Ask The Readers — Give Me An “A”!
No, this isn’t about grades. I got back from Maker Faire last weekend on Monday. It’s a festival dedicated to science, engineering, ingenuity and creativity. Really it’s a bunch of nerds like me hanging out, showing off their projects and selling their kits and wares. It was amazing. But the thing that struck me most was the native integration of artwork with all of these technology projects. Art and technology have an interesting co-existence. Some people call it “design”, like how “Industrial Designers” are the ones that draw up cars and other items to make them prettified for consumers. Engineering is sometimes the underlying skill set for many types of art, as well. In general though, the forward facing part of a product is the last concern of engineers; really it’s the first thing that consumers see in a product, it’s actually quite important. And all along the way, when…
She Who Hesitates
This week at Engineer Blogs we’re talking about your role as an engineer as your company changes over time. I’m lucky enough to work for a company that has a well established and successful product. We also have lots of specialized support departments that attempt to make the engineer’s life a little easier. But on the other hand we are still rapidly growing. The company has more than doubled in size in my tenure. I’ve talked before about the conflicts between doing the technical work or doing project management work. A company with a reputation and a good administrative staff can be a huge boon to an engineer but if you are growing you need to be careful you don’t rest on your laurels either. (Street sign photo credit) When I had to return something in my personal life and stopped by the local post office I realized how spoiled…
Doublespeak and Placing Blame
I’ve been on some extensive travel lately and as Chris Gammell related travelling for engineering is no easy task. Making sure you have all your necessary test equipment and access to all the resources you might need involves a lot of planning. But sometimes things just don’t work out in your favor. I’ve talked about testing to failure before. However, plenty of times when you are not anticipating failure it happens anyways: Murphy strikes again. The problem is in dealing with your failure. Very often it’s unclear whether you caused a component to fail or whether you had a bad component to begin with. Miss MSE just talked about how engineers need to be good storytellers. Unfortunately there’s very often no good story to tell. If it was your equipment that caused the failure (but you can’t figure out how) that sort of implies you’re due for future failure. Or…
How to be convincing
It seems like I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to convince others of my ideas. Or sometimes it’s my boss’s idea that I’m trying to get across to another department. One interesting thing I’ve found is that people are especially critical if your idea steps on their specialty. I’ll give you an example. A lot of folks where I work have pretty good machining experience. They’re very familiar with various finishes and also with welding specifications. If you’re presenting a machined part with some welds and a finish call out they will quiz you non stop on why you chose that material and that finish over any other. But they are a lot less familiar with various electric or electro-mechanical processes. In my mind the finish I chose for a machined part is just as obvious as what kind of shielding and sleeves I’m using to protect the wiring harness.…
When Failure is the Only Option
Failure is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it’s exactly what you want. You might start with one component that’s been well tested with the existing system. It can be a simple clamp or a complicated swing valve (like the one pictured from DHV Industries). You probably tested it out when it was originally implemented and proved you had plenty of safety margin. But now your system has changed. Maybe you’re sending your system into freezing winter temperatures or hot, arid deserts. Maybe you’ve got a more powerful compressor that generates much higher pressures than you’d been dealing with before. So how do you test that component? Most standards would suggest you take your max operating conditions and increase the magnitude by 50% and test at those conditions. That proof test would verify your equipment can operate safely at your max conditions giving you a 1.5 safety margin. But in…
Continuing Draw of Diesel
I talked last week about increasing fuel economy standards in the US and how our engine designs have been improving incrementally to meet this new demand. It was almost a year ago that I talked about the military’s affection for diesel in a wide variety of platforms. Well now it seems like the flexibility of diesel and the American consumer’s desire for better fuel efficiency is meeting somewhere in the middle. When Americans think about diesel they might have an image in their heads of 1970s diesel cars puffing black smoke everywhere or a smelly large truck. Diesel is extremely popular in Europe but their environmental and safety standards are different which prevented direct injection (ha!) of European diesel cars in to the US (like the direct injection of the Bosch common rail injector in the photo). Still the advantages in fuel economy with the models we’ve been seeing so…
Reinventing the Wheel
The internal combustion engine has been around for several hundred years and been used successfully in industry and commercial applications for more than one hundred years. When we think about cutting edge technology we tend not to think about things that have been around that long. And in fact, most of the design of the engines we use today have not changed substantially in decades. But that doesn’t mean the small changes we are working towards don’t have dramatic effects. (Photo via creative commons from Ranj Niere) The auto industry has voluntarily agreed to meet new fuel efficiency standards of 55 mpg fleet average by 2025. Yes you can reread that, they voluntarily agreed. So why? Don’t more stringent fuel efficiency standards make car design and manufacturing more expensive? Yes and no. Yes it make it more expensive, but manufacturers know that demands for better gas mileage from consumers will…
Sacrificing the Short Term
Most designs are a solution to a problem. But a lot of times you can’t always solve the problem the way you want. The ideal solution might require a redesign of interconnecting parts that you can’t necessarily change. Or it might require time to test components that you don’t have. Sometimes you have to pick the next design iteration because it’s available or works within your time frame. But how can you be sure you’re not sacrificing the best solution for something that’s easy? Sometimes you need to have an interim solution. Sometimes you do have to make the quick and dirty choice while still working towards something long term. I’ve had several problem child pieces of hardware lately and this decision has come up several times. Often I’ve been forced to come up with a practical quick fix. It’s tough when you do that to keep the momentum up…
Open Source Hardware | OSHW
The big event that happened last week for me was the Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Summit 2011 (OHS). So this week I want to review the interesting talks that took place and what it means to me as a electronics design engineer. I’m guessing I am not the first or last to review the event, Jeremy Blum was at the event and you can check out his review on element14. So keep an eye out for other reviews too. I was unfortunately not at the summit physically, but like thousands of others, I watched online via uStream. Not the greatest way to watch as the slides were all blurred but free. There was some 20+ talks given by people with a range of experience in OSHW, all with equal interest; however, my favourites were as follows: The team (Jurgen and Alison) from OHANDA were the first to catch my eye…
Seeing the code in the machines – Indestructible software.
For many people they just except that software exist as some form of stuff that allows you do do things on computers or is hidden inside machines. In a way software can be as hard to physically get hold of as it is to see the flow of electronics in a wire or see the flow of air particles generating a vortex off a wing tip. However software is a important components in nearly everything you touch, from the mouse your scroll around the page with to the hundreds of servers that send you search results when looking for that next holiday. Software engineers are a massive part of the industry but what does software really do and can software really break? It would be difficult to explain software and how the flow of code works in a modern computer as they have become very complex machine. Instead its possibly…