Welcome to my little, cosy, corner of the web
... oh yes, and the name 'Csele' is pronounced 'Chelly' or 'Chell-eh'1

Who Am I? ...

I am a full-time professor at a small college in Niagara, Canada, teaching photonics (laser engineering), thin-film technology, and embedded systems design using PIC (and dsPIC) microcontrollers in the department of Technology. I have authored a book on lasers as well as an article in the Kirk-Othmer Chemical Encyclopaedia.

What's New On My Pages ....

About Me ...

Since this is a personal web page I thought I'd start by sharing a little about myself first from my photo album of personal faves (with photos chosen randomly by PHP code - some are quite dated though) ....


At Great Wolf Lodge in the fall of 2006. We stayed there overnight but when we arrived, our room wasn't ready so we took-in a game of miniature golf on this beautiful October day. I also discovered how tough it is to keep up with a ten and a twelve year old.

OK, Let's try Chronologically ....

Born in the late 60's, I grew up in the 1970's at a time when lunar missions were just ending, and we still got home delivery of milk from Sunnyside Dairy via a horse-drawn cart (No kidding about the horse-drawn cart, I remember our neighbour running out to the street with a shovel after the horse had passed to gather poop ... errr ... fertilizer for his roses :). The vacuum tube was still king (but solid state was coming of age quickly), and my parents were one of the first ones on the block with a colour TV. The TV brought us images of space missions and of the war in Vietnam, and people seemed preoccupied during this 'cold war' period that nuclear war between the superpowers was imminent. TV, too, seemed preoccupied with the whole 'cold war' theme and spy shows like Mission:Impossible (a show I just _couldn't_ miss ... and in the days before the VCR that meant the world had to stop) were all the rage!

Dad owned a shoe store, Ernie's Shoes, on Main street and my brother and I spent a good deal of time there in the back while Mom and Dad tended the store. On weekends, we'd make trips to Preston, Galt, and Kitchener to the shoe factories there to pick-up custom orders. On the way home, we'd tuck ourselved into 'cubby holes' made between the boxes in the back (these were the days long before seat belts were mandatory). And on the way home, we'd often get a special treat, a hot hamburger from either the Knotty Pine or Gulliver's Travels restaurants! On weekends we weren't "on business", we'd go on day trips to places like Burgoyne woods in St. Catharines. Weekend trips were common and we'd go places like the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit as a day trip (leaving very early in the morning, and coming home very late at night).

Dad had an interest in history of all kinds ... he once said that if he had gone to university he'd have liked to have gone through for a history teacher. In keeping with that, as kids, we visited a lot of historic sites and places. My favorites were places like the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn MI. The Henry Ford was a particularly interesting place as it featured many of Edison's labs including the Menlo Park lab pictured here. Another prized collection of the museum is one of the oldest Newcomen engines in existence.

A bit of that love of history rubbed-off on me and today I have an interest in the history of technology. The Niagara area, in what was the industrialized north, has a wealth of historical sites of interest including several generating stations which are 100-years-plus old! I have outlined several on this site.

I took an interest to electricity quite early - ever since Dad had build a flashlight on a yardstick using D cell batteries and a flashlight bulb. As a child, I'm told I liked to string extension cords all over the house and "wire it up" ... I found all things electrical interesting! As time went on, I started reading electronics magazines (both old amateur radio magazines from the 60's as well as Elementary Electronics and other contemporary magazine) and began building projects outright - some in kit form (like Radio Shack P-Box kits) and others from those magazines. Rather simultaneously, my interest in science also developed. One of my favourite places to visit for inspiration was the Ontario Science Center in Toronto (it was an annual trip) where I particularly enjoyed playing with the computers there (they had a large PDP-11 which played tic-tac-toe) as well as seeing the laser demo ... lasers were especially fascinating!

