Santa’s Little Helpers
In this post, I’ll talk a little bit about what it was like procuring parts at my old job, a mid-sized R&D lab. (Or maybe I should say an R&D lab working on a number of aerospace projects and particularly concerned with part traceability). To my childlike eyes, it was a strange sort of magic. I’ll try to elaborate. You see, as a mechanical engineer, I like concrete, tangible, physical things. The process of going to a store, giving someone money, and getting something in return makes sense to me. There’s been a fair exchange of goods. The procurement process at work, however, seemed like voodoo in comparison. The way procurement would work at my old job was that I would fill out a piece of paper with a list of the parts I wanted (yes, paper! although at some point we switch to an electronic version of the paper, which…
The Future of Education
The Overiew I recently signed up for 6.002: Circuits and Electronics, an introductory level course and the first course available from MITx, MIT’s free, online school. Unlike MIT’s Open Course Ware, which has an incomplete selection of videotaped classroom lectures (some courses are more complete than others) and assorted problem sets, the MITx course has been designed from the ground up to be completed online. Each “week” of class has two lecture sequences, a homework set, and a lab. The lecture sequences each take about an hour and a half to complete, and are broken up into 2-5 minute segments. Some segments feature virtual chalkboard sessions, others feature clips from actual classroom demonstrations. Occasionally, the professor will ask you to solve a simple problem in the middle of class to reinforce a point. The video segments then switch to an untimed online mini-quiz. The student answers in a text field and get…
Topics In Engineering And Outsourcing That Scare Me
When I was job hunting a few months ago, I decided I was less interested in aerospace/defense and more interested in working in consumer product development. I was particularly interested in working at a consulting firm, because the variety of work appealed to me. The thought of working on a single product line for years on end…did not have much appeal. At many of the product design and consulting firms where I interviewed, I encountered a disturbing trend. I had been peripherally aware of it, but finally encountered face to face: Not many consumer products are engineered in the United States. At one firm, for example, I saw a design for a new model blender. The firm had handled the industrial design, essentially designing the appearance of the blender, it’s contours and colors and the shape and number of it’s knobs. A factory in China, they told me, would do…
An Interview with Ytai Ben-Tsvi, Inventor of the IOIO
Ytai Ben-Tsvi is the creative mind behind the IOIO (pronounced “yo-yo”). It is a hobby development board similar to the Arduino, but designed specifically to attach hobby peripherals to an Android phone through the USB port. I recently had a chance to interview him. What is the story behind the IOIO board and what has been your involvement thus far? In the summer of 2010 I was in California on a business trip (I was living in Israel then). A colleague of mine was telling me about the cellbots.com project that he was involved with. They were building little hobby robots based around Android phones. He was unhappy about the hacky ways they were using to connect the phone to motors and asked me whether I have an idea to fix this. After a couple of days, I thought I found a solution and that’s how IOIO was born. Another thing that makes it…
Why It’s Still Necessary to Build Real Hardware
CAD modeling, virtual prototyping, and 3-d printing all have their place; but at the end of the day, You Still Need to Build Real Hardware. In this post, I’ll share a few examples of my own hard won knowledge that no book or classroom lecture ever covered. The real lessons of the day came from some time in the shop with experienced and very talented machinists. I was doing work designing a socket drive to connect a steel shafted motor to an aluminum component. The socket and motor were both modeled in CAD, tolerance stackups were taken into account, and we had something like a .0025″ clearance between the walls of the socket and the drive shaft. The parts came from the machine shop, and like a little kid on Christmas, I tore open the packaging and started putting parts together. We put the mechanism (and associated motor) through it’s paces and…
Useful Things I Have Learned That Engineering School Never Taught Me
I had this post written already, but think it’s an appropriate response to recent articles from GEARS and from Miss MSE about which humanities classes I thought should have been part of my education. I’ve been out of school for several years now and along the way I’ve picked up a few things that made me say “Why didn’t they teach that to me before!?!?” Now, brace yourself, fellow engineers, because I’m not talking about some arcane science or deep mathematical insight. I’m talking about the general disciplines that fall into the field I think of as the Liberal Arts. Of course, when I was student, I rolled my eyes and thought that Liberal Arts meant things like studying Art History of the Early to Late Middle Renaissance, and wondered how it would get me a job. Now, I see the Liberal Arts as a set of “soft” skills that…
Old Technology That’s Still Surprisingly Useful
At my old job, when one of the engineers retired, he would ceremonially dump everything they had in their office onto a table in the hallway for the rest of us to pick over like vultures. The coolest thing I ever found was something called a Gerber Variable Scale. The variable scale is a stretchable spring with markings at regular intervals. When you stretch the spring, the markings change size. The tool is made for transferring markings off graphs without well laid out axes. You can also draw neatly delineated tick marks with it as well, at any size you want! Pretty cool! In the picture below the spring for the scale is compressed all the way. The little disks are numbers, but most of them seem to have fallen off over the years. In this picture though, the little silver colored block (the slider) has been moved all the…
Awesome Tools For Every Mechanical Engineer
I’m a mechanical engineer. I love mechanical things. My parents gave me lots of Legos to play with as a child and I suppose I never entirely grew out of them. If I had to say what the favorite part of my job is, I’d probably say it’s when parts come in the mail. I mean, it’s like Christmas. Stuff shows up on your desk in a nice box and you get to rip it open and play with what’s inside. How awesome is that? After parts arrive though, there are still the tools to play with. Here are some of the coolest tools out there that I think every mechanical engineer should have. Calipers The first time I played with a pair of calipers, I was maybe 9 years old and following my dad around to a space satellite fabrication facility. An engineer picked a pair of calipers up…
Real Life Examples of My $100K+ Education At Work
I’m convinced that in my job, I use 95% of the material covered in engineering school less than 5% of the time. Most of what I do boils down to on the job experience or falls in the category of project management. In many cases, not much would separate me from a talented hobbyist or tinkerer. Of course, this makes me question the value of my education. Why did I spend all that time learning all that stuff? I’ve considered it for a while, and I like to tell myself that the 5% of the time I really use my degree is what makes me valuable as an employee. In a tangential line of discussion, there’s also been a fair bit of talk in the news recently about the workforce, the number of engineers trained in the US, and why so many STEM students change majors. One line of reasoning…