Work

I work for Parsec Systems, Inc. A bunch of what I'm getting is subcontracting work to various other consultants on things they either can't handle alone or don't have enough time to cover.

Some of the work I've done recently is for a firm which makes first responder emergency communications integration and interoperability equipment. Their first product is an all digital video recorder system for police patrol cars. I did a couple of DLLs for controlling video capture and signalling hardware and a data exchange mechanism for moving evidence in the form of video files to an external evidence locker. Once this firm is going along well I'll provide more details.

I also build web sites with interactive features and online data applications. It's not very exciting work, but some of the data processing stuff translates directly into embedded projects that will be sure to come up. Since I do the HTML front end part also the client gets a complete data handling package through one source. Nifty.

A certain unnamed medical products client in the far NW part of Chicagoland is trying real hard to get away from being a plastics OEM and back into real treatment gear. (They used to have a branch that made patient-handling equipment but recently spun that off to another firm.) I did a bunch of architecture and software component design for a new syringe pump these guys are making. Their plan was to implement IrDA, BlueTooth, and potentially USB and RS-232 connections to the pump. Nothing exists in a vacuum any more, not even the smallest embedded device. Everything has to be networked and hooked up.

To that end I have put together my own lab network with a Win2K server, two Win2K Pro workstations, a WinXP workstation, and a Freespire workstation. I usually keep a couple Win98 and Win95 units lying around for legacy testing. If anybody ever asks for Crapple development I have a Mac mini in a box somewhere. AT&T provides ADSL at a reasonable rate, both speed-wise and money-wise. Right now I'm using the dynamic IP to save some money.

Other Money-Making Efforts

• Web sites. The most recent complete site is a speculative co-venture with Design Down Under, my newest web graphics design partner. Kym Soderlindh has proven herself to be quite talented in visual design, being able to select colors, paterns, and layouts that fit together naturally and display style, class, and taste. I am lucky to have found her.

  I also built sites for all of Heptel Corporation's businesses, but the survivors are Heptel Engineering, Estertec, and Zero MPH. RIP: Heptel Janitorial, Cleansphere, Super Ad King, and the original Heptel Corporation site.

• Model rocket kits. Say hello to Controlled Kinetics. All those designs I did nearly 40 years ago worked when I tried them out. No other rocket kit company is making a line of rear engine, pod ejecting boost gliders. I'm gonna fix that.
• Aerial photography from a balloon. A radio controlled balloon. A tethered, radio controlled balloon. Not very exciting from the R/C perspective, but very cool if I can make it all work. Imagine shooting pictures of houses and other real estate properties from 50 meters in the air. Imagine crowd pictures from the county fair done from that vantage point. It's on the back burner, but still drawing cognitive current at a low rate.

Phun and Education

• Model Rockets. Take a look at my rocket page for a few lame pictures. I have done a bunch of Fantasy Scale, but most recently have focused on rear engine boost gliders, my first true rocket love. A couple of years ago I found some old designs I drew up between the ages of eleven and twelve. I never got a chance to build them as a kid because I couldn't afford all the prototype materials. Later I lost interest in scratch building rockets because I had other hobbies on my, um, "mind." But now I have both time and the low level of investment actually required to produce working rocket gliders, so they have been flying off my bench, so to speak. I'll post more pictures as I capture them.
• More web sites. I put up a site for my rocket club, the Northern Illinois Rocketry Association (NIRA). I worked with Todd McGehee of All-Kind-ZA Graphics to create the Village Bible Church of Carol Stream site. Todd and I met at church and have ongoing work together on some projects.
• Motor/sailboat steering control system. This is a model for a real time embedded application, where the model is a Windows based app that acts like the front panel of the control mechanism. I want to be able to design the closed loop speed/directional control as a normal motion control subsystem and then marry it to the boat virtual interface. The "boat" will have all kinds of user-adjustable vectors for screwing things up like wind, currents, gusting, waves, etc. The motion subsystem will be able to detect absolute location, speed, and heading through a GPS (faked out, of course) hookup. That way the alarms will be based on actual speed instead of apparent speed. This one gets a low priority because there is no money in it at all.

Other Goofing Around

I got a GPS receiver (Garmin GPS 12) some time ago. I walked the medium loop at Knoch Knolls to see what kind of positional accuracy I could get. It was not very impressive. Then Selective Availability was turned off by the Feds, and Lo! Behold thine accuracy! I've seen the horizontal error as low as ten feet. Pretty cool.

But what's this? I tried the Rx out yesterday and got only one satellite. Has The Bush League turned Selective Availability back on with a vengence? Gotta see what's what. It could be that my receiver is just croaked. It's acting phunny anyway.

I also want to explore and possibly build some outlaw forest preserve trails. (Wait a second...did I say, "outlaw?" No, no -- there's a good eight feet between those two trees, officer!) There is a lot of wooded preserve and park area within an easy 20 miles of here that remain unexplored by me. What if outlaw trail already exists out there? What am I doing here, typing on this dumb computer?

I've also been composing music. Well, something like that.