Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S4E35 Shawn Patterson | Interferometers, Lasers, & Not Panicking
Shawn Patterson has developed an expertise in Process Development for electro-optical and mechanical engineering platforms. Shawn has taken prototype engineering efforts and carefully improved upon aspects of their thermal management, method of assembly, and package design.
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Aaron Moncur, host
Outro music: Blue Ocean was written, arranged and mixed by Shawn Sinohui in Phoenix, Arizona 2022
Music:
Shawn Sinohui on acoustic guitars, harmonica and vocals
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Mark Corradetti on electric bass guitar
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Shawn Patterson:And then And then here's the problem. We're going to solve the same problem again, I guarantee you're going to be I'm going to see the same problems being talked about and solved that that guy Ralph, a year ago, had already done this work. And he was a good engineer.
Aaron Moncur:Hello, and welcome to another episode of The being an engineer Podcast. Today we're here in the studio with Shawn Patterson, who has developed an expertise in process development for electro optical and mechanical engineering platforms. Shawn has taken prototype engineering efforts and carefully improved upon aspects of their thermal management method of assembly and package design. Shawn thanks so much for joining us today.
Shawn Patterson:Hello, Haglund. Very glad to be here.
Aaron Moncur:All right. So can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Shawn Patterson:Yes. I started my laser career In, outside of Boston, Massachusetts, at a company that was designing the very first LASIK machine. And this is before they were FDA approved in the US. So about 1996, I started working there as a CAD drafter. And I, the engineers took a liking to me, and I knew enough not much about engineering, and certainly nothing about lasers. But I never did much CAD drafting there. And I got pulled into the labs for laser testing. And do you want to know what a laser is? Do you want to see the you know, they would entice me to come in the labs, they took a real interest in me. And I ate it up, I was in my early 20s to mid 20s. So I got involved in lasers that way. And I excelled at that company. And best friend of mine was was at Northeastern University is it for engineering himself, and he was interning there. And we were working on FDA approval and getting ISO approval and moving through all the steps to be ready to sell lasers that would correct vision. And I did a lot of interesting projects there. And it really get stamp engineering in my in my you know my DNA.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, so Shawn, you, you didn't just jump into engineering right away. Tell us a little bit about that journey. Right? You. You mentioned to me before we started the recording that, that you kind of took some time to explore a little bit and figure out like, what's out there? And what are you really going to enjoy?
Shawn Patterson:Absolutely. If I had chosen to go to university at 18 out of high school, I'm sure I would have chosen wrong. I didn't know anything about engineering at the time, but I was mechanically inclined. But I left, you know, home around the age of 18 or a little earlier. And I moved to Santa Barbara with my girlfriend. And then I hung out there like figuring out what I wanted to do and meeting friends and you know, learning to surf and everything you do in Santa Barbara really enjoying it. I was there to have fun. But I was also cognizant of, I'm here to gather intelligence to help me get to a career in life. And I didn't know what I wanted. So living there, I took some cad classes when Autodesk was making AutoCAD and this is before SolidWorks many decades before SolidWorks. But in any case, um, I took architecture so I was drawing, you know, residential architecture and building architecture at the City College Santa Barbara City College. So I did that. And then I had an opportunity to go to Boston and sell all my stuff and just go and I had not built a family yet. I had no wife or children. So I sold all my stuff. And I did that the house. What a great adventure. Oh, I was out for adventure for sure. So you mentioned
Aaron Moncur:I think it was at Boston where you first started learning about lasers. Some of the engineers there kind of took a liking to you and started introducing you to different technologies and things that they were working on. What do you think it was about you that encouraged them or made them feel comfortable pulling you in and wanting to share some of their work with you?
