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Latest Entries

Engineering Leadership

Thursday, 19 November 2009 11:57 P GMT-06
I do not desire to be in a traditional project management position within the engineering profession.  I also don't really desire to become a deep technical specialist in one very specific aspect of engineering.  I love the process of d
Category: Engineering Profession
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Metal Casting Project Failure Part 2

Monday, 16 November 2009 9:59 P GMT-06
A couple of weeks ago I tried again at the metal casting in my back yard.  I changed the fan to a 12 V very high speed fan that would be part of a rack of computing or telecom equipment.  I think the fan is approximately 1.5 A at 12V. 
Category: Home Projects
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ESD and Hand Tools

Wednesday, 14 October 2009 9:23 P GMT-06
Last spring I came across an article in Conformity magazine that made me think about ESD risks [1].  The article described how hand tools can be a significant source of ESD when working on circuit boards.  Hand tools can be designed to mini
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Metal Casting Project Failure

Wednesday, 14 October 2009 9:03 P GMT-06
This past weekend while I was camping, I fired up the flower pot furnace that I constructed for the first time.  Needless to say I did not have success.  First, I put some hot coals from the camp fire in, turned on the air intake fan and c
Category: Home Projects
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Singleton Pattern

Wednesday, 14 October 2009 8:40 P GMT-06
I learned about the concept of a singleton in object oriented methodology and I've started to understand the implementation in C#.  A singleton is a design pattern commonly used in object oriented programming in which a class is designed suc
Category: Software Design
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Outdoor Fire Pit Project - Part 3

Wednesday, 14 October 2009 8:37 P GMT-06
This is a continuation of the outdoor fire pit project. On September 27 I completed the project.  I had to buy more bricks and more mortar to complete it.  We ran out of the 50 lb. pale of mortar toward the end of the top row.  I had b
Category: Home Projects
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Lifetime in the Information Age = 7 years

Thursday, 1 October 2009 7:43 P GMT-06
The pace of technology advancement is almost unbelievable.  In the past 15 years the internet has grown from almost nothing into an indispensable part of life.  I can recall the BBS's that were prevalent in my youth which were text base
Category: Computers
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Ethernet Network Debug

Wednesday, 30 September 2009 6:51 P GMT-06
I'm working on a software project where a PC application communicates with an embedded system over ethernet.  In order to verify some changes I made to the software, I had to monitor the network traffic on the Ethernet network.  A tool
Category: Software Design
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Metal Casting Project Begins

Wednesday, 23 September 2009 10:04 P GMT-06
The weekend before last, I finally began the home metal casting project that I started almost exactly two years ago.  Actually I had purchased supplies for it and started construction right after I wrote that article in 2007, but it has sort of
Category: Home Projects
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Via Tuning

Wednesday, 23 September 2009 9:39 P GMT-06
Via tuning is the design process of optimizing the geometry of a printed circuit board via (plated hole that connects routing on one layer to another) to minimize the impedance discontinuity that the via presents in the transmission channel path.&nbs
Category: High Speed Digital Design
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Signal Integrity Reference Books - Multigigabit Channel Modeling and Power Integrity

Wednesday, 23 September 2009 9:27 P GMT-06
There are plenty of well known signal integrity books that cover the basics.  Recently I have started to see some books become available on more advanced topics.  Here are some that I have discovered, although I don't have any of these
Category: High Speed Digital Design
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Outdoor Fire Pit Project - Part 2

Monday, 21 September 2009 9:22 P GMT-06
This is a continuation of the fire pit project.  This past week I visited some local brick yards to get the materials.  At two of three brickyards I was told that fire brick was not appropriate for an outdoor fire pit because it does not ho
Category: Home Projects
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Fluorescent Light Bulb Experiment Part 16

Monday, 21 September 2009 6:38 P GMT-06
Yesterday a 65W indoor flood light in our upstairs hallway burned out.  I decided to replace it with a compact fluorescent flood light.Philips Energy Saver 65 Reflector Flood R3016W750 Lumen light output8000 hour lifeOne unique thing about this
Category: Home Projects
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Security Challenges for Wireless Medical Products

Monday, 7 September 2009 9:18 P GMT-06
There was an article in the July issue of IEEE Communications magazine describing the design challenges for security in wireless medical products, specifically geared toward implantable devices.  The article was actually an interesting discussio
Category: Digital System Architecture
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Floating Point Numbers on 16 Bit Processors and Digital Number Systems for DSP

Monday, 7 September 2009 8:57 P GMT-06
I came across an interesting paper in the July edition of IEEE Communications Magazine.  The article describes some of the challenges of doing DSP style calculations with number systems [1].  I didn't take time to fully understand every
Category: Digital System Architecture Software Design
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Outdoor Fire Pit Project - Part 1

Monday, 7 September 2009 8:50 P GMT-06
My in laws have been doing some upgrades at their trailer by the lake which have lead to the need to move the fire pit.  I decided that a fun project would be to make a masonry fire pit.  I did quite a bit of web searching and found a pictu
Category: Home Projects
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Bottom Bracket Bicycle Repair

Thursday, 3 September 2009 9:48 P GMT-06
About 3 years ago I decided that running was not a good form of excersize for me due to chronic leg issues, so I decided to switch to biking.  I proceeded to buy the coolest looking $70 bike I could find at Fleet Farm.  It was a mountain bi
Category: Home Projects
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PID Control in an FPGA

Thursday, 3 September 2009 8:01 P GMT-06
I am working on an application that requires PID control.  The design is an enhancement of a design that already has PID control implemented in a processor.  There is already an FPGA in the design that provides glue logic and IO expansion f
Category: Digital System Architecture
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Visual Studio C# Hello World Program

Saturday, 29 August 2009 8:38 P GMT-06
In my new position as a software engineer I am working on a PC application that provides a GUI for an embedded test system.  The PC application is written in C# with Microsoft Visual Studio.  In order to start familiarizing myself with the
Category: Software Design
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Digital TV Reception Experimenting

Friday, 7 August 2009 8:12 P GMT-06
I started investigating digital TV reception at a rural area and documented it in a previous article.  Yesterday I did some experimenting at various times with a Jensen TV931 amplified antenna connected to a Magnavox digital TV tuner to analog c
Category: Home Projects
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Linux on an Old Computer

Friday, 31 July 2009 10:10 P GMT-06
I have an old laptop computer that I purchased in 1999 (Mobile Pentium II 366 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 6 GB hard drive) running Windows 98.  The computer is barely usable anymore because it is so old and slow.  I decided to try to install Linux
Category: Computers
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Software Design Opportunity

Thursday, 30 July 2009 9:18 P GMT-06
I have been given the opportunity to broaden my experience base in electronic product development by spending a year as a software design engineer in my company's software group.  I have created a new category on this blog to track my activi
Category: Software Design
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Robots in Farming

Thursday, 30 July 2009 8:58 P GMT-06
I once read about automated farm equipment controlled by GPS to allow really precise and straight plowing and harvesting of fields.  That seemed like a fairly straightforward application of technology to farming.  Last year I saw an article
Category: Robotics
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Social Networking and Product Development

Monday, 20 July 2009 8:45 P GMT-06
I recently saw an advertisement article in Design News Magazine that described the value of social networking technologies through the internet in product development.  The article was written by PTC, and described how social networking framewor
Category: Engineering Profession
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Digital Television Reception

Sunday, 5 July 2009 6:29 P GMT-06
This was the first weekend since the analog television transmission was shut off that I had a chance to see how the digital signals come in at the lake in central Wisconsin that we camp at (camp in the trailer/running water/electricty sense).  F
Category: Home Projects
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