Latest / The Elevator Careers Podcast / Encoders in the Elevator Trade | Jared Stearns

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Encoders in the Elevator Trade | Jared Stearns · The Elevator Careers Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: But I will tell you, I know a lot of successful people.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: And there is a lot of opportunity, particularly if you live in the Rust Belt, if you live in uh anywhere in New England, in New Jersey, New York, areas that have a large legacy industrial base.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: You know, um, the best uh engineers I meet in the field, they're typically running the teams, they're typically engineering managers.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: Because by the way, you know, for the most part, you get a degree in engineering, you're an engineer, right?
0:25
SPEAKER_00: But to be an engineering manager, you got to prove you know how to lead people and solve problems.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: And you don't learn that at college.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: And uh a lot of engineering managers I've met came from backgrounds where um they started uh doing something with their hands, having that real world application.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: Hello, and welcome to the Elevator Careers Podcast, sponsored by the Allred Group.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Matt Allred.
0:49
SPEAKER_01: In this podcast, we talk to the people whose lives and careers are dedicated to the vertical transportation industry to inform and share lessons learned, building upon the foundation of those who have gone before to inspire the next generation of elevator careers.
1:04
SPEAKER_01: Today our guest is Jared Stern, sales manager for Encoder Products, a fierce and local industry's encoding health care.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: Jared started his technical training as a helper to his authoring crafters and other farm equipment in the tech.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: At some time in the military and postproduct school teaching, Jared became a technician working on turbul motors, which paved the way for his current position.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: Jared credits much of his success to getting hands-on experience and is a big proponent of doing what you love.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: Jared, welcome to the show.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: I'm excited.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's always a pleasure and uh looking forward to to talking with you again.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: And and um I'm always there's always something I'm learning, and I hope our our listeners you know can learn something as well.
1:54
SPEAKER_01: But uh tell me a little bit about your your early career path and what what would you say excited you most right out of high school?
2:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, it wasn't elevators, that's what you're getting at.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh for no other reason than I just knew no better, you know.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: Um grew up on a uh with a dairy farming family uh in the the the woods of uh eastern Connecticut.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: Uh and I just always loved uh the study of life.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: So in high school, I uh uh wanted to I left high school wanting to go to college to be a high school biology teacher, and that's where it all started.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: But uh I did four years of that and got my my teaching certificate and and uh diploma and I did that for about six months, and uh and and I love teachers, uh they're amazing human beings because I was bartending and waiting tables to pay for college at the time, and I talked to one of my fellow teachers and said, Hey, you know, after all the fees and taxes and things, what do you make as a teacher?
2:50
SPEAKER_00: Whoa, I uh you know, I make more net on Thursday at the restaurant.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: So that was the end of my teaching career, right?
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, and quickly said, Oh boy, I I gotta do something different.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: What do I do with this degree in biology?
3:03
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I'd always worked with my hands.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh my father uh taught me at a young age that hard work doesn't make you rich, it just makes you tired.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: So he did not milk cows.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh he fixed the farmers' tractors.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: So I spent most of my childhood uh driving around in a pickup truck uh with a toolbox on the back, uh handing my dad wrenches and socket drivers as he fixed, you know, this IH tractor here, John Deere tractor there.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh so I was always good with my hands.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, and always, you know, my favorite part of college was actually physics, learning the right-hand rule and the floor current and Ohm's law and all this.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: So I just applied that and uh I got into a small company called Servotech, which at the time was in Haddam, Connecticut.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Now they've grown a lot in there in Middletown, Connecticut.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh and the owner there uh taught me um uh taught me more than anybody else about how to uh be in business and uh about uh working on uh electromechanical equipment.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh so I spent 14 years there, left as a general manager, and you know, got a really strong background in uh robotics, uh specifically with ServoMotors and their related encoders.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh we brought on three vendors um uh that we were selling and purchasing uh encoders from, and one of those was encoder products.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh so after I left uh Servotech, it was to go try my hand at at sales and uh to become an outside salesperson and run a region of the country for encoder products.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: So you were you were essentially, was it more of a technician then in your your first career?
