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Product Design and Manufacturing

 
Consulting

Before starting any job it's important to hammer out a specification for what is expected.  Communication skills are an essential part of this process because many clients don't have the detailed technical understanding of what it takes to convert that napkin drawing into a real product. Flexability is another requirement! Without exception, every design I've started has had more than one mid-course correction, most often from the clients themselves.

A consultant must also keep up on the ever changing tecnologies of the day! But, there is so much to know, it's best to focus ones skills. I now intend to take my knowledge and experience of Microchip PIC® MCU controllers and expand into the rapidly growing Android market. The need for Android to external embedded controller functionality is very high, with many large corporations getting involved. As part of that effort I am prototyping an embedded controller with Bluetooth and jumping into Android programming. I've found some unique programming tools from Anywhere Software (Awesome software: Imagine being able to create an App for your smartphone with no prior knowledge of the Android OS, or JAVA for that matter within one day). Tools like these are critical to today's fast turn-around environment. Also, due to my interest in blind and vision impaired accessability I am also researching how blind accessability to the Android platform might be achieved with simple touch screen gestures and TTS voice response.

I looking forward to talking with my next prospective client, and I hope to add your project here soon!

PIC® is a registered trademark of Microchip Technology, Inc.

MAJOR PROJECTS AND CLIENTS


PUMPMATE: A talking remote control for insulin pumps, for blind and vision impaired diabetics.  (2009 - 2011)

Pump-MateAn associate and friend who is a type 1 diabetic and blind as well asked me to get involved in this project.  The insulin pump system I was attempting to interface with consisted of a wearable insulin pump, a blood glucose meter, and PC based software that communicated on a proprietary RF link.  The task was daunting: Everything about the RF communication link was an unknown; frequency, modulation type, packet encoding, packet data definition, packet size and CRC as well.  Examining only the RF I was able to completely reverse engineer and duplicate the packets, and subsequently develop the code for a PIC18F87J11, which became the heart of the PumpMate.  The PumpMate also includes USB, 16khz-16bit codec for speech output, FAT16 for a 2GB microSD card, ISM band RF transceiver, OLED/LCD screen, NiMH batteries with built in charging from USB.  Over 11,000 lines of code makes it all work!  PumpMate is patent pending.

Brooks Technology,  Killeen, TX, 76542
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