At Malander Engineering LLC, we are dedicated to bringing you success in your endevours, whether you are a company or an individual. We want you to be great at what you do and achieve that success while enjoying yourself in the process. We're a company that actively investigates the resources you have, as well as those that are available to you, to ensure that you are working effectively and efficiently. Take a minute and imagine what it would be like if your productivity was as close to 100% as you wanted. If there is something slowing you down, or if you would like to have us analysize your situation, feel free to email us. As a convenience to you we also have an online request system where you can present your opportunity and watch the improvements develope.
And, did we mention coaching? We also provide a service where we will meet with you to help you brainstorm new and exciting ways to expand your horizons now that you can accomplish more than ever. If you want to hear some of the success stories, which we have contributed to, stop by our Success Stories page and have a look.
There is an old saying “Necessity is the mother of invention”. While this is seemingly true, in our experience there are often cases in which inventions are not realized because there isn’t a clear understanding of what is needed. In other cases, some would be inventions are left by the wayside because of a misperception of a lack of resources, or the belief that a solution is impossible. Ironically, it is exactly these type of situations that the saying is speaking to. Probably the main cause of these misperceptions is that the decision makers (the person or people controlling the resources) are not the same people that have the need. As a result they may not truly understand the benefit or feasibility of the solution.
Throughout the years of working the in the technology industry we have seen this play out over and over. As an engineer it has been my job to solve the problems, or to create something to provide for necessities that were deemed to be within the ability of the available resource to address. As you might imagine there have also been occasions where it was apparent that a solution was needed and feasible from an engineering perspective, but not well understood from the decision maker’s perspective. It was from these situations that our company was conceived.
We have enjoyed helping our customers better understand the opportunities that are available to them. Many times a simple consult is enough to show them what they could be doing. As soon as they realize the need and get an idea about how to approach making provisions for it, their own employees get energized to create and implement a solution. In those cases we are avaible to assist if those employees run into any roadblocks. In other cases where the need is uncovered in an area where the company itself lacks the expertise to create a solution, we have provided the engineering to create the solution. Then during the installation and implementation processes we work to establish local expertise so that the solution become an organic part of the business. In either of these two situations, it has been our experience that as we work together to discover needs and get systems in place to address them, additional opportunites arise to grow the customers company even futher, or better serve their customers and by so doing surpass the competition.
If you represent a company or are an individual who is either looking to succeed, or take the success you have already achieved and make it enjoyable, please feel free to contact us. On the right side of the page we have provided interface to allow you to post questions or comments as well as request assistance.
All of stories shared here are a recounting of projects that we worked on. The purpose of these are to help you as the reader to understand the possibility and opportunities that become available when one carefully considers the resources that are available and how they might be better utilized. To rephrase that into more common terminology within the industries involving technology, all of these would be considered cases of “thinking outside the box”. For this reason the stories are titled by the need that was satisfied rather than the specific project names.
For the sake of preserving ownership of the intellectual property involved company names and locations will be excluded.
Story 1Situation: A company that designed Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) needed help characterizing one of their devices. In this case the device was an electrically actuated switch, which is similar to a relay. They came to the University where I was studying and hired two students to perform the characterization using the various electrical sources and meters that were available in the University’s Electronics lab.
Task: The way in which the characterization was to be accomplished was by connecting a variable power supply (via micro probes) to the control pads of a switch, to test and control the opening and closing of the switch. An ohm-meter was connected across the signal pads to measure resistance before, during, and after actuation of the switch. In addition while the switch was closed, a current source was used to test if the current capacity of the signal path met, or exceeded, the necessary specification. All of the voltages applied, as well as the resistances and current capacities were recorded on a piece of paper. That is after recording the initial conditions, the power supply was to be turn up slowly until the resistance seen on the ohm-meter dropped dramatically. When that happened the voltage of the power supply as well as the resistance seen by the ohm-meter were to be recorded on paper. Then the voltage of the power supply was to be lowered slowly until the resistance jumped up, ideally back to its initial value. This voltage and resistance were again to be recorded. This process was to be repeated until the device failed. When the device failed, we were to type all the data we collected into a spread sheet and send that to the engineers and project manager.
The expected lifetime of the devices we were testing, in terms of cycles, was in the many 10’s of millions. The process of doing one cycle could take minutes depending on the voltage at which the device actuated, and how quickly you ramped the control voltage. It also depended on how quickly the person could record the information.
