End of consulting projects!

 The last couple of years have been frantic. I was supposed to be retired but ended up on a couple of projects that ate up the time.

HOWEVER - as of yesterday.....

I have taken the decision to down tools on consultancy work and focus on stuff I want to do. That includes travel as well as finishing off the frog and bridge products we have built within the Advisory business.

Feels like I've retired - still 'working' but not getting paid for any of this - does that constitute retirement?

Anyway I need to run through what I can remember of the past year to try and not have a gap in the blog records.

Things that happened in 2021 and up to July in 2022 that I can remember - in bullet form,

1. Presentation of bridge monitoring and satellites at Manseds conference - first I'd done in quite a while.
2. Many trips to the 'Static' in Wales - excellent working breaks.
3. Roxy (our motorhome) trip with Amanda around Scotland - fantastic!
4. 1st and 2nd Glasbury bridge recordings taken with SAIN
5. Anniversary in LLandrindod Wells
6. Start work on Autonomous Minesweeper project for Thales.
7. Trip to Plymouth to see 'the boat'
8. Trip to Madrid with Richard to visit FOSSA Syatems and update on SAIN dev.
9. Christmas in the Static
10. Trip to Maui - WOW always great. Lahaina flat and worked through analysis of SAIN data with Stuart.
11. Trips to Bristol, Templecombe on Thales job
12. Trip to Crete on historical tour.
13. HS1 'wall' recordings with SAIN
14. 3rd Glasbury bridge recording
15. Salisbury and Bristol again to finish Thales job.
16. ENDED CONSULTANCY PROJECTS FOR NETWORK RAIL AND THALES IN JUNE

which probably doesn't mean much to anyone but myself. 

Now to refocus on SAIN.

2019 summary (very late - 2/10) - research entry that was missing

 

2020 - Year of the lockdown

 2020 - A strange year all in all - but major progress was made!

The potted history;

1. Project work rolled in throughout the year which was very good for business finances. 
2. Big ticket item is that we finally delivered the 25 Manchester Metrolink Safety Cases for Thales - after 5 years!
3. We took up residence in Sensor City offices in Liverpool. Then promptly got moved out to Liverpool Science Park while the SC offices were being 'expanded'. We will see if we ever move back?
4. We built our rail infrastructure simulator CLAMP Critical Location Acoustic Modification Platform and took many thousands of readings for various void and bridge configurations. 
5. We were planning of running some real field tests with SAIN but lockdown put a stop to that. So we ended up doing runs on CLAMP.
6. We secured a trial on road bridges in Powys which hopefully we will carry out this year - once we are out of the third lockdown period!
7. Ten SAIN units are now on delivery from Fossa for this project.
8. We are also firming up our bridge signature analysis and hope to be presenting the results in Mallorca at the Civil Comp conference in 2021.

So all in all not such a bad year. Our caravan in Wales has helped tremendously - many weeks were spent there planning and researching which otherwise would not have happened!

Onward and upward.....

2018 - where did it all go - just realised I didn't do one of these

I'm slipping - so bit late and a bit brief but this is what we were up to in 2018!

Busy, busy, busy.....the journey continues.

Name of project	Uncertainties at start	Issues arising during project	Further work	Ongoing/Ended
CROAC – app to analyse Costa Rican frog calls.	Could we develop an analysis package to run on mobile phone for identifying calls in the wild.	Difficulties with running complex analysis fast enough on mobile devices. Complexity of the background noise to the calls. Resulting in false calls.	Algorithm needs refining to help reduce false calls.	Ongoing
Rail infrastructure health monitoring.	Could the health of railway infrastructure (points, bridges, tunnels etc) be monitored through their changing sounds.	Difficulty getting access to real railway infrastructure. So we used a model railway to prove the concepts and think through the sensors required. Preliminary analysis showed simplest analysis would be to focus on bridges.	Need to develop sensor to a level where it can be left for a period of time in the field. Need to prove we can identify signals for real railway bridges.	Ongoing
PACE – air-conditioning control system.	Could a new air-conditioning approach be controlled using the new LoRA radio communication protocol and a simple control device.	Control of the peltier cooler was non-trivial requiring significant hardware modifications. LoRA communication setup proved less effective that originally anticipated.	May look to use more standard communication methods.	Ended – proved LoRA is not right for this system.
Wheel slip analysis	Could a big-data approach be used to analyse rail wheel slip occurrences.	Access to appropriate data was difficult to obtain. Data was provided by Siemens in the end but then we ended up with too much data. Effort then had to be expended refining this data.	Initial analysis has demonstrated the technique. Larger data sets are now needed to refine the algorithms.	Ongoing
FOSSA – satellite swarm communications. Effectively he ‘glue’ to communicating and transmitting data from remote monitoring devices using cheap satellite systems.	Could a cube-sat be developed to use the new LoRA communication protocol. Built and launched at low cost.	Difficulties encountered applying the LoRA protocol to the satellite communication time window. Power consumption on the satellite required special design of solar cells.	The cube sat now needs final build then tested and commissioned for flight	Ongoing – launch planned for Sept 2019

