Kenneth Finnegan – Mechanical Engineering Student at University of California, Davis
h5. How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?
Ever since I was a small child it was obvious that I was just wired for engineering. I enforced a strict policy of tearing apart any appliance we were throwing away before I’d let my parents toss it or take it to the e-waste center. My father was also very good about getting me the classic Radio Shack 60-in-1 electronics kits, and our family vacations revolved around visiting science museums and taking industry tours. We’d take Amtrak passenger trains halfway across the country just to visit the local science museum or take tours of dams, breweries, mines, bakeries, sewer systems, the list goes on.
The trains we took for these vacations turned out to be particularly important. My father has always been a big rail fan. and when I was two, as one of these family trips, he took us to the Western Pacific Railroad Museum in Portola, CA. The Western Pacific Railroad Museum is a very hands-on railroad museum preserving the history of the Western Pacific railroad before it was acquired by the Union Pacific, and is a very unique museum in how they give you a tremendous amount of freedom as far as climbing up on the equipment and really getting a sense for how big these old pieces of equipment are and how they worked. The lack of do-not-touch signs was glorious for a child like me, but what really got me hooked was their rent-a-locomotive program. With an instructor, they take you out and teach you how to run a diesel-electric locomotive, and let you drive it around the rail yard for an hour. Needless to say, my dad and I found this unbelievably awesome, getting to drive a 120 ton locomotive. For a couple years, we would come back and pick out a different locomotive every summer, before we finally became life members of the museum and my dad got involved in the museum’s operating department running the weekend passenger train for the visitors.
Unfortunately, to volunteer in the operating department, you had to be 16, and I wasn’t even ten yet, so I clearly needed to find something else to do to keep me busy during the day. This was when the volunteer mechanics, who maintain all of the locomotives and rolling stock for the operating department, adopted me and taught me everything from basic hand tools, to welding, to running a fork lift and heavy-lift cranes. By the time I got into high school, I was doing everything from replacing brushes in the locomotive’s 600V DC electric motors, to stripping locomotives down to the engine block, replace leaking oil control rings, and building them back up again.
Of course, while I was spending my summers working on 50 year old locomotives, I was also teaching myself how to program in Java and C, and playing with 555 timers and 9V batteries. Majoring in mechanical engineering for college wasn’t always a clear-cut decision for me, but it’s certainly one I’ve never regretted. I enjoy building electronics, but it’s nice to have it be something different from what I do for school and work to come home to.
During freshman year of college, while enjoying the fruits of having already taken Calculus and Statistics in high school, I had some free time to try and figure out what the big deal was about this new board making waves online, the Arduino, so for Christmas I bought myself an Arduino Diecimila, and my father bought me the ARRL Amateur Radio study guide for my technician Ham license. I went on to upgrade to an Extra class Ham that summer (W6KWF) and between that and my Arduino, was well on my way. Since then, the last three years has been an incredible climb up the learning curve of electronics from my first blinking LED, to the challenging projects I’m working on now.
h5. What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?
I love my Hakko 936 soldering station. The difference between a temperature-controlled soldering iron and your typical junky 25W soldering iron just blew me away the first time I used one. I only wish I had broken down and spent the $100 on it all the much sooner. Luckily I got it when I did, because Hakko replaced it with the Toys-R-Us branded 888 only a month after I ordered it.
h5. What are your favorite software tools that you use?
It’s a little silly, but my favorite piece of software is actually the Windows Image Resizer PowerToy. This is a simple little program where you can right-click on any number of selected images, and tell it what size you want the resulting files. It’s one of those things that as a blogger I’m doing all the time, and the PowerToy does exactly what I want it to, and is so elegant in that it does absolutely nothing else. It baffles me why Microsoft dropped support for PowerToys after XP; they were some of the few pieces of software they released with Unix-like simplicity.
I spend most of my time working with vim, avr-gcc, and Eagle. I also do a lot of work with MSP430s, and I really wish I could list an MSP430 tool chain I actually liked… I haven’t found one yet…
h5. Do you have any favorite circuits, ICs or parts that you like to design with?
Since electronics is just a hobby for me, I usually don’t have an onus to actually finish projects inside of any time line, so I love to forgo handy modules like LCD displays and software libraries, and instead dig in and build as much as I can from raw components, be they raw LCD crystals, 7400 logic, or writing my own peripheral drivers.
As far as my favorite IC, I’d say it has to be the Atmel ATTiny2313. It’s small, easy to get running, and you can do some pretty amazing things with just the 15 I/O and 2kB of program space on it. I use them all the time as smart display multiplexers or SPI/I2C to serial adapters.
h5. What is on your bookshelf?
I’ve collected many of the classics, primarily as gifts, since my parents gave up trying to understand most of what I want for holidays years ago, so they really appreciate when I ask for books instead of obscure development boards: Kernighan & Ritchie “C Programming Language (2nd ed)”, A 2009 edition of the ARRL Handbook, Horowitz “The Art of Electronics”, Oberg “Machinery’s Handbook” (I regret not getting the large print edition), “Roark’s Formulas for Stress and Strain” (Why do they never tell us about this book in college?), “Mark’s Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers”
When I’m in the mood for some lighter reading, I’m a science fiction junky, having the usual works such as the complete Ender’s Game series and Foundation series.
I also spend a lot of time and money digging treasures out of used book stores. I have gotten all kinds of books on welding, metallurgy, programming, science fiction, vacuum tubes, and anything else that strikes an interest.
