Michael T. Barber

Hello, I’m Michael Barber. I design scientific electronic products.  I started designing electronics in middle school when I wanted to have a rocket booster on my kit remote control car.  I figured if I hooked a circuit board where a servo plugs in, there must be some way to decode what the command was, and then fire off a rocket igniter.  I didn’t figure out how to do this until I was in college and had access to an oscilloscope, but that burning desire lead me to learn how electronics worked.  This also helped to land me my first job as an engineering intern, where I learned how to do PCB layout in Orcad Capture and Orcad Layout.  These days I’m using Altium Designer, and I’ve done hundreds of board schematics and layouts including circuits with microcontrollers, FPGAs, USB, Ethernet, and RS-232.  Early on, I realized that if I could make my electronics talk to computers, then there were few limits to what the hardware could then do.  To this end, I learned Visual Basic, VB.NET, and dabbled in a few other programs.  I’m documenting here some of the things that I’ve found interesting, as well as putting many of the mistakes that I’ve made out there in the hopes that others might learn from them as well.