Location 57.1511 N, -170.2501 W
U.S. Coast Guard Loran Station St Paul, Saint Paul Alaska. This was a one-month temporary assignment where they needed an experienced transmitter technician to cover while the replacement was identified.
St. Paul is certainly cold. The diesel engines purred, and the transmitter was a wonder of technology. The transmitter’s water cooled F1086 vacuum tubes were the highlight of the tour.
Note: This post is part of DigiKey’s celebration of engineering week. The question was selected from social media feeds.
The coolest piece of tech is the one that inspires you
What would you do on an island 300 miles past the point of nowhere?
One month isn’t a long time. As far as professional duties were concerned, it was appropriate to maintain the status quo to provide continuity for the new technical supervisor.
To keep busy, I purchased the equipment necessary to program the PIC16C71 as shown in this picture. This included a laptop, two ceramic chips, a UV erasure, several books describing the PIC and a collection of parts: some from DigiKey and some from Radio Shack.
Figure 1: Image of the author’s first microcontroller project. The LEDs would move back and forth with a brief tone emitted once every cycle.
For that entire month, I dedicated myself to learning PIC 16 programming. That’s over 100 hours dedicated to a single task. I learned assembly language techniques for functions, jumps, and acceptable program organization.
Years later, I discovered that I had done things the hard way as the very first program featured a timer-based Interrupt Service Routing (ISR). Concepts such as saving the microcontroller’s context (W and status registers) and polling for the source of the interrupt were among the first lessons learned.
The 8-bit Microchip PIC will always be the coolest piece of tech because it was an essential learning process that reshaped the way I thought about technology. In one month, I learned some of the most valuable lessons in electronics that started me on the journey to my current position at DigiKey.
The time spent with the PIC16 microcontroller was as profound as first learning how to compute Ohm’s law. This was also a wonderful lesson in interpreting microcontroller data sheets.
Parting thoughts
The PIC16 is forever part of my story.
I’d love to hear your answer—what’s the coolest piece of tech you got the chance to interact with.
By the way, in northern Minnesota it is perfectly acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition, especially when it’s too cold outside to worry about grammar. We just say, “Do you want to come with?” It’s much easier that saying, “Will you please take a moment to share your story to inspire the future generation of engineers?”
Sincerely,
Aaron
Image of a F1086 vacuum tube which is the hottest piece of technology I have ever worked with.
About this author
Aaron Dahlen, LCDR USCG (Ret.), serves as an application engineer at DigiKey. He has a unique electronics and automation foundation built over a 27-year military career as a technician and engineer which was further enhanced by 12 years of teaching (interwoven). With an MSEE degree from Minnesota State University, Mankato, Dahlen has taught in an ABET-accredited EE program, served as the program coordinator for an EET program, and taught component-level repair to military electronics technicians. Dahlen has returned to his Northern Minnesota home and thoroughly enjoys researching and writing articles such as this.