Shawn Patterson:I think it it may have been my use and my A California ism. They were on the East Coast and they thought I was the cool guy that was a California kid. Okay, you know, the early 90s to mid 90s. And they probably I think they hadn't even been to California. So I was just like this kind of cartoon character from California almost. And they add to surf and Holmen. Boston, not many people surf even though they're on the water bands, just the beach. Yeah. So in any case, they took a look a liking to me, they found me to be a cool guy. I was no what I had maybe a cool factor or something. But anyway, these guys were family men and older engineers. I was out for an exciting time. And we all really meshed really, really well, personality wise, even though they were from the East Coast. And I was I had never been to the east coast. So I was just learning about the Boston attitude accent. They're different than Californians and Californians can be lackadaisical and Bostonians. They keep relationships a long time. And when they say they're going to show up, they show up. And they you know, you become someone's friend in that area. You're like a friend for life. So we went river rafting in Maine, they invited me I was stunned. And at this company called summit technology in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was just I was my first engineering job. And I couldn't believe it. When I saw my printout of my my work statement said that I was in the r&d department. I worked in r&d. Wow, I work in r&d at a corporate company. It was a startup, but it was a it was a funded one. Well funded, I believe in I know that the a lot of things were defining me at that time. And I was looking, I had been looking for definition. So this was I was running with it.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome. So you, you got into lasers and optics. And that's kind of been a theme throughout your your career. Give us a sense for how do engineering teams use optics professionals like you like what are some of the problems that you have solved or or that you could solve? Because I think a lot of engineering engineering teams have not worked with any optics, personnel. And so like, how do we work together? What do you do?
Shawn Patterson:Well, I luckily stumbled into optics and laser systems in Tucson, Arizona. Well, I did it there when I came out west to get an engineering degree. And so I did three years of an optical sciences and Bs at a U of A University of Arizona in Tucson and which is known for optics, optics Valley and yes, strong optics program. And in any case, I did three years of that degree in the night. As I say, I fell into lasers I fell out of school and into a startup engineering laser company called for D technology. And they were making a new type of interferometer, which an interferometer is a metrology device that measures high technology surfaces can measure ICS you know, integrated chips, silicon wafers, telescope mirrors, it gives you the topology down to nanometer levels. And it uses laser to do that and optics and a whole optic train on polarization of the laser and all these qualities. But I was leveraged for my persistence, my creativity, kind of my free spirit, I think because I had to do some weird stuff there. I had to interpret a lot of weird things with these, when I say they were approaching this metrology device in a new way. I mean, it had been done temporally temporal. So with time, they were doing it spatial, meaning time didn't matter. And with these delicate instruments very sensitive to vibration, if you need to take you know 1215 microseconds to take a measurement, you can get vibration introduced into the measurement which lowers the resolution, but if you can take it all instantly, you you can take it on a vibrating table. So they had developed and really mastered a way to mask the CCD cameras that were taking the images, pixel for pixel they would put polarisers and so every block of four pic souls became a super pixel. And it had the different angles of polarization to add up to 360. So 9121 8360 all the way around. So instead of moving the test piece with respect to the reference, you could leave them steady, and not have to wait for it to move forward and move back. But they could be steady. And the information would be caught in the Super pixels, because it turned the polarization of the light. So it accomplished the turning of the, you know, to two pi theta turn instantaneously. So you had lower resolution than a megapixel camera because it wasn't mega, mega pixel camera, but divide by four. And that's how many pixels you really Yeah. But then, of course, we bought a four megapixel camera. So we could have a one megapixel image. But getting those to line up and there's more fringe patterns, and there's gluing that mask on the CCD and getting it to be a sellable product was very challenging. And I was one of the few people that could do it.
Aaron Moncur:Wow. Okay, so this gets into another question I have, which is, what are some of the tools that you use as an optical engineer, and even are there some basic optics tools that engineering teams out there who maybe dabble in optics every now and then might want to consider adding to their arsenal,
Shawn Patterson:um, you know, then an optical sciences, it depends on what your what you care about what you're looking for, if you're looking for beam quality, you're going to use, you know, energy detectors. And you're going to use setups with XYZ stages. And you know, the mechanical engineering plays very heavily in laser science. And there, there are spectrum analyzers, if you care about the wavelength, how, if you care about how concise the wavelength is, or how, how narrow your spread of wavelengths is in a laser, because people will tell you that a laser has a single wavelength. And that's what makes it a laser. It's coherent, it's one wavelength. It's rarely one wavelength, unless it's a very, very expensive with laser. Because there's a little spread of wave of frequencies there that are, if it's a green laser, there will be just a bunch of green frequencies. And it's still a laser, but it has a spread of wavelengths it has a line with, if you look at it on a graph, it's not just exactly 532 nanometers, like anything. So but the the lasers. So if you care about wavelength, or you care about wavelength spread, or you care about beam quality, there's a lot of beautiful things to see. And laser science, I mean, you're working you work with crystals when you make solid state lasers, lasers that we pump and energize crystals, and the crystals will take a certain wavelength and then double it or half it. And now you go from the invisible regime to the visible. So now you've just taken infrared and made it bright green angle. And with these crystals, and they are doped with impurities, you know, to get this behavior out of them. The way a laser and laser based on solid state crystals works is fascinating, fascinating. So let's
Aaron Moncur:let's get into like the the basics of the laser. Oh get is a laser and like what are the core components of it? How does it work? And this could quickly go over I think most of our heads, so like, try and keep it kind of basic?