At home, there were a number of diversions including a large (8 foot by 8 foot) train set we had in the basement. As a kid, we'd swing by Niagara Central Hobbies on St. Paul street in St. Catharines - even when closed you could operate the train set in the display window via a capacitance-operated hand-shaped switch on the window. I liked trains, even as a child, and we'd often walk down main street to see trains crossing there (in the early 70's, trains frequently crossed through town on a multi-track main line which passed the busy Atlas Steels plant in the middle of town). There was even a neat wooden switch tower near that crossing.

Growing up, I wasn't a total geek (close to it, mind you, but not totally). One of my favourite pastimes in the late 70's / early 80's was roller skating. Welland had an excellent roller rink at the time (the Roller Alley) and I spent a good deal of time there. They played everything from disco to new wave ... I even had a "Roller Boogie" T-shirt so popular before the "Disco Sucks" backlash of 1979 which led to embracement of "new wave" (with acts like Devo, 'M', the B-52's, and Duran Duran). Roller skating died as fast as it arrived, and the Roller Alley sat dormant for years, eventually becoming a Fabricland. I enjoyed music since the mid 70's and that interest certainly grew. By the mid 80's I had migrated to more 'alternative' tastes such as the acts featured on Toronto's CFNY (acts like Thomas Dolby, Propaganda, New Order, and Kraftwerk).

Other diversions from my purely "techie" interests were provided by my older brother. A "car jockey", he also built dune buggies from old VW Beetles and seemed to take pleasure in getting me to drive them despite my apparent lack of driving abilities and usual difficulties involving a novice driver encountering a standard transmission (which resulted, one winter day in which I drove a Beetle around our snow-covered crescent, in placement of said Beetle on top of a large mound of snow requiring the digging-out of the vehicle). I owe a great deal of the "worldly" part of my education to him!

So, I did OK in school (although was preoccupied with "fun" stuff that had nothing to do with my studies), and my interest in both science and engineering progressed (that was the "fun" stuff I mentioned). I migrated from basic electronics (like those P-Box kits, as well as building colour organs and other projects) to digital electronics and computers and in 1979 I got my first "real" computer, an Ohio Scientific Superboard. I spent soooooo many hours teaching myself the BASIC computer language and writing programs on this machine which featured 8K of memory (that's 8192 bytes) and stored programs on a cassette recorder. It was around this time, as well, that my parents bought me my first laser: a HeNe laser kit in which I had to assemble the power supply from a bag of parts and a schematic. Owning a laser, back then, was a bit like having your own interstellar spacecraft (or so I thought).

During school (beginning in grade seven) and throughout high school I entered science fairs and this was the primary vehicle which drove my interest in science. Science fair projects allowed me to combine my love of electronics and computers with my interest in science and so was the perfect outlet for me. Not surprisingly, many of my projects involved lasers: starting with that HeNe kit I got and progressing to completely homebuilt devices including several gas lasers (argon and nitrogen) and dye lasers (both nitrogen-laser and flashlamp pumped). My science fair experiences reached an apex when I won first place in Physics at the 35th International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) held in Columbus, Ohio. My Science and Lasers Page contains many personal reflections and memoirs including my experiences at the Niagara Regional Science and Engineering Fair (NRSEF) and International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) which shaped my interests.

... and then Real-Lifetm kicked-in ...

After high school I avoided reality pursued academic excellence at the University of Waterloo and McMaster University for seven years earning a degree in honours physics (from the University of Waterloo) and later computer engineering (from McMaster University) ... I did mention that I was never sure whether I should be a physicist or an engineer didn't I? During my time as a student I had the usual summer jobs (like programming a custom POS system for a photo shop on a DEC Rainbow computer running dBASE-2). I went on to do more database programming and installing Novell networks which later spun into a business which helped put me through school.

