Hello

This site has been set up to provide an Internet presence for us and our friends, since the registration of Domestic Zoo Limited the focus has started to move to a more business oriented view. However, as Domestic Zoo is our business the site will always contain a mixture of the business and the personal.

We have something to do with all the sites to which these pages are linked. In some cases there is a business relationship but in the great majority they are just friends who we have helped or are helping. The links under other links are nothing to do with us and are only included because they are in some way useful to us.

A little background about me and the work I have been doing for many years now. I’m a design engineer who has a great deal of experience in all aspects of real-time system design, hardware, software and firmware. I have designed and build a wide and diverse set of systems everything from anti-lock controllers for commercial vehicles and trains to custom measurement systems that measure the railway infrastructure from a train moving at speed. My formal training was as an electronics engineer but as software has become a major part of most systems I have continually evolved and re-educated myself.

My speciality is an understanding of what makes such systems work successfully in a vehicular environment, everything from the environment to the way the people work. I profess not to be a manager but I have often arrived to take a technically lead role on a failing project which has finished as a success. I even have an understanding of issues associated with EMC Interference and Susceptibility although I am not a specialist.

As the systems have become controlled and driven by software I have worked in everything from assembler and C through to G, the graphical language used by LabView. I suppose if I need to define something within the field but outside my comfort zone its large currents and voltages but even those are not unfamiliar as I designed a communications system to talk to electronics on the live side of a pantograph on a train. For anybody who does not know the pan on a train connects to the 25kV overhead wire.

On several occasions I have built models of systems to help in the design process, prove functionality or simply to convince senior management that a project is possible. However, models also provide a great way to reduce risk as they can allow the testing of sub-systems and components long before the physical construction starts.

Because of the nature of some of the systems I have designed I have learnt a great deal about Linux, Lamp and Web Services. When a system produces large volumes of data it also has to become its own data centre or the customer will not be able to manage.

So in summary everything from driving a solenoid to driving the internet.

On a mere personal level we are very passionate about and have been actively involved through the Derby Link in the Chernobyl Child Lifeline charity for a number of years.  Each year we try to host a couple of children for two weeks. It's wonderful to see a child arrive quiet, tired and more than a little frightened, blossom and become full of life. Some of them are quite ill, others are just weak, they all come from the area where the radiation is below the evacuation level but well above the acceptable level.

Life is hard for them without the radiation; if for instance they go to the dentist at home they get no aesthetic even for extractions. One of our girls had thirteen teeth out under a general and the first thing she said when she woke up was thank you; it still brings tears to my eyes.

Believe it or not because of changes in the National Health Service we now find it almost impossible to provide the service that fixed the teeth of so many of the children!

To get some idea of what Chernobyl means have a look at Motorcycling through Chernobyl, I'm not sure of everything that Elena says but the truth of the pictures and what happened is clearly visible and people are suffering and will suffer for generations to come. People are so stupid, I still find it hard to believe what happened there.

Frank

All material on this site is copyright and cannot be reproduced without consent.
© T&F Smith 2004-09