So, why have we decided
to create a blog about the engineering and programming projects we are starting? Because I think it’s an experience worth documenting and sharing. I’ll give a little history of my experience
and motivations to take on something like this, and why I’m inspired to see
where we will go from here.
When I was at the University of Oklahoma for Electrical Engineering, my focus was on Digital and Hardware Design. My absolute favorite course was our Digital Design Laboratory. This was where the "rubber met the road", per se, where much of our prior coursework found practical application. As part of our class kit, we purchased a Motorola M68HC11EVBU for about $70, which was a Moto 68HC11microprocessor along with RAM, UARTs, and an EEPROM. The EVB was short for "Evaluation Board", which gave us plenty of room for additional logic parts and wire wrap posts... yes, I said wire wrap...
Here are a few pics of
the actual board we used in school, along with the jumble of wires on the back.
Wire wrapping was the
cheap way to do "breadboarding", and after spending $70 on an evaluation
board as a college student in the 1990s, there wasn't much room in the
budget for a super-expensive breadboard. Plus, wire wrap allowed us to
keep the design we were working on "stable" when we had to put it in
our backpack and take it with us. With hundreds of students making their
way through the labs at all hours of the day and night, nobody would dare leave
their precious design board out to be tampered with. After all, this was
a competition of sorts.
The project for the semester was fully open to our imagination. Using the project board and any other parts that we could purchase or scrape together, we were told to develop a real-world application that used the microcontroller. That was it. Talk about wide open! My lab partner and I thought on it for a week and came up with an overly aggressive project, a solar panel tracking device. The microcontroller would take in a number of sensor inputs and without human intervention and adjust the face of the solar panel to the most efficient position to capture sunlight. At first light, the panel would scan the horizon looking for the Sun, track it throughout the day, and go into an East facing default position at night, waiting for the Sun to reappear. If it happened to be a cloudy day and the sun could not be “seen”, the panel would go flat to capture all the ambient light it could.
What was our first error in taking on this aggressive of a project? We forgot that we were not Mechanical Engineers and we did not have one on the team. Looking back, it would have been great to call up any of my friends that took the mechanical path and asked for their advice. Nowadays, I would just run over to the mechanical engineering department and ask “Is this possible? How can we keep from burning up multiple, very expensive stepper motors?” Yeah, that is the pain we endured to teach us what all modern companies and our professor knew – “Never hire an Electrical Engineer to design something mechanical, even though their confidence tries to convince you otherwise.”
Beyond our mechanical issues, the project went amazingly well. We developed a specialized sensor made from photocells and a small box, used analog to digital circuits to sample voltages, used comparators to compare the voltages and determine the desired panel movement, developed a program that analyzed the data and made decisions, and fed a bank of relays to drive stepper motors in the desired direction. It all worked very well, and we could demonstrate the proper results through the oscilloscope… since we had burned out at least two motors and the last was on order when we had to demonstrate the design for our final grade.
The quote above was used by Professor Tull at our final demonstration to describe the root of our mechanical problems. Luckily, he completely understood. Since we were able to demonstrate the proper outputs in the lab via the scope and a light bulb on the end of a long stick, we received a 98% in the course. That was the top grade for the semester and we received wall plaques for Outstanding Project Award. We were very proud of our work and I was inspired.
At the time, I thought
that little EVBU board was amazing. We could do almost anything with it. We
could direct huge fields of solar panels and solve the world’s energy crisis,
we could prevent world hunger by delivering food via autonomous helicopter to
hungry people in out of reach places… or we could just go to work for a large
company and spend our talents on a small section of a huge design, which is
what both of us ended up doing. I can't say the I regret it in any way, just that your creativity eventually gets stifled.
After more than 15 years in the digital design industry, I'm feeling inspired again. Jordan, my 13 year-old son, and I started spending some time on the Arduino site. Our collective creative minds started going into overdrive. It reminded me of how much fun it was to develop without bounds. I want to feel that way again, and I want to share that feeling and experience with my children.
