Weekend Journal — CSI: Component Stupidity Investigator
I often say that troubleshooting is the main skill I possess. My day job requires interfacing with manufacturing and trying to help them solve problems from time to time (among other things). And recently while working on an issue, I’ve come upon one of the most difficult problems to solve: component level problems. The hard part about component level problems is narrowing down and eliminating all of the other potential problems in a circuit board. There’s always temptation to look at a problematic part of a circuit and immediately declare, “These parts are no good. Get me the vendor on the phone so I can yell at them!“. However, that would have you chasing ghost problems and wouldn’t make you any friends at the part manufacturer or distributor. No one likes their product being accused of being shoddy, nor do they like chasing problems you have fabricated because you were…
Development Kits 101: What Makes A Good Dev Kit
Since I was about ten years old, I have been building and playing with electronic development kits. Over that time there have been good ones and bad ones. Nowadays, I get to review Dev Kits, so I get to look at them from an outsiders view point, not one where I’m clouded by the excitement of opening the box and getting started with it. So in this blog, I want to pass on to you, and the makers of these Dev Kits, what makes one work! I guess we have to first have to consider why someone wants a Dev Kit before deciding if it’s good or bad. What people or engineers expect from the experience is key. There are two main flavours of Dev Kits, in my view, which are as follows. First, you have the kits where they supply you with the key device or component that you’re…
Weekend Journal: Know Your Nerd Audience
One benefit to being part of a large(ish) corporation is purchasing power (not super large, but big enough to turn a head or two). You get lower part costs, you get more guarantees of delivery and you get better support. And sometimes as part of support, you get to talk to some very smart people (hardly exclusive to when you’re an important customer). Well, let me back up a little bit. Sometimes you get to talk. And sometimes you only get to listen. My issue comes up when vendors come in and say they want to talk. That they want to have a ‘conversation with their valued customer’…and then proceed to plow through slides that you have no interest in. This happens all the time and I dutifully sit through them, especially if they’ve bought me lunch (I can be bought with food, doubly so for good food). My problem…
School Competition Pt3 – Awards Day
Over the last few weeks I’ve been talking about the Schools Contest held by Chelmsford Engineering Society (CES). The first week I explained the basic background of the contest and then how I take part in the judging process. Well this week its awards time and we get to see who has won! Once again our hosts are Anglia Ruskin University who help out lots with this and other CES events. There was also lots of support from the sponsors including my company ebm-papst UK Ltd who also supply one of the trophies (full list of sponsors at end). The award winners came along and one again put on a great show of the work they have done. For me like some of the other judges it was our first opportunity to see some of them or have a long chat about the work. Its hard to take in 50…
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…
School Competition Pt2 – Judgement Day
Last week I introduced the Chelmsford Engineering Society (CES) Competition for schools. As I said before, I was one of the judges, and this week, I want to report back on what I have seen and what stood out. Before I show you the entries that stood out, I first want to run though the background information about the contest so you better understand the whole day. My day started at the Marconi Building, which is on the Anglia Ruskin University complex, at 8:15am for registration. I was one of 42 judges taking part on the day. We were being supported by members of the CES, who were organising and helping log scores. We are all paired up with another engineer who we have not meet before; I was with a chap called George who, in his day, used to make TV Camera tubes before it all went solid-state. Each…
Engine Control Unit | How It Works
This week, I wanted to get a little more hardcore with the electronics and explain one of the products I once worked on: the Engine Control Unit (ECU) of a Formula 1 racing car. Some 10 years ago, I worked for a UK company that designed and built electronics for a large proportion of the racing world. From Formula Ford to World Rally cars, from go carts to NASCAR cars, their electronics found their way in. They designed things like data loggers, sensors, full car looms, and even the £50,000 steering wheels you used to see in the Ferrari Formula 1 cars. However, the really clever stuff was carried out inside the ECU. The basics of a car engine are easy to understand: suck in some air, mix a little fuel, add a little spark, and bang! You get a big explosion and lots of smelly gases which you throw…
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’…
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…