Below are some hardware designs I have done.  Some of these are commercial products I've designed for various employers, while others were designed for hobby or recreational use.

This is a 4-layer SMT board that was part of an emergency vehicle siren.  Designing for automotive environments presents challenges not present in less hostile surroundings.  When load dumps happen, you'd better know what they are, why they happen, and how to prepare for them.

This is the back side of that same CPU.  Components on both sides of the substrate was somewhat annoying.  Still, it worked the first time!

Now this big boy is actually two PCBs made as one.  The idea was to scribe the board in the center to create a "cracker" board.  The board would be stuffed, waved, and reflowed.  Then it would be snapped apart.  Once separated, these two boards would mate to the CPU board.  And yes, there were some rather large currents switched on this baby!  Those MOSFETs would get quite a workout.

The previous shots were PCBs laid out using Orcad Layout 9.2.  That program has to be the worst program I have ever seen.  There was nothing intuitive about it.  Aside from being dumb as a rock, it actually interfered with getting tasks accomplished.  The biggest problem was checking the design via rules.  Some rules were grouped together such that you cannot turn off one rule without turning off others.  I pray I never have to use that program again!  Protel is a much, much better product with a radically shorter learning curve.

This is a hand-held IR remote control I designed for the Dukane SmartSystem a long time ago.  We must have shipped close to 100,000 of these things!  As far as I know, this is still being made and sold, although the company has changed hands twice since my being laid off as Director of Engineering in 2001.

Remotes are interesting beasts... they are the one product that does not have an "off" switch.  As this is powered all the time, there are interesting demands for quiescent current consumption.  Never mind that about 80mA is pumped through two IR LEDs when a key is pressed.  This was used in educational settings... schools, hospitals, and clinics (even the Mayo clinic).  Those settings use low energy lighting which played havoc with infrared controls.  I solved that problem with a rather unique solution!

The next item is a low-tech audio mixer.  Aside from wanting to have a number of inexpensive studio-quality mixers for my synthesizer, I wanted to try out a new board house that does small runs rather inexpensively.  Although the silk-screen was less than perfect, I was quite satisfied with the quality.  Yes, this board was laid out with Protel.  A pleasure to use and copper pours were so simple to do.

I can't wait to start working with these new chips...  They are DDS function generators that can sweep the audio range unattended, with programmed frequency limits and sweep times.  These are pre-production samples for a prototype audio analyzer I'm working on.  Marry one of these babies to several Wavefront Semiconductor 24-bit CODECs and a Wavefront 50MIPS fixed-point DSP, and you have an audio analyzer for unattended venue equalization.  Sound contractors should love this!  (I hope.)

I did the software for this product as well.  The product this replaced was thoroughly tested, but written 100% in assembly language.  (I did the first incarnation before being promoted to Director of Engineering at Reuters, a number of years ago.)  To minimize testing, the original assembly code was "ported" from a Von Neuman style CPU to one of a modified Harvard architecture, and re-coding it in C on the fly.  I think I went through about six bottles of aspirin during that software "port".

Below, is the platform I used for software development.  When these microcontrollers first came out, the flash version of the chips were pure unobtanium.  Not only that, Microchip only offered the EPROM windowed part in a DIP-28 with 0.6" span!  "Crash and burn" actually refers to how one had to bring up the software for the first time.  My EPROM eraser was running 24/7.  Therefore, I was unable to even layout the real deal until the 28-pin skinny DIP parts became available.  As an early adopter of these parts, I was a beta tester for the CPUs and the C compiler.  (I went through more than 30 revisions of the C compiler before things got stable.)

Yup, designing hardware and software is really easy.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Now this a is software development platform for a quad gate-delay product.  Five, 10-bit A/D converter channels in the CPU, monitor various external panel pots.  The RJ-11 jack connects to my PIC-ICE.  No more "crash and burn" modus operandi for this!

Here are some "Radio-Flier" boards under construction.  This was my first independent product launch.  This was part of a sport rocketry recovery system using radiolocation for tracking a descending rocket after having deployed parachutes via radio control.  Recovery could be 4-5 miles from the launch site and altitudes greater than 20,000' AGL were doable.

I seem to have started a trend in the sport rocketry community... I was the first to split from the mainstream and specify red LPI solder masks on my boards.  That was part of my product identity to distinguish my products from everyone else's.  Now, red and blue masks are common, where only boring green was the norm until I showed up.

The main purpose behind this endeavor was to teach my boys how business actually works.  We did the marketing research, product specification, hardware design, software design, packaging, promotion, sales, A/R, A/P, and even grunt shipping & receiving.  And yes, we built the damn things one at a time!  What better way to teach your teenaged sons how the world of business actually works, than to do it in front of their eyes and with active participation?  This also had the effect of keeping them engaged in healthy interests rather than getting into drugs and other mayhem.  I am proud to say that this worked out exceptionally well.  My eldest son graduated with honors from UIUC with an EE degree and is now employed as a software engineer and project engineer at Motorola.  He manages a small software development group located in Poland.  (Poland?  Yeah, its a small world.)

My youngest son works full-time in an IT department for an insurance company and is studying for his electrical contractor's license on the side.

This is a very old prototype for the design of a guitar preamp.  It includes a distortion circuit, overload detection (hence, the LED), and and envelope follower to control a filter.

And here is a prototype of the filter the envelope follower was to control.  It is a standard state-variable topology using an LM13700 dual-OTA for frequency control.

I have many more products I like to showcase here, but this is a taste of where I have been and what I have done design-wise.

I like to write "technobabble" so here are a couple of writing samples:

   Click this PDF icon to get a user manual for the construction of a studio-quality, exponential-responding VCA for music synthesis applications.

    Click this PDF icon to get a cookbook on authoring a Product Requirements Document for most any electronic product.  This document is all business and works in the real world.