NOTE: WVIT was bought by WVU in the Spring of 1997 and became the West Virginia University Institute of Technology. When I started college in the Fall of 1996, it was still the West Virginia Institute of Technology.
Where does one begin in starting a robotics company? I had no idea. First and foremost, I needed something to sell - robots. In order to sell robots, one must manufacture robots. In order to manufacture robots, I would need to design robots. In order to design robots, I would have to understand software, hardware, and mechanics. At that time in my life, I had only a rudimentary understanding of software and didn't know anything about hardware or mechanics. Since I changed my major to EE, I figured I'd start there - learning the fundamentals of electronic analysis and design...
Where does one begin learning about electronics? Ohm's Law, of course! V = IR, where V is voltage (measured in Volts), I is current (measured in Amperes - or Amps for short), and R is resistance (measured in Ohms). It's a simple algebraic equation and conceptually easy to understand. Practically speaking, all you need is a battery and a resistor, so I bought a 9V battery and a handful of resistors. With a digital volt meter, I measured the voltage, current, and resistance to verify what I had learned in theory. But I wanted to see results; I wanted to see something happen. So I bought some LEDs (light emitting diodes). At first I didn't know about things like current-limiting resistors, so I burnt up a few LEDs - kind of a depressing start for someone with ambitions of starting a robotics company. Finally, I figured out how to calculate the value of a current-limiting resistor to limit the amount of current through the LED so as not to fry it. Lighting up an LED is cool and all but not very exciting. What next?
I spent a couple of semesters learning about AC and DC circuits. I learned about electronic components like resistors, capacitors, inductors, etc. It didn't come easily to me at first, though I look back now and wonder what was so hard about it. I took a class called Analog Electronics where I learned about diodes, transistors, and other devices with P-N type junctions. The real break came when I took a class called Digital Logic Design & Analysis where I learned about Boolean Logic, Karnaugh Maps, State Machines, etc. In the laboratory exercises for this course, we started using 7400 series logic gate chips: AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR, XNOR, and so on. By connecting the input pins of those chips to either +5VDC (logic high = 1) or 0VDC (logic low = 0), the output of the logic circuits could be seen by measuring the voltages (states) of the output pins. Later we connected the output pins to LEDs and current-limiting resistors. For the first time, I could actually interact with an electronic circuit! :) This was an amazing feeling! When I changed the input states, I could see the output states change as different LEDs turned on and off. This was further enhanced as we used the theory we had learned to design simple binary adders, counters, shift registers, flip-flops, multiplexers, etc. This is what I had been waiting for! ...We had lab once per week for 3 hours. I was always the last to leave the lab and usually the only one to actually get my circuit to work correctly. The other students were only interested in rushing through the exercises to record their data and leave as fast as possible. I recall one day in particular when I was paid one of the two highest compliments that I ever received in college. My professor, Dr. Umar Farooq, approached me after everyone else had left and told me, "Sam, if I were an employer, you would be the only student in this lab that I would hire. When all is said and done, you are the only student who consistently gets his circuit working correctly. In the real world, there is no 'close but no cigar'; it either works or it doesn't. Keep up the good work, and you will be very successful one day!" I was encouraged by his compliment.
Of all the other classes I took in college, only three others really contributed to my understanding of electronic circuitry: Introduction to Microprocessors, Embedded System Design, and Senior Design. In MicroP, I was introduced to the Motorola 68HC12 microcontroller. It was a big printed circuit board (PCB) with a microprocessor, LCD display, LEDs, and I/O (input/output) ports for connecting to external circuitry. My favorite experiment consisted of reading in quadrature phase encoded signals from an optical encoder and outputting signals to a stepper motor. This was PERFECT for precise control of a robot! I started getting ideas for a small handheld mobile robot which would use two stepper motors and differential steering to navigate a predefined path, programmed into the microprocessor. The idea was to have in the center of the robot an ink pen which would protrude through the bottom and draw the path of the robot on the surface below it. I wanted to program the robot to draw cycloids like the old Spirograph toy. This sophistication was still a bit beyond the scope of my knowledge, but I decided to start by finding a suitable microprocessor (brain) and learning more about stepper motors. One day after class, I asked my professor, Dr. Stephen Goodman, if he could spare a few minutes to talk with me. I told him my ideas and he tried pointing me in the right direction, though the talk wasn't really very helpful. The problem was that the Motorola microcontroller board was prohibitively expensive for a poor college student ($250). It was also too large and bulky for my specific application because of all the extra functionality of which it was capable - which was unnecessary for my robot. I started looking for alternatives. I briefly explored FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) but soon realized that wasn't the right solution for me.
I also started trying to design my own stepper motor driver from cheap logic chips. I used Karnaugh Maps and logic tables to figure out how to wire up the D-Flip-Flop chips to get the proper stepping sequences for the stepper motor. I came up with an elegant solution before realizing that all I really needed was a universal bi-polar shift register. It worked; however, this only made the stepper motors turn one way or the other continuously with no intelligent control to make a robot follow a path defined by a mathematical function. I was at a dead end again and resumed my search for an affordable, single chip microprocessor.
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| This was my first attempt at building a robot. It didn't work! :( |
NOTE: I would be remiss not to mention the fact that most of my experiments didn't work at all! I spent many, many nights staying up well past midnight tinkering and reading scores of mind-numbingly boring books in my pursuit of electronic knowledge. I had far more miserable failures than meager successes, but I was determined and pressed onward! It wasn't until I designed that stepper motor driver circuit that I really started understanding electronics. From there, my successes snowballed!
