What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

Well, that varies based on what I’m designing. My old standby is a portable Tek scope. It’s convenient to take to the field and it always finds the problem…

My lab has the standard put up of hp freq counter, Kron Height generators, fluke meters and more that have faded into history. Most of what I do is system and embedded design so I find myself always cobbling something special together to deal with the variety of platforms out there.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I have dozens of compilers I’ve collected through the years. I’m fluent in many C, C++ dialects and have done a fair amount of assembler code in my years.

I have a code library I’ve maintained on the PC using Microsoft VC++ that lets me build test panels and interfaces to debug embedded designs quickly. This has been a very productive approach and lets me simulate what the end product will talk to, even if the final interface has not been built yet.

For hardware design I uses Orcad 10.3, a little old but stable. I want to upgrade but haven’t found anything that really compels me to do so..

I use Autocad, excel extensively, Parts & vendors to keep track of my inventory. Winmerge is cool and bailed me out when I haven’t saved properly. Firefox with noscript is my browser of choice. Teraterm is ok, but some day I’m going to write my own that actually does what I want it to.

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

A few year ago, I worked on a military product for a subcontractor. I was called in for my video and hardware experience. It is a 6” cube that contained 4 complete video compressors, a solid state secure drive, embedded PC and 4, 1553 busses plus power supply. It was intended for the Stealth..and other things that fly (nuf’ said).

The circuitry was truly state of the art using Altera Cyclone fpgas. Debugging this monster was a nightmare. There were no test points for the 684 pin bgas..this is the military ‘style’, so we had to come up with our own methods. What we ended up creating was a series of fpga code libraries we could load to probe internal pins and data paths through the PCI interface and the FPGA loader interface. We built the equivalent of a logic analyzer we could load into the Cyclones. This was quite tedious since reloading each piece of the system was a sequential affair. Changes to the windoze driver were even trickier to load.One spin took almost an hour to set up. We coupled our observations with intuition and a mental walk through on the vhdl code to finally get it working. This effort took more than 4 months, but produced a truly incredible product. Sorry I can’t go into more detail here except to say it’s out there.

What is on your bookshelf?

Everything! I absorb information like a sponge and my interests are all over the map. On the tech side, I like Circuit Cellar, Servo,EDN, Design News, Wood for my magazine fix. My library is constantly taking over the house, in fact I just archived my Dr. Dobb’s collection to make more shelf space, Byte went to the closet long ago.

If I’m not up on a particular subject I have to work on, I usually purchase a few books on the topic, mostly to get the ‘lingo’ right and find more links to do further research. For the past few years I have been terribly disappointed in most of what I buy. Many of the so called experts writing these books do a cursory job and rarely provide enough useful info to do anything. I view this as form of cowardice..just satisfy the publisher and take the money. If you are writing a tech book..your audience is tech people, NOT the general public. Address your audience.

Programming books are my pet peeve. Most are boat anchors and few have provided any real education. Even the best authors write these as advertisements and never provide a work-around for known issues. Will I ever read the real scoop on the millions of bugs in Microsoft compiler code? Probably not.

I’ve stopped buying them, more useful info can be had on the forums even if it takes some time to search out. The people that do, know.

For fun, I also have a huge UFO/ Sci-fi/Alternate energy collection.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve? (special way to analyze circuits, special process you use to make something, etc.)

I’m very disciplined in keeping documention, all electronic even if printed.

When designing a new PC board, I always build in some way to debug it. As parts get smaller this becomes more critical to save time. You can’t probe an LGA package so you had better think about this before committing to copper. Rework on prototypes is tough.

I like the JTAG interface, it works well and is supported by most IDE’s and compilers. The specialized ISP interfaces from Atmel and Microchip are also good, but there is lots of variation here within product lines. Universal is not, so you may have to build something just to address a particular design.

If the design has a switching supply, I also add some way to break the output so you can characterize it before applying full power to the rest of the circuit.

It also pays to think about how you will deal with programming the design in production. If you are trying to build a million of anything, you can’t take a minute to program each one.

Just remember, that part/interface you THINK will always work, is usually the one that doesn’t and eats up most of your debugging time…plan ahead.

