Making Soap and Processing Data

My youngest son works at a liquid soap manufacturing facility in Cambridge, Ohio. Sunday evening I talked with him for our regular weekly call and asked about a project for which he is spending a lot of time. He mentioned that most soap factories mix all of the ingredients in large vats and then fill individual containers. He went on to say that his facility is more advanced in that it mixes the ingredients in the piping, does the appropriate cooking, mixes more ingredients, and eventually fills the individual containers. This is a much more streamlined approach where the only bottleneck is at the end.

I listened intently as I had no idea that making soap mirrored some of the data processes I work on at Sony. We have some data pipelines where all of the data is stored together and then cleaned in batches. Other pipelines clean the data as it comes into the system and quickly stores it in the tables that get used for analytics. The advantage of the second method is the data is always up-to-date. With batch processing you have to wait until the batch is processed before you can analyze the data. That may occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly frequency.

I explained the similarities to my son and he further elaborated that in the factory they have real-time monitoring of the systems. This includes flow rates and temperature values for different parts of the process. He asked if we have the same types of monitoring for the data and I responded that we do.

While my son is a Mechanical Engineer and I am an Electrical Engineer, the same ideas can be used in both disciplines with correspondingly similar pros and cons. This reminded me of a class I once took on "Thinking Outside the Box." The course mentioned that you may get ideas for solutions to problems you are working on by simply looking at other seemingly unrelated fields. I can't agree more.

How Smart Traffic Lights Work

One of the advantages of taking Electrical Engineering classes in college and having a degree in the subject is that I learned how a number of devices in our society work. The other day I saw someone who sent their children to jump up and down on a sensor used to detect if a car is overhead. In this case they were trying to open an arm for a parking lot but it is the same technology for traffic lights. Unfortunately this adult erroneously believed that traffic sensors are triggered by weight. I thought the same thing growing up. Imagine my surprise when I attended my Electromagnetic Physics class and the professor informed us that it is just a metal detector buried under the asphalt?

Before college I tried like those kids to get my bicycle to trigger traffic lights to turn green for me. After doing a number of bunny-hops with no luck, I would sheepishly walk over and push the pedestrian button. After college I learned a trick and can now trigger traffic signals to turn green for me about 80% of the time. The bike I currently use to commute has an aluminum frame. While aluminum is a great conductor of electricity, it isn't magnetic and that is what a metal detector is looking for. Iron is magnetic and also rather heavy so they try to use as little as possible of it in bicycles. There is one place they can't avoid it though and that is the bike chain. I have discovered that if you ride so your chain is directly over the sensor, there is enough iron in it to trigger the light. This may take a bit of trial and error for some lights but I have learned where all of the sensors are on my 3-mile ride to and from work each day.

When I saw those kids jumping up and down on the car sensor, I politely asked them to move and rode over the sensor. My trick worked and they entered the parking lot without any trouble. It is a simple trick but looks like magic to young kids.

Engineering Notebooks

I was instructed to keep notebooks by my engineering professors when I was getting my degree in Electrical Engineering. I was told that all good engineers kept notebooks and so I dutifully obliged. When I went to work for Oracle Corporation right out of college, I continued to keep notebooks and have kept every single one. My professors told me that my employers would want to retain my notebooks when I left but not a single company has ever asked for them.

Naturally I started a new notebook when I joined my current company and have filled two volumes. My coworkers see my notebooks and have been known to make copies of various pages. I have even had several people mention that I should write a book. I tell them I have and that it was a lot of work for very little pay. Lately I have been thinking about writing another book though. The only problem is that people don't really read technical books any more. It is much easier find information on the Internet. Then my boss suggested I write a technical blog, string the entries together, and create an electronic book of sorts. I suppose I could do that with this blog, but it is far too diverse for a single book. Besides I try to keep my entries short and simple so that everyone can understand them.

