#497 – An Interview with Brock LaMeres

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Today’s episode is sponsored by Keysight, who recently started Keysight University. We hear from Daniel Bogdanoff and Jit Lim about USB, including the specs on the newly announced USB 4.0. To check out the USB 4.0 Pitfalls course and many more classes about test and measurement, check out Keysight University.

Welcome, Dr Brock LaMeres!

• Brock came from industry. He was working at HP and took classes at night to work on his Masters and PhD. The classes in his program had few traditional students. The profs were working engineers.
• After graduating, he stuck around to teach classes and loved it. He wanted to make it part of career.
• Using (modern) CAD tools in school
• Application was tied to the tools
• Chris went to a conference of EE Dept Heads (ECEDHA) and was put off by their unwillingness to try new tools.
• Teaching with captive tools in virtual machines?
• To get the context of the material, you have to show the application.
• Brock likes to show the historical aspect of engineering, or the “Rapid historical evolution of technology”. As an example: the battles between Tesla and Edison (War of the currents)
• Another example is how Intel (“INTegrated ELectronics” made up the name, if you didn’t know) hasn’t really been around that long, historically (<50 years).
• Brock teaches every level at MSU:
  • Beginners: EE 101
  • Middle of curriculum: Logic circuits and design
  • Advanced: Embedded systems
  • Grad level: Digital design, including real world problems like signal reflections (Editor’s snarky note: so analog too!)
• MSU has been dealing with COVID-19, like any other higher ed institution. But Brock was already teaching classes online.
• He has written books and paired it with youtube videos, so it wasn’t a huge transition for a lecture class.
• However, there was a range of experience across the campus, especially the profs who weren’t super digital savvy.
• Brock was interested in distance learning 10 years ago, especially addressing problems with the labs.
• He got a grant from the NSF to research how students could access equipment on campus and perform the lab somewhere else. This was before the availability of the low cost instruments of today.
• Chris asked how they measuring engagement / frustration
• It’s a wide range: Students that need full engagement is not 100%. In fact, there’s a percentage that don’t want interaction at all. “They just want to crank”
• Breaking the class into different groups based on learning patterns means more time to engage the students who are struggling.
• Engineering is more about internalizing
• The thing that is missing is self-regulation: “If you’re stuck on something for 30 minutes…then stop”
• They do a large number of low stakes homework assignments to track progress. It helps let them know when students get left behind and he’s not a fan of exams.
• Vocational education vs traditional education.
• Senior design class is a must to be ABET accredited. Students learn that the circuit design is not the problem. It’s the “everything else”
• Brock started working with NASA, continuing on his work designing FPGAs with HP. NASA wants reconfigurable hardware to accelerate computation, but also want to reprogram on the fly. Reconfigurable hardware can also flush out faults in space.
• They came up with a digital platform: Rad PC
• Processor voting on the output. “Voting” = 3 circuits produce outputs: if one crashes, the two that are the same will validate the broken one. This results in triple modular redundancy.
• They have gone up to space a bunch of ways!
  • Put on sounding rockets
  • Put on the ISS (!!!)
  • Two cube sats
    • Rad Sat U
    • Rad Sat G
• Internally, the hardware has a bunch of monitors all over the place, including error correcting code (ECC).
• MROM
• Rad hard parts are expensive and hard to get, so they’re trying to use commercial FPGAs.
• Chris asked about the overhead “cost” of having monitoring internally on FPGAs.
• Looking at MTTF
• The mission itself is driving a lot of the requirements
• Other ventures like Planet Labs (past guest), SpaceX (past guests) also are using commercial hardware with smaller mission horizons.
• Any missions requires an analysis of how to burn up.
• They’re currently working on a project to go to the moon! Part of the Artemis Program.
• The computer will use the landers and rovers radios for talking back. Brock’s computer will connect to the Lander and the Lander will take care of all the data (over some satellite uplink).
• Their Cube Sats are amateur band using SATNOGS for base stations.
• New book/course that’s coming out, which is an Intro to Embedded Systems course reboot at MSU.
• Took a different approach, a different way of learning
• Wanted every student to come to class with the micro attached to their laptops, so a $10 dev board/platform was the goal.
• Brock is passionate about reducing costs for students, especially because of the public school charter.
• Previous target was Freescale processor, but the dev boards will still $100.
• The lecture for this class leads right into the lab, hosted in a room with more infrastructure.
• Wrote the book/recorded videos.
• A new book about Embedded Systems is coming out this week!
• Breaking down material into smaller chunks
• Some students are faster than others students
• Chris asked if the students coming out of the class, but Brock says it’s tricky to figure out “are they better”.
• Regular employers for MSU students? Bozeman has a strong optics community, as well as large scale employers like Boeing in Seattle.
• Brock was named a Boeing Professor, which means he got a grant to work on the program.
• Check out more about Brock:
  • His Montana.edu page
  • The new course Youtube channel

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