Consulting Case Studies

While it may seem cheaper to hire a less experienced engineer, they have a tendency to charge straight into the task. A more experienced and knowledgeable engineer with a diverse skillset can look at the project from a broader perspective, and identify the most efficient path. Even if you do not hire me to build your project outright, with a couple hours of consulting I can create a game plan for a less expensive engineer and reduce the budget and schedule by an order of magnitude.

Case Study 1: X-Cap COTS Solution

Visionary Machines LLC needed their x-cap (used to hold corrugated plastic boards together) mass-manufactured at varying quantities.  I was brought on to modify their component to be mass-manufactured for either 3d printing or injection molding.

After designing the injection-molding and 3D printing models, I found a similar component COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) available, used for holding together wire shelves. It required a light modification to the design, by separating the corrugated plastic boards into uniform walls.

Original
Configuration

COTS-Based
Configuration

While I was unable to recover the time and money spent on the 3D printed design, the adoption of this off-the-shelf component saved my client many months of development time, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in manufacturing costs.

Case Study 2: Disc Tracking with CV

The was to build a device to track the absolute rotation of a disc, and send that information to a smartphone for further processing, and presentation to the user.

When I was initially brought on to the project, the plan was to use either a magnetometer/accelerometer/gyroscope combination (the horizontal orientation precluded the sole use of an accelerometer), or to attach an optical or magnetic encoder to the outside of the disc that could be read by a stationary sensor. A previous engineer had taken a shot at the project, with few results to show.

Seeking a more elegant solution, I noticed that with some deliberate placement, the disc was visible to the phone's camera. This facilitated the use of a fiducial-based tracking solution from the smartphone, greatly simplifying the project by eliminating the need for electronic hardware development, and the associated firmware and mechanical mounting solution.

Original Hardware Solution

The electronics (dark blue) is effectively glued to the center of the knob, but does not rotate with the knob due to the mount (light blue).

The mount does not carry the weight or position of the electronics, only keeps it from rotating with the knob, and so the requirement for mechanical stiffness is reduced.

Turning the knob rotates the axle of the quadrature encoder, which we can read and send to the phone through bluetooth.

CV-Based Solution

While I was unable to recover the time and development delay from the other engineer's previous attempt, I was able to:

- Greatly improve the timeline and reduced project cost by eliminating the need for hardware development, and simplify development logistics into the app
- Reduce the per-unit cost to almost nothing
- Improve the user experience by reducing setup complexity
- Additionally improve time-to-market by with a solution that can be entirely updated OTA

Having shifted the direction of the project into a pure software solution, I advised the client to seek someone with more applicable skills.
(This is the project that resulted in the testimonial at the top of this page)