David Leask: Project Consultant At Novecom

Join us on the Engineering Success podcast as we sit down with David Leask, a project consultant at Novacom. David shares his fascinating journey from electronics apprentice to agricultural technology expert, offering insights into the world of Internet of Things (IoT) in agriculture.

Discover how David’s passion for electronics, sparked by childhood curiosity and nurtured by mentors like Bob Cowan, led him to a diverse career spanning trade work, education, and innovative agricultural projects. Learn about Novacom’s groundbreaking mesh network technology for water monitoring on farms and how it’s revolutionising resource management.

David discusses the importance of passion, persistence, and adaptability in building a successful career in electronics. He shares valuable advice for aspiring professionals and emphasises the significance of hands-on experience and community engagement in regional projects.

From Sydney to Hobart yacht races to commercial beekeeping, David’s varied interests showcase the multifaceted nature of engineering professionals. Don’t miss this inspiring conversation about the future of electronics, the role of AI in engineering, and the importance of bridging the gap between industry, education, and regional communities.

Tune in for an enlightening discussion on innovation, career development, and the exciting possibilities in the world of electronics and agricultural technology.

Listen to the episode

Transcript

Please note: this transcript has been auto-generated and may contain some errors.

Welcome to the Engineering Success podcast. My name is Mel Seitzler and I am a senior engineering consultant here at Nui Tech People. Today I have the pleasure of being joined by David Leesk from novacon, who is a project consultant there.

Thanks for joining me, David. Yeah, really excited to be here, Mel. Thanks for having me.

Thanks. So I guess what I’d like to start today is with, I guess you telling us a little bit more about your role and your career journey today. Yeah, sure.

Well, my role currently with Novacom, part of Emergent Group, is project consultancy role and my areas of specialty are agriculture and implementation of Internet of Things. Awesome. And I guess Internet of Things for those not in your space, often known as the IOT world.

Yeah, yeah. So I’ll give an example. Particularly with agriculture, we’ll focus on say, water flowing in pipes.

Let’s say that water’s pumped from a critical waterway like the Macquarie River. So the water’s pumped. The government agencies need to know how much water is being pumped and that’s then reported back to the government, to the data acquisition service.

So the Internet of things model comes in where ultimately that water that’s pumped out of the river is metered at the point of take, but then it’s distributed through to different farms through a piped network. And each farm has a water monitoring device. And then that meter that’s metering the amount of water that’s being taken for a particular farm is also reporting back to a dashboard.

And the Internet of things model kicks in because the meter that’s producing data ultimately talks through a field based computer, little industrial computer, and then that uses a communications topology to eventually end up getting that data onto a dashboard. So that’s the Internet of things model. And that dashboard is available on your desktop computer or your mobile phone.

Yeah. But exciting to see it applied in the agriculture space. Absolutely, yeah.

And I guess before your role at Novacon, talk us through a little bit of that early part of your career. Yeah, well, this is really exciting little journey. So I left school and I went straight into a technical apprenticeship.

So I’m a tradie, but I’m, I’m not a carpenter, I’m not an electrician, I’m not a bricklayer. I’m an electronics trades person. It’s a little known trade, but quite a well recognized trade in our country and internationally.

So I served an electronics apprenticeship with Sanyo, a Japanese manufacturing company that at the time had a substantial base in Australia. And from that my passion and understanding for electronics just grew in breadth and in depth and I applied myself. I did okay academically through the technical college system and I also attained a gold medal in the what’s now known as the World Skills Trade Olympics.

And from, from that I end up becoming a service manager for a service company for a period of time. And then I went out on my own and my own business for approximately 13 years, basically having great fun repairing stuff that was broken and did okay out of that. And from there I was tapped on the shoulder and asked if I would consider putting my industrial worth back in to my own industry using Tafer’s vehicle for that.

And I turned that offer down. So there’s no way I’m going to be a teacher. So the seed was planted and I, I went to University of Newcastle and did a degree in adult vocational education and training and that set me up for 21 years worth of career in the TAFE system being a teacher and then a head teacher and then in various managerial roles and that I decided that it was enough for me after approximately 21 years, pretty decent stint.