Shawn Patterson:Yeah, it's it's pumping electrons with energy to excite them and getting them to an excited state and they have orbitals that it's like stair steps that can only be on one step or the other. There's no in between. So, you energize. So you have to put energy into a laser cavity to energize the lazing medium, and these electrons, valence electrons will jump up to higher energy states. And then the correct photon will come by and it will stimulate a drop in energy of the electron and that drop the the delta of energy there you've just lost some energy. Well, it doesn't go nowhere. It turns into a photon that matches that introductory photon. And you have to this happening, you know millions to billions to trillions of times inside of a laser cavity with many atoms and electrons, you get a cascading effect and you get what we all love this word gain. You see get laser gain and then you get lazing and you have lazing action where now your cavity is bouncing between the two mirrors that that terminate the cavity one will be an output couple or where you will get the output of course, and then the other is a high reflector. So between your output coupler and high reflector, you keep the energy inside until the gain is high enough, and you're pumping it with electricity. And so there's an electrical to optical efficiency, you're going to put in more electricity than wattage that you're going to get out, of course, but what happened, some of it goes in heat. And then, you know, it's this conversion that's happening, you exceed the output coupler when you finally get enough gain, now you have a laser beam leaving the cavity. And now you work with that, you know, what's your energy distribution, are you Gaussian, which means nice and warm in the middle and cooler on the on the on the outside, if you're looking at it radially like a cross section. And that that's you're not going to get that at first, you know, you're gonna get wobbly, you know, looking beams and then you got these different modes inside of a laser that will take over and it will want to do this on this mode, which is maybe the, if you were looking for 532 nanometer wavelength, you might get 540 that wants to laze, but that won't lays as efficiently as 532, if you can get it down to 532, and you got to use temperature, you know, thermal dynamics. Crystal placement, alignment is superduper important in these lasers, and the ones I was making were tiny, tiny, like a pinto bean. Okay, so I'm using pick and place machines that, you know, can place these tiny, one millimeter cubed crystals, or maybe one millimeter, you know, squared by and then it's longer. So, a longer clip, maybe maybe five millimeters long, six millimeters long. These different crystals, and then a very tiny diode pump, which is the initial energy input. You pump these crystals, they do their magic, you get laser output.
Aaron Moncur:Well, I don't think I've ever actually heard an explanation of what a laser is or if I have spent a long long time. Alright, this is maybe a silly question and and by opened up a whole can of worms here. Why don't we have really cool laser guns like in Star Wars? What's the what's preventing us from getting their
Shawn Patterson:laser gun? Yes. We have lasers in they can be in the form of a gun. I mean, you can point a laser across the parking lot and burn a hole in the side of a car with an hot IR laser, infrared laser 1000 nanometer wavelength or, or somewhere in there before you get too far IR because then the frequency is kind of lazier and slower. How fast it's it's oscillating.
Aaron Moncur:So why don't we have it in like a hip holstered gun? Like in Star Wars? Is there just there's none of energy density? And in the AR?
Shawn Patterson:I see if you could have that in it, it exists. I mean, I don't think people want to carry that around, you know, like you carry around a firearm. To literally dangerous
Aaron Moncur:to yourself, maybe, yeah, it's,
Shawn Patterson:it would be pretty dangerous. You could make one that pulse. So it would send a pulse like a bullet, which is a single, you know, single projectile, you could send a single pulse that's loaded with energy. And then pulse pulse for you know, again, and again, like a machine gun, I'm sure that exists. They just, I go on YouTube, I see people burning their skin with blue lasers or popping balloons. Yeah, you know, lighting things on fire with lasers, blue is a very high frequency and the prot the last high frequency, you can really see with your eyes, then you get to violet and ultraviolet. But those high frequencies have a lot of energy, and the red will have less energy in the infrared, we'll have even less energy than that. But here's the thing about lasers, a watt laser output of a watt, a joule a watt, that is much more powerful than a light bulb. of when you think of watts of a light bulb, you know, no one buys a one watt light bulb, because you can't see anything with it hardly. But a one watt laser will burn through your leather couch, you know, and if you focus the beam or not, you'll get even more power density. Yeah. But you know, lasers dissipate in air they they start you know if you stand a collimated beam because if you have a we were we made tripods and we had lasers on top of buildings going from building to building across the campus. For experimental stuff. I was in the optical sciences program, we'd be up there at night with red lasers and pointing to a receiver across campus and trying to make sure we could hit it and these types of things and we could call them in our beam by the time it got there and it's spread out quite a bit and so the energy density is less right And so it's hard to keep that on a long distance. And the solution is not to focus the beam a little bit and think that it's going to spread less. It just kind of doesn't really work that well, but smaller, tight beams. And this is where beam quality comes into play. So as I said, What were you looking for? You're looking for wavelength adherence or beam quality, or, you know, for the tools you want to use in your lab, do you need a spectrum analyzer? Because you want to know the spectrum of wavelengths? Some lasers can put out to wavelength, you know, and I've seen that in fiber optic lasers, Rama and laser can put out, you know, yellow and green at the same time. But in any case, yeah, these lasers as weapons are probably best left in the military's hands.
