Mr Ian Wraith

Senior Technician

email : i.wraith@sheffield.ac.uk

tel: +44 (0) 114 222 5864

BTEC Higher National Certificate,Electronic and Electrical Eng. July 1991, Sheffield Hallam University.
BTEC Ordinary National Certificate,Electronic and Electrical Eng. July 1989, Stannington College, Sheffield.

Main Activities

I provide electronics support to all groups within the department. This support mainly involves the design , building and programming of custom made equipment to aid research and teaching. In addition I provide a repair service for faulty research and teaching equipment plus I adminster four Linux PC's which act as web servers and data loggers within the department.

My specific skills include;

• Printed Circuit Board design
• The design of both analog and digital circuits
• C & C++ programming (Using Visual C++ for Windows PC's , Dynamic C for Rabbit Semiconductor embedded equipment and GCC for Linux PC's)
• Java programming (for both PC's and Dallas Semiconductor TINI embedded circuits)
• Knowledge of HTML and WML
• PHP and Perl programming for use in dynamic web pages
• SQL programming and knowledge of interfacing with the MySQL database using both C & PHP
• Assembly language programming with Intel 8031 and 80x86 series processors
• Using Dallas DS1990 iButtons for use in security and safety applications
• Knowledge of "AT" commands for interfacing GSM and GPRS wireless modules to alarms
• Knowledge of the NMEA commands when interfacing equipment with GPS receivers
• Knowledge of the MAP27 protocol to communicate with MPT1327 wireless equipment.
• An ability to remove strange foreign objects from photocopiers and to find those responsible

Some recent projects I have been involved with include the following;

• A gas alarm for the semiconductor clean rooms that sends SMS text messages to staff when there is a problem and displays the current status of the alarms on a web page.
• A web based interface to the departments equipment database which was programmed in Perl. This now allows all technicians to enter new equipment into the database via the web.
• A remote temperature and humidity logging and display unit for use in the semiconductor clean rooms. This involves six remote sensing units linked together using licence free low power wireless telemetry. The data gathered is stored in a MySQL database with the data provided in graphical format on this web page.
• A microcontroller based unit to measure the efficiency of semiconductor material and a program written in Visual C++ which interfaces to that unit and displays the results graphically on a PC.
• A unit to control access to the semiconductor clean rooms using Dallas DS1990 iButtons which also displays a list of those people in the facility.