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I started there as a technician and then I I ran the uh AC Servo Motor Shop, we called it, and then um then I ran the whole shop as we grew.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: You know, I was employee number two or three um in a little one bay garage with a you know a car garage door on it.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: And now um I think they have a 20 something thousand square foot building, and you know, there was a dozen or a dozen and a half uh employees there.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: Um so the my the end of my tenure, I was running the uh the day-to-day operations for the company, which was a lot of fun, still small, right?
5:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: So in in Coder Products, uh it became one of your vendors.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: How did you actually make the the switch, if you will?
5:16
SPEAKER_00: Well, a couple of years into working for Servotech, you know, it's it's always fun.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: I would call them very much a startup.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: The owner was very practical and still is very pragmatic, but also um very good at at uh estimating risk.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: And he took a lot of risk, but he took risk very smartly.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: So it's always fun to be in that environment where you get to do cool new things.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: And the servo motor world is very secretive.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Most of these motors are built in Europe or Japan.
5:45
SPEAKER_01: Um there are some that that's an interesting term.
5:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: What I mean by secretive top secret or no, no, not top secret, but secretive in a way where uh which kind of like cars are now, uh, you download a data sheet for a motor, it's not gonna tell you what's inside of it.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: So if you're in the business of rebuilding servo motors, you're not gonna find a manual, you're not gonna go to Napa Auto Parts and get the guide of what the torque specs are for each bolt on that motor.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: You gotta figure it out as you go.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: You reverse engineering, and you know, there's a lot of uh uh the school hard knocks in this type of thing.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, but we started investigating encoder companies because that's a major uh component in a servo motor, is the feedback device.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: That's what makes it a servo motor, right?
6:27
SPEAKER_00: Closes the loop with the control.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: And uh uh we found some major brands of encoder manufacturers that would work with us once they saw what we were capable of.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: And we actually became factory authorized for some brands that had never authorized anybody before uh for in the repair uh uh world, anyway, for uh commissioning their encoders and installing them in motors.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: And encoder products was one of those.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, I had become good friends with the outside uh regional sales manager Bill Faison, who's retired now, wonderful man.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: Um still go to see him in North Carolina.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: And uh he when he retired, they asked me to take his role.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: And uh sales has always um uh interested me.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh I got a big mouth and I love to run it.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, storytelling is half a sales after all.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: Um so uh I jumped at the opportunity, you know, and I still work.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: In fact, uh Servotech is one of my customers.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: Um very fond memories, and and I still work with them.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: Right on.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: That's cool.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: How how did being in being a technician essentially prepare you for your sales role?
7:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh my God.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I'm not the only employee of Servotech to say this.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, I, you know, towards the end, I was hiring uh our our uh entry-level technicians to train.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: Well, nobody goes to tech high school or even college to learn how to rebuild servo motors.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: And you know, you have in in in in Connecticut anyway, in the tech high school program, you have automotive departments, uh you know, kids who go to school to learn how to repair cars, you have electrical to be residential or maybe commercial electricians, and you have carpentry.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: And we would hire kids out of uh automotive or out of residential electrical because they understand how to use tools.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: You know, they could read an ohm meter, um, and that's that's pretty important.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: And some of these kids now, I have kids that are not kids anymore.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: You know, they're adults with families and they're working in top secret applications designing uh uh you know uh uh defense-related uh projects, and it's because of what they learn there.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: So my hands-on technician time at ServoTech, just like theirs, was invaluable.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, you've got a lot of uh candidates being interviewed for sales engineers' roles, for example, who have all the knowledge, but they have no wisdom.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: You know, they they so when they approach a problem, when you when you visit a customer site and they have a problem they're trying to overcome, you can only apply what you've already been taught.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: You haven't had to think on your feet and develop a new solution.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: So invaluable for sure.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: Well, and it sounds like that, you know, there's a lot of knowledge that is not being taught.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: So you know, unless you're learning it on the job, unless you know you're bringing in so back to your teaching career, it sounds like you you are in a teaching career, it's just not public uh schools, right?
9:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, I do enjoy uh uh teaching.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: And that's one of my, you know, this role I have now as sales manager, um, uh that's one of my favorite parts, is uh is is helping my guys um uh uh you know improve.
9:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: Very much a teacher.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, not uh biology per se, but no, that's still uh definitely a teaching profession.
