PRone DRone

AUCTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

AUCTION AND ASSIGNMENTS

Flight-co a Buffalo, NY company that repairs flight simulators at municipal airports, hires a student electrical engineering intern from a small Florida university, Florida Institute of Science & Technology (FIST) just for the summer. As most student intern jobs go they are filled with some minor remedial responsibilities along with some major grunt work. The intern is used mainly to get parts from the parts room that the technicians are using to repair pieces of flight simulators that were brought back to Flight-Co's shop near the Buffalo airport.

One of Flight-Co's buyers is on-line and sees the cables and joy sticks along with the circuit boards in one box and decides to bid on that Pounce Inc. box for the cables and joysticks. The other box has many of the non-working PR1-DR1 circuit boards in it and he bids on that box for the boards as well.

Several boxes are won in the auction including both boxes with the X1 and X2 circuit boards along with the still operational controller. The next week the buyer at Flight Co, opens the boxes shipped to him with "circuits" handwritten on it and a large "SELL" sticker along with the normal standard bar coded shipping labels.

He dumps the boxes out and puts all the circuit boards on one table pausing at the red paint penned circuit boards.

He calls the electrical engineer down who picks up a couple of the non-working PR1-DR1 boards while the student intern looks on and says, "Oh cool, a few of these are telemetry controller boards, you don't normally pick these up from salvage. Where did these boards come from?" Before the buyer has time to answer the engineer says, "Here's a computer board," as he holds up each board and separates them into three piles. The buyer never answers the question not knowing the originating location of the boards in the first place. The X1 and X2 boards are tossed in to the "telemetry" pile along with the half a dozen or so non-working boards.

All the boards and cables are sorted and taken into a parts room by the intern. The parts room is fairly organized and the boards are stacked into a bin each bin is labeled "Telemetry," "Computer," "Hardware," "Controller" and "Miscellaneous." There is no due care in handling the boards because they all are salvage. However, because the X1 and X2 boards are battlefield spec they can handle all this relatively light mishandling of normally delicate circuitry.

The Flight-co intern pauses sometimes to walk around the parts room to investigate the varied inventory. The intern picks up the X1 and X2 circuit boards and studies them. He then gets a cable he came in there for and heads back to the technician's workstation.

Just one month later, the electrical engineering intern is now back at school and the students are discussing what they did during the internships. The professor walks in and asks students to share aloud their intern experience. The Flight-Co intern tells the class what he did.

The professor jots a few notes after each student is done sharing. A few weeks later the professor calls in the intern from Flight-Co and asks him for some contact names. The professor tells the student, "It would be nice to get some of those circuit boards for logic exercises." The student replies, "They have plenty, I think we only went through five to ten boards the whole time I was there... they literally have dozens just sitting there in their parts room."

The professor drafts a letter to the intern's suggested contacts. Less than six weeks later, a box arrives at the professor's office with two dozen random circuit boards. X1 and X2 are among the donated circuit boards along with various other electronic hardware components. The professor is elated as he is slowly placing the boards and other components including the still operational PR1-DR1 joysticks when paired with the X1 and X2 circuit boards.

The professor shares his circuit board cache and other electronic hardware with some of his colleagues and various student projects. Due to the large amusement park business in the state of Florida there is a great deal of interest in using the circuit boards to control animated robots or amusement park scenarios.

Bill and Ted, two senior electrical engineering students at FIST working on video related games are given several circuit boards including X1 and X2 by their professor for their electrical engineering lab project. The professor looks at their circuit boards and examines them closely. She looks at both sides and says, "This looks like it might be a telemetry controller type circuitry." The two gamer senior students with very poorly kept hair look at each other with a childish like knowing grin.

Bill and Ted work on the various circuit boards including the X1 and X2 circuit boards. The two students are also using the original joysticks from the PR1-DR1 project. This hardware is attached to a shell of a computer case and a flat screen monitor. One of the students is soldering and the other is typing on the keyboard.

For their class project, they developed a video game that is very similar to the rest – with animated figures running through a maze of obstacles blowing nearly everything up. The students are presenting their final work to the class. The class cheers and groans at the gore and violence.

The professor remarks, "You guys have not used any of the telemetry networks on your circuit board. I would have thought with such elegant boards like that you would have come up with something less," she pauses looking for the right word, "shall we say common."

Then Bill and Ted look at each other and slap each other looking disappointed, one says, "I told you." The other replies, "You didn't tell me anything," as he slaps his lab partner again.