Weekend Journal: Engineer Tabs
I will never be as good of a guitar player as I am the day of an engineering test. Why? Because I’m a procrastinator. Hell, I’m procrastinating doing some things around the house this afternoon, just to write this post!. And when I procrastinated in school, my distraction of choice was playing the guitar. So to this day, I still associate the two. Learning guitar as a hobbyist and learning electronics as a hobbyist. And my learning process for the former was strikingly similar to how people learn the latter (at least in the practical, hands-on sense). Even more similarities exist when you include institutional learning in the mix. While this article will not be a treatise on the benefits of institutional over hobbyist learning, it will point out where weaknesses may develop and how to possibly better merge the two for an overall more well-rounded student of electronics or guitar. I also limit…
Changing the world one fan at a time.
You may have noticed that I work for ebm-papst UK Ltd, but do you know what we do? Or how we are changing the world? This week, I want to explain the most exciting development since the electric motor: the EC Fan. Ebm-papst is a market leader in supplying fans to the whole world. That’s everything from fans in microwaves and ovens to fans in computers and IT equipment right the way up to massive fans keeping data centres and supermarkets cool. However, it’s the development of the EC fan that has made a massive impact on the world. I’d like to point out from the beginning that ebm-papst is not the only manufacturer of EC fans, but we were the first! The EC fan is important because it is much more efficient than standard electric fans. A typical AC fan uses magnetic fields to spin the rotor around. However,…
The Swiss Army Knife Engineer
So yes, it is that time again when the slightly odd electronics engineer posts another blog. Having got this weeks theme via email again I stopped and asked myself – do I always have a totally different view about things from everyone else? Well, in short, yes I do! As an electronics engineer I tend to interface with others like mechanical engineers and software engineers or departments like production or maintenance. However, I don’t think I’ve had problems talking to them or getting them to understand me. This is mainly because I have worked in other areas of business and engineering other than just magically appearing as an electronics design engineer. In other blogs I have talked about my education and progress to becoming an engineer and you will see I started off in production and did a mechanical engineering course at college. So I’ve become one of them ‘Jack-of-all-trades’…
Wear Sunscreen : The Unguided Engineer.
This week I received an email from Chris telling us what the theme was – The things that made us who we are, the turning point. Chris suggested in his email we could consider the people that helped make it happen, our teachers and mentors. But what happen if you had none of them? Well that’s what hit me when I read the email. I don’t consider myself a great engineer, there has been no turning point in my career other than ploughing though 13 jobs. My teachers at school did not inspire me; in fact, I was told when I left school I’d account to nothing because I have Dyslexia. Looking back over 20 years of working in engineering I can’t say any one person has taken me under their wing, sponsored me or guided me. I’ve just been out there doing it on my own. When I started…
Wiggle It – Just A Little Bit | EMC
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…
The Engineering Social Hub
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…
VHDL Numeric Library Sheep
So some time back, I did a few blogs about how much I like writing VHDL and what a wonderfully language it is. I also did a bit of an intro for software engineers (don’t worry, you don’t need to read them to see where I’m going here). However, I came under a bit of criticism about what I wrote and my use of the evil STD_LOGIC_ARITH package. OK, I may not be a full-time VHDL engineer but I think there are far too many people being sheep and using the numeric library though peer pressure while not considering true engineering principles. So first off, let’s get this all straight – I class myself as a embedded electronics design engineer. My day job is all low-level electronics and microcontrollers, no FPGAs. However, I spent a few years working on a VHDL design for a Gigabit Ethernet Card where I looked…
Lucky Job Number 13
I started work straight from school with only a handful of good grades and no idea how my life would pan out. Twenty-three years later, I’ve gone though 13 jobs and been made redundant 6 times. The electronics industry in the UK has not been good to me. So in this blog, I want to tell you about the ups and downs I have been through and talk about whether I would recommend the industry to others. I started my career as little more than a spark in a bottling hall. This was a great opportunity for me as I had an apprenticeship that got me though two years of college and on my way to being an EE. Apprenticeships are in short supply now, and its a real shame as these are a vital stepping stone for many leaving school who, like me, cannot pay their way though university.…
What Makes a Good Hobby Magazine Project
Now that I’m a full time blogger for EB, I guess I had better get my act together, start thinking more about what I write, and spend less time reading magazines. This week, however, it’s the content of magazines and the way in which hobby projects are written up that I want to consider. In the UK, it’s hard to come by electronics magazines in the local shops. It’s just not a popular hobby as, say, fishing, motorbikes and guns – don’t ask! So most hobby electronics engineers get magazines through the shops’ own subscription system (they order it for you) or direct from the distributor. I do remember a time, however, when electronics magazines were very popular, so I guess that shows my age. I used to select a magazine each week or month and then follow the building of the project. A great example of this is shown in…
Quitting engineering
Sometimes we go through an experience that makes us wonder if it’s really worth it to continue on our current path. I had one such experience when I was nearly done with my master’s. If I hadn’t been so close to finishing, I would have quit. That experience was a class. The worst part was that it was an undergraduate class. Going into engineering from physics, there are, as in any field, a few core classes I was lacking. I was not prevented from taking any grad classes due to this deficit, but I was required to take about four undergraduate classes before I could graduate. The third one of those was one that I felt reasonably good about. I had taken a couple upper-level math courses that were relevant. With that sort of preparation, significantly more than most undergrads in the course, I felt like the class shouldn’t be…