- Joined
- Jun 25, 2012
- Messages
- 4,429
It has been quite the ride. I am at the other end of a person's career - been working for 40 years. You go boy - a tech career has provided me interesting and fulfilling work and a decent income. Going forward there will never be shortage of jobs for technologists.That's an impressive list! Really interesting, all of it. Was your work on gyroscopes and accelerometers before their use took off in all of the portable devices everyone has now? Those things are awesome (meaning accelerometers and gyroscopes. I guess cell phones and fitness trackers are alright as well). I'm still in college right now, and I've got a year left on my chemistry undergraduate degree, so I've just barely scratched the surface.
My work on gyroscopes and accels were on the very high end, very high accuracy instruments for navigation. Only the military could afford them, or on long distance aircraft. These were all large. Large as in fist-size down to pinky-tip size. The MEMS revolution (microelectromechanical systems) was just being invented and productionized. I worked on those too when they were still in basic research. The MEMS instruments still are not very high accuracy but they are way small and way cheap now because they were designed to be manufactured with the same processes and on the same equipment that has carried us through the computer revolution and the steady marching on of Moore's Law.
The flight computer on my semi-automated, GPS stabilized, flying camera platform (called a drone when being insulted) I bought for $1000 is a computer and 6 MEMS instruments in a package the size of pinky fingernail and costs about $100. My equivalent systems were $200K and the size of a microwave albeit three orders of magnitude more accurate and stable.
BTW my close friend is a Phd chemist with a career in carbon graphite composites for airframes. If you start having motivation problems I will have him give you a talking to...
There, I've really bogarted the good morning thread now.