As we discussed in the initial installment of this 2-part extravaganza, some people pursue a predictable path on their way to engineer-hood (where “-hood” comes from the Middle English “-hode,” which itself comes from the Old English “-hād,” meaning “state of being”). Others, like your humble narrator, end up taking a more circuitous route, which may involve Lady Luck finagling the dice in their favor (I owe her one).

In Part 1, we focused on my story, but it’s not all about me (it should be, but it’s not). In this column, we are going to focus on my friend Adam Taylor, whose story is strangely reminiscent and inextricably entangled with my own.

Adam’s Story

Like me, Adam was born in Sheffield, England. However, he hails from the suburb of Stannington, while I milled around the neighborhood of Millhouses. Also, Adam arrived in the world in 1977, which was two decades after I’d decided to grace the planet with my presence. What this means, of course, is that I’ve had 20 additional years to mature and hone my engineering skills (that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it).

Unlike me, Adam didn’t start out with a career in engineering in mind. This may explain why he opted to take History, Geography, and General Studies as his A-Levels. Even worse, since Adam spent more time in the pub with his mates than was good for him, he too messed up his A-Level exams. (Adam is like the brother I never had. Of course, I do have a brother, Andrew, whom I love dearly, but Adam is like the one I never had.)

Rather than get a job, Adam did what most of us would do in his situation—he decided to join the Royal Air Force (RAF), so he toddled down to the local recruitment office and told them he wanted to be a fighter pilot. Once the lady in charge had stopped laughing and had wiped the tears from her eyes, she spent some time chatting with Adam, inquiring as to his interests.

During this conversation, she managed to get Adam to acknowledge that he would be interested in becoming an engineer and working on airplanes, missiles, and that sort of thing. She suggested that, if he were to join the RAF, he should come in as an officer because he already had two A-Levels with the minimum required grades. However, she also noted that if he wanted to come in as an engineering officer, he would need to get an engineering degree.

The problem, of course, was that Adam didn’t have the requisite number or types of A-Levels to be admitted to university to take such a degree. When he pointed this out, she replied that he could apply to take an appropriate 1-year foundation course at the university. Assuming he passed, Adam could move on to take a full-up degree.

Adam says that if she’d left things at this, patting him on the head while kicking him out of the door and leaving him to proceed on his own, there’s a high probability that things would have progressed no further. Instead, she picked up the phone, called someone she knew in the engineering department at Sheffield Hallam University, and set up an appointment for Adam the following morning. As a result of this good Samaritan, Adam took and passed the foundation year course and went on to get an honors degree in electronics.

To cut a long story short (which—much like my dear old mother—is opposite to the way I usually do things), Adam’s course included working with PIC microcontrollers, which he programmed in assembly language, 68000 microprocessors, which he programmed in C, and FPGAs, which he programmed in VHDL. (Suffice it to say that components like FPGAs and languages like VHDL didn’t even exist when I was a student.)

On leaving university, Adam’s first job was with a defense contractor using Xilinx FPGAs as a platform to develop and implement digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms for use in radar systems. Adam’s next position involved using FPGAs to create control systems for nuclear submarines. This is where he honed his skills with respect to creating high-reliability, mission-critical, safety-critical, radiation-tolerant designs.

Adam also used FPGAs to implement high-speed cryptographic algorithms and high-performance image processing algorithms. All this experience stood him in good stead when he eventually moved into the aerospace industry and started creating FPGA-based designs for use in space applications like satellites and deep space probes.

In 2014, Adam founded ADIUVO Engineering and Training. Since that time, ADIUVO has built an enviable reputation with respect to high-reliability, mission-critical, safety-critical, radiation-tolerant designs. As a result, Adam now spends a lot of time jetting around the world, contracting for organizations like NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). That’s not bad for someone who almost didn’t become an engineer.

Networking

In his 1624 prose work, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, the English metaphysical poet (or should that be “metaphysical English poet”? I always get those two confused, which infuriates any existential poets) John Donne penned his famous No Man Is an Island piece. The original version commenced as follows:

      No man is an Iland,
      intire of it selfe;
      every man is a peece of the Continent,
      a part of the maine;

In the modern vernacular, this would read as follows:

      No man is an island,
      Entire of itself,
      Every man is a piece of the continent,
      A part of the main.

If this isn’t a metaphor for networking, then I don’t know what is (remembering that I never metaphor I didn’t like).

Do you recall my saying that Adam’s story is strangely reminiscent and inextricably entangled with my own? Well, we’ve covered the “strangely reminiscent” part, but what about the “inextricably entangled” portion of the tale? I’m so glad you asked…

One day in the summer of 2010, Adam was sitting outside a clean room waiting for the test results from a satellite that boasted one of his FPGA designs. For reasons he can no longer remember, he decided to write an article about designing FPGA-based finite state machines (FSMs) for high-reliability applications. He penned this article there and then. The next step was to get it published.

Since Adam was using Xilinx FPGAs, he was familiar with Xilinx’s Xcell Journal magazine (I remember this as a very tasty publication). So, Adam reached out to Mike Santarini, who was the publisher of Xcell Journal at that time, and Mike snapped this article up.

A couple of years later, in 2012, I was invited to become the Editor for a new website called All Programmable Planet. This was intended to cover anything and everything to do with FPGAs. I knew Mike Santarini, so I wasn’t overly surprised when he emailed me to say he wanted to introduce me to a young engineer called Adam Taylor. Mike said that I might be able to persuade Adam to write some columns for All Programmable Planet. As things turned out, it proved difficult to get Adam to stop writing (“prolific” doesn’t cover it).