And then I decided it was time to go back. I wanted to be on my farm, I wanted to be there full time. And that’s where Larry Platt’s outfit, Emergent Group comes in.

I, I was strongly encouraged to come and have a bit of a, a play in the sand pit known as Novacom within Emergent Group. And I’m so glad that I was asked to come along because it’s the most awesome gig and, and my full time work on the farm can wait a bit longer now. Very good.

So you just touched on a little bit there I guess about having a farm and this little world outside of Newcastle. How has that farming life impacted your career? Well, my family, both sides of the family are pioneers in agriculture. One side of the family own a substantial beef cattle station.

If you’re familiar with Thunderbolts Way just outside of Gloucester, about halfway up Thunderbolts Way there’s, there’s a premier cattle station at the moment called Giro Station. Well, Karamere station was where my family had interest, was right next door. There are two bookends.

So one side of the family came from Caramere and the other side of my family citrus pioneers from the central coast. So from that the siblings for the main all went into agriculture. That’s all they knew, all they loved, they remained there.

So with my gig with Novacom as an agricultural project consultant, the knowledge and understanding and experience in electronics coupled with the knowledge, understanding and experience in agriculture is a marriage made in heaven. It’s an unusual set of skills to be combining. For example, one of my close cousins is also off the land and he became a plant mechanic.

And so his journey was to end up in a leading hand role for tunnel boring under cities. And. But he’s also gravitated back to the land as well.

So out of. Out of my family, I was one of the very few people that took on a technical trade where everybody else was basically plant machinery. Agronomy, for example.

Yeah. And why electronics as a trade? I had this bent toward making things and breaking things. I needed to know how everything functioned.

I could be presented with a perfectly serviceable piece of equipment and within an hour it would be broken and wrecked. It would be in a million pieces. But I’d be really chuffed because I would have those pieces all laid out and then I wouldn’t necessarily understand to component level what those pieces meant.

But. But I knew that I had just deconstructed something that was working. And now all of those bit meant something in the grand scheme of things.

Occasionally I’d be able to piece it back together again. But I was always completely intrigued by complex machines and in particular complex electronic systems. Yeah.

How that interest really came about. The real kickstart for me was in about year two or year three in infant school. One of the girls in my class bought her brother in one day for show and tell.

And he gave us a presentation on CB radios. And he also gave us a presentation on Morse code. And he spoke about this really intriguing thing called standing wave ratio, which in the CB world back then was termed swa, which the amateur radio people would hate me saying, but standing wave ratio.

And I watched him dial this little machine and a gauge would show when transmitting a signal that that transmitter was matched to the antenna. And that was revealed on this meter. I was so intrigued at the notion that there was an interrelationship between this black box with a microphone attached and then an antenna attached to that.

And then he could dial this thing to match the two. And he spoke a little bit about soldering. And we smelt the smell.

And I’ve never forgotten that smell. So really my career pathway was being laid from when I was in year two or year three. Wow.

Shows the importance of STEM exposure so early in your career. Absolutely. And I’ll have to go a little bit further with that as well, that it’s a curious thing that pretty much right the way through school, I wasn’t engaged at all.

And in particular in maybe the latter part of junior high school and Most definitely into senior high school, I would be classified as being completely disengaged. So what is it about me that I can be completely and utterly disengaged with science at school and be failing physics, yet I could not wait to get home from school in the afternoon and turn the TV set on and watch Professor Julius Sondmiller. He had such a profound impact on me as a young person and he gave me permission to be able to experiment and gave me permission to wreck things to find out how they worked.

But at the same time, he also, through his little shows in the afternoon, disciplined me to use correct language and to be able to pronounce things and spell things correctly. He was a real stickler for spelling and pronunciation. So there’s this notion these days that if a young person needs to be exposed to an industry, that they need to be exposed to that industry by another young person.

But so the question that I always had for myself is, why is there this man who’s in his late 60s or 70s, why is he so engaging for young people? Like, why is this man so much more engaging to me than, with respect, the teachers that I had at school. And that was a real learning time for me. And it was lessons that I kept very close as an employer when I was in a position of responsibility with TAFE and the people that I would determine as being the most effective to impart their knowledge and understanding.