Aaron Moncur:I'm sure the military has done deep research into how lasers can be weaponized. And the fact that we don't have laser guns, like Star Wars probably says that there's got to be some kind of like, you know, physics space limitation, right? Or maybe, maybe a normal, like bullet gun is just every bit as good as a laser gun. So I spend the money to develop a laser gun. I don't know.
Shawn Patterson:Yeah, there's, I think there's a laser system that keeps track of how far away the moon is.
Aaron Moncur:Okay. Okay. So that's perfect segue into this next question, which is, a lot of people when they hear lasers, they might think about like, cutting or burning with lasers. What are, of course, there are far more uses for lasers than cutting or burning, what are some of the other uses that lasers are commonly used for?
Shawn Patterson:I can tell you one that's pretty interesting is the crystals I mentioned earlier, they get hot. And you don't want to have an active cooling system, if you can avoid it, you would like them to be passively cooled. So you need a heat circuit. Well, lasers can be used to mentalize the bottom of a dielectric or the sort of surface on a dielectric crystal to mentalize it, usually gold will be the choice of metal, but then you will use a laser to adhere this metal to the one surface of the crystal and it would be the bottom surface so that you can weld it or solder it to a metal base. Now you're going to have a heat circuit. You're on your way to controlling or managing your thermal, you know, increases and stuff. So So lasers can mentalize dielectrics. And then you can solder on to things very cool.
Aaron Moncur:All right, well, let me take a brief break here and share with the listeners that Team pipeline.us is where you can learn more about how we develop or help medical device and other product engineering or manufacturing teams develop turnkey equipment, custom fixtures and automated machines to characterize, inspect, assemble, manufacture and perform verification testing on your devices. And we're speaking with Shawn Patterson today, Shawn, what? What are a couple of the biggest failures that you've had in your career? And what have you learned from those experiences?
Shawn Patterson:It's good question. Um, I've, I will all go back kind of. In school at University of Arizona, I struggled a lot with the speed of which I know 400 years of engineering and science is being thrown at you. I struggled with wanting to slow down and absorb it instead of week to week or on to the next round of the Nexus electromagnetics. And physics for this type and a physical of another type and differential equations in high math and calc four and I don't even remember calc one. I'm still my identities and just going so fast. And I had a more romantic view of what getting a degree would be like. And I wanted to know about the scientists themselves. I mean, I read about ampere and volta and these scientists that developed you know, so many of the rules we use Maxwell, and any case, you can aid so it wasn't like that. So I really struggled there. But you know, I started as we all have done or people who've tried to get an engineering degree, it's it can be tough, and you're up late at night and you're pulling your hair out and you're, you're sweating for the tests and you're wondering if you know everything and you're, you know, you shouldn't be studying up to the last minute because that means you're not prepared but you're going in and you only got here to count on yourself and you do your best you know, and sometimes you get enlightening moments during the test and might said some of my tests were three hours long, and three to four or maybe so in any case I struggled at university, but I also learned a lot. And one of the things I've learned is that learning calculus and these types of mathematics are not so you can then get be an engineer some years later, pull out paper at your desk and say, Oh, I'm gonna write to Senegal, I got a problem, I fix it here, oh, just put it in an integral and saw this line integral. Oh, there we go. 4.7 feet. Great. That's what does it. You'd never you don't do that. Why you learn this math or why I think I learned it was to help us think analytically, it helps it teaches taught me how to think about things and how to just delve deep into it and get get into so I struggled there. And then I had, I had been trusted a lot at a company I worked for at EA phase shift, which I think was just called phase shift at the time, but this was in Tucson and I was entrusted with building the new 12 inch aperture, which was very large for this machine that used to be foreign chapter, we were making a gorilla sized version of this great interferometer that was called a Fizbo, after the scientists Fizbo. And it was an interferometer inside there a nested three interferometers to kind of build up that beam path to get to the output that was three times larger diameter beam coming out to measure big surfaces, large telescope mirrors and things. So I was entrusted with building it. And I did my best for several weeks. And I really felt great about the trust they put in me. And after I when I finished it in a tummy, it was perfect. And i dotted all my eyes and Cross my T's. In quality testing, it came out that my beam quality was bad and giving bad results. And the software was not interpreting the maps, right. And I had misaligned it somewhere. And in lasers, the next word you're ever always gonna say is alignment, laser systems, alignment, alignment, alignment, it