9:35
SPEAKER_01: And especially if someone maybe doesn't have the the technical background, maybe you're hiring a salesperson and they don't have as much technical, you're probably digging into the technical to help them understand the the whys and wherefores of of what they're trying to sell.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Exactly right.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, definitely.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: You know, and the biology aspect actually comes into play more than I thought it would, you know, because of the amount of medical device that we get into.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: And I had no medical training, you know, it was just a a biology degree.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: But somebody comes in, oh, we're working on this machine that does PCR reactions.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: You say, oh, polymerase chain reaction.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: Are you doing genetic type work?
10:09
SPEAKER_00: And that's a very basic thing, but only if you're in that that world a little bit.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: So that always helps me as a salesperson look a little smarter uh than maybe I am.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: Right, right, right.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: So um tell us a little bit about like the um, you know, the the encoders, right?
10:25
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, that's that's what you're doing now, um, kind of on top of servo.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: And and I'm not, you know, super technical and and uh you know, but but how how does that work and what's what's the application for elevators, for example, or you know, I I have no idea how how it would work in a in a medical device thing either.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: Gotcha.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: So uh encoder products specifically uh focuses on rotary encoders.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: And when most people use the term loosely encoder, they're typically referring to a rotary encoder uh versus something linear like a scale that you would put a scale on something and measure.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: So um sticking to rotary encoders, uh, they're a device that you use to measure speed uh uh or position or angle, which would be another form of position.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: And they're really elegant uh in their simplicity.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh we've all kind of made them already.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: If as a kid you threw a playing card in the spokes of your bike tire, you kind of made an encoder.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: If you if you could actually listen and count the clicks of every time your card hit the spoke and you knew you had 60 spokes on your your wheel, well, hey, I heard my card flick 60 times.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: I've done a full revolution.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: Ticking out a beat there.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly it.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's that's a good way to put it.
11:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, that's always sell.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: So I sound much smarter than I than I uh uh am many times because it's in robots, right?
11:44
SPEAKER_00: It's used for extreme positioning, and you see these very complex automated systems screaming, uh screaming around, making products, uh elevators uh you know, moving around, positioning themselves very accurately.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: And they think that must be a really technical product.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: It's a disk, shining a light through it, and there's lines on the disk, and you interrupt the light, and you're counting those interruptions.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: And now you can have all these boards that give you all these protocols.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: Well, I need my encoder to speak CAN because I'm putting it in a truck and all the vehicles operate on a CAN bus, or I need it to speak uh Ethercat because I'm working with a system that takes that protocol, or I need an SSI protocol.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, EndAt is very big in the elevator industry, as a matter of fact.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I need my encoder to speak NDAT.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's just the communications board of the language.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: Okay, but the guts of it are all the same.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: It's a disk that spins with lines on it, you're counting the lines.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: It's almost like uh, you know, human beings with different languages.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: You know, sounds like your product can speak different languages, but you boil it all down, it's it's it's the same.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, I wish that was true.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: Um unfortunately, uh they've made it so that you can trademark your language.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: So there are languages we're not allowed to speak.
12:54
SPEAKER_03: Right.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Um, but for the most part, absolutely true.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but they're all giving the same information.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: You know, and in elevators, it's probably worth mentioning there are two flavors, and the flavor I told you about is an incremental, and I won't get too much into the weeds, but there are two.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: There's vanilla and chocolate with encoders, and that's it.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the first one is incremental, where you're just counting those ticks, if you will.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: You're interrupting the light and counting.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: Hey, I I counted 60, 60 lines, I did a turn, or I counted so many lines over a second, and I can guesstimate, well, every line is an inch, and I counted 10 over a second, I'm moving 10 inches a second, that kind of thing.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: So that's your speed, right?
13:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, and in an elevator, you would use an incremental encoder for the most part because you're just looking what is the speed of the car.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but there are uh non-rotary and now uh starting to see more rotary encoders that are used for position.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: And the difference with that is it's more like your watch.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: So the disc on the encoder has a unique code, okay.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: Kind of like our watch is one, two, three, four, right to 12, 12 kilometers.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: What time it is?