And in fact, at one stage of my career with tafe, one of my most effective and engaging teachers ever was in his late 70s and he was so popular, Professor Julius Sumner Miller. Yeah. So as far as electronics is concerned, the building, the curiosity, the push into physics by this famous professor, but that’s all well and good to develop an interest, but what sparks you into a career is a completely different thing.

And so I can talk about somebody in our region who had an absolute profound impact on me and still does to this very day. Yeah, one of our captains of industry. If you like, I can give you the story of that.

So many people in our region will know a man called Bob Cowan. And I, as a 15 year old kid, was riding my bike around Warners Bay and I found myself riding right into this industrial building. And I shouldn’t have been there, but I rode my bike straight into there.

I didn’t know what the heck was going on other than I was intrigued by these big machines making these big banging sounds and lots of blokes in their working machines. And I was sitting on my bike, just taking all all this in And I got yelled at. One guy in the workshop told me to get out, this is no place for kids.

But then there was this voice that said, what are you doing here, young fella? And I said, oh, I’m just having a bit of a look. And he said, do you want to come and have a chat? And I immediately got a bit scared. He said, leave your bike there, come with me.

And I went into an office that was adjacent the big industrial building. Anyway, I’m sitting down going, what have I done now? And. And here was Bob Cowan.

And the business was then known as Cowan Sheet Metal. He said, so what brings a young fellow like you into a place like this? What do you want to do? And I said, oh, can I do some work experience? And he said, done. When do you want to start? Okay.

So what I did was I, as a 15 year old kid, I didn’t know what I was walking into. I really didn’t even know what work experience was. Those words just fell out of my face.

So I did this autonomously. The school wasn’t involved, my parents weren’t involved, but I organized my own work experience with cow and sheet metal. I was there for two weeks.

Yeah. And one thing that I can say is that I learned reasonably quickly that I did not want to be a sheet metal worker. Yeah, I did love, you know, the outcomes of the work.

I thought they were very clever, but it just wasn’t for me. And one thing that I will never forget is that in the lunchroom they said, you know, one way to gauge the amount of time that a sheet metal worker has been in industry is the amount of fingers on his hand. And they’re all holding their hands up and they’re missing.

And so something really powerful happened while I was on work experience at Cowan Sheet Metal at Warner’s Bay. This is in the early 80s and at that time there was a lot of unrest in Newcastle industrially. BHP was winding down and at the same time there was a horrific drought happening.

So agriculture was getting knocked around savagely. Traditional heavy industrial manufacturing was being dealt a really savage blow at that time. So there was a message that was sent around all the workers at this business and we were all asked to assemble out in the car park on the dirt.

And there was a whole bunch of workers standing around in a circle, not really knowing what was going on. And I was standing next to Bob and there was a secretary standing on the other side of him and that secretary was holding a pile of brown envelopes. I didn’t know what that meant.

But I can say that that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a grown man cry. And it was Bob. And I’ll never forget his words saying to the guys, I’m so sorry, this is the only way.

I can’t do anything else. I just can’t do anything else. And he was a shattered man and it shattered me as well.

And I, I just thought, wow, this is, there’s something about that that showed me that that man was a really special man, caring, but also he had one mission and that was to ensure the survival of his company. So at that time, the equipment that I witnessed being manufactured there were, you know, non glamorous items like panels for zinc alum garden sheds and urinals for RSL clubs and stainless steel backing plates for fish and chip shops, you know, that sort of stuff. Years later, the service manager working for a company, we did lots of work in lots of different areas and I found myself doing some work at a local caravan park.

The manager of the caravan park, when I was talking to him, settling an account, he said, see that bloke over there? He pointed to a very small caravan and there was a bloke sitting inside it. He said, you know that bloke sitting in there, he’s got this idea of some thing called a decompression chamber. And I said, wow, that sounds pretty full on.

What’s his name? And he said, that’s Bob Cowan. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

So I made a, made a beeline straight for that caravan. I knocked on the door and he looked up and he said, work experience, kid. And I said, hey Bob, how you going? And then, you know, we caught up and then he told me about his plans for a decompression chamber, a hyperbaric chamber.

