Interview with Bill Porter

Featured Engineer

Bill Porter

Bill Porter - Electrical Engineer; Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City

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

At 4 years old, I took apart and reassembled an electric riding car on my own. I knew the best route via bicycle to the nearby RadioShack, was on a first name basis with the manager, and had every 500-in-one electronics kit they sold and duplicates of a few. I remember I taped one kit to my bedroom door wired one to act as an alarm to keep my brothers out of my room. I was 11 and already using electronics to deal with life’s pressing problems. (well, a kid’s problems anyway!). Then the first Lego Mindstorms was released, and I immediately got hooked on robotics. Other middle school kids were getting in trouble for staying out late. I got in trouble for scotch tapping 50 feet of black construction paper lines to my parent’s tile floor for a line follower robot. But these thing were no surprise to my parents, as my grandfather was an ME for IBM and my Father owns a generator company in Florida and both supported my engineering upbringing. Like most engineers featured here, it was in my DNA from day 1.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

An oscilloscope is my best friend. Also, I feel helpless if I don’t have my Weller soldering station nearby.

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

This is a tough one. I’ve had my fair share of timing conflicts and near microscopic solder bridges, and I’m still very young. I’m sure there are many more difficult bugs in store for me. I’m most proud of one situation where a million dollar robotic system had failed and was poised to get sent back to the contractor that designed it. With no documentation nor prior knowledge of its inner workings I was able to track the problem down to a failed $20 serial multiplexer IC on its motherboard. The trip to the contractor that I saved it from would have easily cost the government $10,000 if not more.

What is on your bookshelf?

The only book worth mentioning is the EE bible itself; Horowitz & Hill: The Art of Electronics. I first encountered the book in my Electronics 2 class in college that was taught by Norman Thagard, the first American Cosmonaut. In a class of only 5 students, he instilled in me a respect and passion for Electrical Engineering more so than any professor during my college career. This was his book of choice, and it’s now my favorite book to fall back on. Very few can say they were taught electronics in college by an astronaut.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

This may be well know by the community, but I just recently discovered the bi-directional level shifter using only a single MOSFET trick. For example let’s take a mixed level I2C bus. You connect the source of the MOSFET to the low voltage data, the drain to the high voltage data, the gate to the low voltage supply, and add separate pull-up resistors on both buses. With neither side getting pulled down, Vgs = 0 and the MOSFET is not conducting. If the low voltage side gets pulled low, Vgs is greater then the threshold and the MOSFET will conduct, pulling the high side low as well. If the high voltage side gets pulled low, the drain-substrate diode inherent to the MOSFET will start to pull the low voltage side down as well, until Vgs passes the threshold and the MOSFET starts conducting normally. Philips Semiconductors has a really good app-note on this trick.

Is there anything that you are working on for the US Navy that you can talk about?

I’ve been with the US Navy for almost 3 years now and unfortunately can’t talk specifics about my projects. The short story is I build unmanned vehicles to help keep sailors away from harm’s way. Unmanned is the broader term that covers remotely operated vehicles and autonomous vehicles. The ones I design and build are a little bit of both.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

Working with and learning from the scientists and engineers is an ongoing adventure, and certainly my work with the children in our community is note worthy. It’s exciting to see their eyes light up when we explain a scientific concept. There are so many note-worthy engineering experiences, but it’s not always the science that makes them note worthy. Knowing that I’m using my engineering skills to help our nation’s defense initiatives in a way that perhaps saves lives certainly makes my chosen career very purposeful.

How did your blog come about?

I bought a domain to create a professional resume site while I was job hunting just after graduation. I put up a few of my personal projects and documented my senior design project, a robot that would autonomously find and sort trash to be recycled. After I scored my dream job I didn’t bother doing anything with it and figured it could serve no other purpose, or so I thought. After several months, I started noticing it getting more and more traffic, and got some emails asking questions about my past projects. I realized if I put more of my side projects online, it might help other beginners in the future. So I revamped it into a project blog, and started documenting my projects in greater detail. During the first year online it saw nearly 200k hits and I’ve seen several awesome projects from other people using libraries or designs they got off my blog, so it’s well worth the effort. I love getting people interested in engineering, and this is one way I do it.

What has been your favorite project?

The only thing I love more than engineering is getting kids interested in STEM and thanks to various federal grants and local education outreach funding, I get to spend some of my time at work doing just that. My main STEM outreach project is called the “Science Brothers” and it consists of a 30 minute stage show for elementary kids. The show centers around two characters, the ‘Science Brothers’ who specialize in different STEM fields. They prank each other and argue over who’s field is ‘cooler’ and in the process show off some cool science demonstrations. The show is a hit and the “Science Brothers” make regular appearances on local news stations and community events to promote the program and other STEM activities. I won’t bore you with anymore details, if you want to read more about the program and watch a recording of it, go to http://www.sciencebrothers.org.

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

NSWC PCD’s core mission areas are: Mine Warfare; Diving & Life Support; Amphibious & Expeditionary Warfare, and Naval Special Warfare. We also support other areas that have to do with breaching the Littorals. I think we’ll maintain those core mission areas, but as our Division’s expertise and history is in sensing and sonars, there may be opportunities for us to deliver more robust unmanned systems or systems that require sensing and sonar expertise. This is the area in which I predominately work.

What are your hobbies outside of work?

Unfortunately I have the major problem of trying to take work home, but I love it. When I’m not building robots for the Navy, I’m home building robots for fun. I just can’t stop. If I find myself wanting to learn about new technologies I’ll come up with convenient projects that leverage the technology I want to learn. Right now it’s ARM based microprocessors thanks to NXP giving away free dev boards through silly promotions. Luckily my girlfriend at the time, also an engineer, puts up with my hobbies even when they take up the whole living room – so much so that I had to ask her to marry me; on a circuit board. Yes, I hijacked one of her projects and proposed to her on the silk screen. Is there a better way to ask an electronics geek to marry you? By the way, she said yes.

Any words of advice for those future engineers still in college?

Build a website! My boss has told me it was my website that made me stand out among all the other applicants. Now I moonlight for HR doing recruiting and I can’t stress it enough. When you look at a resume you only see a person’s qualifications. When you look at a project blog you get to see their passion. Guess which one makes you look more appealing? Make sure you have your resume posted on USAJobs.gov if you want an awesome government engineering job like mine.