On the 2nd or 3rd spin of pc board, I will take out some or all of this if needed to get the design into the final parameters.

What has been your favorite project?

My robotic projects. I belong to the St’ Louis Robotics group, RoboMO for short http://www.robomo.com. I’ve always had a love of robots. A few years ago I spent a lot of time helping to get this club organized, in fact I came up with the robomo name. I got the club started on standardizing on the Atmel line so that they could learn how to program them and spend time actually MAKING robots and not struggling with code.

During my time there, I envisioned a modular hardware scheme with multi-processing support that would make building robots easier and eliminate most of the custom hardware interfaces everyone has to build, at least for the average user. I planned out a complete product line and have built about 80% of this. It’s a big project, especially on the code side. With all of the other things tugging at my time, this has unfortunately been sitting on the shelf. I hope to get back to it and complete the project.

I haven’t been very active in the club lately.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences? (blowing up things, getting shocked, etc.)

I’m laughing…yes I’ve been shocked a few times and trashed a few expensive items. In my early days I worked on my process control products and did field installations and debug. I remember sticking my hand into a cabinet where some fool had wired a high voltage bus next to low voltage control and I accidentally shorted them with my wedding ring. Gold is so wonderful! It provided the path and prevented me from receiving a severe shock. Since then I never wear jewelry…

Back at the first company I built, Abionics, we designed a low power data collection system with potted I/O modules. In a rush to ship to a client we built a number of modules. In final test we found that we used a bad resistor value to meet the range requirements. We ended up trashing thousands of dollars of modules and missing the deadline. Lesson learned..don’t let marketing push the dealine.

As for blowing things up, one of my techs once worked on the first rail gun project. He told me a story of how the first time it fired it took out the bunker wall and shocked all the pocket protectors.

There are many more projects I have been invloved with, but I’m afraid I’ll exceed your text limits and your audience may not believe me.

What are you currently working on?

For the past year I have been doing a joint venture with AikenLabs LLc. We are developing a system to motion enable things…like objects in your world or full body motion capture. We are developing a standardized interface so that code using our product can live a long life. Some of this technology is useful in the gaming world and we will support this community actively with open source SDK’s. We introduced this concept at CES2011 to an enthusiastic response.

See us at E3 in june.

We are talking to numerous people supporting vertical applications that may use our technology.

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

When I look into my crystal ball..it’s foggy. I see where I want to go, but the economy and market forces are not responding to normal business methods. Everyone in the financial world wants a quick fix and there are none. We need more long range thinkers or everything will move to China, where they are long range thinkers. I have many more innovative ideas, but protecting these is becoming a fool’s errand. The patent office is not your friend.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

The biggest is the economy and IP protection. China steals everything and sees this as their ‘rite’. Their view is that if we can’t protect our property, then it’s our issue not theirs. Their assumption is not that off track. Our government is hostile to business here and although they keep telling the public how much they support innovation in America, they are lying.. SBIR grants are a joke. Innovation in America is not dead, it’s stronger than ever, but being suppressed by lack of money, no IP protection, corrupted legal system, too much government regulation. Why bother introducing something new just to make someone else rich?

I have 3 patents and they are making other people money, not me.

Second is education. I have had the honor of mentoring some young engineers and the concerns they have are real. First is that they did not learn anything in school to prepare them for the real world and allow them to be productive. This is not their fault, it is the fault of the educational system. Time was that an engineer out of school would apprentice with the ‘old dogs’ and thereby learn his craft. No more, these programs are long gone. Companies are only interested in their bottom line and have no time for this. This is a BIG mistake in thinking. The world is more complicated than ever. If we are to continue to innovate then companies must grow their engineers in specific fields. Hiring foreign engineers is not the answer. They are not smarter than Americans. The only companies that understand this concept are the pharmeceuticals. Rarely do you see engineers leave these firms, it’s not musical chairs for a good reason.

Third is government.

We all need to make a conscious effort to downsize the government. This problem will not go away by ignoring it. Government is not the answer to our problems and continues to eat up capital that could be used to spur on innovations. If you want a Star Trek world, you can have it, but someone has to pay for it. The days of printing money are coming to an end.