The book I want to write is very technical and so this evening I will be starting a second blog. Don't worry, I will still contribute to this one so that I get my 71 entries per year. My second blog will be a deep dive into PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL has some of the best documentation for any computer software, whether commercial or open source. However it lacks a cohesive set of examples and certain solutions to real-world problems. My hope is that my new blog will work hand-in-hand with the existing documentation and add clarity to some rather difficult concepts. Hopefully it solves a hole that I feel exists currently.

Where are all the Hobbyists?

There is not much to do in the evenings on a sailboat once the sun goes down. I really only have 3 choices: go out, watch TV, or read. Lately I have been studying electrical engineering. While I was in school getting my degree, I took a lot of different courses and was presented with a lot of information without any context. I remember having one class on feedback systems and kept trying to get the instructor to explain a real-world application for this information. It is only since I have gotten my amateur radio (ham) license that I have seen useful applications for all the stuff I learned in school. Why couldn't one of my professors just drawn a block diagram of a radio receiver and showed us a practical application for what we were learning? My gut tells me that they didn't have a clue either.

While I was going to school, I had a good friend that had gotten his ham radio license while in the Boy Scouts. He seemed to understand all of the principles being taught every day and had the best grades in all of his classes. Now it makes sense, he had a practical application for everything he was learning. While the rest of us were just trying to get the math right, he knew where the circuit would be useful and why we were designing it that way. Getting my ham radio license when I was in the Boy Scouts really would have helped my college career.

All of this studying combined with Lance Armstrong's bad luck in the Tour de France this year has gotten me thinking about the old Radio Shack store. If you don't know, Lance rides for team Radio Shack, which is trying to shake off 20 years of declining popularity. When I was a boy, I used to go to Radio Shack and look at all of their neat electronics kits. You could buy things like resistors, diodes, and capacitors. Even though I had no clue what they did, I wanted some. I had visions of creating wonderful electronic devices in my garage, as did many other visitors to the store at that time.

Now when you walk into a Radio Shack, it is like a ghost town. I don't know how they stay in business because nobody is ever there. Sure they sell things like mobile phones, but so does every other store. I'm just waiting for Starbucks to add them to their list of goods. If you go to the back of your nearest Radio Shack, they still have individual electronic components but I never see anyone back there.

This has me asking the question: Where are all of the hobbyists? Have they disappeared or are they still out there?

Keep It Simple

This past Tuesday I received a call from my father-in-law, Ed. He is in the middle of an engineering project and needed some help with some electrical engineering. He is a mechanical engineer and often comes to me because of my electrical engineering degree. He described his problem and I took notes. I then informed him that I was tied up for the next couple of days with a project of my own but that I would do some thinking and see if I couldn't help out later in the week.

Yesterday my software project finished up before noon and so I had time to think about Ed's problem. However I was reluctant to start on the project because it has been over fifteen years since I have done any real electrical engineering. Sure I mess around with computers and build fun little projects every couple years or so, but this was real engineering work. I was going to need to create a digital state machine complete with reduction tables and a bunch of stuff I would need to relearn. So I put off starting the project until after dinner.

In addition to being a Scoutmaster, I also sit on the Snowbird Ski Team's board of directors. The official organization name is the Snowbird Sports Education Foundation but everyone knows us at the Snowbird Ski Team. Our monthly board meeting was last night and so I continued procrastinating Ed's project. I didn't get home until after 9pm and thought I could start in the morning.

Everyone went off to bed but I found myself with a slight case of insomnia and so I figured I should do a bit of reading. If there is a cure for insomnia it is reading old college books and so I pulled out one of my electrical engineering texts that I was planning on using as a reference to help with Ed's project. I skimmed the first five chapters and I started to remember the class. Then I started to remember some of the basic elements used to create digital state machines.

Thirty minutes after I picked up my text book I had reduced Ed's complex engineering work to two simple elements. I pulled out a piece of paper and drew up a quick schematic diagram. I have the parts in an old lab kit from back when I was in school and so I think I can build a prototype today and makes sure it works.

Sometimes we have a tendency to look at technical or computer problems and think they are too complicated. We then procrastinate getting started. When we finally develop the courage to attack the problem it turns out to be a lot simpler than we thought.