My wife and I made a pretty drastic move, we packed up the whole family and left Canada for Silicon Valley.
Why? I landed a job in what many consider the mecca of engineering. I work in aviation, designing, building, and debugging manufacturing machines that test equipment before it goes on an airplane. It’s a blast. Every project is different, with different technology inside. It pushes me out of my comfort zone almost daily, and sometimes I find myself solving problems with tech I’ve never touched before.
Recently, I’ve been working with pneumatics. I thought I had a decent grasp of the basics — you push air through some valves, right? Easy.
Wrong.
For the sake of this blog post, let’s assume my setup was simple in theory: I had an air source, some valves, and the plan to control them electrically. I figured I could power these electric valves with 24V and they’d send air one way or the other. But during bring-up… nothing worked.
Turns out, the valves I picked needed a specific minimum pressure to even activate. And that pressure was way higher than my equipment could supply.
Luckily, I found a colleague who’s a pneumatics expert, and he guided me to a solution. Problem solved, but my curiosity was officially piqued. I wanted to really learn this stuff.
Luckily, I found a colleague who’s a pneumatics expert. He pointed me toward a solid solution, but before I dive in, I want to learn how to read and create pneumatic schematics with ISO symbols so I can execute it right.
I went down the rabbit hole:
- Searched for books, YouTube videos, and whitepapers
- Dug through Festo’s (German automation company) website
- Browsed supplier resources
If you haven’t tried it, NotebookLM is basically a personal ChatGPT that only knows what you feed it. You upload your documents, videos, and other sources, and it answers questions only based on that material. The best part? Every AI-generated answer comes with citations so you can go read the original text yourself.
And here’s the wild part: it can turn your notebook into an AI-generated podcast.
Naturally, I uploaded all my pneumatics research and hit “podcast mode.” The next morning, I was cruising down the 101, listening to an AI explain valves, actuators, and pressure systems to me.
Was it helpful? Yes.
Was it the safest idea to learn complex engineering concepts while dodging California drivers? Probably not. 😅