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| Robot Building For Beginners - my first robotics book |
Up to this point, all of my focus had been on learning about the fundamentals of electronics. It was around the summer of 2003 when I bought my first robotics book - "Robot Building for Beginners" by David Cook, an electrical engineer from Chicago. His book was written about a small line-following robot called "sandwich" (because the body was made from a Ziplock sandwich container), which used only an LM393 comparator chip as a brain. From this book, I learned about comparators, voltage dividers, Cadmium Sulfide (CdS) photoresistors, motor torque, and many other things.
I joined the West Virginia Army National Guard just after I got out of the Army. In West Virginia, the national guard will pay 100% of college tuition, which allowed me to use my Montgomery G.I. Bill to pay my monthly living expenses (rent, utilities, car payment / insurance, groceries, etc.). In September 2003, my national guard unit was activated and deployed to the war in Iraq. I had also met a girl, dated her, and got her pregnant. My son, Ethan, was born just 3 weeks before I was deployed. I married the girl. I missed the first year of my marriage and my son's life.
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| Daddy and Ethan - picture taken 2 weeks before I was deployed to the war in Iraq |
I took that robotics book to Iraq with me, along with an assortment of electronic components. I made a small version of the "sandwich" robot, but it didn't work because the tiny pager motors lacked the necessary torque to propel the robot.
I came back from Iraq, went back to college, went through a divorce, and resumed my extracurricular studies / tinkerings in robotics.
Around this time, I started reading about the robotics projects on David Cook's website: http://www.robotroom.com/. There I learned that you could make your own printed circuit boards at home! So I bought a book called "Making Printed Circuit Boards" by Jan Axelson. I also downloaded free PCB design software called PCB123. I designed a printed circuit board for my stepper motor driver - what an amazing feeling it was to see those LEDs blinking and stepper motor turning while connected to my own neat little PCB!!! I took it to the engineering department and even gave a one-hour lecture on PCB design / making.
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| Making Printed Circuit Boards by Jan Axelson |
In January 2006 I began working at Marathon Petroleum oil refinery as a co-op student in the electrical engineering department. I did three terms at Marathon, alternating semesters between college and work.
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| Aimee (and her mother) on our wedding day - Isn't she gorgeous?! :) |
On Thursday, May 25th, 2006, I met a beautiful, talented woman named Aimee. We married on August 11, 2007. She is my best friend and love of my life! :)
It was around this time that I discovered a hobby electronics magazine called Nuts & Volts. My favorite monthly column was the Personal Robotics series written by Vern Graner. More on this later...
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| Daddy and Ethan on our way to see the new SUPERMAN movie in Huntington, WV |
In my search for information about stepper motors, I discovered a really neat website called From Bits to Bytes to Bots. I also discovered a really cool website called http://www.instructables.com/ where I found a neat project for creating a homemade X-Y axis plotter using two stepper motors. So I went to the local pawn shop and asked the owner if I could have two broken optical scanners that he couldn't sell and was going to throw in the dumpster. Even though the broken scanners had value to me (because of the stepper motors inside), the pawn shop owner could not sell them and gave them to me instead. I took them apart and removed the stepper motors and drive assemblies. I spent about a week thinking about how to construct the mechanical components of the gantry-style plotter. Then, without any printed plans, I set to work building the plotter from wood - all from plans in my head. I stained and polyurethaned it, and it was beautiful - my first mechanical marvel! After downloading some free software from the internet and connecting it to my computer's parallel port (remember those?), I was able to print any line drawing with my homemade plotter! It worked perfectly! I took it to the engineering department and showed it to Dr. Goodman and Dr. Cercone. It was then that Dr. Goodman paid me the other of my two highest compliments in college. He told me, "Aaron, I wish all my students were just like you!"
In the Fall of 2007, I began my senior year of electrical engineering at WVUIT. It was during that semester and the next that I took my favorite college course: Senior Design. My project was a solar tracking power supply. The device automatically detected the location of the sun in the sky and pointed the solar cell toward the sun for optimal solar energy collection, storing the energy in a battery. ...There were 6 students in the class; and on the first day, I hand-picked two of those students to be my partners. As it turned out, I did about two thirds of the programming and all of the electronic and mechanical design / construction. This project was another breakthrough for me because I discovered the Parallax Basic Stamp (single-chip microprocessor), servo motors, and how to read data sheets. I also learned about analog-to-digital converter chips, and I built another beautiful mechanical contraption. Those two semesters I spent almost all of my free time in the machine shop working on the solar tracker from dusk 'til dawn, literally.
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| Solar Tracker sitting on my basement workbench |
My solar tracker project for Senior Design and thermostat project for Embedded System Design, were the only two projects to actually work at WVUIT in several years. Dr. Goodman told me that the solar tracker was the "quintessential Senior Design project" - another great compliment. ...On the first day of Senior Design, Dr. Goodman told us that in the past the students who were successful were the students who lived, breathed, ate, slept, and shat their project; and that I did! :) Again, though I don't recommend this as good engineering practice, I designed the entire thing in my head - electronics, mechanics, everything - with no hard plans from which to work.
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| My mom and dad on their wedding day (1974?) |
Aimee and I got married just before my senior year started. Upon returning from our honeymoon, I found out that my father had committed suicide just days before the wedding. I was devastated, and it took a toll on me emotionally. On the first day of final exams in December 2007, after returning from a routine check-up at the V.A. Hospital, I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes and Walking Pneumonia; even so, I still had to take two finals that same day. Needless to say, I was an emotional and physical wreck that second-to-last semester with so many adversities on top of a full load of senior level electrical engineering coursework. Despite those hardships, I excelled! :)
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| My graduation day from WVUIT with a B.S.E.E. |
On May 10th, 2008 (Aimee's 29th Birthday), I graduated from WVUIT with my B.S.E.E. - just 12 years after starting! :)
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