John Gilmer is a now retired professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA. Just retired as of 2020. This site was intended primarily to be a resource for students at Wilkes, where various documents and images of interest can be posted. It will still be used that way for any adjunct teaching that may occur, but nothing at the moment. I'm still leaving material for various course here in case the stuff may be useful to someone. This site also serves as a resource for a number of other activities, including various professional, family, and hobby interests.
Some Currently and Recently Taught Courses at Wilkes
These courses are among those I have often taught, and it is possible that I may be teaching some of them again. Syllabi from recent offerings and other materials from previous offerings are a useful guide to what will be done in upcoming courses should I teach them again. At the moment, EGR219 seems most likely for Spring 2021. Here are materials from the most recent offerings.
The Engineering Laboratory Reports Manual that I was working on as my sabbatical project in 2016. It is available for use now at Lab Manual. The manual has been used so far to support EE241, EE283, EE252, and EGR222. A final revision was made Summer 2018.
Background: This project was to revise, bring up to date, and to expand the "Engineering Laboratory Reports Manual" first developed during the summer of 2008. After seeing the deficiencies noted on their laboratory reports in EE252, Electronics 2, students responded, "We don&squot;t know how to write a (good) laboratory report." They were right. The original 2008 manual was an emergency response. This project revised and extended that original manual, which was unsatisfactory in many respects.
This is a page where I have put material that should be of interest to Wilkes EE students, meant particularly for my advisees. This includes material descriptive of the Wilkes EE curriculum, and more general resources on problem solving and such.
Military Simulation
My interest in military simulation dates back to my early years of playing with toy soldiers and model ships, through paper and cardboard technology wargames, to computer military simulations. During my years at BDM Corporation (1977-1991) I was primarily involved with the design and development of military simulations for studies and for the U.S. Army. Research since then has focused on technologies to improve such simulations (especially the representation of human decisionmaking). Yet, I also remain involved in the cardboard technology wargames, which in so many ways address things that the computer simulations do not, and have the virtue of transparency.
The list below includes several papers and projects that reflect these interests. (An annotated version of this list is here: Military Simulation Document List.)
The Football Organization of Louisa is a play-by-mail football league, now in its 12th (XII) season. Business has been conducted by (postal) mail until recently when email methods have been used. The rules of the game have been evolving since the early 70s. Each mailing includes a game plan that allows the recipient to play an entire game, then compile statistics and return results. The current FOOL league was preceeded by the "UFL" (Unknown Football League) which played eight 10 game seasons. So, in all, there have been hundreds of games played with this system. Further FOOl information including the schedule, rules, current rosters, and an example game, is available on a dedicated page. Season XI wrapped up with the Black Bandits winning the Championship game against the Violet Storm, flipping the outcome of the previous season when Violet won out over Black.
A fun area of research in recent years has been toy trains. There are collectors who have developed massive amounts of materials on dating, production, variations, history and prices for toy trains on an amazing scale. But very few of these people are interested in technical characteristics, at least in an analytic sense. So, the field is wide open to investigate these things, especially questions like, "Why was this done?" For example, about 1927 to 1928, with the Ives company in serious financial trouble, why did they expend the resources to develop a new standard gauge motor? The simple answer is that there were problems with the early motor. I have taken a quantitative look at this issue. Lionel produced a locomotive No. 42 that had a variation that allowed shunt operation (for DC) of its motors. Why was that not repeated? I'm still working on that one. A collection of papers is located here:
Thomas the Tank Engine (at least, one of his Lionel incarnations) arrived in Pennsylvania in late 2008 for my birthday, and I received a digital camera shortly afterwards for Christmas. What to do? These stories are the result. Note that these are about a particular Lionel toy Thomas the Tank Engine, not the original (who is still on Sodor as far as I know) or any of the other millions of spawn spread throughout the world.
