Projects

I have worked on several projects throughout my career so far.

  • TPS (Transaction Processing System) v5 offers guaranteed, in-order delivery messages between programs, possibly running on separate computers. It is use in many (more than 25?) tire plants throughout the world. It also doubled as my MSCS project, which was pretty convenient.
  • TSIS (Tire Sidewall Inspection System) is a system for detecting bulges and depressions on tire sidewalls. Geometrical data is collected from the tire using point lasers or line lasers and analyzed by a rule-based expert system. It has been my most challenging project to date.
  • TTOC (Tire Testing and Optimization Controller) is a control system for tire testing equipment. It is a huge project that started in 1994 (well before my time, I was still an undergrad). I am constantly trying to figure out ways to overhaul it to solve various problems and support new equipment and still ship machines every couple of months.
  • FFH (Final Finish Host) provides a system for organizing tire test information comprising primarily test conditions and result data. It is a good-sized system based on C, Oracle and PHP.
  • Internal Billing System. What can I say? I never wanted to be an accountant, but someone had to do it.
  • Tread Label Applicator is a project to automatically print and apply tire tread labels. Primarily I worked on the code to generate a PNG of the labels based on a database of objects defined for a given label.
  • RIM (Rim Inspection Machine) is a machine for measuring runout of rims using line lasers.
  • Other projects that I can’t or won’t talk about because they are embarrassingly stupid or highly confidential.

I also have done a lot of work with digital filtering techniques (2D). One filter that I find particularly useful is the modified-median (or percentile, if you are an Excel fan) filter. It works nicely for skipping along the tops of objects (like tread blocks or buildings) and yet can ignore meaningless fuzz (like pin vents or TV antennas).

Another area that I have spent a lot of time thinking about is elimination of machine influence in rotary measurement systems. Essentially it involves thinking about harmonics as vectors and using 2 dimensional Euclidean geometry… well I can’t really say more about that I’m afraid.

To better learn C++, I started working on a digital filtering application.  Hopefully I will have something to show for it soon.  Essentially it will filter waveforms with the following filters: FIR, modified median and moving average.  I think the bulk of the work will be in presenting the results.  Another cool feature would be to allow users to define their own filters using an embedded scripting language.