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12 The PCB Design Magazine • September 2016 pole switches, and a gutted Motorola radio be- hind the front panel. The attached pdf is of the manual for the replacement radio. The second pdf is a copier scan that shows only a portion of the panel flex cable (focal length issue). I took this with me on my CSUN job fair interview with JPL, and as it happens not too many other students had comparable show-and-tell items. After graduating from CSUN I went to JPL as a mechanical design engineer. At that time JPL was just getting into CAD design and they had three seats of Computer Vision Cadds3 that were kept in a dimly lit closet. My first task (after listening to Cadds3 training tapes, and reading the manuals) was to layout a two-layer PWB used in a PAP smear analyzer. From there I worked in a support role for most of the flight projects that came through our mechanical de- sign group from Galileo on. The drafting tables were slowly replaced by more CAD stations; we transitioned through software revisions, flirted with ProE (until the designer revolt), and settled on Unigraphics NX and Solidworks. PWB design moved from Computervision to Protel, Mentor and Altium. My work focused on electro-me- chanical design. This might include light struc- by Andy Shaughnessy If you watched footage of the Mars rover driving all over the red planet, you're familiar with some of John Cardone's handiwork. He's been designing rigid, flex, and rigid-flex cir- cuitry for spacecraft since he joined JPL in the early '80s, and he's worked on some of the more ground-breaking flex circuits along the way. Now John runs his own design service bureau, JMC Design Services, and he continues to de- sign circuitry for things that blast off. I caught up with John recently and asked him to give us the straight scoop on designing boards for spacecraft. Andy Shaughnessy: John, give us a little bit of background about yourself, and how you got into PCB design. John Cardone: My first engineering jobs were with Raypak, where I designed hydronic de- icing systems (which looked very much like film heaters on a larger scale), and then Medical Communication & Instrumentation (which co- incided with my start at Cal State, Northridge), where I designed my first electronic enclosure, PWBs and flex cable, all on the drafting and light tables with pencil and red/blue tape from Bishop Graphics. The product I redesigned at MCI (later Bio- com Inc.) was a medical communicator, the Biophone 3502, which was a feature of the old '70s TV series "Emergency." You can see the old unit by clicking here. It had miles of wire, stack John Cardone on Designing Flex for Spacecraft FEATURE INTERVIEW