Pico-Satellite coming along

Nothing to do with me mind - project is one of my trusted advisors projects.

Check out @FossaSys on Twitter for full info.

However, its a great learning ground for my Fortran revival - learning by osmosis about Arduino's and LORA with a bit of programming thrown in (but not too much mind).

Box of tricks just arrived for the schools workshops that are planned to take place over coming months - code to be flown on the satellite.

How cool is that.....beep, beep, beep....

The revival is revived!

Railway Big Data done small

Workshop now contains our rail simulator!

Why bother building our own you ask?

Well we have had a few negative encounters around :-

• Difficulties getting funding
• Difficulties getting access to data
• Difficulties not giving away IPR 

The solution is, therefore, build our own railway - a miniaturized version  of course! This does have some issues with scalability however its great for proof of concept stuff and is getting us into real data analysis of multi data streams.

4 Arduinos being installed and coded up ready for all sorts of good stuff!

Onward and upward.....

2017 - where did it go?

Long time no blog - life took over!

Things have moved on in business and on the home front.Home front we have moved house finally after 12 months of renovation of the new property 'The Villa' we are now in and up and running. I have my Ohana (office) and Advisory workshop (garage) initiatives in progress.

Work front has been full on. Majority of the year was spent working on a project for Thales, which I think is now under control and can be moved on to the next phase in the New Year. This has been great for consolidating the business and given a bit of 'thinking' time to what needs to be focused on and where funding is going to come from. And its not the following, one thing 2017 has shown us is that.....start of RANT.....

getting funding for innovation projects in the UK is a complete nightmare - so much so that we have given up trying on our own as a small business. Catapult, runs is own consulting arm - why - I have no idea - seems a little conflicted to me - so now we won't bid because we've had ideas 're-cycled'. Also why on earth would you go to one of their events to brainstorm ideas for innovation. Well we went to one but that was it. Then there are other Innovate UK initiatives i.e. KTP - where's your business case and partners - and by the way can you fund 50% of the work. Its not as bad as that, I'm sure if we put enough bids in we would get something in the spray of money coming out. The issue here is the amount of time it takes to put a submission together - i.e. to fill out all the forms (while working full time on projects and making sure your business is still functioning). I'm sure its just a means of keeping box ticking checkers employed. May as well just fund 100% of the research yourself as you could have the work done in the time it takes to do all this - and keep the IPR.

.....end of RANT.

We did waste a lot of time and energy on these things. Suppose its fine if you are a large outfit with spare capacity to service the submissions but we don't have that luxury. better to just get on with development. So that's what we did.

We have been building upon out review of big data and its application in the railway sector in particular. These have included;

• building a strategic relationship with AIT the Austrian Institute of Technology to resell their product range.
• building partnerships on projects with Universities such as Lancaster and Manchester - both working out brilliantly for us.
• setting up an office in Atlanta to build links with Georgia State University and to kickstart our US business.
• developing an NLP tool for analysing risk logs - see a previous blog on this one - I got so excited I blogged - conference coming up in 2018 to present the results.
• keynote speaking at events such as the IMechE annual conference - scary.

So, in all, 2017 has been a year of consolidation and positioning, we now need to push through on some of  the product development ideas.....onwards and upwards in 2018.

Cheers.....Gary