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CAN and ARINC work is always a little nerve-wracking since you are dealing with safety issues on every hand.

I’d sure hate to be the guy who’s firmware caused a disaster :-/

Imagine the hand-wringing and grief that must have resulted from the recent Boeing fiasco with the flight control on the 737 MAX ...

Working with biomedical devices is similar... you can leave NOTHING to chance.

It’s nice to be able to just create hobby projects now, no one is gonna be in mortal danger :-)

I enjoy playing with simple AVR projects and prefer DIP packages to avoid the hassle of having boards made... I often do dead-bug soldering, it’s a fright to look at but once the project is in the cute 3d printed enclosure who’s gonna know...lol

I was seeking very low power with high noise tolerance on the railcar. The PIC18F6680 was clocked at 4 MHz. The ride quality accelerometer routines were written in assembler to ensure the 120 SPS with boxcar averaging could fully process before the next interrupt arrived. Delivering the data result over the CAN bus was a leisurely event by comparison. The anglecock, cutlever and handbrake controllers were more entailed with actuator/sensor pairs. Unfinished was an enhancement using DigiMesh on XBee to permit a dynamic "consist" with remote activation of the onboard monitoring system and detection of A vs B end orientation on the rail. It matters when controlling the anglecock/cutlever for the A or B end of the car. The brake piston position sensor served to save time for the brakeman doing a visual inspection of each car to ensure the brake was disengaged before the train moved. Flat spots on a wheel from being dragged are not good. The thermal sensors in the bearing adaptors (inboard/outboard) for each bearing served as advance warning of a pending bearing burnoff allowing detection more repidly than the in-track sensors located every 10 to 20 miles. A burned bearing derailment avoided is a big economic win.

My FRA project died on January 20th, 2009 just after noon eastern time. Upon Obama's inauguration, I had to call the 46 people on the project to inform them. The funding was so abruptly cut that $1 million in specialized equipment was abandoned in a railyard in Joliet, IL. I had $80k in specialized development tools in my home lab. I packed up $50k of licensed software and sent to UPS back to the project office. Some of the hardware still occupies space in my basement. A year after the funds were pulled, my PhD colleague died from melanoma. He did the business development with FRA. I did all the EE/CS work. We subcontracted the physical board CAD/fab/packaging.

My wife got into creating little scenes with my dead bugs in the early 80s. She was a pretty good Pascal programmer on my OS/9 systems, but it wasn't her favorite thing. She earned a ham license to complement being a Master Falconer in a time when cellphones were in their infancy. Caring for a bird of prey is too time intensive for her now as a full-time police/fire/EMS dispatcher, so she moved on to collecting snakes and lizards. :-)