Colin Bell

Background

About Colin Bell

Since I stated at Renishaw Plc as an Apprentice in 1996 I have worked on a number of key projects and progressed through the engineering ranks to my current position of Senior Electronics Design Engineer where I currently manage a small team of two people. Projects I have worked on include various non-contact tool setting laser based systems (1996 - 2003), 1 year secondment to write assembler code for a specific PIC microcontroller based project, and finally SPRINT project. SPRINT is one of Renishaw's flagship projects and has been in development for the last 15 years. SPRINT is an analogue scanning system for machine tools. It allows users to accurately scan the surface of parts that have been machined on a machine tool without the need to take the part off the machine for inspection. This dramatically increases cycle times. Companies such as Apple have trailed SPRINT and found the system to be very successful when inspecting the aluminium cases that fit onto the back on iPhones and iPads. My contributions to the SPRINT project include battery life optimisation through efficient control of electronic sub-systems. VHDL code was written to enable/disable electronics subs systems to improve battery life. A new optical protocol was designed by myself and written in VHDL to send data from SPRINT to a transceiver. The protocol was based on FSK. The assembler code for the on-board PIC microcontroller was written completely by myself. During the early stages of this project I was also responsible for designing and simulating some of the electronics sub-systems including the optical transmitter circuit and power supply design. In recent years (2015 - Present Day) I have progressed from Design Engineer to Senior Design Engineer where I have the added responsibility of managing two engineers.