13:52
SPEAKER_01: Sure, sure.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: So you can look at your wristwatch and if you have an analog watch and you can see what time it is.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: You didn't have to watch it move to there.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: An incremental encoder, you have to listen and catch every count, or you don't know where you are.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: They're all the same, all the pulses.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: So an absolute encoder, you it spits out a word value that tells you where it is.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: You could stop listening to it, you could unplug it, turn it, plug it back in, and it's going to tell you still where it is in a position.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: Some elevator applications require knowing the position of something, not just the speed.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: And that's when you use that encoder.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: Maybe more than you wanted, but no, it it's fascinating.
14:28
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I you know, I haven't ever uh worked on an elevator or been inside the shaft or any of that, but but I'm always fascinated to just I guess in my mind and envision how it works, you know, seeing pictures, some some videos or whatever.
14:40
SPEAKER_01: But it is always intriguing to just wonder like how does it know where to stop, right?
14:45
SPEAKER_01: How does it know you know the next floor?
14:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I assume they're the uh you know uh a consistent height, but but I know that's not true because a lot of times the ground floor of a big building, you know, they've got a higher ceiling or or something.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: So being able to dial in those locations sounds like that's exactly what your uh your product is is helping do.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Correct.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: When it's a rotor encoder, there are elevators that use like uh tape readers where they actually put uh you know a uh basically a roll of tape with unique code all the way up, kind of like reading a just a very long barcode.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna say it's it sounds like a tape measure that they've they've pulled out and just kind of slapped it on the wall.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: Oh, we're at eight feet two inches, that's where we need to be.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: Exactly right.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: But that's a long piece of tape to install, you know.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: So there's pluses and minuses, but that's another way that they position a car uh in a shaft.
15:33
SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: Um what what uh what do you love most about the your role, your company, what you're doing now?
15:42
SPEAKER_00: Well, I've got a new role uh as of uh of June of last year as sales manager.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: So now I'm covering the northeast, southeast, and and midwest, which gets me into uh more industries than I used to be in uh when I covered just the northeast, which was Maine, down to Virginia, over to Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: Um, and doing that a lot more exposure to the elevator industry, for example.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, so you know, my favorite part of the role, probably from that upbringing, uh fixing engines, uh, is I love getting into the nitty-gritty.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: Um I love uh seeing a solution that others gave up on, a problem, I mean, that others gave up on in trying to find a solution to that.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, the elevator industry, uh, some of the unique features, yeah, I can make it seem the encoders are simple.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: And what they do is, you know, elegantly simple, uh, but they can't fail.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants to be in an elevator if the encoder fails, right?
16:35
SPEAKER_03: I know.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh, so there's a lot with the mechanical mounting of an encoder.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh, maybe there's redundancy of signals, maybe there's two sensor heads.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of different ways to solve the same problem depending on who's designing it and what features they're looking for.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but elevators are one of the industries that I take a lot of pride in.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Of course, I love packaging and boxing and gluing as well.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but elevators are important and you know, it's uh it's a serious industry in that uh it's not tolerant to mistakes.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: You know, somebody from packaging calls me, oh, we had a run of hot dogs go bad because the sealer was sealing too early.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: All right, well, we lost some hot dogs.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but you know, the elevator industry it's much more uh requires much more uh um consideration.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: So absolutely.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you've got some yeah redundancies and just making sure that you're not losing position or or track of speed, or obviously you got you know people's lives, people's you know, loved ones, and um everybody, you know, you're right.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a it's a bigger, bigger deal.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's something we take pride in.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: We're uh we're very unique versus our competitors in that we're much smaller.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: Most of our competitors encoders are just one product line, and they have many others, vision systems and all sorts of things.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: Right.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: Things you wouldn't even expect to be related.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: Uh all we do is rotary.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: And probably 60 to 65 percent last I looked at what we do is custom.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: So uh we aren't selling parts out of a catalog, you know, not vacuum cleaner salespeople, I guess you'd say.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, most of what we do requires us to go in and come up with a custom solution.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: And because we build everything in-house, not to make a sales pitch out of this, but it's what makes us different.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: We're machining the parts, we're populating the PCBs and everything.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: We can really offer uh unique uh solutions without breaking the bank, and that's where we excel in the elevator industry.
