Welcome to Ivan Paul Davey Portfolio

Over the years I have designed many items from simple controls circuits to complex automation controls above you can see a couple of electronic items I've designed

My ideal working role would be: a controls engineer, working with Rockwell or SCARDA systems; where I would make improvements to existing equipment and new designed to increase productivity, I have over twenty years working within computer control systems and a good understanding on most industries, I would start by removing persistent faults, this would then give time to work on improvements, I believe that anything is possible, but miracles can take longer.

My Destiny: At an early age I liked trying to find out how things worked, playing with batteries and motors, I even found that a battery and a transformer would give back EMF as I know it now, I used this to give my playmates at school electric shocks, my Father worked at Marconi and my Mother worked at a microchip company, I still remember every time they made a break through my mother came home with a new microchip, first 2 transistors then 4 on a chip and so on, now of coarse they put many thousands on a chip.

At school: I guess this set my destiny, at school I was into science remember making a valve amplifier, then playing with an OC71 transistor, if you scrapped the black paint off the transistor it become light sensitive, in my last year I remember making a analogue computer very simple just done add multiply and subtraction, At this time digital computers where only for business mainly IBM machines.

While at school I got a part time job: on Saturdays I was working at the local motorcycle shop, helping with repairs and building new motorcycle for the showroom, I seamed to get all the electrical problems and rewired many motorcycle, then worked at the local auto electrics reconditioning starting motors, dynamos, alternators, I got 30 shillings a week I gave ten shillings to my mum, and ten shillings into saving club, and had ten shillings for myself it went a long way you could buy 48 chews for a shilling or half a gallon of petrol for my motorbikes, I would spend hours stripping and rebuilding my motorbikes and racing them over the fields.

My Apprenticeship Test: I wanted to work at Marconi, I can thank my mother for helping me, she took me to Chelmsford for the test, their were about 30 others wanting the apprenticeship and their were only six places, I found the test very easy, one test was taking one piece of wire and making into a shape like this below without any ruler, the idea was to make a square and get the last part of the wire to fit into the corner, try it...

I got mine to within 2mm, then I was given a puzzle to solve, the tester started his stopwatch and put it down but by that time I had finished, too his surprise.

My Apprenticeship: I was lucky and started my apprenticeship at Chelmsford new street in the R&D department, I was on day release at Dovedale college, I loved it, I learned all about the technicalities of materials & electronics, after the first year I was transferred to water house lane where they were in the process of designing the colour broadcasting TV camera, I come out of my apprenticeship with a steam engine I built in my spare time and a HNC + in Electro Mechanical Engineering.

My First Job: Was with Compton Instruments near to where I lived, I was put into the calibration department were I had to calibrate high voltage 11KV and high currant 1KA power meters, carry out three phase power factor & balance correction, also helped in building echo sounders.

My next Job: was just next door with Morris Ashby a SHELL company, I went and see the MD and managed to convince him that I could takeover as electrical maintenance engineer, within six months I was promoted to charge hand, then Forman, their is no drought this is where I leaned the building blocks of everything I now know today, anything I wanted SHEEL would buy it, I made the machines run faster and safer doubled the output with the same number of operators, I put in robots index tables and built control panels their where no PLC back then I had to hand build and design everything, they even let me build a digital computer this is before Sinclair Spectrum, using the lintel 8080 processor it even had a 12v clock? I managed to get it running at 18MHz with 2K of memory that took up half the board made up of 64 byte chips!!! I came out of Morris Ashby with a Manager, Hydraulic and Pneumatic certificates and all the control knowledge anyone would every need.

Machine Control: When it comes to machine control I'm a natural designer, I have designed many controls over the years from simple stop / start circuits to networked multi control PLC / HMI I have just taken (2009) a BTEC with Rockwell Automation and passed on the Allen Bradley RSLogix 5000 Programmable Logic Controllers. 

I started at Global Automation, as a panel builder making control panels for dust vents and backup power supplies, I then got moved to their electronic department where I designing and made industrial calibrators for the oil and gas industry, the first calibrator I worked on would do pressure in seven rangers, two temperature rangers, five AC voltage, five DC Voltage, two DC Current, and a 4-20mA Range with percentage, this instruments was of analogue design. After sometime we moved to Corby Northants change to Metartec were I was made up to senior electronics engineer and started to bring in my digital knowledge to design many instruments like the PIC500 and MET100 the MET100 is still being made and sold a decade later as of their robust design and high accuracy it was sold off to Time Electronics when Metartec closed, the instrument just relied on a single 3ppm resistor in a rotormetric mode with a 24bit sigma delta A/D making it very stable, I believe that this was the first time this type of design was done using the monitor circuit to feed back into the simulation circuit through a Microchip most other designs use a current mirror circuit, I could write pagers about the projects I have done for this company. The main thing I learned in this job is that everything needs to be balanced and finding the best way to remove any imbalance.

The great thing about this type of circuit over the mirror circuit is that you can use math's for any correction. I wrote a 21bit third polynomial in assembler for this project, and fitted it all in a 2k PIC microchip.

My belief is, if everything has an equal opposite and when they come together they cancel each other out to nothing then my way of thinking is that from nothing you can make equal opposites of something.

By this I don't mean there is an anti-me somewhere, but just the same amount of anti-particles
that make up every particle as we know it Jim!. 

After Metartec had closed, I started work for IEEE Industrial Electronic and Electrical Engineers as a front line projects engineer I got mainly involved with the packaging industry making fast controls with mechanical compensation, one of my tasks, was to carryout any new control designs, I also had to commission new machines home and abroad, I would also be asked to go and fire fighting / fault-find on other companies machines, I am more then capable of walking up to any machine even if I've never seen before without any drawings and fix it. 

If you would like me to design something for you then please use my contact page.