Niceville, FL
bob.cv@baggerman.org

The two passions in my life are aviation and electronics. I am a 450+ hour instrument pilot. I am also a Maker. I make things. The last half of my career I have been fortunate in being able to bring these two together in developing aircraft instrumentation.

I hold an Airplane, Single Engine, Land with Instrument Rating license. I passed my private check ride in Dec 1980, worked on my instrument rating for 12 year (passed the written twice) and finally passed my instrument check ride in May 1998. I don't hold a commercial rating so every hour I've flow has been on my nickle. Between my flying, hanging out with flying friends, and doing electronics research work for the US Air Force I've gotten had some interesting experiences. Here are a few pictures of some of them.

Most of my career was spent developing and testing military avionics systems, mostly for the US Air Force. The last half of my career was spent supporting flight test programs, writing analysis software, performing flight test data analysis, and developing instrumentation. I became active in the DoD Range Commmanders Council in 2005, helping develop the IRIG 106 standard for flight test instrumentation. I write open source software libraries and tools that implement the IRIG 106 standard and make them available through my irig106.org web site. One of my last projects was to assemble a telemetry downlink receiving station.

I also spent 3 years at Zodiac Data Systems (now Safran Data Systems) as a Field Applications Engineer. Zodiac makes flight data recorders and so my instrumentation and IRIG 106 experience was a natural fit. I enjoyed working with the factory guys in Cologne, Germany and Paris, France, and I enjoyed working with customers to solve their instrumentation problems. Along the way I developed the Zodiac support web site. I enjoyed my time at Zodiac and they were very good to me, but I decided to quit full time salary work and try consulting jobs.

Lately I've been consulting with a startup company that makes an innovative commercial roof vent system. I have made some automated test jigs and pressure instrumentation systems. I also designed and fabricated mechanical test fixtures and electronic instrumentation for wind tunnel testing.

I make things. I make things for fun, and sometimes I make things for profit. But I always make things for fun.

I love electronics and instrumentation so it is natural I would develop my own altimeter / barometer. This is my own hardware and software design and I've had a lot of fun making it.

In 2018 when a hurricane was approaching I lashed together a hurricane wind speed logging station. It is based on an inexpensive anemometer interfaced to a Raspberry Pi which sends wind speed reading to my wind speed web site.

With the wind speed station are receivers for receiving aircraft ADS-B and boat AIS transmissions. ADS-B data is sent to FlightAware as well as a couple of other flight data web sites. I also make available a real time feed of aircraft positions in my area.

I also track boats on the Choctawhatchee Bay with an AIS receiver and send the data to MarineTraffic as well as a couple of other boat tracking web sites. My boat tracks can be seen at the MarineTraffic web site. My station is “PTR Station ID 555”.

I have been mentoring high school robotics since 2009. There aren't many opportunities for kids to learn shop skills these days. Certainly not like when I was in high school. Many of them don't know which end of a screw driver to pick up. For a lot of kids this is their one opportunity to learn to cut, drill, and make something. I think it is important and I have a lot of fun with it.

I recently need to wind some cotton string into a light decorative rope for special occasion. We learned to twist rope with a crude homemade jig way back in Boy Scouts. I brought that concept into the 21st century with some gears custom designed in Autodesk Fusion 360. I 3D printed the gears and the gear mount assembly as well as a guide handle. It worked great, just like back in Boy Scouts.

My wife has trouble keeping up with me when we ride bicycles so I electrified her bike. This is an $80 Huffy from Walmart. By the time I put new planetary gears on the back wheel and an electric motor assist on the front wheel I had about $1000 in this thing. But it rides like a dream!

I also do a little wood working when I get the time. I have a small shop so I make small projects. Box making has been my focus lately. Boxes require a high degree of precision that I enjoy. I mostly work from found wood because it has so much more character. Here is a box I recently made from wormy oak from a neighbors house and some pin cherry that fell in a storm.