Interview with Michael Schmid

Featured Engineer

Michael Schmid

Michael Schmid - Industrial Automation Engineer

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

I guess the standard story. I always enjoyed building things, and taking things apart when I was young. My older brothers didn’t always share my excitement in taking things apart, especially when it was their stuff.

I was lucky to attend a high school that offered an electronics program, I think that is when I fell in love with electronics. I took a year off after high school so that I could work to raise money for college. After starting college, I worked as a manager at a local auto parts store. A few years in and running low on funds, I helped a man solve an electronics problem on his daughter’s car, he thought it would be a good idea if I talked to his employers. A few phone calls and meetings later, I was a technician, then a designer and later an engineer. Now, ten years later I touch almost everything that passes through our doors.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

A good DMM and a soldering iron that can maintain a temperature goes a long way. I think that you can debug almost anything with LEDs.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I think every hardware system that I use has it’s own IDE, so it is really nice to consolidate. Anything that comes with an Eclipse plugin gets a thumbs up in my book.

I grumble about it every time I have to use it, but I can get things done in AutoCad.

What is on your bookshelf?

The Art Of Electronics – Horowitz and Hill
Old Textbooks
Make Magazine
Several books from O’Reilly
More of those little yellow books that I would care to admit

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

I sketch out everything. I have piles of notebooks where I sketch out everything I am designing or troubleshooting. I feel that if I understand it enough to sketch it, I can make it work. It doesn’t mater if it is just a line drawing or a hand drawn full process flow chart.

I believe that one of our best troubleshooting tools is on the front of our face. Most things in electronics will give of a very distinct smell when they are running on the edge.

What has been your favorite project?

I think it had to be an inspection machine for a connector manufacturer. We were testing SMD automotive connectors for coplanarity. The customer was looking for repeatability of +- 1mil, I delivered +-.3mil. The system involved positioning, visually inspecting the part, laser marking, and logging the part into a database. I really enjoy projects that span technologies. One of the advantages of my job is the diversity, I could be designing a digital system today, a PLC/SCADA system tomorrow, and a database system the day after that. We are in the business of selling engineering services, so there is no such thing as a normal day.

Are there any downsides to working on so many different technologies?

Absolutely! There are days where I think I don’t know how to do anything. It always seems that when I really get interested in a technology, it’s time to move on and work on something different. There are times when I jump from C to Basic and it takes days for me to stop putting semi-colons behind everything.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

Several of my projects are 480V/300A+, over the last couple of years I’ve had my fingers in the wrong place several times. I follow the one hand rule when working with high voltage, but it really tingles. It takes a little while, but the hair eventually grows back.

Many years ago, I was working on a government contract that called for a Windows PC to be in charge of a mission critical system. I should have questioned the spec, but that’s not how government contracts work. One weekend, the inevitable happened. The Windows PC crashed and the system failed. It only took a few minutes to do $500,000 damage to the facility.

What are you currently working on?

I can’t really discuss any on going project work, everything I do belongs to somebody else and is therefore behind a NDA.

Things are a little hectic at home, two years ago I purchased a three-time foreclosure. I don’t think anything could have prepared me for what followed. I have learned that there is no such thing as a simple repair. I think that for everything that I have fixed, I have created at least three more problems. There has been more soldering on pipes than there has been on electronics since I have moved in.

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