bcsinnovations

Steve ‘Mac” Rowe (Electrical Engineer) Having fun at the 2009 Engineering Excellence Awards

How long have you been with BCS?

About 9 years full time. But I was doing consulting work for BCS for a year or so before then.

What were you doing before then?

I was at Polartechnics, working on a cervical cancer diagnostic device. I was doing a lot more electronics in those days and learned the hard way not to design based on preliminary datasheets.  I designed a DSP based system using the bleeding edge of ICs, but when the DSP chip was officially released, it had half the maximum clock rate the preliminary datasheet predicted.  This caused me quite a bit of angst, but we made some savings in another area to cope.  I'll never make that mistake again!

Who was here when you started?

Dave Bull and Steve Sommer. They were working in Dave's garage on fold out desks in Marsfield, Sydney.  They cleared a patch in the corner, and I joined.

How long did you stay in the garage?

We were in there for a few years, it was loads of fun. Jan, Dave's wife, would sometimes cook us lunch and we would go upstairs and sit around their dining  table.

One day in the garage we were trying to solve a problem for a new sugar purity testing device.  David picked up some parts from Jaycar to prototype up a solution - this was back before the technical side of Jaycar rebranded and decided they preferred to be called 'Electus'.  He ended up talking with the sales guy behind the counter at Jaycar about what he was going to use the parts for, and the sales guy (a bright young chap called Andy Wyatt) suggested a totally different approach. It was one of those genius “I wish I thought of that” moments.

It turns out Andy was studying mechatronics engineering as well as managing an electronics store.  When he completed his engineering degree (picking up the University Medal on the way) he ended up working for us.  Now he's our technical project manager and he still keeps coming up with those “I wish I thought of that” moments.

What has been the most interesting project you have worked on?

Most of our projects are really interesting in themselves, even in the most mundane jobs there are always puzzles to solve.  Engineering is all about achieving the results with limitations. The limitation might be time or money, but it might also be power consumption or manufacturability. Every project is slightly different and it’s great using the skills you've fine tuned on one project on the next.  My favourite projects though are always the ones that I can start from scratch.
 
Most amusing thing that happened ?

The project was a multi-channel audio recorder which could record up to 16 channels simultaneously.  It won its fair share of awards, and was cutting edge for its time.  Since it was international, you could select the language on the LCD screen to not only be English but Chinese, Korean and half a dozen other languages.
 
Thankfully, the customer had organised all the screens to be professionally translated, so we didn't have to do that.  It had been in the market for a while when my sister dropped in for lunch one day and I couldn't resist showing off what a great job we had done on this device. My sister however, could read and write Chinese fluently, and noticed that the phrase “You are listening to Channel 3” had been translated as “You are listening to water road 3”.  Nobody had mentioned it before.  I now have a lot of respect for the amount of work done to produce international products!

So why are you called  'Mac'?

I'm told it's short for Stephen.  I never figured it out either.  If there is a terribly amusing story in my dim dark past that can explain it, nobody's talking.  I've been called 'Mac' for well over a decade or so now, and I can't imagine being called anything else.