18:30
SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: I mean, part of my brain is wondering well why would everything need to be custom, right?
18:37
SPEAKER_01: Is there not a way to the 90% of them are probably the same and you and you can just buy vanilla?
18:44
SPEAKER_01: Or does it need to be custom every time?
18:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, not every time.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh it depends who we're working with.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll do elevators uh for large um contracting companies that do repairs, and they're trying to uh uh replace encoders that were uh manufactured by companies 20 years ago, and I'll use the name DRC uh did a lot in elevators, and I I'll use their name because they don't exist anymore.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: So you can't find those elevators.
19:10
SPEAKER_01: So this is like in a mod, right?
19:12
SPEAKER_01: They're they're looking for something to exactly right.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: Okay, exactly.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: But there's a lot of those elevators out there, and if they can't find an encoder to fit that unique uh, you know, mechanical mounting, whether it be inside of a pulley or a shiv or on the back of a motor that was designed then, they're not going to want to replace that large motor because they can't get an encoder that mounts correctly.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot in the mod industry in the uh uh OEM side of things.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, obviously we have a major manufacturer.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: I'm in Connecticut, right up in my state.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, an encoder is a sensor, just like a proximity sensor.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: It is you don't choose your encoder and design around it.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: Generally, you choose your motor, and you've got constraints of where you're installing this thing, but you choose your motor and your gearbox and your major uh components like that, and then you pick your encoders to fit.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: But hey, sometimes you end up with a motor that's the right size, it's everything you need, but you've only got a two-inch clearance between the motor and the back wall or something, and you need that encoder to have a low enough profile.
20:08
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: We get asked a lot to fit the encoder within the the inner uh diameter of an electromagnetic brake, and there's constraints and temperature uh uh considerations and a lot to go with that.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, it's it's uh very much uh required, and I think the biggest reason because they they choose us last.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: We gotta fit in whatever they're doing.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: You gotta make it work, right?
20:31
SPEAKER_01: Right.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: Which is good.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: I don't want it to choose encoders first because then they'll buy something off the shelf, right?
20:37
SPEAKER_00: Right.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of people selling encoders off the shelf.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: Right, right, right.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, and you talked a little bit about you know solving unique problems and and uh you know sounds like there's obviously a lot of opportunities for creativity and and thinking outside the box.
20:49
SPEAKER_01: And I guess along with that, what uh uh you know, as you as you look forward, you know, what what are some of the uh uh I guess the the things that you're saying?
20:58
SPEAKER_01: Oh, hey, this could change the encoder industry.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: Is certain are there are there certain technologies that that as you look ahead like wow that that would be different?
21:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think so.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: Um there, you know, for example, uh encoder optical encoders, which is what we make, the majority of what we make is is optical.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: So you have a glass disk that you're shining light through.
21:22
SPEAKER_00: And there are other technologies out there now that haven't existed for as long.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, whether that be capacitive, inductive, magnetic, uh, all different ways to accomplish the same thing, get pulses in a circle.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, but most of those are not uh anywhere near as accurate.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: So if you're purchasing an encoder where accuracy is a consideration, and we're talking orders of magnitude, uh typically less accurate for these technologies.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: So I don't consider them game changing as much as there are new um solutions for the lower commodity end.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're building a vending machine, you don't really care how accurate the claw is to get the kids.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Toy outright or something like this.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: But there's uh some new technologies.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh, one of them is reflective technology, which we offer now.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Um, and that technology allows the the sensor uh and the the the uh um LED to be on the same side of the disk.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Because before you had an LED shining let up through and your disc is going by, and then you had your sensor on the other side.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: So now you got a PCB on each side of the disk.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: And generally speaking, there's an air gap in there that's very thin.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: We're talking, you know, a thousandth of an inch or somewhere thereabouts uh between the reed head and the disc.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: So uh one of the common failure points for encoders, including in the elevator industry, when you're when you're running on large motors that expand and contract a lot when they warm up and cool down, um, is disc crashing, where the disc actually contacts the sensor head.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: And as soon as it does, it wipes the lines off the disc.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: And that's it, uh that is a problem inherent in that design in general, with any manufacturer's encoder.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh, this new reflective technology, which is really neat, uh, it shines a light at an angle onto the disk and then bounces back up to uh to uh uh uh a sensor.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: And uh it allows for much larger air gaps, you know, and tens of thousands are larger.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: Um so we basically have completely eliminated the potential of a disk crash uh with this technology.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: So I see that I see that really uh uh uh being implemented wide.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: Once you see the technology out there for a while and people begin to trust it, is you know, as if you're uh an OEM of elevators and you're looking at common failure modes, you can like cross that common failure mode off your list.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna happen again.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: So I think that's pretty much awesome.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, what happens if a you you get one of those disc crashes?
