I have done a little bit. I was employed by Micropilot to build an automated calibration device to calibrate the sensors on the autopilots they manufacture. This included design and construction of both hardware and software. Most of my career has been software development, secondly systems administration, this one job was great fun because it was the only time I got paid to design and develop hardware. It did involve designing a rack to precisely rotate the autopilots to use gravity to calibrate their accelerometers in 3 dimensions, and precisely rotate them to calibrate their rate gyros. A set of pumps and pressure/vacuum reservoirs calibrated the pressure transducers used for the pitot tube and altimeter. Quite interesting; I used some simple easy to find parts, others were high-end industrial components, and some parts were custom-machined to my specifications. And I had to install, add additional equipment to, and program an environmental chamber that used 480-volt heaters and liquid nitrogen to cycle temperature from -55°C to +75°C. Keeping temperature adjustments stable and using minimum liquid nitrogen were concerns. Yup, it meant control of exhaust fans, valves, and duty cycle modulation of the heaters. The process also required loading software onto the autopilot microcontrollers. And I did update software onboard the autopilots themselves for a couple tasks.

Is that good enough?

Rob Dyck

-----Original Message----- From: roundtable-bounces@muug.mb.ca [mailto:roundtable-bounces@muug.mb.ca] On Behalf Of Don R. Wolfe Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 11:09 AM To: roundtable@muug.mb.ca Subject: [RndTbl] Home Automation

Well we meet again, we need to talk serious motor control as princess auto surplus is waiting. Who in Winnipeg has good knowledge of motor control, microprocessors, bridge motor control either professionally or a great hobbyist. Need a mentor.

Thanks

The Automator DRWolfe