Of course, it wasn't all academic work and along the way I "played" with the same kind of stuff I started-with years ago. As well as studying computers at University (I took several electives in programming), I learned how to program microprocessors (a Z8 microcontroller and the Zilog Z-80 micro). With a few friends, we'd make a bi-annual trip to Toronto to shop the electronics stores there often scooping some great deals on computer parts. I even built an updated colour organ (I'd built several, my first around 1977) - this time employing active filters using OP-Amps instead of insensitive discrete RC circuits. Along the way, I got involved in building a few high-voltage devices as well.

Upon graduation (can't be a professional student forever, I guess), I went to work for the control systems group at CP Rail developing train control systems, primarily a client-server based OCS (Occupancy Control System) running under OS/2. I learned a lot about programming at that position, including pre-emptive multitasking and inter-process communications (all under OS/2 while at CP). I became the 'comms' guy of the group specializing in communications systems (including RPCs). Long before that, though, I had a fascination with trains and specifically control and signalling systems, so this position was right up my alley!

I am a licensed Professional Engineer (P. Eng.) in the province of Ontario and a while back I 'moonlighted' as an engineer with VanDenTech Engineering specializing in embedded-systems solutions for industrial motor and power control applications such as large motors (up to 30,000 hp) and control systems such as PID controls.

... and then I came to Niagara College ...

In 1994, long before the photonics programs were even conceived, I came to the college as a professor of computer engineering technology teaching, primarily, hardware design (REAL hardware, like address and data busses, I/O chips, and all that jazz). For years, I taught a project-based microcontroller design course in which students designed and built a project of their choosing, most involving control systems.

I have utilized many microprocessors in past projects including the 6502, Z80 (my old fave), Z8 (another old fave - I like Zilog I guess), and dabbled with the 68000. Nowadays I pretty-much exclusively develop systems using PIC (RISC) processors including the PIC18F and the dsPIC30/33 series of processors - both used in courses I previously taught. The new dsPIC processors are particularly exciting since they offer a 16-bit core coupled with a DSP processor featuring 40-bit accumulators. In many ways, the processor seems to have all of the best features of many of my favourite processors from the past including a register bank (W registers) resembling those of a PDP-11. On the software side I pretty much use C/C++ exclusively for programming on a PC, usually to support PC-based front-ends (e.g. the logic analyzer project which has a front-end that runs on a PC and was programmed in C++ ... a PC makes an excellent unit for graphics display).

I began teaching in the fall of 1994 and was coordinator from the fall of 1994 until the spring of 2005. Originally coordinator of the computer engineering technology program as well as first-year coordinator, during my tenure I initiated the computer engineering technician program and from there I was coordinator of the computer engineering technician and technology programs. While I was originally hired to teach into the Computer engineering technology program, with the start of the Photonics program in the early 2000's (and the demise of the Computer Engineering Technology program a few years ago) I have now migrated to teaching exclusively in the photonics programs, both technician/technology and advanced-lasers certificate programs (and previously in the Bachelor of Applied Technology degree program).

A physicist first, an engineer second, before I became an engineer I had a keen interest in physics. To me the most fascinating areas of physics include quantum mechanics and atomic phenomena. My interest in lasers carried-over from when I was young and I have outlined many of the types of lasers I had constructed over the years on my Homebuilt Lasers Site and Science and Lasers pages.

I am a member of the IEEE Computer and Laser & Electro-Optics Societies as well as a member of the Optical Society of America. I am still 'split' between physics and computers.

Publications:

Fundamentals of Light and Lasers I am the author of a book entitled 'Fundamentals of Light Sources and Lasers' published by John Wiley & Sons in 2004 (ISBN 0-471-47660-9). Focussing primarily on lasers, the text introduces background concepts necessary to understand lasers including the nature of light itself, blackbody radiation and atomic emission, as well as basic quantum mechanics. Lasers are covered in detail with practical, real-world examples found throughout. The last six chapters of the text outline various laser systems in detail including visible, UV, and IR gas lasers, semiconductor lasers, solid-state lasers, and tunable dye lasers.


Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia I am a contributing author to the fifth edition of the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology (2007) as well as the online edition. I wrote the section on Lasers providing somehwat of a 'crash course' on laser technology.

Circuit Cellar Issue 249 Recently, I wrote an article in Circuit Cellar magazine outlining my Color Organ design along with a tutorial or the basic DSP technique of convolution (Issue #249, April 2011). Since developing a DSP course at the college a few years ago, I have employed such techniques for a host of applications, in this case to create three very high performance filters for audio separation. And since the DSP chip offers incredible speed, a constant-volume algorithm was implemented freeing the user from the need to adjust the gain of the device. Finally, a phase-control technique was implemented making the light output truly proportional to the audio intensity.

Personal Interests and Hobbies:

Workshop One of my oldest hobbies, which I have had since I was quite young and still have today, is electronics and computers. My workshop consists of two rooms, one a smaller, but well-equipped, electronics area and a larger main shop area (12' by 16') used primarily for woodworking. The small area is equipped specifically for electronics repairs and development and is equipped with an oscilloscope, multiple lab-type power supplies, meters, a signal generator, a frequency counter, and a logic analyzer. Many pieces of test equipment including the logic analyzer and the main power supply are homebuilt and other pieces are rebuilt like the old nixie frequency counter. Test equipment is mounted on a shelf immediately on top of the work area. The small shop also houses a huge number of plastic drawers on the walls housing various generic parts (like resistors, capacitors, and chips) as well as specific parts for my vintage computer collection (of the PDP-8, PDP-11, and Ohio Scientific variety) - parts like old CPU and RAM chips. I have outlined a number of projects I have built on another page, most based on PIC microcontrollers.

What started as a necessity turned into a hobby. When we first moved into our house we were, like many new home owners, house-broke and so could hardly afford luxuries like a new kitchen. I enlisted the help of my father-in-law and we built new cabinets (basic, but functional, particle-board cabinets). Projects around the house continued and renovations, and woodworking, have become a hobby. We have done various modifications to the house including building the basement into a family room (it was a separate apartment when we moved in), relocating various walls in the process, and built a breakfast nook onto the house where a covered sunporch previously stood. I built the entire room myself including walls and floor, drywall, and added garden doors to the outside. I did the ceramic tile work for the room as well as our bathroom and a few other jobs for my in-laws - I've actually come to enjoy doing tile work. In 2005, when my kids went with grandma to Slovakia, my wife and I rebuilt a good part of her basement, ripping out the old bathroom and workshop area and replacing it with a new bath and craft room. The old bathroom was tiny: a 30-inch shower and a 24-inch door which opened onto the toilet - claustraphobic at best. Walls and the old shower unit were removed and a new 60-inch wide fiberglass shower unit was installed. Porcelain ceramic tile was laid throughout the entire area, and walls in the new craft room panelled to finish it.

Half-Deacon's Bench While most of the previous renovation projects involved heavy work, more recently I find myself migrating to more delicate projects like cabinetry (I could say something sentimental like It's in my blood, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker in "the old country"). My shop is relatively well equipped with a larger area designed primarily for woodworking complete with a 220V 2hp dust collector, two bandsaws (one metal, one wood), two drill presses, a belt sander, radial-arm saw, and a mitre saw. Some of my equipment is homebuilt including my router (used as a shaper) for which I built a large, stable, router table with a heavy fence built from a single piece of aluminum channel (The speed control on the router requitred rebuilding as well). The first project to use such doors was a Half-Deacon's Bench, seen here, which worked-out well. I have also fabricated the same type of doors for our camping trailer, pine cabinets for the den complete with _real_ raised-panel doors (entirely made in my workshop), and the most recent project: a new oak vanity for the upstairs bathroom. The old cabinet, the last remaining original cabinet in the entire house, was an aged particle-board box with doors which haven't stood-up well against exposure to moisture. The new cabinet was built with a real oak front (not even veneer this time) and rail-and-stile oak doors (using a matching set of cutters on my 3hp router) with real oak raised panels.