can improve efficiency, it can polarization and alignment together, you're working with these things to really pass through all the doors in the optical system cleanly and then get your output that you want. So I had fouled up in the alignment. And I it was the first off. So you know, and I was a lone wolf on this project. And I love that they let me do that. But it failed through final test. And it was still 90% there, but they sent an engineer in to fix it. And no one said anything to me. And it was it really felt weird. I felt like an outcast. And I've I kind of in a roundabout way I found out that he was sent in to fix my work. And he fixed it. And then it went out to probably NASA or somebody big a very important customer. And no one ever talked to me about it. And it was just strange. You know, life goes on and but I felt a little downtrodden about that or you know, crestfallen in that I was really had built a reputation, and I was my reputation for what I could do there. And I wanted to impress the leader of that company was Chris Cooley. opolis. And he was from he was a professor at the U of A and then he, as he told me, he got tired of seeing his students go off and start businesses and optical sciences and make more money than he did as a professor. So he said he started a phase shift technology in Tucson. And this guy was a maverick, and really strong one at that. I mean, this he was he is really a great leader. And anyway, I knew him personally. It was a small company. So you can know the top, you know very easily and I felt like I let them down.
Aaron Moncur:Look, thank you for sharing such a personal story. How like, you mentioned that it felt like maybe the kind of circumvented you row. How would if you had a chance to go back and kind of relive that time. What would you have said or how would you have requested leadership to to handle that situation? Because I imagine there are leaders engineering leaders listening right now to this episode, who maybe are dealing with similar situations and maybe they don't know the best way to handle it. So how would you have preferred that situation be handled?
Shawn Patterson:I just would have liked to have been included in the you know the the failure analysis the FA I would have really liked to have been included in that I would like to have been shown the bad maps it was made. In, I would have liked to have been held accountable, but I wasn't. I wanted to be held accountable, and therefore, are Ergo learning. Right. But it it wasn't handled that way.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. Have you had any opportunities in your career since then where maybe you were on the other end? Right. And and maybe you were like supervising or coaching someone else, and you had the opportunity to, to like, correct. Some other engineers or technicians mistakes and help them learn, like, what's the right way to do this?
Shawn Patterson:Yeah, I have I've, I've had to bring people and show them their mistakes before and people with more degrees degrees that I don't have, you know, and engineers further along in their career, I've you know, everyone can do you create a mistake and do something wrong. And I, sometimes it doesn't matter who digs up the root cause they are the root cause. But I have and I think it's, um, you know, it's not easy to tell someone, you know, they made this mistake and come look at what you did. And then it depends on the personality, because they can have excuses right away, or yeah, all ears. And they want to know what they did wrong. And they can let you just be the authority and show them this happened. This happened. I found this and you forgot this? And, you know, we need it. I you know, and you can't go to the point it's work. So I can't get to the point of why did you forget that? You know, it's almost like asking, are you here? Are you paying attention to your job? It's a you got to broach it, you know, in these certain kinds of ways? Sure. Yeah.
Aaron Moncur:Well, I love that use the phrase, I want it to be held accountable. That is such a great attribute of strong engineers, right? We don't want to be let off the hook necessarily. We want to learn from our mistakes. And that's a really important behavior. Along those same lines, based on your experience, you know, past 20 years, whatever. How have you seen engineering teams mess up product development? What are some of the common mistakes or problems that that we make as engineers,
Shawn Patterson:I would say one thing would be exit interviews. So when people leave the team, and there is no one in charge of retrieving their lab books, their computer directories, their paper in their office, or their posters, their everything and compiling it into back into the rest of the people that are still here. Hey, Jim, do you need these graphs because, you know, Ralph left, and we he made a bunch of this, he did a bunch of work here. Know that I've not seen that done very much at all. And I've never seen anyone in charge of that. And then the lab books get left, somebody cleans out the cubicle, the next guy comes in, and I don't know where the lab books go. And then they may be given to someone and someone puts them in a drawer somewhere. And then, and then and then here's the problem. We're gonna solve the same problem again, now that we're all already solved, we're gonna guarantee you're going to be I'm going to see the same problems being talked about and solved, that that guy, Ralph, a year ago, had already done this work. And he was a good engineer.
