Large Scale Automated Test System Reconfiguration

A detailed diagram of the relay cards we designed as part of the patent we filed at Boeing. It was accepted as a patent in January of 2017.

While working at the Integrated Airplane Systems Lab at Boeing I worked with Boeing's Intellectual Property Management (IPM) group to submit one of our designs to be patented. The full filing can be found here in plain text and here in pdf. I received awards from the IPM group at Boeing for this relay system and a power verifier. The USPTO awarded this system a patent in January of 2017 and I'm now a patented inventor! None of this would have been possible without the years of work that the hardware design system team put in before I was ever even hired at Boeing. Pat McCuen’s hard work as the architect of the hardware design group laid the template/groundwork/enabled this system to be successful. Pat’s feedback on this configuration proved invaluable in adapting it to future projects. Without Pat I definitely wouldn’t have this patent and the hardware design group would definitely be struggling!

The Relay cards would be installed into relay boxes.

Those boxes would then be installed into our test systems to be able to automate the switch between testing configurations.

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The statue and pin I received from the Intellectual Property Management group at Boeing for the relay box system and for the power verifier I designed for them.

When I left Boeing they threw me a reirement party.

I made this plaque for my mentor Mark Best who retired after 36 years at Boeing. Without him I wouldn't have challenged the status quo nearly enough.

The labs that we built supported multiple different airplane configurations and our invention used custom built modular relay cards to automate the switch between configurations. Numerous of the other labs at Boeing would be reconfigured by having a lab technician physically move cables from one part of the system to another. This resulted in a bunch of bent pins, the system being accidentally mis-configured and lots of wasted test time. Our invention automated this process and made the switch over in seconds versus hours!