About
Here is a bit of background about who I am and what I have been up to.
Born and educated in the United Kingdom, I have always been inflicted with a desire to understand how things work and have been taking things apart and putting them back together for as long as I can remember. Sometimes they even worked when I had finished!
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I was first introduced to the delights of electronics when I inherited my brother's 'Philips EE8' electronics kit at the age of 7. Please click on the photographs for more information. |
Soon after, I was given my very own 'Philips Engineer EE1050' kit. |
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After that I was hooked and saved up all of my pocket, birthday and Christmas money to buy the spectacular 'Lafayette 150 in 1' hobby kit. |
I was lucky enough to get a very good grammar school education and went to Collingwood College, Durham University to study Physics and Electronics at Honours degree level.
I then spent 13 years designing digital Radio Telemetry systems for Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace. These systems were used to collect stress, pressure and temperature information from rotating engine components including fan and high temperature turbine blades. Key attributes of these systems were:
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There were plenty of trips to Europe and the USA during this time, with some exciting flight and bird strike testing, but getting it wrong in any way could jeopardise the data from a multi-million pound test.
I was also involved in the design of a blade-off detonation device whilst at Rolls-Royce. You can see the sort of thing here.
After leaving Rolls-Royce, I completed several years working as an independent contractor for companies including:
- Drake Electronics - Audio/visual mixing equipment
- British Aerospace (Systems and Equipment) - Ground avoidance systems
- Ricardo Engineering - Control systems for 'Mild Hybrid' cars
- DCA Design International - A wide variety of projects for this world class design agency
In 2006 I left the UK for New Zealand where I worked at Hamilton Jet designing fault tolerant water jet control systems.
Shortly after that, I started up my own elecronics design consultancy and 3 years later returned to the UK.
I have experience in the following fields of electronic design:
- Commercial
- Aerospace
- Medical
- Automotive
- Industrial
- Small and large volume manufacturing
My skills include:
- PCB design, schematic capture and simulation using Protel/Altium
- Low level and precision analogue design
- Signal conditioning
- High power circuit design and layout
- High voltage design
- Digital design
- Interface design including IrDA, USB, SPI, I2C, CAN and LIN
- EMC design and testing
- RF design
- Environmental testing
- Embedded C programming
- C++ programming for Windows applications