Chris's Blog

While going through some old cd’s and stuff, I happened upon some great music by Mr. Burke Ingraffia. He is a folk singer now a days, but when I was in high school, I had the priviledge of having him as one of my religion teachers at Archbishop Rummel High School. Finding this just brings back all kinds of happy memories.

I also found some of the stuff from WRHS-TV. Man some of the stuff is so old, I bet I am the only one with a copy of it still. I wonder if any of the guys such as Rudy, Chris, or Matt have any other works from that time. I wonder what else I will find within my old cd rack. Guess it’s time to start looking again.

So on Friday, I will have officially quit working at Data Technology Solutions.  I am heading back to my hometown of Metairie, LA, and move back in with my wife.  We have been separated due to our jobs being in two different cities, but I received a job offer to work at Keystone Engineering and Total Systems Intergrators about 2 months ago.  I chose to work at Keystone Engineering for several different reasons.

As far as Data Technology Solutions goes, they have been very good to me.  I have a few loose ends to tie up over the next day or two with my Dual Antenna Switch project, but I finally can say it is done.  I am outfitting several of the boards with updates in order to get them working more smoothly and be less problematic.  Unfortunately, the original boat one of the Dual Antenna Switch units is on, the Aaron McCall, is going out to the Caspian Sea, and the domes with the gear will be coming off of the boat.  The Dual Antenna Switch still has a few upgrades which could be done to the units, but overall, I believe the project is in good condition and able hands at Data Technology Solutions.

I received a compliment from the Seatel Rep, Mitchell, at work today as well for figuring out how to make the Seatel terminal strip interface to the Hughes Modem.  Seatel didn’t have the parts DTS needed in order to make the system work, so I made a small board that would make the Hughes modem’s handshaking signals interact correctly with Seatel’s DAC unit, which controls the antenna dome.  I should the rep the circuit as it wasn’t complicated or any kind of trade secret in hopes that they can incorporate the trick into their own terminal strip or a simple addon for the terminal strip to work properly.

Hopefully in the future, I can get the Dual Antenna Switch to talk to the modem through software and just poll the modem for various information rather than relying solely on the receive lock signal.  The software for the block zone switching may not be optimal though, as I do not know very well how the block zones and Seatel’s antenna selector switch interact.  I have to go over the patent more for that, and if DTS wants to contract me to modify the software then I would accept the work as long as it is not a conflict of interest with Keystone Engineering.

One day, I hope DTS gets the unit patented and I get to have my name on it.  Other than that, I think all in all I have done well over at Data Technology Solutions.  Even though we are parting ways, I wish the best of luck to all of the men and women who work at Data Technology Solutions in order to make it what it is today and in the future.

So I started up a Minecraft server to play on with some friends and such. The address is omegamc.dyndns.org. Check it out if you like to play the game. I will try to keep the server up as long as I can during the week and weekends when I am not home. Hope to be able to add some more plugins for extra utility pretty soon.

My tenure at Data Technology Solutions will be coming to a close at the end of July 2011.  My wife has already moved down to New Orleans for her job, and I am following her at the beginning of August, when our lease at the old apartment runs out.  My wife is working as an electrical engineer for a New Orleans company along with her brother.  It will be nice to get back home and to be able to see all of my friends every weekend without having to drive 2 hours into Metairie or New Orleans.  I will be working as an electrical engineer in the New Orleans metro area as well.

The place we will be leaving in is pretty nice.  It is a 3 bedroom 2 bath triplex.  We will have a guest bedroom and an office which makes me all tingly inside to know I will have an actual space to work in that I can customize to look like an office instead of the extra bedroom that is our junk room at the old apartment.

I plan to work on some model rockets in order to get more plans hashed out.  I will also have to house all of my equipment I have picked up while working at DTS.  I have an oscilloscope, several soldering irons, and some miscellaneous equipment to help do technician work or engineering work.

For now I need to go plan how everything is getting home, but will post more about different things later as I have run out of ideas to talk about for now.