And I was just completely blown away that, you know, a few years before, quite a few years before, I was watching, you know, him overseer company that was making panels for zinc alum garden sheds and now they’re talking about decompression chambers. My gosh, what a leap forward. And it was, it was another growth moment for me.

And I thought at the same time, this man is putting everything into this. I’m going to continue putting everything into what I do as well. So this guy personified grit and determination and when you hang around that some of it rubs off.

And so anyway, I, I followed Bob’s journey quite a bit and as my career progressed I, I continued in one of my sports and that was Dingy dingy racing, competitive sailing. And. And then one day I bought my first yacht and then I saw Bob Cowan at the yacht club in one of his special boats and we.

We saw each other again and he said, hey, work experience guy. Hey, Bob, what’s happening? And he just referred this wonderful story to me about the fact that there was a chance meeting for him on an aircraft and he went from being completely concerned about not being able to get this decompression chamber model off the ground to this chance meeting on a plane, meant that, wow, he’s able to actually launch into realising his dream. And then as time progresses.

Newcastle’s a small place. Absolutely. Yeah.

The good people know the other good people. And often, often there’s more chance meetings and here down the track, then I realized that Bob is effectively, you know, founder of Hunter Manufacturers. And it did not surprise me.

Yeah. At all. And that night, when I.

When I was with tafe, we were a sponsor for the event and often our students were recipients of awards. So I was at the Hunter Manufacturers Awards quite a bit. And one year, I’ll never forget seeing Bob Wright, his Harley Davidson out there on stage.

Another, you know, if he didn’t do something like that, something would be really wrong. Yeah. But, yeah, so I think from that initial exposure from show and tell in year two to year three through to being influenced by Professor Julius Sumner Miller and then being supercharged by Bob Cowan, that gives a bit of an idea of how I ended up gaining the interest and the energy to launch into what I’m doing and where I am now.

And all in your own backyard in the Hunter. That’s absolutely it. Yes.

Yeah. So during your time with tafe, you’re involved in some key initiatives, some of those around advanced manufacturing. Can you perhaps share one of those initiatives that you’re involved with? Absolutely.

I’ll share a pretty cool initiative and I’ll share how that initiative came about. So I was made aware of the importance of backing yourself and making sure that you’re involved with industry groups and networking groups. And through my involvement in the Australian industry group at the time, Adrian Price is a guy who was running the Australian industry group, Hunter in Innovation, Hunter Manufacturers Innovation Cluster.

Being involved in that. There was a lot of mutual understanding from industry players and TAFE and the stuff that I was doing there. And an opportunity came up for me to be able to join a representative party to go from Newcastle to Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania a few years ago.

I remember Adrian saying to me, david, if you come on this journey with us, it will change your life and it Absolutely did. And so the idea of that trade mission to Pittsburgh of all places, was brought about by the notion that Pittsburgh has already seen a demise of its steel making industry and it had seen the wind back of its mining. And that’s fairly familiar turf for Newcastle, the Hunter region.

And so the idea of the trade mission was so that all of the participants could gain an insight into a potential direction for Newcastle and the Hunter Valley at large. How does Newcastle fill the voids left by traditional blue collar work? So it was actually a really powerful immersive experience and we met some key players in political figures as well as industrial players in many different areas. One of the lessons that we learned was that if you become too tech, you become quite isolated from blue collar, traditional blue collar workers.

And I remember the, the Pittsburgh mayor talking to us about an emerging issue with the fact that the city was becoming so tech savvy that pretty much the blue collar workforce had up and left, okay, to go somewhere else and earn a living because they’d been automated out of their own existences. And the only people that were really left were people in the service industry and taxi drivers. But guess what? At the time in Pittsburgh, that was a test bed for autonomous taxis.

And so the cab drivers were feeling threatened. And in the service sector there were robotic restaurants, for the want of a better description as well. So he was saying that the pendulum can swing too hard against, you know, social values.

It can swing too hard across to one side because it’s fine to automate everything. But what about the humans? Yeah, and so that was a really interesting thing. So there were some key players that I went to the Pittsburgh trade mission with that bought similar learnings back that I did.

I punched my learnings into the vocational education sector. Other people were punching their learnings back into their own industrial businesses. So what came from that was the then managing director of TAFE New South Wales, John Black.

