Thomas Loch

About me

Hello, my name is Thomas Loch and i am currently working for Cabman as an embedded developer.

From a young age i developed a passion for electronics and aviation. I pursued my aviation passion and studied aviation at Griffith University for 4 years, during this time I gained my commercial pilots license with a multi engine command instrument rating. Due to the GFC and some aviation regulatory changes in Australia, a large number of small operators could no longer afford to hire inexperienced pilots and shut down in the year I graduated, so I was unable to get that all important first flying job. From here I went on to working at Aldi, where I was promoted to a salaried manager within my first year of being with the company. During this time, I continued learning and experimenting with electronics (mainly Arduino). Once my passion was reignited, I gained employment at Pacific Data Systems. Here I was given the opportunity to develop my basic skills into something much more. I went from basic through hole soldering and bread boarding, to comfortably being able to rework down to 0402 size and designing PCB's using Altium. Realizing I enjoyed this kind of work and enjoy applying my knowledge to these sorts of problems, I decided to go back to university and further my knowledge of electronics and hardware / software design.

After studying for just one year I went on a holiday to the Netherlands in my break. Suprised by the various job offerings and possibilites I stayed and started working here. I have since worked for Atos as an Iot developer, and now for Cabman as an embedded developer.

This website is by no means a complete and thourough porfolio of all my projects. It is provided purely to give a glimpse into the kind of projects that i like.

Personal Interests & Projects

My interests include:

• Reverse engineering: I like to pull things apart to see how they work, this is what sparked my interest as a teenager. These days I still occasionally pull things apart to see if I would have designed it in the same way, or if it could be made better.
• Learning new Skills: I like to learn new skills, sometimes through necessity other times just for fun. For example, I learned LaTeX so I could write math assignments. Now I've written my CV and cover letter in it also. This website is another great example, I learned how to use bootstrap, and set up a custom domain name, so it looks like I don't use github pages to host this.
• Photography: I love photography. I like being able to capture a moment (landscape and animals), and presenting it with a wow factor. I admit I'm no pro, but I give it go. This has also lead me to learn a bit of photoshop.

Personal Projects:

• Motion Simulator: This was my final year project for my aviation degree. The design was copied (with permission) from a retired mechanical engineer's own motion platform. Most items were machined at home, with the exception of the gears, they were machined for free by a local gear manufacturer. I wrote my own software that communicated between FSX and a parallel port, plus various other testing software that was required.
• 3D Printer: After the Motion Simulator, I became very interested in 3D printers. At the time pre built units were quite pricey, so I decided to build my own. I drew up plans in Inventor, and got the various bits made that I could not construct myself. It is built out of 3030 extrusion, holds a standard heatbed and has a printable Z height of about 300mm. It can print at speeds of 150mm/s, however to get good quality prints I print at or below 100mm/s. Its not pretty, but it works.
• Ergodox_RGB: This project came from the want of an ergonomic keyboard. The ergodox seemed like a good choice but was only available through massdrop, and riddled with quality issues. So I applied my recently acquired SMD knowledge and got to work. I wanted to produce something which was not available, so I decided to add a RGB led under each switch. This project provided quite a learning curve to be able to integrate the led's into pre existing firmware, as I did not have any experience with C previously.

Professional Projects

Professional Projects:

• Medical Smart Fridge: I worked on this project at Atos, it revolved around the tracking and tracing of medicine,through the use of RFID technology. The purpose was to keep tight control over controlled drugs, be able to pin point which fridge the medicine resides in, and keep track of expiration dates / storage conditions. I was responsible for hardware procurement, assembly, and programming.
• Connectivity Platform: With close collegues at Atos, I worked on this project which aims to serve as a single cloud based point of access for various data sources. I become involved with the project as scrum master, and programmer for small battery operated hardware. I worked with various communication platforms such as LoRa, NB-IoT, and BLE (Bluetooth).
• Electronics: At Pacific Data Systems worked on various electronic projects along side a computer systems engineer. The longest project was developing an in-house product with a very basic PCB, to a fully featured product that was able to communicate with almost any sensor combination possible. This project went on for just over a year, and went through 5 r&d revisions. I was responsible for the hardware side and updated and incorporated any changes decided upon by the engineer. I have also worked solo on other hardware projects, as can be seen in the gallery.
• Hardware: At Pacific Data Systems I was given free reign over 2 hardware projects. One was a temperature sensor enclosure machined out of 316 stainless steel. This unit is used to measure gas pipeline temperatures after the pipeline has been commissioned. It is made up of several stainless components and a 2m long carbon fibre tube. The other project was a frame that could house a small self contained system, that can be bolted down or pole mounted. The frame is capable of housing 3 different types of batteries, 2 different sizes of solar panels, and many different enclosures. This frame was laser cut from 1.6mm 316 stainless steel sheet, and bent according to my 3d model.
• Software: At Pacific Data Systems I developed a few small testing programs for inhouse use. The most notable being for the pcb I spent over a year developing. The software I wrote would connect to pcb via Modbus, and be able to query all the associated registers and coils to retrieve sensor data and to update the configuration settings if needed. I have also had some basic training in programming DataTakers, which are data logging devices made in Australia.