Aaron Moncur:I couldn't agree with you more. I'm gonna do a little plug right now for something that we've been working on. It's a platform of tools, education, and community for engineers. And the whole idea behind this whole thing is we've had hundreds and hundreds of years and engineering to figure out the wheel yet we continually reinvent it as engineers and I think that's a source of frustration for for so many of us. Chances are what you're working on, someone else has worked on something very similar, if not identical to that some company, some time period, somewhere, someone has probably done something very similar. So why can't we pull all that information into a single repository where it's easy to find and stop reinventing the wheel? Alright, so that's my, my diatribe. I'm done off my soapbox now. But anyway, I agree just so much with what you said there. What skills do you think the best engineers have?
Shawn Patterson:Don't panic. Okay. I've had bosses and higher ups that do that, and it's never, you know, productive or It doesn't add anything good. And I've had to deliver really bad news to my bosses sometimes, and sometimes late at night, before. Customers are coming to see if they're going to buy our startup like Texas Instrument was Texas Instrument TI was coming to buy our Navy buy our green laser program at compound photonics. And that would really been great for us because we were seeing some investor fatigue as a startup. And we had been several years into the game and not made a profit. We were pre revenue as they say. And the night before they're coming, the bigwigs are coming in, to have my demos, my laser demos down in the lab are not working, they stopped working all the sudden, and they were the most impressive ones that would have really maybe tipped the scale in our favor. And I have to go up to my boss and give him this really bad news that I've troubleshot it six ways to Sunday, and I can't get this thing to work. And we're out of diodes or we only have three other good ones and and we're scrambling and can I take that crystal off of that other laser and weld it to this one tonight at 10pm to make it work, and I don't even know if that's really a surefire fix. So in any case, this man, he would just have given him the worst news that I can give out of saying, Okay, what temperature were you running at? What what are the amps? Did you see the data? Which oscilloscope are you using? Let's go downstairs and it's a downstairs lab. So let's go down and take a look. That was his approach. Not hopefully, you know, yeah, yes, expletive that and it says company killing prospect and wow, hell are we going to do? Yeah. How did this happen? And Dammit, this and DA and then storming down to the lap. Now, this guy, I won't say his name, but he was one of my best mentors and bosses.
Aaron Moncur:That's amazing. Well, speaking of tough projects, what are one or two of the most challenging projects that you've worked on?
Shawn Patterson:Challenging, I'm working with water systems can be really challenging and water cooling lasers that are going to go in the field I worked on at NP photonics in Tucson, I worked on a laser system that would be drug along the ocean floor in the North Atlantic to look for oil. So these are fiber optic lasers. And there's some 64 of them in a box. And they're they're going to have all their tentacles down fiber optics. And they're going to be drugged by this enormous, you know, oil hunting ship in Norwegian, Norway, Norway, or somewhere in the North Atlantic seas, ocean. And this system had to go underwater, but it had to be water cooled and the lasers had to be, you know, all these lasers together had to work in sync. And this was one of the times where a salesman over promised in order to get us a sale, and came back with this really wild idea. And our engineers worked on it modelled it ASAP, kind of running fast, or working nights and weekends to put together this ocean floor investigating laser system. And I was new to electronics in a sense. And I really realized I had to really hunker down on soldering and test. And soldering is not trivial at all. Soldering is very important. And doing it right is very important. And the same physics that come up with anything is as far as thermodynamics and things are really important and good solder joints and all of the things one one solder joint fails, you're done. I don't want to poopoo anyone but a lot of graduated laser engineers do not know how to solder anything on their
Aaron Moncur:horrible ice in my hand here.
