Bob's Wrap Up

In Bob's last article with Circuit Cellar, he attempts to wrap up a career of more than 50 years as an embedded systems engineer and 14 years with Circuit Cellar. He looks at each of his 58 articles by category and provides some recommendations for his fellow engineers.

- By Bob Japenga

This month marks the end of the “Embedded in Thin Slices” column for Circuit Cellar. I am almost 10 years beyond my retirement from industry and I am a bit out of touch with this fast-moving field of embedded systems. KC, Circuit Cellar's publisher, asked if I could end with a wrap up and farewell for my final article.

First, I want to thank everyone who was and is at Circuit Cellar for allowing me fourteen years to explore and share in print a few of the facets of my 50-plus years as an embedded systems engineer. I also want to thank all of you readers who have been so kind, encouraging me along the way with words of thanks for my articles. In a fast-moving field where we often feel behind the eight ball, I am always amazed that people actually can learn something from me.

FIGURE 1 was part of the Viking Mars Lander team.

I feel particularly blessed to have enjoyed my career and always feel for those who don’t enjoy their professions as I have. Who would not want to have been part of landing a man on the moon (even if it was part of a cleanup effort after Apollo 17), or landing a probe on Mars (Figure 1), or flying around in corporate jets demonstrating your RNAV system (even when it misses the runway by 50 yards)? Who would not want to be part of bringing computer controls to a machine where so many operators lost fingers changing the settings on-the-fly on a music-box-style timing drum rotating at 20RPM (Figure 2) for a glass bottle manufacturer (Figure 3)? [1] I was particularly blessed the last 30 years of my career to work with a great team of embedded designers creating a wide variety of embedded systems for other companies.