At Solutions Uncommon, our motto is “We Listen”.
My name is Chuck Elliott, and I own Solutions Uncommon, LLC.
When I began this company in August 2021, my vision was to provide advanced engineering support and consulting services to Fortune 100 companies. In 2021, I was coming off a career in systems engineering and data acquisition that spanned almost four decades. Seventeen years were were spent as a Senior Test Engineer at Compaq Computer Corporation. Ten more years were spent as a Senior Systems Engineer at Hewlett Packard, from where I retired the first time in 2012. Another nine years were spent at Daikin Technology Group in Waller, Texas, from where I retired a second time in 2021. I started Solutions Uncommon LLC in 2021, and for two more years I leveraged my network of friends and engineering abilities within Daikin to continue there for another two years with Daikin as a consultant for the Reliability Engineering Department.
One might ask, if it was a good gig, why give it up?
The short answer is my vision and priorities have changed.
The longer answer is that throughout my life, I have always cared deeply about this planet. It has given me everything I have. I figure I have twenty more good years left, and I want to use whatever remaining time I have to give something back to it. Surely forty years of electrical engineering experience can continue being useful for a little while longer. I want to use my network and knowledge to significantly strengthen our planet’s resilience in the face of relentlessly increasing stresses that are threatening it.
“Sound can make the difference between life and death.” —David Attenborough
The only question for me is what difference can I make? I don’t know the answer, but I have ideas that can make high-end audio recording equipment affordable to the research community. To get an idea of what I mean by that, I invite you to watch David Attenborough’s documentary “Secret World of Sound,” which is available on Netflix. Pay close attention to the quality of the sound in the recordings throughout the documentary, then, I invite you to pause the documentary and play recordings you have made yourself for your own research. Listen closely to the difference between the two recordings. Keep in mind that the same kinds of frog and cricket noise were present in Mr. Attenborough’s recording that were present in your recordings and, yet, nearly all of that ambient noise that is absent from the former is deafening in the latter. The difference between the two is what an engineer calls SNR (Signal To Noise Ratio).
How did his team do it? They used vibrometers and other advanced equipment which cost tens of thousands of dollars for a single listening device.
Quality recordings don’t have to cost that much, especially when one realizes that while we may not be able to achieve quite the same exquisite performance as Mr. Attenborough, we can very likely achieve eighty percent of the quality he got for 5 percent of the cost. Eighty percent is a game changer. Wildlife sounds buried in the noise today would suddenly pop. Researchers would be able to study sounds animals are making and relate those sounds to their (the wildlife’s) behavior while they are making them. Less obtrusive observations could be made from greater distances than they can be made today. You can imagine for yourself many other benefits. The benefits accrue in the form of better and more conclusive research as well as to the animal life itself, which in the end, we all want to conserve and protect.
That is why I want to work on this.
Can it be done? Yes. But it cannot done by any single person working alone. This is a multi-discipline endeavor. That’s why I want to make myself and my company’s resources available to other talented people and companies who are similarly aligned. I want to coordinate with and augment leaders and workers who all have in common this one idea: Our planet’s resources are finite, and we are consuming them at alarming rates. If the planet is going to save itself, we need to play an active role. We are, after all, products of this planet.