Arcade Machines As the kids get older (and I, in a mid-life crisis, relive my childhood), the rec room in the basement has migrated from a playroom to a true "recreation" room complete with foosball (table soccer), an air hockey table, and several arcade and pinball machines as seen here. The machine on the left is a homebuilt Mame arcade machine running over fifty classic 80's arcade games including PacMan, Donkey Kong, and my personal favourite "Elevator Action". The cabinet was built from MDF board and has the same shape as the classic Centipede game (which it also runs). With a subwoofer and 40W/channel sound system, the machine also serves as a jukebox.

The two pinball machines are a 1979 Williams Firepower machine and a 1990 Data East Phantom of the Opera machine. Despite having digital displays, Firepower is very much an "old school" machine (the flipper buttons, for example, switch current directly to the flipper solenoids) while the later machine is a reasonably modern machine with great sound and light effects.

Sir Adam Beck (I) Generator A history buff, I have an interest in both 19th and 20th century history (Ironically, I was not a fan of history when I was a student but now find it fascinating), but my real pet interest is the history of technology. To that end, I have had opportunities to tour numerous old power plants in Niagara including the recently retired Canadian Niagara Power Company's Rankine generating station at the top of Niagara Falls, Sir Adam Beck I at Queenston, and the Decew Falls Plant (which is over 110 years old). None of these plants, when originally built, supplied 60Hz power - most were 25Hz except for the Decew at 66.6Hz! Other technologies I find interesting include Telephone Switching Technologies including the Strowger switch, Nixie tubes, and early steam engine technolgies employed engines such as the Newcomen engine.

Another primary interest is military technology and military history (Some of this interest likely grew from growing-up during the Cold War). I find the application of technology in the military to submarines, the atomic bomb, and spaceflight intriguing. To this end, many of the books I have read for recreation are historical in nature (for example Failure is Not an Option which outlines, firsthand, the history of the early spaceflight program). I have also visited a number of museums concerned with military technology including the Military Communications and Electronics Museum in Kingston and the the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

DisneyWorld, Florida As a family, our primary summer and fall activity is camping (teachers have one of the few professions where you can actually get use from a camper). We camp both for relaxation (i.e. "real" camping in wooded areas) as well as a vehicle for touring (for example, our three-week tour of the East Coast in 2006). In the winter or spring, we usually escape to Disneyworld, our favourite vacation spot.

An avid amateur winemaker, I have also tried to make beer in the past (usually dark ales) but after a few "unspectacular" brews I pretty much stick to wine nowadays. My tastes have changed gradually from making purely whites (usually a Riesling or a Sauvignon Blanc) to making more red wines (Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon). In the past, we had toured many Niagara wineries discovering new tastes. And I enjoy experimenting (i.e. tasting) different beers (who doesn't :) and in the summer enjoy lighter lagers like Sleeman Honey Brown - this having become my 'standard' in-stock beer. In the winter I often go for heavier ales such as Guinness (with 'winter beer' and 'summer beer' it begins to sound like a gasoline commercial doesn't it?). As a whole, my favorite beers are usually brewed in an English or Irish style (e.g. Boddingtons or occasionally a Hobgoblin. For a change a nice little Saranac Black Forest, a beer I get when camping in New York state, goes down nice. Black Forest is a German Schwarzbier, a heavy lager similar to Kostritzer.

At one time I downhill skiied, scuba dived (PADI advanced), played golf (or at least looked like I was chopping wood :), and played the guitar although it's been a few years since I picked-up my old Gibson SG so I wouldn't want to do a recital right now :).

Teaching:

My current specialties at the college are lasers (not applications, but more specifically the mechanism of the laser itself), vacuum and thin-film deposition technologies, and embedded systems design (using microcontrollers and DSP chips). I am fortunate that our college features some of the most amazing labs anywhere including a dedicated class-4 laser lab (housing various YAG, CO2, and Argon lasers); a spectroscopy lab with several high-vacuum systems; an SEM; and a class-1000 cleanroom with thermal, eBeam, and sputtering deposition systems. Take a look at our SOP page showing many pieces of equipment we have.