Action: After performing this process for a couple of days, and successfully collecting relatively few data points, it was clear that a different approach was needed. An automated approach was needed, or we would probably never reach the desired cycles to failure of 90 million. On top of that the process introduced a lot of variables that complicated the process of engineering a better device based on the data. The variables were the result of all of the steps in the process being done by hand, which meant there was no uniformity in voltage ramp rates, sensitivity to closing (switch actuation) voltages, etc. The more consistency one attempted in these areas, the longer the process would take. An automated solution could at once eliminate most if not all of this variability. As a result I requested that they allow me to create an automated test system. The opportunity was granted, with much enthusiasm from the engineers waiting for the data. The first step was to connect all of the electronic devices to a PC, using a GPIB card and cabling. Then HP VEE was used to programmatically implement the test procedures. The electronic devices being used to test the switches were not quite capable of doing all the needed measurements, so a circuit board was created to extend their capabilities. Because the end result of the testing was to be an excel spread sheet, Microsoft Visual Basic (VB) was used to create components. These were integrated into the HP VEE system, so the data could be written directly into Excel. In addition to that VB was used to perform the statistical analysis and generate the charts used by management and the engineers.
Result: The result was that measurements could be taken much more quickly and in a consistent manner. In fact, the results came in so quickly that we were actually able to test devices to failure, which generally occurred in the 1.6-2.6 billion cycle range. This success gave rise to new opportunities. The main one being that we could now actually perform failure analysis on the switches. It turned out that the other student involved was interested in photography, and was overjoyed by the chance to take pictures with her camera, of both known good as well as failed devices, so that the failure mechanisms might be determined. In practice it was difficult to take consistent pictures by hand. This gave me the opportunity to design and build a wafer mount, or leveling stage, that could be precisely adjusted, so as to achieve consistent pictures. On top of all of this, we had a resource at the University, that was sitting unused for the most part, which was a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Our focus was now effectively shifted away from doing the day to day measurements, which could likely have gone on indefinitely with minimal progress to show for it, to doing complete lifetime validation and failure analysis. As a result, we were able to leverage the SEM and get a detailed view of how various design features held up to, or were changed by, continual use. On our part as research assistants, our work went from a very monotonous and repetitive process that didn’t really leverage our knowledge and experience as engineers, to one where we were adding tremendous value to the company and really enjoying the work we were doing.
Situation: A local Bible church was in need of web development and maintenance assistance. There was a webpage for the church, but it was outdated and there was no one administering the webpage.
Task: The webpage that the church had when we first began to assist them was a wordpress webpage. This had been done in an effort to make it easier to maintain. However, certain functionality was desired that was not easily available within wordpress. Therefore, custom development (HTML, CSS, Javascript) was necessary to achieve a webpage that provided all the functionality and style desired by the members.
Action: We gave the webpage some much needed updating, as well as adding some customized CSS to give the page a fresh, new look. We also added audio streaming capabilities to the page to enable the church's message to get out in an efficient and aesthetically pleasing way. From there we continued to support the webpage through regular content updates, and worked to maintain what had been done to improve the church webpage.
Result: Once we completed our update work on the webpage, it was possible for the public to get uptodate information about the church through the webpage. Beyond this was one significant intended benefit as well as at least one unforeseen benefit. During the time leading upto our work with the webpage, some of the believers who had attended the church on a regular basis were no longer able to attend due to physical limitation, illness and even geographic location. By providing the sermons in audio format, the believers were now able to listen and participate at their convenience. The participation part brings us to the unintented benefit, and that is, having provide both the sermon and the notes, participants of the church were able to complete their own followup studies, starting from where the pastor left off rather then starting from scratch. As a result the amount of spiritual growth as well as the depth of Christian fellowship were greatly enhanced. This occured prior to the Covid shutdowns and so, at that time, the newly available media was used to supplement rather than replace existing interaction between members.
Situation: The head administrator of a group was over-whelmed by the magnitude of work necessary to maintain accurate and up-to-date memeber information. This was due to the fact that the member sign up was done entirely on paper. The difficulties represented themselves in two main areas. The first was during the annual meeting. The purpose of the is meeting was to introduce members to each other as well as discuss currently planned events as as well as how to create and run events. During that meeting the sign-up sheets were available for new members. Some years, there were quite a few people filling them out. Answering questions about the form delayed or inhibited the administator's participation in the meeting. The second area of difficulty was that these forms were being filled out by hand and then collected to be reviewed by the administrator who would then enter the data into a Google Sheets. This process was quite time consumming and in some cases difficult to accomplish because of illegible handwriting.
