New Job

New Job:

I start a new position with the Ohio State University Department of Astronomy in the Imaging Sciences Laboratory on Monday December the 19th. This marks the end of my 5 year stint as a factory automation consultant. I learned a lot in those five years, but I am glad to be moving to something new, interesting, and challenging.

Before going out on my own as a consultant, I worked as an Electrical Engineer with a Department of Defense contractor in the 1980s and early 90s. The company was Piqua Engineering, Inc. - I worked there for 10 years. After PEI a few former employees and I started a company called Technitron Labs, Inc. TL's main product was specialized instrumentation for paper mills, municipal waste and drinking water treatment plants, and industrial water treatment plants. TL was sold after a few years (along with my designs); I moved on to doing Controls Engineering at a company called Zed Industries, Inc. Zed made packaging machinery and thermo-formers. I spent 6 years at Zed bringing their equipment control systems up to modern standards before moving on to a purely software engineering job.

Finally, in 2001 I started vHMI Automation, Inc. The main product when I first started was a Visual Basic based Human Machine Interface (HMI) package that I wrote and various C++ based Programmable Logic Controller communication drivers. I expanded into both hardware and software system consulting in factory automation and control systems. I also did instrumentation, automated test system, and microcontroller based system design. Because I was an independent consultant, it enabled me to live outside of the USA for a while (where I learned a lot about how other countries view the US - which is not as bad as you hear from the news). I also realized how much we take for granted the life we have in the USA. I returned to the US in June of 2004.

I am very happy about leaving the stressful and uncertain side of consulting behind. I am looking forward to working in OSU's Astronomy Department where they design and build extremely interesting instruments for ground-based optical and infrared astronomy.