Vacuum Deposition at Niagara College Some of my favourite courses are PHTN1432 and CTEC1630, two long-running courses which have been with me since soon after I had started teaching at the college. While CTEC1630 died with the computer engineering technology program, PHTN1432 continues to be taught into all of our photonics programs and is constantly updated to include new techniques and equipment (the photo to the right shows an actual lab in the cleanroom - the yellow hue is not an flaw of the photo, the entire room is under yellow light to avoid exposing resist used in fabricating silicon chips in the same lab). Recent improvements in the course include the use of design software to model thin-film devices prior to fabrication in the lab and the use of all three major deposition technologies (thermal, eBeam, and sputtering). This course is the essence of college education: the application of theory to real-world problems and structures. It is a course for which I still feel personally responsible and is still "my baby".

And embedded systems ... they have been relegated once again to "hobby" status. One of my current projects is to design and build a dsPIC-based oscilloscope project for the Computer/Electrical/Electronics program's workshop project. This unit employs a 33FJ processor, can sample at 1MS/s, and features a graphical display. I continue to build a host of other projects as well.

Courses I Currently Teach:

Here is a brief description of courses I currently teach (or have taught in the past year). All feature an intensive laboratory component:

As well as the current courses above, I have taught a whole bunch of other courses4 ranging from electronics and microcontroller design to general education courses (happens when you teach for almost twenty years)

After The Term Is Done ... the fun begins

During the fall and winter terms I teach (and really, it's not bad getting paid to talk about stuff you find interesting anyway). In May and June, right after the winter term ends, my favourite activity is building and updating labs. Now 'building' a lab would be easy if one had all the money in the world: design a lab, purchase the equipment, and away we go .... but academia these days is far from perfect and often the only way I would be able to afford the equipment is to rebuild old, donated, equipment or build a complete lab from spare or scavenged parts. This is not to malign the college: most colleges simply don't have the equipment that we have nor do they have the facilities .... the only reason we can afford this stuff at ALL is due to a curious and strange phenomenon at Niagara College in particular in which several of us (I mean faculty and support staff) bring in donations of otherwise prohibitively expensive equipment and rebuild it for use in the labs. Some of the best (and most unique) equipment we own was either built in-house or rebuilt and our laser lab, as well as our microelectronics lab, is full of equipment like this.

DPSS System While moonlighting for a company which utilizes lasers in a process, it became obvious that one effect I need to demonstrate in my laser classes is the temperature-sensitivity of non-linear systems (such as frequency doublers and OPOs). It is well known that non-linear systems are very sensitive to temperature (since this affects phase matching), and this is always discussed in class, but I think it is hard to appreciate _how_ sensitive without a good lab demonstration. This setup, a new lab for PHTN1400 and PHTN9180 classes, consists of a small DPSS system with separate controls for diode current, diode temperature, and DPSS/SHG temperature. By varying the DPSS crystal temperature is can be found, for example, that a 0.2 degree shift in temperature results in an output power drop to one-third of the original value!

This lab setup will enhance an already existing lab in which students determine the sensitivity of a DPSS laser to shifts in pump diode wavelength. The peak emission wavelength of a diode varies naturally with diode current and such variations will affect the efficiency of pumping a DPSS. In the current lab setup, the pump diode on a commercial DPSS (identical to the unit above) is substituted with a Coherent model 890 tunable Ti:Sapphire laser (pumped by a large 10W Coherent I-200 argon-ion laser).

And that's how I spend a good bit of my time in the spring while I'm not teaching. Past May/June projects have included rebuilding a 1969 ruby laser (including a new cooling system, and new logic card which now employs a PIC microcontroller), rebuilding a vacuum system, and building a few other lab setups.