He had a tough gig. He was heading up one of the largest employers in the state and he was trying to bring TAFE New South Wales into, into a contemporary training arena such that TAFE would be providing current generation technical training for current generation technical needs. And he had a really tough gig.

But it just so happened that both of us aligned with our values. John contacted me and asked if I could introduce him to some key players in the Hunter region. And it was very, very easy for me to identify and introduce him to those key players and I’ll dob them in.

Right now one of those key players is Adam Amos. He is a Self backed, amazing man who’s building up his company, Robotic Systems. I admire everything that he does and he is certainly putting his money where his mouth is and he’s growing and growing.

So what I did was I pinpointed Robotic Systems. There’s another company that I pinpointed, BlueZone Group, Darren and Gunilla Burroughs. They’re a power couple in our region.

Gunilla coined the phrase at the time that Newcastle is in a Goldilocks phase where nothing could be any better than the time right now if you want to implement a startup, for example, with full support, mentoring, training. So Darren and Gunilla’s outfit, Blue Zone Group, was pinpointed. And the third point was a robotic dairy at Upper Lansdown out of taru, owned by Adrian and Stella Drury.

So what I did was I triangulated those three businesses and what sits in between those businesses? Well, the greater Hunter. And so we, we traveled to the three businesses, we met people within those businesses so the managing director of TAFE NSW could fully understand what the businesses represented and what types of training people within those businesses needed to satisfy the technical demands of those companies. And he was particularly taken with the robotic dairy.

And the reason why is because he already had a bent toward agriculture and I do as well. And so we worked together very, very well. And at the time I had quite a bit of immunity within a big bureaucratic system and I was able to get a heck of a lot of stuff done.

So what I did do, I was able to convince the hierarchy within TAFE New South Wales that Newcastle is very, very well placed for the implementation of what they term then a skills point in innovative manufacturing, robotics and science. And as a consequence of that, I was able to look after a project to develop the framework for a really interesting qualification. My theme was that there’s an electrical engineer who designs cool stuff.

It’s manufactured, it’s put into service and at some stage of the game it might fail. So the electrical engineer could have a person on the ground that implements this gear or maintains it, calibrates it, whatever, and that’s an electrician. And so then there’s a computer engineer and then there’s a computer technician and then there’s an electronics engineer as an electronics tradesperson.

And now there’s a qualification called a mechatronics engineer, but there’s no mechatronics tradesperson. And so Adrian Drury, who owned this beautiful robotic dairy, six individual milking robots that would milk 430 head of cattle up to five times a day over a 24 hour period, these machines. Awesome.

But his complaint was, where the heck am I going to find somebody who knows hydraulics, pneumatics, electronics, electrical, who can weld, who can operate a computer, you know, and oh, by the way, they need to be comfortable around cattle as well. Where are we going to find people like that? And so the managing director was pretty keen on the idea of pulling together a whole new qualification that TAFE would pioneer. And it was called a mechatronics tradesperson for Agriculture.

And that put a real fire in my belly. Yeah. And because of my networking in the region, I was able to survey approximately 70 industrial companies around our region and come up with a framework of training outcomes that on average companies around our region would need to satisfy the requirements of a mechatronics tradesperson.

So that that project attracted by default some pretty cool funding to buy some hardware which I imagine today is still sitting in a laboratory somewhere in the hunter waiting, waiting for the day. But so that is an example of a really cool project that I was able to implement. And politically it gained a lot of traction.

It, it had the vibe but it didn’t have the, the internal oomph to, to perpetuate it. So. Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a really interesting project to be part of though.

Yeah, it’s scary to get involved in stuff like that within a large bureaucratic environment because you’ll either survive or, or you’ll be cult. Yeah, clearly you survived, which is good. Yeah.

As my father would say, you’re better off being the middle ranked, the middle ranked soldier in the middle of the pack hide. And he said, David, you’re doing exactly the opposite. Yeah.

So your current role, you’re with Novacom, which is part of the Emergent Group. Can you tell us a little bit more about Emergent Group and I guess what Novacom’s doing overall? Yeah, sure. So Emergent Group is a really cool company that was founded by a guy called Larry Platt.

