1995 - ~1998
At the time, having just recently graduated from
college, Liebert Corporation's R&D Group was the first employment of my IT career. I started at
Liebert's R&D facility in Delaware, OH as a temporary employee.
My first assignment was to migrate
an Apple Basic application to a Windows Visual Basic application. The
application was used by a single Electrical Engineer to design custom
transformers for Liebert 's lines of power conditioning and transformation products.
The engineer who used the application had to modify the code base to achieve
the desired results as the code base had embedded within it the data required
for designs. Hence, should, for example, a metal ferrite core be required tor
the targeted transformer design, the engineer would have to modify the data
within the application to achieve this design consideration. Overall, this lead
to a loss of productivity and additional encumbrance for the engineer in
designing the transformer and, in fact, all transformers under their preview.
I was able to achieve the
objectives of the assignment using Windows and Microsoft Visual Basic for the
user interface. I incorporated Microsoft Access for the data repository.
Liebert was previously in a position such that should the engineer leave the
company for any reason, or should the Apple computer fail to operate, custom
transformer design would come to a halt.
After this completion of this initial task, Liebert
hired me as a permanent employee of their R&D Group.
My next assignment was to design an
embedded communications system to handle communications between all existing
and most of the legacy systems which Liebert produced. Their lines were quite
extensive encompassing cooling components, power conditioning components and
control components. Initial designs of these components were created to
communicate with one another using a proprietary Liebert communications
protocol. Liebert was losing market share as time ensued because their customer
base desired to intermix system components amongst various Liebert competitors.
For example, a customer may wish to have a MCI control system which would be
connected to a Liebert power conditioning system.
To achieve the objective of
overcoming this limitation and increase market share, Liebert's R&D Group
designed and built a daughter card which could be installed within all
pertinent Liebert products. This daughter card required a configurable
communications protocol embedded within it. My task was to create this
communications protocol. Overall, the daughter card would speak "Liebert" on
one side and "any other required speak" on the other.
As the system was embedded, my work
involved burning the code, which I created, into EPROM devices.
Later during my time at Liebert, I
assisted in remediation of Y2K concerns. I became involved in configuration
management and the design of configuration management systems as Liebert soon
discovered that the required components to remediate legacy systems, in the
field, was rare and difficult to acquire.
I stayed with Liebert for several
years learning and growing much in my skills and capabilities.
While at Liebert, I became involved in the design and creation of electronic circuit boards, Amateur Radio and volunteer work with Emergency Management agencies in the areas of field communications and the determining the location radio signals. The latter skill is used in the event of lost individuals or downed civil aircraft in remote locations and/or lost vessels at sea.