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1983 - 1986 Richard joined the co-op program for electrical engineering in his 3rd year at University of Maryland. He chose to work a Naval Surface Weapons Center (NSWC) because of a recommendation from the college program and after interviewing with the head of the department to which he would eventually work. The work at NSWC's G43 department was
centered around building state-of-the-art fuses for conventional missiles.
Over the three years at NSWC, Ricahard worked on a number of projects,
performing a variety of functions. They included:
The last item in the list was a fascinating project to take a completely analog fuse and turn it into a completely digital one. This digital equivalent was based on the Motorola 8051 microcontroller. Instead of relying on temperature sensitive and imprecise analog components, this new bread of fuse used machine language to perform the signal processing tasks. For this project Richard programmed the microcontroller, designed the signal processing "glue" and even created a digital instrumentation system to better test the device. For this, Richard won a couple of awards. |