Of those, the books I treasure the most are the early Wiley engineering handbooks. Back in the 40’s, Wiley publishing an entire series of engineering handbooks bound with red covers, on everything from mechanical design, to electronics, to mining logistics. They’re completely out of date, and almost entirely useless, but I find such an elegance in how engineering was done 75 years ago, and how the authors then wrote about it. And besides, you never know when the rules of thumb for how many sticks of dynamite you use to remove a stump might come in handy.
h5. Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?
It’s simple, but probably my best trick is just the fact that I have a personal blog, where I write about all of my projects, and document what went into them, and what I had problems with. This is immediately useful because it forces you to be introspective about what you’re doing and trying to solve, but as you write more, it becomes even more useful as a reference. I am constantly pulling up my own documentation for past projects, to look up part numbers, schematics, and various tricks I figured out the hard way.
Your blog doesn’t even have to be fancy, or even regularly updated. It was years before I had more than maybe five people reading my blog, but I kept documenting stuff on it, and I kept referring back to it, and slowly but surely, I now have something incredibly useful, not only for myself, but for anyone else searching online for how to solve the same problem as well.
So get on Blogger or WordPress, and sign up for your own free blog to start collecting your notes in. You’ll appreciate it later.
h5. What has been your favorite project?
Last summer I was working as an intern for a silicon wafer etch company, and they set me onto an R&D project to try and develop a completely metal-free vacuum chamber to study ultra-pure plasmas. It was an incredible experience trying to figure out how to custom machine every single basic vacuum fitting out of exotic plastics and fused quartz, instead of using off-the-shelf metal vacuum parts. Of course, since I was an intern, I only had three months to get the prototype working, so it was a lot of nights working until almost midnight with only the other intern left in the building, trying to get more work done while hiding from the HR managers, who kept making us go home and sleep.
The facilities guys were pretty unhappy on my last day, when they were trying to clear out my cubic for the new employee starting in the same cube on Monday, and I hadn’t left after lunch like the rest of the interns. I was still working! It wasn’t until 6:30pm on my last day that I finally managed to get the vacuum chamber put together in the clean room, and was sweating bullets when I finally had to turn on the multi-million dollar turbo pump underneath my chamber to do the leak check. It turned out that there was nothing seriously wrong with it, but I had run out of time to do any further testing, so after my boss glad-handed me for a job well done, I had to run out to my truck and take off for Davis to start classes the next week.
h5. Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?
The one lesson I really had to learn the hard way, while somehow miraculously not killing myself, was that when you’re working with high-voltage equipment, you stick your left hand in your back pocket! I was working on the battery switch on a diesel-electric locomotive, which instead of the little 12V battery like in your car, uses eight 8V lead-acid batteries, each the size of a large suitcase. The battery switch itself is a huge 100 amp knife switch straight out of the Frankenstein movies. Someone had complained that it was too hard to move the knife switch back and forth, so I had opened the knife switch, and was loosening the bolts on the knife to make it easier to open and close. Of course, knife switches are supposed to be wired with the power source connected to the jaws, to make them safer to operate, but this locomotive happened to have been wired backwards, so the knifes still had 64V across them, even when they were open. To make the situation even more precarious, where the frame of locomotives are supposed to be isolated from the electrical common (I could never get a good reason why, but that’s what all the manuals say), there was a ground-fault somewhere in the circuitry, so me loosening the knife with a wrench in one hand, and my other hand leaning against the metal frame of the cabinet, turned out to be a really bad idea! It took me getting thrown across the engine compartment by 64V hand-to-hand to really drive home that you can never trust what something “should” be; take the time and check your assumptions!
h5. What are you currently working on?
I’m currently doing some contract work for an iOS development company down in San Diego developing data acquisition hardware for the iPod Touch. When I’m not getting paid as an independent contractor to build electronics, I’m working on low-power MSP430 devices and IR-based data communications. Whenever I do finish a project, or even just make sufficiently interesting progress, I try and document it on my personal blog in such a way that others can come in and use my projects as basic building blocks, or even inspiration, for their own projects.
h5. What challenges do you foresee in our industry?
Having spent the last four years alternating between working in the trenches of a Bachelors degree at a top university, and working as an intern in the industry, I am deeply concerned by the quality of the education we are giving the next generation of engineers. The gross lack of public interest in investing in human capital means there just aren’t going to be enough good engineers in the future to continue the progress.
The United States is graduating over 10,000 less engineers per year than it was 30 years ago, and I expect that to go down. I consider myself extremely lucky for graduating when I will, because for the past few years we have seen double digit percent tuition hikes year-over-year, so many families with students in high school, who may well have had a viable financial plan for college, may now find the cost of college intractable. Doubling public college tuition in the span of the last four years is pulling the rug out from underneath a lot of people, and if not right away, we’re eventually going to feel the effects.
I wouldn’t say that the Cold War era was a time period we should be striving to return to, but the vast energy and resources we spent at the time to grow an entire generation of engineers and scientists undeniably enabled the huge leaps of progress over the last 30 years. We as a nation need to decide that education is important again, and find the next Apollo program to inspire the next generation and give them a reason to be an engineer again.
h5. How close to being done with school are you? Do you have any plans after graduating?
I have two quarters left before I graduate from UC Davis in March with my Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering with honors. After that, I’m planning on going on to graduate school and get a PhD in one of a couple fields of mechanical engineering, of which I haven’t quite decided. It pains me a little to watch all of my friends going off and getting awesome jobs in the industry, but I know that once I start working on something I love, I’m not going to want to come back and try and get my PhD later, so it’s either several more years of college now, or probably never getting my PhD later.
In the mean time, I’m looking forward to six months between graduating and starting at grad school, so if anyone is looking for a six month MechE co-op from April to September, I’d be interested in hearing from you.
* Kenneth can be found writing about his latest projects on his personal blog, can be followed on Twitter and Google+.
