Interview with Adam Fabio

Featured Engineer

Adam Fabio

Adam Fabio - The Renaissance Engineer

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

When I was 6 years old, my father gave me an old rotary telephone to play with. I took the phone apart, and was amazed at all the components inside. It was like a miniature city. I wanted to know how each part worked. That lead to me taking apart anything I could get my hands on. Usually I would get things put back together, though not always. I’m not sure if my Mom’s clock radio ever quite worked the same again. A lot of my interest settled on robotics. I spent quite a bit of time building various robots as a kid.

I also was very involved in Radio Controlled car, plane, and helicopter hobbies. During college, I worked part time at the local hobby shop, and flew an RC blimp at the local NHL team games.

I went to SUNY Stony Brook for my BS in engineering. Somehow between all the classes, I found time to compete in the SAE walking machine decathlon. That was my first introduction to working on a major project with mechanical, electrical, and software segments – and a very hard deadline.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

My Metcal soldering iron and a good selection of tips. I’ve tried a ton of soldering irons over the years, and always end up coming back to my Metcal. It makes surface mount soldering almost as easy as through hole. The RF based heating system just works. The only downsides are the price, and the fact that you need different tips for lead and ROHS solder. Thankfully you can get parts relatively cheaply on ebay.

My Panavice, because a steady hand is useless if you don’t have a steady board.

A good Oscilloscope – this might be my trusty Tektronix 465, or my newer Rigol. Hopefully I’ll be able to afford one of the newer Tek scopes for my home lab someday.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

For hardware design, I’ve done a lot of work in Altium – and Protel before that. I’m just starting to work in with some of the open source tools like Eagle and Kicad. For software work, I’m a big fan of Eclipse and Code::Blocks.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

There are a bunch that I can’t talk about due to company / security constraints – but one that comes to mind is a bar code reader board that I worked on a few years ago. The board would work read some bar codes, but not others. This particular model board had was known for having problems in the analog section, so that’s the first place I looked. Nothing was wrong. Then I delved into the digital side – still nothing jumped out. I kept looking and finally found the problem. Bar codes are read by measuring the width of each bar and space.

In this board those bars and spaces were measured by a cascaded series of CMOS 74161 counters.

I found that when the third counter in the cascade would roll over, the whole circuit would lock up. The counter would only roll over when a very wide bar or space was read.

I now knew why some codes read, but not others. I was hot on the trail of the problem, but what was the solution? I replaced the offending 161 chip, but the new chip behaved in the same way. It turned out that the trace to the boards decoupling cap was broken during manufacture of the board. Somehow the board passed testing, and we ended up with the problem. I soldered a wire between the ground pin of the chip and the cap, and all was fixed.

What is on your bookshelf?

The Art of electronics, Analog Circuit design (Jim Williams’ book), Fatal Defect – Chasing Killer Computer Bugs (Petterson)

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

My best trick is my co-workers. Both in software and in hardware, it is easy to get “wrapped around the axle” trying to fix a problem. I’ve often found that talking a problem out with a co-worker either makes me have that “eureka moment’ – or they’re able to look at the problem with new eyes and see what I’ve been missing. I also do this quite a bit for friends and co-workers. Jumping in and helping to debug a problem is one of the most rewarding things for me in engineering.

What has been your favorite project?

My favorite project was a simple, but very rewarding one. Around 1996 I had the opportunity to teach a robotics course to a group of sixth graders. This was before first robotics was popular in the local schools. I wanted the course to explain robotics – but also be hands-on. I designed a simple bump and go robot with a MicroChip PIC16C54, (graciously provided by Microchip Corp.), two continuous rotation servos, and some tactile switches. In addition to the basic design, I also had to come up with a curriculum that would allow the kids to understand what was going on inside those chips.

One of my favorite lessons from that class was binary numbers. I asked the students how high they could count on their fingers. They of course said 10. I replied to them that I cold count to 1023 on my own fingers. Of course none of the students believed me. This lead in to a lesson on binary. I’ll never forget seeing the kids eyes light up as they grasped the number system.

At the end of the course, each of the kids left with a working robot, a basic understanding of PIC assembly language, and a desire to learn more.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

I spent a few years working for a startup in the bar code industry. We made machines that would check the quality of printed barcodes as they were being printed on giant (house sized) flexographic presses. Being a startup, the engineers (both of us) performed double duty as installation and service techs. Large printing presses are like airplanes – the printing company wants them running 24/7. Any time they are down, they are losing money. We would have to do most of our work while the press was running. This often found me dangling 12 feet up in the air with my oscilloscope running calibrations as giant rollers spun inches away from me. Pretty far removed from the small lab i was used to working in.

What are you currently working on?

In my “day job” I currently work on RADAR, Air traffic control, and sensor fusion systems for a defense contractor. RADAR, ATC, and sensor fusion are extremely interesting – both from the software and the hardware side. Especially now with the FAA “NextGen” airspace around the corner. New technologies like ADS-B are making the skies safer than ever.

I do consulting as a side business, and in the long term, I would like to move that to a full time job. On the hobby side, I’ve been doing some work with quadcopters and other small UAVsystems. I’m always working on my robots as well.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

I’m hoping to keep building my consulting business until I can jump to that full time.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

In the foreseeable future – the defense industry is going to shrink. On the public side, that can be seen with things like the shuttle fleet shutting down.

I think that the embedded side of things is going to continue to flourish. The smartphone industry is an example.

Your website is called “The Renaissance Engineer” – what does it mean?

The title was actually in response to the increasingly common corporate policy of pidgin-holing engineers. Electricals just do circuit design, software engineers just code, etc. I believe there still should be a place for the truly interdisciplinary engineer. The now well established maker / hobbyist industry is proving that out on the hobbyist side. Some companies are moving toward interdisciplinary fellowships as well.

What advice would you give to children and young adults interested in the engineering field?

Go for it! Technology keeps moving forward. Transistor sizes shrinking, and numbers of transistors growing. Lower and lower power analog parts come out every day. The way I look at it, every day is the most exciting day in history to get involved in engineering.

If time and money were no object, what project would you be working on?

That’s an easy one – robotics. I’d like to do some work in robots using machine vision for navigation. We have robot cars that drive themselves, but we still don’t have a relatively inexpensive robot that can successfully navigate the average home.