To: Debra Arntsen Subject: accomplishments section of resume Dear Debra Arntsen, Here's a list of some things I have done. (I know I'll remember one more thing just after I hit that ``send'' button). Which ones do you think would catch the eye of a HR person ? They all are verbose. I think you and I can find a way to summarize them on my resume. Accomplishments At MotorGuide, I worked with a mechanical engineer to design the Pinpoint 7620 sonar display. Compared to previous sonar displays which had 2 stacked circuit boards, I squeezed all the electronics onto one circuit board, which reduced cost and made it easier to assemble. I gave the 7620 a high-voltage CCFL back light that was brighter, yet cost less than the previous sonar display. ``smart mosfet'' speed controller / donut board We had a motor with a puck at the bottom. The puck listened for echoes and sent the echoes up on one set of wires and out to a sonar display. You could see echoes from fish and the bottom clearly. The motor also had a speed controller at the top. When you turned the motor on, it sent control pulses down another set of wires to the motor at the bottom. The speed controller let you smoothly speed up and slow down, but the cross talk between the 2 sets of wires was so bad that the sonar display screen basically went black. I took all the electronics that were at the top of that trolling motor, and I packaged them in a small space around the moving parts at the bottom of the trolling motor. I call it the ``donut card'' because it has a hole in the middle to let the shaft go out to the propeller. Now that my ``donut card'' generates speed control pulses right at the motor, you can run the motor without seeing any interference on the sonar display. When new electrical engineers were hired at MotorGuide, I helped train them on the CAD system we used. 7420 I worked closely with a mechanical engineer to reduce the total cost of the display. ... easier to assemble (lower labor costs) ... MotorGuide sells ViewSaver, a interface cable and a disk with software I write. It allows fishermen to transfer images from the sonar display to their PC. At the Oklahoma Imaging Lab, I did a research project for Lucent. The assembly line at Lucent assembled and tested thousands of circuit boards a day. So you can imagine that even if only 1 percent of those circuit boards failed the test, those 10 boards per day would pile up pretty fast. They didn't want to throw those boards away, because if they could only fix them, they would be worth several hundred dollars each. And practically all the failed boards could be fixed in a few minutes if you only knew what the problem was -- one of the parts missing, or one of the pins on a part not properly soldered down, or something like that. The problem was that it took a trained technician hours, sometimes all day, to track down exactly what the problem was, using the traditional methods of (1) stare at the circuit board (sometimes, you could see the problem right away -- missing part), and (2) power it up, hook it to a test system to exercise all the inputs, then look for the incorrect output and try to trace it back to the exact part(s) that weren't right. I showed that when you look at a board through an infrared imager, it's obvious where there is activity (the CPU on a good board glowed white hot in infrared), and where there is no activity. I displayed the difference between a good board (in infrared) and the current board under test (in infrared). When the problem was that the power pins on part weren't connected, that part stayed cold, so you could see it turn black in image on the screen, so the technician could immediately replace that part. Certain kinds of failures made a patterns of brighter-than-normal and darker-than-normal parts all over the board, so the technician would have to spend a few hours on a test system to figure out what the problem was. But often I would see exactly the same pattern on many boards, so once the technician figured out what to fix on one of the boards, the technician could fix them all the same way. lab tours I did some research for Lucent at the Oklahoma Imaging Laboratory. Dr. Acton, the lab director, talked me into giving tours of the lab. I think the best part of the tour was at the end when I'd talk about my project. I'd turn on the infrared camera, then I'd babble on about my project -- the infrared camera, circuit boards, image enhancement, failure analysis, but no one listed -- they were all looking at the screen next to me with the infrared camera on top. The infrared image of a human face looks very different from visible light. But when the face on the screen moves when you move, and stays still when you stay still, you pretty quickly figure out -- hey, that's me. And there was always someone in every group that would push to the front and make funny faces for the camera. We didn't really have time to go into all the details on all the projects going on in the lab. But that's OK, because they realized the important thing -- that with the right sort of cameras, and with the right sort of computer enhancement, we can make visible what can't be seen with human eyes. And that can tell you interesting and useful things. At Sunset Laboratory I wrote the software for the air-pollution analyzer. I also built some of the interface electronics that connected the PC running my software to the rest of the instrument. At Sunset Laboratory I wrote most of the software for the retina scanner. At Sunset laboratory, I designed the AIB-PC interface card. I added a few features compared to previous interface cards, but I maintained software and hardware compatibility. So people could continue using the same software, and continue to plug in the same sensors that they had been using with the previous board. While I was at Sunset Laboratory, the World Wide Web was beginning to become popular. I convinced my boss that Sunset Laboratory needed its own web site. I found a ISP that would host web pages, I authored the corporate web site, and I maintained the site as long as I was there. Then I didn't have to manually fax a copy of NIOSH Method 5040 to everyone that was interested. The web site made it possible for people all over the world to get information about the company and its products.