After many months of hard work, I finally completed my first design.  This is a monumental task for me.  My first design at work is completed, and is about to start undergoing sea trials at the start of April.  I can’t go into much detail yet about what the project entailed or how I built it, but maybe one day I will be able to.  All my years in school finally paid off with an initial design completed.  All that is left is for some minor updates and such to hardware and software.

As new ideas get brought to the table, I evaluate them the best I can and see what is feasible and what is not feasible in order to design new features into the board and such.  I also recently completed a small secondary project as well.  The secondary project just involved some research on finding an uninterruptible power supply which could be turned on and off with a small external switch.  This project just entailed calling vendors for the day and explaining what we were looking for in order to get the project completed.  The UPS project was completed before the due date passed.

The only bad part about getting a few projects done at work is that I can look forward to not being able to go out on any side jobs in order to make some extra money.  Being on salary has its advantages and also has its disadvantages.  But we shall see what turns up with the projects I have working on.  Maybe one of them will allow me to get a bit more money after this year.

After many months of working on my first real world project alone, the time has come for testing and benchmarking. The project is an rf switch, and it has a lot of thermal properties I didn’t consider before the testing phase. I have had to add on several heatsinks on the power regulators as they are just getting too hot without them, and I added a second fan in order to cool the project.

Heat is one of those problems that’s hard to foresee without the right tools. I completed this design with no simulation tools for heat issues, even though I wish I had a few tools to work with still. As for the heat problem, I will just have to hope during the burn in tests, nothing fails. I am looking to try to get at least 75,000 hours MTBF for this project. The Mean Time Between Failures would be around 8 years or so. The switches are only designed for 100,000 MTBF which means they may last a bit longer or shorter depending on what goes on.

After a long thermal analysis today, I will begin calculating and deciding on a MTBF number in order to publish in the datasheet for the technical side of everything.

So lately at work I have been exploring the different disciplines of electrical engineering through different projects getting dropped on my desk.  The past few days have been a mix of electrical power design, solar power designs, electronics, rf design, and even circuit analysis and design.  It is amazing to me since I work at a small company, we could use all of these different fields nearly every day.  Every day right now offers some new and exciting field in electrical engineering, its no wonder why people don’t specialize while in small companies.

So this week, I am really in doubt as to why to design anything. My boss thinks my designs are cool, but the people who I am designing different things for believe my designs will never be better or can compete with a major company we use. While I admit, the company we currently order the part from has some decent designs, it seems the customer I am working for within the company wants more and more. I don’t mind the fact that he wants the design to do more and more. What I do mind is the customer keeps putting my designs down like they mean nothing or aren’t worth anything. It is really frustrating right now. I am almost to the point of why I am designing this stuff if it will never be good enough. It’s like if the stuff doesn’t perform flawlessly without any testing done, then it will never be good enough. I am getting tired of my stuff being put down because it isn’t perfect. Is anyone’s designs perfect?

So I put up a Zen Cart website where I can showcase a few of the designs I have been working on here and there. Basically, I want to be able to get rid of the extra breakout boards I have in order to thin out the stock every time I make a new breakout board. I also plan to use the same site for the time being to sell my model rocket electronic creations.

I have almost completed the main page for Mancuso Designs that welcomes the user to the home page. I will be able to offer assembly, schematic capture, and layout services to individuals or businesses for smaller projects. The goal is to offer a competitive price for smaller projects that people want to get put in small electronic components but don’t have the skill or time to do it themselves.

I just want to start a small service, and if it grows bigger than I can handle, then I will expand the business later on in the future.

In the near future, I will be launching another branch of my website called Mancuso Designs, or MAD for short. This section of the site will feature a place where you can buy any of the breakout boards I have created in order to help with different designs. I have several of the breakout boards, and I will try to offer kits later on if they are feasible in order to facilitate faster designs for people looking to develop with higher end products which need custom break out boards.

I will also be trying to offer a service to make custom break out boards for customers. Basically, the site will contain most of my designs available for purchase.