Service Learning Week 4 - Just figure it out

Project Management

This weeks key question as part of the service learning class is regarding project management. My background in project management is focused on engineering and gardening. They might seem like very different areas but they have a lot in common. In gardening when I move to a new home the first thing to settle is my fruit trees since they will take the longest. Then I plant my berries so they can reach out and grow into large bushes that produce year after year. Finally come the vegetables, since their lives are measured in weeks.

For a hardware engineering project, using a firmware download station as an example, you want to verify functionality as soon as possible. This means requesting a sample printed circuit board assembly ASAP. Without a sample board you are going to be out of luck, and who knows where that is in manufacturing. People can also be busy and slow to respond so critical human interactions should be loaded to the front of the que. Then you can begin your fixture development based on the presumed correct PCB layout files. A repetitive cycle of e-mails should be sent of course to ensure you get the physical components you need from the PCB designers. Then you begin your 3d prints while still working on your fixture design so you can make sure everything works with a sample board you get. From there on it should be smooth sailing because you have front loaded the critical tasks and verified your design meets the requirements with prototype components.

Then of course if you are a project management professional you can spin several plates (projects) above your head on tall sticks all at once! The end result of successful project management being a peaceful work environment where the critical problems are loaded to the front and available technical and personnel resources are utilized efficiently.

Service Learning Project This Week

Why the title "just figure it out"? This is a classic saying that I have always told my friend, a bit to their frustration. It's true though, you can just figure it out. Computers and electronics are designed by people so they make sense. You may not understand it at the beginning of a problem but you can absorb it. That means if you just remain calm and work at it bit by bit your odds are pretty good at solving your problem whatever it may be. 

Take the LPX-600 3d scanner by Roland found at Monterey Penninsula College (or even the LPX-60) for an example. This scanner "does not support" 64 bit windows 7, windows 8, windows 10, anything past windows XP it looks like. Reading that is pretty frustrating if you'd like to use it with a newer computer! So relax, think for a second. What does it mean that this scanner is not supported under these operating systems? I tried installing the control software and that installed fine. What didn't work was the drivers. So you can look on the internet and download a virus from some Russian website, or look in the drivers folder and see what it really is. It turns out that this device uses drivers that are made for a FTDI communications chip. Conveniently enough they even still update these drivers.

With new FTDI Virtual COM port drivers the only thing you need to do is copy a few lines from the drivers supplied by Roland to add the device information to the new driver information file.[Instructions on github soon] Then you can use the device under windows 7 64 bit and probably newer operating systems supported by FTDI as well. 

Overall my point is that people need to relax, think things through for a second, and keep moving up stream. Maybe there is a Linux version of the software that solves your problem? Maybe you can figure out what chip is inside a machine that you are actually talking to? Whatever the problem is if you don't freak out and just keep at it you can figure out any problem that you need to.