Anything is possible in this new “maker” world. The tools afforded to this generation allow people to skip many of the small details that, as students, we had to design from scratch. It swings the doors of creativity wide open, like we've rarely seen before. Just a few examples are the multitude of maker spaces and fairs available, an abundance of microcontroller boards with "anything you can dream of" plug-n-play, add-on modules, access to 3D printing technologies, and more than anything, the internet. All of these developments make it possible for any kid with a dream to turn it into reality with a little gumption.
I’m excited about where this project will lead us, and I want to make that journey together.
When I was at the University of Oklahoma for Electrical Engineering, my focus was on Digital and Hardware Design. My absolute favorite course was our Digital Design Laboratory. This was where the "rubber met the road", per se, where much of our prior coursework found practical application. As part of our class kit, we purchased a Motorola M68HC11EVBU for about $70, which was a Moto 68HC11microprocessor along with RAM, UARTs, and an EEPROM. The EVB was short for "Evaluation Board", which gave us plenty of room for additional logic parts and wire wrap posts... yes, I said wire wrap...
 |
| Motorola M68HC11EVBU Evaluation Board |
 |
| Motorola M68HC11EVBU Board with Wire Wrapped Backplane |
The project for the semester was fully open to our imagination. Using the project board and any other parts that we could purchase or scrape together, we were told to develop a real-world application that used the microcontroller. That was it. Talk about wide open! My lab partner and I thought on it for a week and came up with an overly aggressive project, a solar panel tracking device. The microcontroller would take in a number of sensor inputs and without human intervention and adjust the face of the solar panel to the most efficient position to capture sunlight. At first light, the panel would scan the horizon looking for the Sun, track it throughout the day, and go into an East facing default position at night, waiting for the Sun to reappear. If it happened to be a cloudy day and the sun could not be “seen”, the panel would go flat to capture all the ambient light it could.
What was our first error in taking on this aggressive of a project? We forgot that we were not Mechanical Engineers and we did not have one on the team. Looking back, it would have been great to call up any of my friends that took the mechanical path and asked for their advice. Nowadays, I would just run over to the mechanical engineering department and ask “Is this possible? How can we keep from burning up multiple, very expensive stepper motors?” Yeah, that is the pain we endured to teach us what all modern companies and our professor knew – “Never hire an Electrical Engineer to design something mechanical, even though their confidence tries to convince you otherwise.”
Beyond our mechanical issues, the project went amazingly well. We developed a specialized sensor made from photocells and a small box, used analog to digital circuits to sample voltages, used comparators to compare the voltages and determine the desired panel movement, developed a program that analyzed the data and made decisions, and fed a bank of relays to drive stepper motors in the desired direction. It all worked very well, and we could demonstrate the proper results through the oscilloscope… since we had burned out at least two motors and the last was on order when we had to demonstrate the design for our final grade.
The quote above was used by Professor Tull at our final demonstration to describe the root of our mechanical problems. Luckily, he completely understood. Since we were able to demonstrate the proper outputs in the lab via the scope and a light bulb on the end of a long stick, we received a 98% in the course. That was the top grade for the semester and we received wall plaques for Outstanding Project Award. We were very proud of our work and I was inspired.
After more than 15 years in the digital design industry, I'm feeling inspired again. Jordan, my 13 year-old son, and I started spending some time on the Arduino site. Our collective creative minds started going into overdrive. It reminded me of how much fun it was to develop without bounds. I want to feel that way again, and I want to share that feeling and experience with my children.
Anything is possible in this new “maker” world. The tools afforded to this generation allow people to skip many of the small details that, as students, we had to design from scratch. It swings the doors of creativity wide open, like we've rarely seen before. Just a few examples are the multitude of maker spaces and fairs available, an abundance of microcontroller boards with "anything you can dream of" plug-n-play, add-on modules, access to 3D printing technologies, and more than anything, the internet. All of these developments make it possible for any kid with a dream to turn it into reality with a little gumption.
I’m excited about where this project will lead us, and I want to make that journey together.
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