Philip McGaw has over a decade of professional electronics experience in EMC, Testing and Research and Development. He lives between Banbury and Daventry in the West Northamptonshire area.

Philip enjoys working within a fast-paced R&D environment, developing innovative solutions to allow for testing complex systems within regulatory framework testing, Hardware in the Loop, or production line testing of prototypes through to final products.

Philip can apply his Electrical and Electronic Systems Engineering background and his skills in 3D Printing, rapid prototyping and Embedded Systems to develop and test innovative hardware solutions for Devices under test, recently this has included Electric Vehicles and Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment. Previously, this also included hardware supplied for testing by customers.

You can view Philip McGaw’s LinkedIn Profile for more information

Philip McGaw’s Recent Posts

• 
  KiCad Traces Net classes
  I have done the following work on Net classes in KiCad, which is derived from what I wrote about IPC 2221 standard trace widths and Creepage and Clearance a while ago. I have been doing some work on my ROV, where I am trying to make two lights for the front of the vehicle. I want these two lights to be as small as possible while still being fairly bright. I am looking to use a CXA1304-0000-000N00B440F LED in each light; these LEDs are 13.35 mm on a side. The PCBs I am looking to use with it are designed… Read more: KiCad Traces Net classes
• 
  UART TX/RX Swapping made simple
  When designing boards, one of the things I spend a lot of time checking is if my UART transmit (TX) and receive (RX) lines are the right way round, or switched over. When the design gets to the printed circuit board (PCB) level, it can be nearly impossible to rework. Development of firmware requires it to work; then you have to remember to fix it before re-spinning a new design to correct the issue. This is where the UART Poka/Yoke comes in Poka-yoke is a Japanese lean manufacturing technique for “mistake-proofing” processes to aim to achieve zero defects, which would… Read more: UART TX/RX Swapping made simple
• 
  Additional Addressing of Nodes
  This looks like a way to allow for addressing nodes on a CAN, RS485 or DMX network without needing to use either DIP switches or PCB changes.
• 
  CE mark + CE certificate ≠ CE certification? – Why you can’t just put boxes together
  Over on Reddit, there is a post called “Client complaining about our own branding on our own custom products, how do you handle white labelling? [link]”, I assumed that they were building a product from scratch and since they were placing a product on the market, they had done their own certification for CE / UKCA marking… however it looks like they were trying to make use of sub-components certification. We have a business where we make custom technical products, usually focussed on lighting and automation. Our products go out with metal branding on featuring our logo, usually just a… Read more: CE mark + CE certificate ≠ CE certification? – Why you can’t just put boxes together
• 
  Adeept vs Navigation Raspberry Pi Hats
  I have an Adeept Robot HAT, but the Blue Robotics BlueOS works natively with the Navigation hat (it’s probably pedantic, but neither of these two hats meets the requirements of Pi Hats). I was looking to see what the functionality of them both was, and ended up making a back-to-back comparison. The Adeept Robot Hat has fewer built-in peripherals, but the BlueRobotics Navigator Drone Flight Controller Pi Hats are a bit more expensive. This is a quick back-to-back analysis so that I can now work out how to make a configuration file for BlueRobotics’s Blue OS to use the Adeept… Read more: Adeept vs Navigation Raspberry Pi Hats

Philip McGaw’s previous responsibilities

Projects that Philip McGaw has worked on previously have included:

• Commissioning of the new EMC and electrical test facilities in Banbury, UK.
• Designing EV EVSE test equipment.
• Development of design validation plans (DVP) and procedures for Electric vehicles (EV) components to meet industry standards [ISO 16750, CISPR 25, ECE Regulation 10, ISO 10605, ISO 11452, ISO 7637] and company requirements.
• Performing validation tests for EV components – HV traction inverters, ECU, DC: DC Converters, BMS, ADAS, HMI, etc.
• Performing R&D and functional tests, and fault analysis for new EV component designs.
• Performing tests with the Vector CANalyzer environment and Python.
• Preparation and release of test reports, hardware bug tracking via Atlassian Jira/Confluence
• Webmaster and Technical Support for Freedom Press and their news website, Freedom News. This involved looking after Linux web servers and WordPress.