Shawn Patterson:I've taught engineering groups of engineers how to solder and how to correctly splice wires and how to make good solder joints and, and all of this stuff and methods and things like that. But in any case, I we were doing a new project and this, our company was, you know, really, it adds to the excitement and the impending peril of if we don't get this money, you know, and sell this project and get it there on time and it's got our work when it gets there. And it doesn't even if even if it works when it's here. You know to say it's gonna work when it's there. These it's a it was a first one we built it. We didn't have any prototypes of this. We're sending them the prototype and kind of acting like, this is a product, a product, a prototype is not a product, okay? You don't go to Best Buy and and pull the electronics off the shelves that are prototypes take to your house. So in any case, I'm a very challenging product, project and time intensive and a lot of new technology and software, test systems, failing lasers, fiber optics, temperature controls, stopping water leaks, just waters, a crazy when you're trying to contain it and tell it what to do. Water pushes back.
Aaron Moncur:Probably like the understatement of the year, water pushes back. All right, well, what what's a tool that doesn't exist, but if it did, would dramatically accelerate the speed with which new products can be developed. And this can be outside the realms of what's physically capable, or at least what engineering and science know to be physically capable.
Shawn Patterson:Yeah, there, you know, we are in it. Everyone probably says this, but we are in a modern age of tillage, and software programs and modeling capabilities today, 3d printing has enabled geometries that you just can't do with a lathe or a CNC machine, you can't see and see a sphere that's hollow in the middle with the lathe, you have to make two halves. But you can 3d print that. So in any case, we have a lot of tools, we have a lot of modeling FMEA and stuff. So we have a lot at our fingertips. But if I was, you know, a tool would well. My headaches have always been rooted in failure analysis, FA and root cause. So I would remake, I would ask for a magic machine that could scan a system like Star Trek and find out which little tiniest little component in a circuit is failing, and why and fix it. There you go. All right, and be certain.
Aaron Moncur:We've brought up Star Wars and Star Trek now. So I think our work done, or work is done in this engineering podcast. Right on all the basics have been discussed. Actually, I do have a couple more questions before we we wrap this up. The first one is if you could write a short sentence or a phrase on a billboard, that every engineer in the world would see, what would that be?
Shawn Patterson:i What comes to mind is a sticker I used to have on the head chart in my cubicle of the electromagnetic spectrum from cosmic rays to radio waves. And the sticker said 186,000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea. It's the law
Aaron Moncur:of physics is a thing. Yes, sir.
Shawn Patterson:For that's not an original thought of mine. But there was also a woman that used to wear a shirt that it said on the front, it just said get automated.
Aaron Moncur:I like it. Hey, that sounds like a plug for pipeline get automated. I love it. Absolutely. All right, well. So specifically within the context of your role as an engineer, what is something that brings you joy, and conversely, something that frustrates you, I guess he already talked about failure analysis. But maybe there's another one out there, there is
Shawn Patterson:I've worked with people that when we have some piece of equipment that we don't even understand, maybe we bought a new spectrum analyzer, or even it could be simpler than that a chiller of some kind that has menus and a computer and a brain and you have to figure out how to make it do this and that people that just start pushing buttons, people, they just start going through the menus and changing stuff. And then without really, and they don't know what they're doing. And I'm like, well, we'll and I'm holding the manual, right? I want to so that kind of thing. People that don't respect very expensive lab equipment. And they just go smashing their fingers into the buttons, but also just any of the adjusters I don't like when people just run their palm on a micrometer to instead of using your fingers to turn it like a human being, but like ramming your your your paw on it to spin the handle that's knurled such that they can grab it with your finger, but they're like, they want to get there faster this way. And this motion and I'm like, oh, boy, meet either leave or do I don't know.
Aaron Moncur:I can see like grading on you mentally just thinking about it.
Shawn Patterson:If Yeah, I'm already not feeling great about this. Just kidding. speeds, a sweater coming off your forehead here, right? Because I've never been anyone's direct boss. So I have to ask them please don't do that. Please do it the right way. Or do you don't say something like do it the right way. So you have to keep relationships shirring At work, yeah. Do it like you yell at your little brother.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, so how about the opposite something that brings you joy as an engineer
Shawn Patterson:brings me joy as an engineer is presenting great data in a meeting, and a review, like a design review to people that were not involved in my project. But we all they're all going to share. And like we all everyone wants to know, how's that project going, Shawn, we're going to, you know, the meeting, you're going to present and I prepare my PowerPoint, and I show up. And I have good data to present tonight. And I have a style that I work, you know, I take great photographs with my phone, when I'm in the lab, and I, you know, I can all edit the photographs and put the arrows where they go and show I mean, glowing crystals that are making the laser beam output, you know, and I'll, I love. So I love putting together really good presentations, and I love presenting.