Larry is another Bob Cowan. But I didn’t ride my push bike into Larry’s shop when I was 15. Larry’s second in charge, Stephen Smith, he was the chair of Hunter Manufacturers.

And I was tapped on the shoulder and invited to come and work in, in that area. So Emergent Group has three companies and one of those companies is called Acubus. Acubus specializes in industrial scale radio frequency communications networks.

So you know, they’ll put up radio frequency communication infrastructure around a big open cut mine. So they do a lot of work in Queensland and across Western Australia for example, and other areas of course. And so the other arm of the company is AdVotech.

AdVotech are consulting engineers. The consulting engineering disciplines can range from structural engineering, functional safety, applied mathematics, environmental sustainability, and mechanical engineering, to name a few. And that’s all under one roof at Mayfield west and the area.

The company that I’m working with under the umbrella of Emergent Group is a company called novacom. Its name many years ago was Novocastrian E Commerce. And Larry saw that there needed to be a little bit of a direction change.

So it’s not E commerce, it’s environmental monitoring and data analytics. And so Novacom is specializing in monitoring the environment. And some pretty cool applications are blast vibration monitoring and the recent earthquake that happened.

In fact, it was in the last week, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was. That was well and truly documented using blast vibration monitoring equipment that’s been installed around mining infrastructure around the hunter, and coupled with that is acoustic monitoring as well. So I think there’s around about 700 points of monitoring around the country, and it is Sri Lanka and New guinea for these environmental monitoring units.

So basically what happens is stuff that’s monitored in the field then reports back using Internet of Things methodology. And we have data analysts on site that are able to glean critical elements of that data as it’s received and then generate reports, send reports off to environmental authorities, mining companies, for example, to make sure that people are remaining compliant. Novacom also has an arm that punches into agriculture.

That’s fortunately the area that I get to get to play. I guess if I was really pressured to say, you know, how is it that someone that’s a project consultant in agriculture can integrate into a company that has consulting engineers? I’ll give a really cool example. In the last month, there was a collaborative effort between novacom and Advitech, where I was doing some work in naramind.

We have implemented a really cool project that I’ll expand on shortly. But there was a structural engineer who came with me. And this structural engineer was able to assist me, particularly with working at heights.

And there was an implementation that I needed to effectively. And it was one of our industrial field computers to be mounted on a gantry, and it was quite high off the ground. And so the structural engineer was able to reassure me, guide me, you know, safety and a lot of technical backup as well, to make sure that the holes were drilled in the correct places, you know, and the stuff was mounted in the most appropriate, appropriate way.

So that. That was cool having a structural engineer with me. But the thing for.

For this engineer was that she had never done any work on a farm before like this. And so that experience meant that there was a structural engineer that was put outside the comfort zone, or the zone of normality and working on a substantial grind farm as well. And so that was an enriching experience that actually led to a point of enlightenment where, hey, these big farms have got huge silos and those silos need to be validated for structural integrity.

Who needs to do that? Structural engineer? And so there’s all of these opportunities that come out of left field and we ended up calling by a satellite grain handling terminal and we learned that that terminal is very soon going through a full revamp, multimillion dollar revamp. And guess who they need on site? A structural engineer. And so the opportunities like that come to the fore when you’re collaborating.

There’s another side to the coin, because the reason why this structural engineer was coming to Narromine with me is because she was commissioned with the task of going out to do some intelligence gathering on some structural work that needs to be done at the Parkes radio telescope. And so by default, I found myself walking around the Parkes radio telescope. And I never dreamt in a million years that I would be inside the laboratory environment in that radio telescope, let alone climbing around dish at heights, you know.

And so from that the collaboration continues because the CSIRO employees then learnt that I made an electronics tradesperson and they need electronics tradespeople on site at the radio telescope right now. And so that gives a little bit of an example and just one, one instance of, of collaboration. You know, how many companies have a design electronics area in close proximity to mechanical engineering or functional safety or environmental scientists? So if somebody that’s doing a project within Novacom needs to have advice from a design engineer, they don’t have to book a two week advance appointment with a consultancy firm in Sydney.

They can just walk 50 meters and tap someone on the shoulder and say, hey, can I bother you? Because it’s got something you need to run by you. So my involvement with Novacom, when I go out onto a farm, I really feel like I am spearheading the capability of 80 or 90 workers under the one roof. All of that collaborative worth.