23:48
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you're maybe you're riding the elevator and all of a sudden that that comes in, does it does it stop?
23:52
SPEAKER_01: Does it plummet?
23:53
SPEAKER_01: Does it blow up?
23:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a good question.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: Everybody should worry about that for the rest of their life when they get in an elevator.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: Now that's where safety comes in.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: Um elevators rely on on redundant feedback.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: There's usually more than one encoder.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of different ways, so I won't nail it down to one specific, but um, there is error detection, uh uh potential built in.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: You know, for example, that we talked about the lines in the disk.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: I could have a thousand lines in the disk, but I have this other line called an index pulse.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: It's one pulse per revolution.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: So my control sees that pulse and then it counts, and it better count to exactly a thousand and see that pulse again.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: So if it counts to 980, because maybe there's a crack in the disk now, then you'll get an error that there's something wrong with the disk.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: But what do you do in the middle of that?
24:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, it still went a full turn.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's ways to design redundancy in.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: Um, so you can have two discs and two readheads, for example, or maybe one disk and two readheads.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: And uh, if you have one fail, uh then the you will see a deviation between the output of the two.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: They should be outputting the same exact signal at all times.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: If we have one disk crash or crack, then you'll have a difference in signal and you'll e-stop, as we say, you'll have a safe stop right away.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: So that's that's typically redundancy is everything.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, a new word.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: I haven't heard it in elevators too much, but it's very large in in automated manufacturing.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: And I would think we're gonna see it catch up there, and maybe it is, I just didn't hear it.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: I don't know everything.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, but is diversity of technology.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: That's that's a new buzzword um for safety.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: And that's where you actually use two encoders uh in a redundant pattern of different technology.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: So we uh have a magnetic encoder uh for that reason in part, because we build redundant encoders where the main encoder is an optical disk, and then we have this secondary magnetic uh kit encoder installed on the back.
25:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's for providing that uh uh redundancy, uh error checking.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: But because they share no technology, they can't have a common fault between them.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna have, hey, look, the battery failed on this one, but on that one at the same time because it's the exact same encoder, right?
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's considered the highest level of of safety.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it reminds me of a, you know, I remember taking a statistics class in college and and kind of that thing that once you have these redundant backups, you know, the the the likelihood of failure goes down just you know, just crazy.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: I I don't remember the numbers, of course, but it was like if this one's 97% up and this one's 97, the likelihood that they're both going to fail at the same time is minuscule and it was kind of mind-boggling.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's uh we have to discuss uh a value uh very often MTTF, I'm sure a lot of people have heard of mean time to fail.
26:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's mtf little d for mean time to destructive failure.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: And that's a very uh common uh number you need nowadays when you're working on a safety application.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: And you know, you're talking about this number that we have to generate.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh it takes a lot of math.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: And I'm a biology major, everybody.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: I don't do the math, but that number is, you know, usually 500, 1000.
26:59
SPEAKER_00: We just did one was over 2,000 years expected between uh destructive failures.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh and you need the numbers in hundreds of years if you're gonna get a product in.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's yeah, it's the statistics behind it are there in the importer world.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: But what um do you have like a uh favorite professional moment you'd like to share?
27:22
SPEAKER_00: There's been a few, uh, and they all are along the same thread.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh one of them was an automated guided uh forklift.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: So fully autonomous forklift drives around the factory moving boxes, you know.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: Um think the big box names, right?
27:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: And uh they were looking at doing angular measurement um on the driving caster.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: So if you think of a typical stand-up forklift you see at a Lowe's or Home Depot, and somebody has the handle that they spin.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: And if you look under it, it's these two caster wheels that just rotate.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's casters in the front, and then just this one big caster in the back.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: They want an angle on something like this.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: And uh they had a proposal of how to do it and came looking for a product from us.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: And uh I said, absolutely, we can do that for you.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: You'd be looking at this, take this along, whatever.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: Hey, by the way, have you considered, you know, on old farm tractors?
28:18
SPEAKER_00: Here it comes.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: I've seen it done like this, you know.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: And what do you think of that?
28:22
SPEAKER_00: Could you fit it because you're gonna have your cost, it's more reliable, you're only using one gear, that kind of thing.
28:27
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not an engineer, and I I say that up front.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: And uh they were they came back to me a day later and said, Jared, we really like that idea.
28:35
SPEAKER_00: And and they ran with it, and we've sold thousands of these things now, and so that's a proud moment because um I walk into stores like that and I can point at it and I show my kids, hey, you know, your dad, he's always on his headset.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: It looks like he's telling stories, which I am half the time, but uh, I actually do do something.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, we had another one, it was for for um cancer treatment, right?
28:59
SPEAKER_00: And uh, so any of those, you know, we we ended up doing a very custom encoder for a solution they didn't think they'd be able to find.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: And it was for treating um prostate cancer.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: And this actually goes on the device that determines the angle to like zap it.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: Um and uh so um it was uh it's just a really good feeling when you see that you played a role in something like that, you know.
29:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and for something, especially that that most people a don't know they exist, b will never see one in their live to know that you've contributed to making something possible that that could really serve them.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: Encoders are everywhere, and and I you know, anything that moves that doesn't have a human being, A, moving it, and B verifying that move because there's a lot of things that human beings move and still need an encoder.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, some of our biggest customers are our mobile equipment manufacturers of cranes and fork trucks, and our encoders go on the the manually operated ones.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: We have uh we're working on with a customer now who uses two or three encoders in their uh salt trucks.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: So when you see your town or city salt truck going down the road, there's encoders on there.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: You know, you go through the airport, and that machine that puffs air at you, there's an encoder in the top of that.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, we get in a lot of cool things, and it's they're not always sexy to look at our catalog.
30:16
SPEAKER_00: You don't go, wow, this is like you know, amazing stuff, but it really is for what we do and what we get in.
30:22
SPEAKER_01: The the end product, I think, is where you get the wow factor, right?
30:25
SPEAKER_01: I mean, yes.
30:26
SPEAKER_01: It's just like, wow, that's that's amazing that that's possible.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: I mean, somebody was, and maybe it was you, I don't even remember.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: Somebody was telling me that you know that the steering column on my vehicle really, you know, it's not a direct linkage anymore, but it's it's encoded, it's you know, it's being watched by all the electronics that you know, when it tells me, Oh, hey, you've you've gone over the line and you need to learn how to steer kind of thing, that it's the encoders gang going, oh yeah, it's Matt driving again.
30:49
SPEAKER_01: Let's give him a notification.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: Right.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: Right.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that's been the most fulfilling.
30:56
SPEAKER_00: And the people I've met, you know, because uh you you're a nuclear engineer, which did happen.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and this nuclear engineer was a professional engineer and had his college doctorate, uh, is a doctor of nuclear engineering uh in his 80s.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: So he was involved in some of the major reactor designs that are are operating today.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: And when people like that are working on a project where they need an encoder, even as an engineer, they don't want to know the nitty-gritty.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: They want to know from me how's it gonna fit?
31:26
SPEAKER_00: Can you modify this?
31:28
SPEAKER_00: I need these signals type of thing.
31:30
SPEAKER_01: Can it give me the output I want, right?
31:32
SPEAKER_01: I I just need to know right, you know, how this this satellite.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: I remember watching the video of of how they I think it's the James James Webb, you know, whatever station and satellite.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: But it's taking these amazing pictures, and I you know, we watched it unfold and and basically position itself and and I'm sure there were a ton of encoders just making sure that every single uh art piece happened at the right time and in the right way, and then you know, stage one, stage two, and and fascinating.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: It is, yeah.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you need vacuum rating, you need to you can't air gas anything.
32:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, we know about space, and uh it's it's a lot of fun.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: So, but I'm telling you, people would find some of the conversations we at Encoder have had getting involved in the motion of every application under the sun because you meet somebody like that engineer and and you get them to.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm a very curious person.
