Many Circuit Cellar readers dabble in both mechanical and electrical design. Jared Harvey—a senior electrical engineer at Howell Laboratories—recently shared with us a photo and description of his home workspace in West Newfield, ME, where he tackles interesting electromechanical projects.
Here is what he says about his space:
I was once told that a clean work space is a sign of a dirty mind. I hope that holds true in the inverse as my work space is always messy. For hobby stuff, I can never seem to prioritize the cleaning operations, I pretty much always choose to put those energies into building something.
Located in the basement, on the left is an oak bench with a vise, which is used for mostly mechanical stuff, in the middle is a metal bench for mostly electrical stuff. on the right is another metal bench for anything else. Also in view is an old drill press and one of those circular magnification glasses with a light, mounted on a move-able arm. I also have a large-ish garage with car lift, which allow for larger projects like the little red suby.
I have a small collection of electrical tools including HAMEG spectrum analyzer, DSO Quad, China logic analyzer, Metcal soldering station, and a couple misc bench top power supplies and misc function generators. It’s pretty basic tools, and whenever I need real tools I have always had access to good NIST traceable tools at work. I have made a re-flow toaster oven out of an B&D Infrawave, which is PID controlled using a thermo-couple controlled and generates mostly IR as well as some conduction heaters in the bottom.
Someday I’d like to help develop an open source multi meter, also I’d like to re-purpose my old AC units making them into a geothermal heat ex-changer. Lately I’ve been spending a bunch of time helping develop rusEFI, and in the past have helped with project like OpenServo. Projects these days have limited time as the 5 year old and 7 year old are higher priority and take up most of my spare time. So it’s generally 10 minutes a day late night or early morning.
Visit Jared’s webpage to read about his projects, including the following: FEA Magnetic encoder Analysis, Radio Propagation Analysis, and Solid Modeling and Gif Animation.
