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The Widget Revealed May 18, 2011

Posted by mareserinitatis in electromagnetics, engineering, research, work.
Tags: ,
6 comments

Yesterday, NDSU filed the provisional patent on my widget.  This means I am provisionally an inventor, according to the USPTO.  I think that no one can ever again question my engineer cred.

Okay, not really.  What it really means is that I can talk about it now without worrying anyone else will take the idea.  However, I also have a paper in the works (which, once I finish fighting with LaTeX, will be submitted shortly), so I won’t bore you with the details.

The widget, if you’re curious, is an UHF RFID tag that works on metal, using the metal surface for its antenna, and it’s about 2 mm thick.  (Commercial tags for metal are about 2-3 times this thick, minimum.)  The goal we’re working toward is, of course, a flexible, paper-thin antenna that will work on metal.  I actually think that’s doable, but I can’t say for sure how long it’ll take.  (And I’d be wrong if I guessed, anyway.)

So that’s the gist of it.  Details will be in the paper…whenever and where ever I manage to get it published.

Quantifying my emotional roller coaster February 24, 2011

Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, work.
Tags: , ,
2 comments

A couple months ago, I came up with a great idea for widget.  (I talked about it a bit on Engineer Blogs.) Since then, I have become extremely emotionally invested in the outcome of my little project.  While the widget itself is sort of cool, part of the reason I’m invested in this is because it’s based on some physics that is well-understood but not ever used in this particular way (that I can tell).  It’s pretty big stuff.

For fun, I thought I’d give you a graphical representation of the past few months.  Unlike FrauTech, I’m cheap and refuse to use Office to make fancy graphics.  Sadly, this means you’ll have to suffer through my equally effective but far less snazzy looking OpenOffice generated plot:

 

The vertical scale is my emotional well being.  Zero is the worst, five is neutral, and 10 is elated.  The legend is as follows:

1 I have this great idea!
2 Boss agrees and gives me funding
3 Initial results okay
4 Tweaks not helping much
5 More tweaks making it worse
6 Trying some new things
7 One of them worked! Order of magnitude improvement!
8 These changes aren’t improving much
9 Oh look! That was awesome!
10 Oh crap. I was using the wrong stuff
11 I have an idea on how this needs to work
12 I’m sick of doing simulations, need to make something
13 I can’t order the stuff I need
14 They want me to sign an NDA before they’ll even tell me if they have what I want
15 Stuff shows up
16 Minion puts prototype together
17 And it sucks
18 Minion improves design, works much better!
19 But still needs lots of improvement

I knew things were going to be a bit rough and that they’re would be ups and downs. I had no idea that it was going to be this bumpy, though.

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