Aaron Moncur:Another thing we talked about a little bit before the show is that you are also a musician, singer, songwriter, and it has been a musician helped you with presenting as an engineer.
Shawn Patterson:Um, I may be so I've, I've been doing open mic nights around, you know, Phoenix for a couple of years now. And that puts you up in front of people and talking. And I it might, because performing, that's just another way of performing. Playing music for people are presenting, you know, quite different but still performing is there. I'm not sure. But I probably this is something more that I the confidence in presenting had to grow with my, my seasoning in engineering and knowing what I'm talking about, after more years that I have experience in this profession. So as my I wasn't always like that. So it was getting out. Yeah, that. So my confidence level rose, and then I've had some really great at compound photonics, you know, we I really conducted some great projects to very successful ends in unknown environment space that I was working in, and can it be done very well. And then a meaning that then after my lone wolf period, in the lab, and reaching out when I need help, when things I don't know, I need some wire bonding done, I need some gold wire bonds, I need something redone. Measured whatever people help you, but then I'm on critical path, right? And that carrying that through is just really exciting and really rewarding and fulfilling. And you get this great sense of ironed my money today.
Aaron Moncur:That's a good feeling. For sure. Well, is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you think listeners ought to know about your experience your insights into the industry, anything else that comes to mind?
Shawn Patterson:Yeah, just just have a free open mind about it and be determined to look deeply into your projects and your interest level. Sometimes you have to artificially make it high. Because you may not love your project sometimes. But learn how to really get your, your focus, and reach out for help when you need it. But just thinking, thinking stopping to think is really important. You will come up with ideas that you didn't know you had when you think about it, but you have to have some understanding of it to be able to think about it back to Calculus and things like that. That's that's teaches students how to think it's not that you're going to be writing derivations on your desk. Because you're not you don't do that. After you leave college. I don't think anyone ever does that anymore. Don't drink and derives.
Aaron Moncur:Oh, that's the best engineering joke I think I've heard all year. Todd drink derived. You heard it here, folks on the being an engineer podcast from Shawn Patterson. I think that's a really good point you make about learning how to think and I'm not sure I've ever thought about it that way. So that was insightful for me to hear. I know for sure that one of the most important things I took away from my college education was learning how to think critically analytically, but I don't know that I ever thought about okay, exactly. How did I learn that? And I think you make a really good point that it's like, you know, doing the math problems, the physics problems, the fluid dynamics problems, it's, it's yeah, you might use that some They may be shocker I have not, like ever really. But going through that process over and over and over does teach you how to think analytically. And I think that's one of the huge benefits of being an engineer. It is you use it, hopefully in all aspects of your life because it is a tool and it's a powerful tool. Yeah. All right. Well, this has been delightful. Shawn, how can people get in touch with you?
Shawn Patterson:I can be emailed at Engineeringsolutionsbysp@gmail.com S P for Shawn Patterson. And that's, uh, you can find me on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, I am Shawn Patrick Patterson, or use my middle name. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm active on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, I love reading articles there. So yeah, they can find me there.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific. All right.
Shawn Patterson:And my musicianship, that's a kind of a different angle of, but I use engineering and writing songs in audio engineering software for recording and sound microphones, equipment, electronics, it all comes into play audio interface for your computers to produce music, so I can also be reached at the music style I make. It's called rustic rock music. And my website is called rustic rock music.com. And that's just another that's the other side of me is the musician, songwriter, acoustic guitar player, harmonica singer. They really enjoy that a lot. So yeah, I have I have a home life with my wife. I make music. She's my editor for music, and she helps me really develop my ideas. And then I love engineering.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome. And you're on Spotify as a musician as well. Yeah, right.
Shawn Patterson:I use my mother's maiden name, which is Sinohui. So it's Sinohui. But I use my first name Shawn. So Shawn Sinohui on Spotify, Apple, iTunes, everywhere that you can stream music, you'll find them but seven or eight of my songs. Terrific.
Aaron Moncur:Great. Well, I hope he gets some new listeners. Wow would be wonderful. And thank you so much, Shawn, for being on the show today. What a pleasure was to talk with you.
Shawn Patterson:had great I had a really great time, Aaron.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode. To learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing turnkey equipment, custom fixtures and automated machines and with product design visit us at Team pipeline.us Thanks for listening.
Shawn Patterson:Never sees my motion. Oh, right out of town he's been here to change
