Jeff Thompson's

Projects Photo Album

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General Electric Automated Tamper	This work was done at General Electric for Southern Railway, now Norfolk Southern Corporation, and resulted in two U.S. patents and a G.E. managerial award. In addition, Railway Age magazine thought enough of it to put it on the front cover of its March 1985 issue and make it the lead story. The project includes a bi-directional encoder, speech synthesizer, ultrasonic ranging system, hydraulic system changes, and custom metal detectors with my own relative peak detection circuitry.
BBL Industries (Glenayre) Letters: 1 2	Here are a couple of unsolicited letters of commendation for work I did as a design engineer at BBL Industries.
Alcott Chromatography 738 Refrigerated Autosampler	Feedback from the scientists, engineers, and technicians who used the model 738 autosampler said it was easier to use than any other currently on the market because of its user interface. I was the electrical and software engineer for this and other product lines, where I performed thermal analysis, initiated mechanical changes, and reduced the manufactured cost of the unit while incorporating I/O options as part of the standard build. In later version, I added solid state cooling to the model 738, and to its predecessor, the model 728.
Hayes Microcomputer Products Bartco Enterprises Smart Bart	For my work on the Hayes Optima 288 modem software, which was written entirely in C++, I received this appreciation award. Recommended by Texas Instruments' Regional Technology Center as one of two local synthetic speech experts, I was chosen to design and develop Smart Bart® for a local entrepreneur. We also developed versions that used LCD or vacuum fluorescent displays instead of speech. Family Motor Coaching magazine featured this product in its December 1985 issue.
Robertshaw Bellows	Using off-the-shelf hardware components, the consulting team I worked with put together a CNC unit to automate and standardize the manufacture of metal bellows. It also reduced the down time between tooling changes. My responsibility was to write the software, which included user interface, safety control, and a PID algorithm to control the forming pressure. The copper parts show the progression of the work. The CNC machine we developed performs the last two steps of forming the bulges in the tube, then collapsing it into a bellows. Other equipment finishes the part from there. The large part in the background illustrates just a part of the upper range of sizes the machine can handle.
Scientific-Atlanta Cable Modem	For the cable modem system, I wrote the CMTS firmware that sent IP data from the headend to subscriber modems. The operating system was VxWorks.
Keck 2 Observatory Front Back	Although I never worked there, I was a contender!