supply voltage. This inductor is cycled via a device [...]
I was planning on saving the world with circuits. I was going to sit at my desk, work out complex equations from scratch, and create technology so powerful that it shall be honoured for time immemorial with the granting of a patent. At least, that’s what I thought until I had actually gone through the entire patent writing and submission process. Patent making (not technology inventing, but the process of creating the patent based on the technology) is a dreary process, filled with a kaleidoscope of inane language. I now have seven patents with my name on it and the only thing they’re good for are seven extra lines on my résumé. The last four were filed with my current employer, FluxCorp. The other three were filed with my first employer (let’s call it PatentCorp), where I worked for 2.5 years. PatentCorp used to be a hard core engineering company [...]
I’ve come across yet another article on how academia needs to be overhauled. I find these articles interesting because, from the perspective of a scientist, I definitely see where the problem is. On the other hand, I don’t see this as often in engineering. Most of the arguments against the current academic system of training PhDs involves the law of numbers – there are simply too many PhDs and not enough academic jobs to support them. Be that as it may, this doesn’t seem to be as horrible in engineering. I think there are a couple things that make getting a PhD in engineering an easier choice. (Keep in mind that I’m making sweeping generalizations based on my observations and comments from various professors over the years.) First, I think very few engineers actually want to get a PhD. Most see the path to higher marketability as coming through an [...]
It’s a classic struggle – the logical, practical engineer butting heads with the uncomprehending, inefficient business major (see: all of Dilbert). Or wait – is it instead the visionary manager struggling to focus a socially inept engineer puttering off on a inscrutable tangent? (See: popular portrayals of mad scientists.) Somehow, engineers and business people always struggle with communication. As much as it’s beaten into us that the best teams are made of diverse people, both technical and managerial, somehow, in practice, collaboration between the parties is always painfully difficult. Why is this? Partly it’s the way that business people and engineers perceive each other. I’m currently a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering, but my minor is Entrepreneurship, which means I’ve taken a good number of classes in the business school. I’ve had to deal directly with the stereotypes that business students have when perceiving engineering students, and also with my [...]
I decided to try taking our topic for the week–the perception of engineers and the field of engineering–and turn it on its head: What do engineers think of the rest of the world? Some would say, “Who cares?”. Duly noted. If you don’t think engineers are worthwhile, you probably don’t care what they think of you or anyone else. Of course, if you don’t think engineers are worthwhile, you’re probably on the wrong site/side of town. Hint: you’re surrounded, get out while you can. The engineers I’ve met over the years, both in my career and around the web, have generally been quite a benevolent people. In general, we don’t hold ourselves above other professions because we understand systems, including social systems (though some would say engineers are lacking social skills, stepping back and looking at social systems seems different somehow). For example, an engineer might look at a widget [...]
This week on Engineer Blogs we’ve been talking about perceptions of engineers. Before I started working I had an unclear perception about the duties of engineers. I knew the major required a lot of science and math and shied away from it. Once I started working in the industry I found that engineers weren’t really any smarter than any other professionals I had known in my life. What had seemed like a high bar for entry now became something reasonable that maybe I could do too.But more importantly, I began asking these engineers for advice and discovered that many of them really loved their jobs. A few days ago Fluxor talked about whether engineers were respected by society in general. US News did a ranking of the top 30 careers back in 2008 ranked by median pay, job satisfaction, prestige, job market outlook, and barrier of entry for education. Engineer [...]
Over the last year or more, we engineers have seen a great number of new social network changes and continued growth in social media. But where do we fit into this and why are all the big companies like RS, Farnell, Digi-Key etc. all after us to be members of their Social Hubs? First off, let’s look at the big three social sites you could visit (alphabetical order): element14 ( Farnell ), DesignSpark (RS Components), and TechXchange (Digi-Key). There is then a host of other sites you could also use, like EEWeb, ARM, StackExchange, and even big cuddly Dave’s EEVBlog Forum. That should get you started. These sites are first and foremost here for us to use as tools. We can use forums to ask questions, write blogs to tell others what we have been doing, post videos and pictures, and even have pages that follow our projects. Engineers are not the people you [...]
Subscribe By Email
Subscribe By Reader
Recent Comments