I also knew Steve Leibson, who was working at Xilinx at that time (Steve is now my colleague here at EE Journal). It was around this time that Steve sent Adam an “Adam Taylor Edition” of the recently-launched MicroZed Evaluation Kit (that “XXX Edition” is a really smart idea).

(Source: Adam Taylor)

This led to Adam writing the now-legendary MicroZed Chronicles, the first of which was published in September 2013 (Adam still posts one each week). These are the most widely read FPGA-related blogs on the planet. In fact, Adam recently told me the MicroZed Chronicles had received over 30,000,000 hits when he stopped checking several years ago.

Years before I started work on All Programmable Planet, I had become “internet friends” with a PCB and MCU hero called Duane Benson. Duane, who was the Marketing Manager for a PCB assembly house at that time, delighted in building microcontroller-based projects, especially those of a robotic nature (Duane is now a freelance consultant at Positive Edge). Since Duane was an expert with MCUs but knew nothing about FPGAs, he represented a huge potential audience for me, so I wheedled him into learning FPGA design from the ground up, documenting his voyage of discovery in a series of blogs that I published on All Programmable Planet.

Although All Programmable Planet is sadly no longer with us, it provided a great networking opportunity for all concerned. Many of us remain friends to this day, including Adam, Duane, David Ashton, Aubrey Kagan, and “The Mighty Hamster” who hails from New Zealand (Hamster once came to America for some reason and visited me in Huntsville).

It was somewhere around this timeframe that I was tasked with finding speakers for the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC), or Design West as it was briefly known. This allowed me, Adam, Duane, Aubrey, and others to meet in the flesh. It also provided an opportunity for us all to meet folks like Jacob Beningo, who is principal at the Beningo Embedded Group, and Stephane Boucher, who runs EmbeddedRelated.com (Jacob and Stephane jointly organize the Embedded Online Conference , the DSP Online Conference, and the IoT Online Conference).

The great thing about networking is that if there’s ever anything you don’t know yourself, there’s a good chance you know someone who does know and—since they know you—they are happy to share their time and knowledge. Knowing all these folks has certainly changed my life for the better. A few years ago, for example, when I was asked to fly out to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California to give a presentation on the effects of radiation on FPGAs, I immediately called Adam to make sure I didn’t make an idiot of myself (well, no more than usual). If I have questions about DFM for PCBs, I call Duane. If I have questions about Embedded Systems, I call Jacob. When I couldn’t get my homemade Geiger counter to… well, count… I contacted David. You get the idea.

Also, now I come to think about it, different combinations and permutations of our number have worked together on various projects over the years. For example, Adam and I collaborated on a 3-part series of blogs titled How to Get an Engineering Job and Keep It (see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few

The song My Way was popularized in 1969 by Frank Sinatra. Personally, I never really favored Frank as a warbler. It was when someone described him as having “great phrasing” that I realized I wasn’t alone. I much preferred the dulcet tones of singers like Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole.

One of the lyrics in My Way is, “Regrets, I’ve had a few…” In my previous column, I mentioned The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. I’m blessed by the fact that I’ve had a great life with few regrets. Having said this, reading The Midnight Library certainly gave me food for thought (I HIGHLY recommend this book).

There is one regret I have that is pertinent to this prose. Shortly after Adam and I had connected, he noted that we both had bunches of FPGA development boards lying around in our offices, and he suggested we used them to mine bitcoins. (Bitcoin mining gets harder—that is, requires more computation—with each mined coin, but it was relatively computationally inexpensive at that time.) 

This was the summer of 2012 when the value of a bitcoin hovered around $5. On the one hand, once we had implemented the algorithm, we could have left our FPGA boards beavering away in the background. On the other hand, we guestimated that it would take a week or two’s worth of work to get everything up and running. Ultimately, we decided not to bother.

“Roh Roh” as Scooby Doo didn’t say (this was the catchphrase of Astro from the Jetsons). Now, I get a nervous twitch, and my lower lip starts to quiver, every time I hear the word “bitcoin.”

Postscript

I was just video-chatting with David Kelf, who is CEO at Breker Verification Systems. David also originates from the UK. He mentioned that he had read my previous column, which had struck a chord because he had a similar tale to tell.

While he was at high school, David played the keyboards in a band with a couple of friends who we will call Curt and Roland (because those were their names). As part of this, David got into electronics. It started when he needed an echo unit but couldn’t afford to buy one, so he read up on them and built his own. Like he says, “It hummed like hell, but it worked—it echoed—and it was mine!” David went on to build other things of this ilk, all of which would prove useful later, as we shall see.

Instead of studying for his A-Levels as diligently as he should, David went out drinking and playing gigs with the band. As a result, although he did OK in physics, he only got a D in math, which wasn’t sufficient to get into university for an engineering course (although it would have been a stellar grade for anyone interested in pursuing a degree in the humanities).

So, David did what any of us would do in this situation—he took a year off to tour with his band. After that year, having failed to find fame, he decided it was time to go to university. David retook his math A-Level, but he’d left it too late to get much studying in, so he ended up squeaking through with only a C grade.

Eventually, it came time for David’s interview at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). Sad to relate, the professor conducting the interview was less than impressed with David’s C in math. Eventually, the professor asked what David had been doing during his year off. David says that when he explained about playing the keyboard in the band, the professor’s eyes lit up. It turned out that the professor was himself a devotee of the electric piano.

The professor asked if David knew anything about electronics, David told him all about his echo unit, the professor said, “welcome to the university,” and that was “all she wrote.” Well, not quite, because David’s bandmates Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal went on to form a little band called Tears for Fears, which attained international chart success as part of the Second British Invasion, but that’s a story for another day.

Over to You

Well, this has ended up being a much longer column than I’d expected, but I have a sneaking suspicion we’ve only scraped the surface of all the stories that have yet to be told. Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share on anything you’ve read here?