32:23
SPEAKER_00: I I've been known to run meetings long, wasting time because I'm too curious about what people do.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: And there's just a lot of neat stuff out there.
32:30
SPEAKER_01: What skills and education would you say are most valuable for someone if they're fascinated by what you do?
32:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think experience uh with with uh a hands-on application, you know, a lot of universities and I've been out a long time of school, but they do uh um internships and things.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: But I have found when I visit these you know companies everywhere.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: But I will tell you, I know a lot of successful people, um, especially uh um students who had to work, you know, and I was one of them.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: You know, I the college wasn't free, you know, it's not free now.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: Um and there is a lot of opportunity, particularly if you live in the Rust Belt, if you live in uh anywhere in New England, in New Jersey, New York, areas that have a large legacy industrial base, you know, where the old ball bearing factories are, where the old, and there is a lot of uh machine tool companies and engineering firms, manufacturing uh companies that manufacture with automated equipment that are desperate for employees.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: And uh if you want to be a manufacturing engineer in the elevator industry, but go work um at the companies that that build elevators, you don't need to start there.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: Go find a role and it'll be easy to find uh where you can get your hands dirty working on machines.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, um the best uh engineers I meet in the field, they're typically running the teams, they're typically engineering managers.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: Because by the way, you know, for the most part, you get a degree in engineering, you're an engineer, right?
33:57
SPEAKER_00: But to be an engineering manager, you got to prove you know how to lead people and solve problems.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: And you don't learn that at college.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: And uh a lot of engineering managers I've met came from backgrounds where um they started uh doing something with their hands, having that real world application.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: Work hard and uh, you know, you'll get there.
34:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, thank you.
34:17
SPEAKER_01: That's it's great advice.
34:18
SPEAKER_01: It it uh it is a unique, you know, just the like you say, the electro, the mechanical, the you know, sometimes hydraulic, you know, the uh all the all the pieces that that come together and and uh and you're right, it does seem more almost rare that you can find a place where where can you learn all those things and get your hands on them because you know you're not gonna get your hands on them in a textbook.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: You'll see a picture, right?
34:41
SPEAKER_01: You know.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: And that's knocking, not not knocking this generation.
34:45
SPEAKER_00: This generation's at a disadvantage.
34:46
SPEAKER_00: And my generation was the beginning of that.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh, my father's generation, I guess that'd be the baby boomers.
34:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, you will meet a lot of them today as they're getting into retirement and ask them, how did you get into this?
34:58
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of them will say, I grew up working on cars because in the 1970s you had distributor caps, you had carbureted engines, and you could work on your car.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: You can't work on cars today, you know.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: So uh kids today, a lot of the stuff in their life is now disposable.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: There's no reason, they're not getting those opportunities uh to get out their socket set and you know open up the cylinders and increase their compression ratios and all these things that they're they're not doing that.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: Um so they're not getting those skills.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: No, that's a good point.
35:29
SPEAKER_01: So um as as we wrap up, Jared, what um what else would you like to say?
35:33
SPEAKER_01: Any anything you'd like to give to our audience before we sign off?
35:37
SPEAKER_00: Do what you love.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: Um you know, uh I I I had a very jagged path.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: We didn't even get to my my time in the service, which is good.
35:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I've done a lot of things.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: I've worked for the government, I've worked for big companies, I've worked for small companies, uh, I've worked for a lot less money, and I've worked for a lot more money.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: Um, if you don't like what you do, don't do it.
36:01
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: You know, put your family first, put your life first, and do what you like.
36:07
SPEAKER_01: Said.
36:08
SPEAKER_01: Well said.
36:08
SPEAKER_01: Jared, thank you so much for being with me today.
36:10
SPEAKER_01: I've I've enjoyed every minute and uh wish you the best as you continue on your path.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for having me.
36:17
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening to the Elevator Careers Podcast, sponsored by the Allred Group, a leader in elevator industry recruiting.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: Please visit our YouTube channel at ElevatorCareers or check us out online at elevatorcareers.net.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: Please like and subscribe.
36:33
SPEAKER_01: And until next time, stay safe.