My first job experiance

Hi all,
I will be sharing my experience about how luck or God's landed in to my first job. After finishing my engineering graduation in the year 2002, which was shaken by dot com bubble burst scenario. Every one in IT were in nightmare as there was numerous job losses in the industry. It was when times were bad for people in software industry to retain their jobs and at that time my hunt for job started and it was very difficult to get jobs in reputed companies. I was trying for all kinds of jobs, and after some rough SWOT analysis embedded system field looked as a bright prospect to me to start my carrier. It would be also in tune with my area of graduation (Electronics and communication).

Hence after along search enrolled myself for embedded system training in a small institute. They explained the concepts using books and used software simulator to execute small programs of less practical value in industry. After finishing the course out my luck in smaller companies dealing with electronic products in industrial belts around chennai. None proved effective and my search continued day after day and pressure increasing from my parents.

One chance encounter changed my life and gave a break to my carrier. I used to collect micro controller related stuffs in my computer and subscribed to many software tools subscriptions from reputed electronics company in embedded field. They would mail all the subscription CD on a bubble covered pouch.

Once i thought of taking backup of my hard disk onto CD and hence removed my hard disk and wrapped safely on one such pouch and took to a near by computer shop to burn the contents in to CD. Since the burning time for each CD will take about 20 minutes, the shop vendor noticed the pouch bearing the company name and started asking about embedded systems. we soon started conversation regarding every part of embedded system, uses, markets and application areas. During that time he hinted that he owns a small company and they were expecting a new project in embedded system and was searching for any one interested to work with him without fat pay.

I forwarded my resume to them and after few months they called me (i lost my hope and tried some other places during those time) to join their company. It was a small room with a PC and PIC debugger along with all discrete electronic items. There i started learning from basics about transistor principle, board designing, digital electronics, power design, embedded programming in C, cross compiler. we used Microchip's PIC micro controller for all our projects because of in-circuit debugging feature. Out first project was a high power voltage switch for staring motors at preprogrammed time.

Then we started our main project of designing automation electronic systems for a leather painting machine for a mid size leather processing equipment manufacturer. Our job was to replace the equipment's discrete electronic circuits to embedded systems design reducing number of components and reduce service time. We both started a journey of challenging phase in all aspects of embedded systems design and implementation for completing the project successfully. Every thing we had to learn from scratch, we used innovative and ingenious technics to overcome design and development issues both in hardware and software.

once we wrongly designed the board circuit of a high current transistor (TO package) cross connecting the Emitter and collector points. we crossed those two pins and used heat shrink as insulator and soldered the transistor on board, every transistor was left hanging on board. We used schematics software Protel for design instead of graph sheet for a geometric calculation. At last after a great struggle we completed the project and installed in a factory. But the supervisor after noticing glitches on leather during power start up and shutdown refused to
accept our design. We then took a laptop to site and connected the laptop to board using in circuit debugger to fix the issue. But out laptop got hanged due to electro magnetic interference (EMI) from the machine.Then we analyzed the code off line and fixed the issue by adding a delay during power up stage. i enjoyed each and every moment of my work in that company.