Frank Bicknell, here. During my working life I have had many different career paths. Started with environmental controls while going to school. Moved on to bigger and better things. Tried the R&D department of a major semiconductor equipment manufacturer. That worked fine while there was a budget. Moved on to the PCB layout and design, too boring. Moved to the field. Traveled the world setting up wafer fabs, that was fun.
After 10 years of hoping on a plane almost daily, I had a little spell worrying about air safety and took off about a year. During this time, I don’t like sitting still for very long, I helped a friend with his stone wall business. Beating big chunks of sandstone into a usable shape can be very therapeutic.
Well, I got over my plane crash concerns. I decided to venture out into something new, added BMET to the list, and took a job with a medical lab equipment manufacturer, again working in the field. Mostly domestic travel though. That lasted until 911, when air travel became a burden, I could not overcome. My last stint until a few years ago was working with my brother in his mechanical contracting business.
Now to what ties me to XOJO. While working with my brother I saw an opportunity to branch out to some of the electrical control jobs. I did have experience with this technology, although many years prior. We bid on a job and got it. It was to install a new environmental control system for a local school district.
Having a lot of experience with micro controllers from my prior careers, I knew I could build the hardware easily. I knew C++ so the micro programming would be easy as well. Where I ran in to difficulty was the HID (human interface device), the PC to do the setup and monitoring of the control system. I knew enough C# to write executable programs that can interface with the micro controllers. I threw some stuff together and started the testing.
I ran into a major road block when I could not get the compiled C# executable to run on the customers computers. I tried for at least a week to get it to work. Their IT people could not help. The error was cryptic and none of the solutions worked. I was a bit panicked because the contract was coming close to the end date.
I looked at different languages I could use. I needed rapid application development. I looked at XOJO, I was skeptical, the name did not seem serious. I downloaded the program anyway. I tinkered with it for a while and quickly realized that I could essentially convert my C# to XOJO without too much difficulty. I wrote a couple of programs for testing, compiled and they ran fine on the customers computers. Whew. I spent about a month converting testing and learning. Finally, I got it done. It is still running to this day.
I still use XOJO although it is for hobby and personal stuff now. I wish I had gotten to know XOJO many years ago. We could have used an app like this to build quick models for testing.
Forgot to mention. I couldn’t have gotten it done without the help from all of the great people on this board.