Task: We were asked by the administrator to figure out a way to streamline the sign up process. During that discussion it also became clear that the means by which the data was collected also created difficulties in managing the member data later on. Therefore, anything that would help in that area would also be greatly appreciated. One example of a data management problem was that Google Sheets would not allow some of the data to be updated after it was initially created. As a work-around the Administator had just been adding new member entries any time a member needed to change the read only information. As a result their spread sheet had quite a few duplicate entries making it difficult to keep track of who was still a member and who wasn't, which entries were valid and which weren't, etc.
Action: While talking with the administrator as well as other members it became clear that while they all supported the idea of making the admin's life easier, they basically wanted it done without changing anything. As a result we proposed a web-based application that included a sign-up form that was identical to the paper form currently being used. This idea was accepted although there was considerable concern about managing the data. To alleviate these concerns we created an administrator form that allowed them to access and modify data as needed from within the web-app. It should be mentioned that while we were developing a custom solution, we were performing demos along the way at the administrator's request. Each time a demo was performed, we successfully demonstrated the functionality that was desired. One of the common side effects of our work was again witnessed. That side effect is that when the customer (in this case the administrator) starts to see how much our solution can do for them, they begin to think about the possibilities, get excited, and start to say things like "That is great. Could we also have it do...". We went through several iterations of this, each time adding additional functionality to make the customer's life easier.
Result: In the end we did a demo in front of all the decision makers, and they liked the solution so much, and it seemed so simple, that they decided to try to further develop the idea for themselves. This became similar to our solution at the sign-up page. They decided, however, they wanted to stay with the Google Sheets, having the administrator create duplicate entries, but adding another column to indicate if the entry was current or not.
Maybe yours is next!
The comment box to the right has been provided so that you can easily provide any comments or questions.
However, if you need to get in touch with us using more traditional methods, please feel free to contact using the information below.
Malander Engineering LLC
6555 Westbourn Circle
Fort Collins, CO 80525
(970) 226-8726
michael@malanderengineering.com
These are products that are already developed and ready for use.
For ease of use and availability, these products are available as Software as a Service unless otherwise stated.
UltiClocker brings employees closer together by fostering:
UltiClocker's sleek, yet simple design makes the transition to UltiClocker quick, and easy. The UltiClocker experience is designed for people, and is straightforward and easy to use.
This is free and open source software that we developed for fun.
If you like what we are doing, leave a comment telling us so, or email the developer.
Or if you would like to donate, tell us, and we will put a link here for you to do so.
Prerequisites:
Emacs: you can get it here.
Org: Emacs Sword is built for use in org-mode, so org is a must.
Installation:
You can install Emacs Sword from the Malander Engineering emacs repository.
If you have package, you can add that repo with:
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("MalanderEngineering" . "https://malanderengineering.com/packages/") t)
To your init file.
You can now install Emacs Sword in any of the usual ways. Including, but not limited to:
(use-package emacs-sword :ensure t)
Please refer to the documentation found here.
Developed by:
William Malander
william@malanderengineering.cοm
The above is not copy-pasteable
We can provide development assistence in the following areas
Our objective is to create solutions that enhance employee productivity, not eliminate them. It has often been said that "employees are a company's greatest asset." We could not agree more!
As a result we think a company's success can be directly measured by the success of it's individual employees. Therefore, in order to help a company grow and prosper, we endevour to make each employee's success achievable and enjoyable.
At your convenience we can develop software solutions in the following languages.
We can also develop solutions in the following scripting languages.
Web developement can be provided using:
We can also help create or support existing WordPress pages
Our objective is to create solutions that enhance employee productivity, not eliminate them. It has often been said that "employees are a company's greatest asset." We could not agree more!
As a result we think a company's success can be directly measured by the success of it's individual employees. Therefore, in order to help a company grow and prosper, we endevour to make each employee's success achievable and enjoyable.
Our areas of consulting include:
Our objective is to suggest improvement that enhance employee productivity, not eliminate them. It has often been said that "employees are a companies greatest asset." We could not agree more!
As a result we think a company's success can be directly measured by the success of it's individual employees. Therefore, in order to help a company grow and prosper, we endevour to make each employee's success achievable and enjoyable.