Interview with Peter Hayles

Featured Engineer

Peter Hayles

Peter Hayles - Senior Electronics Engineer at Entech Electronics

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

I started by building crystal radio sets, intercoms between bedrooms, and electric train sets. I built my first power supply with a handmade PCB when I was 14 and it still works!

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

Breadboard, a soldering iron, and a multi meter. Even after being an engineer for many years, I am still always learning and trying new things. In the end the only thing that gives me complete confidence is building prototypes of nearly everything. I’m quite good at it, and can generally “whip something up” in a few hours to prove an idea before committing to a full-scale design, and despite all the people rolling their eyes at me and saying “not another prototype,” I can proudly say that a large number of my circuits go to market as the first revisions. My proudest moment was quite recently making a servo/stepper moto controller for a PC104 board-based underwater vehicle that went out as revision 1 with no board changes, component changes, or software changes (the software was developed on the prototype).

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

Labview, Visual C++ 6, MPLAB IDE, and ALTIUM designer

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

In 2001 I was working on installing a flight management system FMS into a C130 aircraft. I had to figure out why the aircraft would bank 27 degrees one way and only 23 degrees the other (it was supposed to be 25 degrees either way). The pilots were most annoyed by this and the Air Force of course blamed the new installation. However, the new FMS was using the old autopilot and flight director in a mode that was not usually used. The problem actually turned out to be the previous system not talking to the new system, and guess what—both systems were made by the same company, but there was a design problem in the output stage of the old flight director that had been not discovered for over 40 years. And in scenes that reminded me of “Space Cowboys,” I had to contact the original designer who had long since retired, and work through the design of an entire flight director (built from analog components and reverse engineer it). I then replicated the problem in a flight test and engineered a solution which was changing one resistor value. But the original manufacturer could not accept the change and so they convinced the Air Force at enormous expense to replace the entire flight director with a digital system, which also worked, but was much more expensive.

What is on your bookshelf?

Issac Asmiov, Edward de Bono

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

I believe that 90 percent of mistakes are made in the first 10 percent of a project, so it really pays to get the best people on at the very beginning to set direction and come up with or review the design concept in the first 10 percent of the project. Otherwise you end up doing it later anyway and that just costs more. We used to develop a design concept document (that for some projects is only one page long) that introduces the concept and details the major building blocks in the project. This is done before quoting the project out and is used as a basis for everything from there on including purchasing, detailed design, and controlling the scope. Any major variations to this concept really send you back to the start for that part of the project.

What has been your favorite project?

I am very fortunate to have had many years in R&D and I really can’t point to any particular one. I love most the one that I’ll be doing next, because it’s new, interesting, and I’m going to learn something new on it. Unfortunately, in Australia engineering is not a respected profession like it is in other countries. You certainly don’t do it for the money. However, I have the ability to actually create something new in my job—something physical that works and is useful—that no one else has seen before. I see it first in my own mind and when it is finished I can brag saying, “Look at what I made!” And I can see them going down a production line, and see people actually using them in real life. What other profession can do that?

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

I have a big box of things under my desk that I have blown up and I have a big cross on the side that says RIP. I have blown up heaps of things and learned from every experience. It’s the engineer that never blow things up that I worry about. If you don’t blow things up, you probably aren’t trying hard enough. Actually, we used to take the graduate engineers down to the workshop and blow electrolytics up on a Friday afternoon just to get them to realize that it’s OK. We even took bets on what voltage they would burst (I normally bet that its about 50 percent over the working voltage for an aluminum electrolytic if you wait for a few minutes). My pride and joy was a $2,000 600A MOSFET which I took out by pulse charging a submarine battery. But there was a disappointingly small amount of smoke.

What are you currently working on?

The ROC SOLID range which is a range of super rugged industrial and commercial computers.

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

Personally I’m hoping to start manufacturing products rather than components (for my own business—see the website).

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Certainly in Australia due to economics, government policies, and the incredibly low cost of Chinese labor, manufacturing is taking a hammering. But there will always be a need for engineers to remain in touch with the marketplace, so customizing unique designs is probably where I’ll go. But that’s pretty much what I like to do anyway.