Ian Rumley

 

 

This site is a supplement to my LinkedIn website, where I can display a little more about myself and some of the interesting materials from my career.

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/ianrumley

 

Get in touch with me at

irumley ( a t ) shaw (d o t ) ca

 

I determined a long time ago that what I like to do is use my skills and abilities to make machines work.  This began with hot rodding cars after high school and, in my professional positions, I have been able to develop and use my skills and abilities in a variety of ways such as automating the operation of complex turbo-compressors and implementing remote control of a variety of fixed and mobile machines.

I believe that one of the most important aptitudes for a software engineer working in the machine control field is, of course, an understanding of mechanical principles and properties.  Although I am not a mechanical engineer my whole career has involved machinery control and I have a good aptitude for mechanics, hydraulics, and physics.  My degree in Electrical Engineering has been very useful in understanding, using, testing, and debugging the hardware and the sensors and actuators which are part of all control systems.

The career achievement I am most proud of was establishing and building the Mobile Applications group at Omnex.  This group of engineers and technicians worked closely with Omnex customers, customizing its radio remote control products to fit specific customer application requirements. After one year as a software engineer at Omnex I established the Mobile Applications group, which grew to include six team members.  Initially Omnex was producing new customized product designs at a rate of approximately one per month.  In 2007, the team delivered an average of more than one custom system per day.  Although some of these systems are one-offs, many are production prototypes.  Typically OEMs, after getting a prototype designed and built (our team's job), will order volumes of between 1 and 50 systems per month which are production built.

I have been a member of two teams which developed software/hardware architectures for control system products.  These architectures covered the entire scope of the system from the Hardware Abstraction Layer to RTOS to user interfaces and included system configuration and communication protocol stacks. My specific roles were to coauthor the detailed specification of the architecture, and to actually implement various aspects such as a user interface with a keypad and display, including menus and display of different types of data and status information; a system of configuring distributed I/O, a flexible system for machine alarms and shutdowns, algorithms, intermodule communication stacks, and so on.

In addition to developing control systems, I have had a lot of experience in field testing, commissioning and demonstrating these systems, including systems developed by other teams. 

In developing and supporting these systems I have written both engineering documents and user documentation. 

In mobile and industrial control systems, CAN is an important communication bus system, and at Omnex, I implemented several proprietary CAN high level protocols, as well as installing, configuring, and using third-party J1939 and, more recently, CANopen stacks. CANopen defines a concept called an "Object Dictionary" which is a very clever way of organizing data and meta data.

I have also designed several simpler RF protocols at PAC and Omnex. 

Safety and safe operation of machinery have been important aspects of the systems I have worked on, achieved through various means including good software design.

An enjoyable aspect of my positions has been working directly with customers to solve their control problems.  This has included pre- and post sales and even included remotely commissioning a system in Australia by phone and email. As the Applications Group manager at Omnex, I would often accompany Sales people as a Technical Sales Engineer on visits to potential customers to explain our products to the customer's engineers, gather requirements, and suggest solutions.