Greg Garner History
Greg Garner began tinkering with electronics when he was 8 years old. He got a Radio Shack 1001 experimenters kit. Boy that was fun! Next, some good friends that worked at Hewlett Packard gave Greg 10 boxes of discarded electronic stuff. This equipement was planted in very fertile soil, and soon Greg had a working Nixie tube basketball display. The high voltage was created from a relay and a transformer. I wish I had a picture of this device. Greg worked several summers as an electronic repair tech for an electronic repair shop in Texarkana. This was a good time to learn from the ground up how to engineer equipment to be reliable, simple, and easy to work on.
Greg began working on his electrical engineering degree in 1982 at the University of Arkansas. During the 7 years it took to get a degree, Greg was working part time or full time. Some of the firms where he did more technician and engineering work during this time were:
Baldor Electric (http://www.baldor.com/), doing Fortran coding and testing of DC motors as a Co-op student.
Weigh Systems, Inc. doing scale repair, and eventually engineering many different scales.
University of Arkansas, designing the Wide Area Bar Code Reader system for the US Postal Service. There are now more than 40,000 WABCR systems in place all over the US.
Greg finished his undergraduate degree in 1989, and began working on a masters degree in Electrical Engineering.
During the time Greg was working on his masters degree, he worked on the WABCR project, and then moved on to Artran, Inc. His first job at Artran was to recover the design on a background music system that was being used at a major retailer. The design was improved on, but then it was decided to re-engineer the satellite system for better performance and reliability. The outcome of this effort was known as the ASR-III (Artran Satellite Receiver model III), and there are more than 2000 of these units in retail outlets over the US.
Greg Finished his masters degree in 1994.
Over the next 9 years, Greg worked his way up from engineer, to senior engineer, then engineering manager, then vice president of engineering at Artran. Many different electronic and computer projects. Descriptions of some of these can be found on the projects pages.
In 2000, Greg and Jennifer Garner started Real Time Engineering. We started restoring old Mopar cars at that time, as well as doing many different engineering consulting projects for various companies.
In 2003, Greg took a full time position with Roku (http://www.rokulabs.com) as Director of Hardware Engineering.
This is a mostly complete list of projects that Greg has worked on over the years:
- Software for an NCSI 3250 scale (8048 CPU) to turn it into a counting scale.
- Rental counting scale system.
- Electronic scoreboard.
- Laser Light Entertainment System.
- MC68000 based high resolution counting scale.
- Instrumentation system for wet braking a vehicle.
- Feed mill batching systems.
- Feed mill mixing system.
- Asphalt batching system.
- Electronic boat speedometer.
- High speed envelope bar-code reading system (USPS service now using 40000).
- Envelope detection system.
- High speed flats bar-code reading system.
- Software for mailing label location on an envelope.
- Software for locating characters on an address block on an envelope.
- JPEG image compression system.
- Address block location software and hardware.
- Satellite background music system.
- Uplink controller for satellite broadcasting network.
- Bar tap reporting system.
- Chicken leg transfer machine.
- Turkey basting machine.
- Vertical turkey bagging machine.
- Horizontal turkey bagging machine.
- Turkey basting/pop up timer/bagging machine.
- Horizontal turkey bagging machine.
- Poultry sizing line control system.
- Chicken buffer/sorter control system.
- Distributed poultry yield tracking system.
- Industrial trash compactor controller.
- Microprocessor based localized advertisement & news distribution system.
- High speed CNC control system for milling machines and lathes (Windows NT)
- Dirt bike enduro computer.
- Dirt bike lap speed computer.
- Poultry line speed indicator system.
- Poultry line speed controller system.
- Chicken breast freezing controller.
- Distributed oxygen billing system.
- Video genlock.
- Audio DSP card for Amiga using DSP56002.
- 68HC11 prototyping board.
- PC104 high speed dual A/D DSP card for in motion weighing.
- PC104 soundblaster card.
- PCI can networking card
- Can embedded systems for user interfaces.
- Firewire motion card.
- USB cards for user interfaces.
- Real time controller for mail sorting machine.
- Visual Basic GUI for dirt bike computer.
- Visual basic GUI for chicken plant batch process.
- TCP/IP middleware architect for remote application connection.
- Cutter compensation for CNC milling machines.
- Gcode compiler for CNC milling machines.
- Digitizing software for CNC milling machines.
- Jet Assisted Startup unit for US Navy (LaBarge, Inc) 68322 CPU
- 3GPP CDMA basestation design
- 3GPP CDMA modem design using TMS320C6202 & Xilinx FPGA’s
- 3GPP CDMA modem design using Motorola StarCore MC8101
- Airborne phased array radar controller
- Educational microcontroller system
- Postal mail sorting system
- Satellite Digital Video Broadcast system
- Flat screen controller
- GPS truck tracking system
- Real Time USB printer driver
- HP Deskjet Halftone printer driver
- Enviromental control and logging system
- Network analyzer (8753, 8714, PNA series) control program for SAW devices
- 802.11a/b video transmission system
- Mopar Replacement Tachometer Kit
- SoundBridge M2000, M1000, & M500 Streaming audio player & Internet radio player
- SoundBridge Radio (Streaming audio player & internet radio with speakers & AM/FM)
- PhotoBridge (Linux based Hi-def photo & video player)
- The family of Roku streaming video players (http://www.rokulabs.com)
- The family of Brightsign digital signage controllers (http://www.Brightsign.biz)