There’s not a lot that this company can’t do. And so the pride is really high for me going out to do this work in the field. But at the same time, I feel completely and utterly duty bound to stick by Larry Platt’s company values.

And one of those company values is if it’s not right. It doesn’t leave the front door. I firmly believe that that’s, that’s one of the values that I, that I hold very dear.

And that led to me being reasonably successful with my own business many years prior. But when, when I’m out on site, not only am I spearheading the capability of the company, but I need to do the collaborative worth of that company justice. I need people in that company to know that I’m being my professional self and representing people adequately as well.

And I think that collaboration piece is so important because there’s so many business where they have these really talented teams, but they are just in silos and they don’t collaborate. No. Well, that I haven’t seen a siloed existence in emergent group.

Yeah. Even the layout of the building is such that it’s all on one level playing field. And if you want to go and talk to an expert in a certain area that you need some intelligence in, I mean, with respect, you can’t just interrupt somebody when they’re in the middle of something.

But ease of access is there and it’s really respectful. Yeah. Fantastic.

In your current role, are there any, like, emerging technologies or innovation projects that you’re excited to share with us? Absolutely, absolutely. I’m going to try and contain myself with this one. The then managing director of Novacom claimed that this innovation that I’m about to talk about is the first of its kind in Australia implemented in agriculture.

So our product engineering team was faced with a challenge and that challenge is that if we have 56 farms, which is a substantial amount of ground to cover 56 farms, and each of those farms needs to have the amount of water that they’re using in, in a system. Each farm needs to have their individual water usage metered and reported to a central, a central dashboard. If you think the 56 farms would cover, say, the whole area of Newcastle and there’s 56 points of transmission for those metered pipes, there will be black spots, radio communications black spots.

And under the Internet of Things model, each of those meters needs to talk to the outside world, but they can only get to the outside world using mobile phone communications. So the challenge for the product engineering team at Novacom was we need to get all of these 56 meters talking to the one dashboard at the same time, reliably, all the time. How they did this was amazing.

They came up with the idea that we would identify the strongest mobile phone signal areas out of those 56 farms and we would identify six of those areas as Mobile phone signal gateways. So that’s only six sites that are being monitored, but what about the other 50? And so there’s a Lora communications mesh network that the guys have created. What that means is that every single metered site talks to every other metered site.

And it’s this cackling conversation that never, ever ceases. They’re always talking to each other and they make a community decision about what gateway is going to be chosen at that point in time to talk to the mobile phone service and get the data out. It’s chopping and changing the whole time, squawking and cackling and they just never shut up.

And it is so clever. One of the things that we really love about this is that this isn’t a Lora Wan or a wide area network where there’s a whole bunch of Internet of things devices to be metered and monitored, talking to a central tower. There are no towers.

These are devices that from the ground to the top of each antenna would be maybe two and a half meters. And the cost is very, very low, the reliability is very high, the demand on power is very low. And I come back to that tower.

There is no tower. So you don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars putting up towers. We’ve kicked a real goal with that.

So now Novacom has proven reliably that we are able to have 56 farms talking to each other in real time. And that data is gathered on a central dashboard. And, and now the collaborative of those farms can pull together reports to show those individual farms how close they’re getting to their maximum allocated water take under their licensing agreement with the authorities.

And the, the board can also send out bills to each of those farmers reliably at the press of a button. So that saves one or two people spending maybe four days in a landcruiser driving around all of the farms, reading meters manually. Yeah.

And all of that information you can pull up on your mobile phone easily. Wow. That is a real goal.

And that’s something that we’re very, very excited about with Novacom. And that’s something you’ve launched in the last 12 months, is it? Yes. So that project was underway from when, when we agreed that we would take on that challenge.

We thought, oh my God, this is, this is a big one here, but we’re going to do it. And, and we work through it. And it was about two years in development and from commissioning to now, it’s, it must be getting pretty close to 12 months now.

And it’s running like a dream. Yeah, very exciting. Absolutely.

So you spoke earlier about Bob Cowan, the Hunter Manufacturing Awards. You’ve, I guess, used your own expertise in being a judge on that panel. How important are the awards for the region? Oh, they’re vitally important.

