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, a couple of WinXP workstations, a Vista box, and usually one or two Linux flavor-of-the-week workstations/servers. I also 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

• Radio control model airplanes. I got back into R/C airplanes a couple of years ago with the intent of competing in the autonomous surveilance platform biz, but after spending a ton of money on it I realized I just can't compete with the Big Boys. Oh, well.
• Web sites. I work with Design Down Under, a graphics design house. 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 built sites for all of Heptel Corporation's businesses, but the sole survivor is Heptel Engineering. RIP: Zero MPH, Heptel Janitorial, Cleansphere, Super Ad King, Estertec, and the original Heptel Corporation site. A lot of web functionality and DB applications in the ol' ashcan. Oh, well.

• 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

• Radio control airplanes, again. I used to do this a long time ago, but I got back into it when I discovered how easy and cheap the current crop of expanded plastic foam airplanes are to build and fly. My efforts have produced successful creations and abject horrors. The dynamics I learned surrounding free flight rocket gliders simply don't apply to powered flight. That's okay -- I've got a whole new set of skills in making park jets. Heh, heh, heh.
• 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've also been composing music. Well, something like that.