I think it could be argued that most people just have a job. How did you get your job? I don’t know, you know, I just got it. Do you love your job? No, it pays the bills.

I think hand on heart, if we surveyed people and put that to the pub test, I think most people would say, oh, I’ve just got a job, you know. But there’s a big difference between just having a job and doing something that you genuinely love. How does somebody land a job in an area that they genuinely love? Or how do they transition into something that they genuinely love, like moving out of their comfort zone, like paying bills and having a routine to going into something that, wow, it’s a bit scary to launch into something new, but at the same time, hey, this is something new, something that I really love.

Well, the Hunter Manufacturing Awards really illustrates one thing that people can’t hide and that’s passion. This whole collaborative of passionate operators is put on display. That display, broadcast correctly gives people who just have a job the opportunity to peek into a portal that opens up a whole world of passion and it shows what people are doing when they’re in jobs that they love.

And so the category that I judge is Apprentice of the Year. And I see passion evolving and I see people already in jobs that they love as opposed to just having a job. And so the Hunter Manufacturing Awards are very, very important for recognition for companies that are doing amazing things.

The byproduct of that is that it just gives people a free look at what’s happening in the region that they otherwise wouldn’t even know was happening. And you know, I can easily pick on, say, Blue Zone Group and you drive past their office in an industrial business park and there’s no real big signage out the front and you would drive past and not even think twice. But if you walked inside and had a look and go, oh my God, you know, look at the cool stuff that’s happening inside this building.

It just, it’s, it changed your outlook on life. And so I reflect on that and I think surely to goodness there must be other 15 year old kids out there on push bikes, like what’s stopping them from riding their bike into Blue Zone Group and someone saying, hey kid, what are you doing here? Well, let’s have a Chat, you know, so I dare say you wouldn’t be able to do that. It’s a fairly restricted environment.

But Hunter Manufacturing Awards gives people that free look. So the metaphor is there’s a bunch of kids sitting on their bikes and they can look into the awards and they can see what opportunities there are and they can do that of their own volition and they can do that by backing themselves. Themselves.

Love it. Yeah. So important, I think, to have that spotlight on businesses and.

Absolutely, yeah, get. Should get it out there, what they’re doing and achieving. That’s right.

And you know, that whole perception of, you know, gee, that company’s doing well, gee, they’re lucky. You know, I remember meeting this guy years and years ago. He used to restore antique stationary engines.

It’s a lifelong labor of passion. And he had the most amazing collection of stationary engines to the point where if you wanted to travel to the States, he would sell a stationary engine, you know, and he said, hey, this is my superannuation plan. I’ve been working my whole life at this and what you see in my warehouse is my worth.

And he said to me, you know, the amount of people that say to me, gee, you’re lucky. And he would say, you know, the harder I work, the luckier I seem to get. Get.

And so Honey Manufacturing Awards once again isn’t there to show anybody that’s just got lucky in business, what they’re doing is they’re celebrating the fact that people are just backing themselves, working hard and never giving up. Yeah, yeah. People don’t see the back.

Always see the background stories. Yes. Yeah.

What do you see as the benefits of building a career in electronics in the hunter region? Well, well, there’s two aspects to a career in electronics in the hunter. One aspect is a design engineering aspect. And hey, you know, Newcastle in this Goldilocks phase is definitely emerging as a tech capable region or city.

And so there will always be opportunities for people in electronics at design engineering level and at a trade level like me. There will always be opportunities because stuff breaks. And I’ll give an example.

Even with Novacom in the last two years, there was a radar based temperature analyzer. What this really cool bit of kit does is it sends a, sends a microwave signal out into the atmosphere and there’s thermally derived signals that are bounced back to a receiver antenna. And this unit rotates in increments up to 90 degrees and then back again.

And what it does is it basically it measures the temperature in approximately 100 meter increments up to 1 km above the, the surface of the earth, and that’s all it does. But that bit of kit is worth a quarter of a million dollars. And that bit of kit was in close proximity to a lightning strike at a mine in Queensland.

And so it was determined straight away that this bit of kit needed to be replaced. And I think back to when I was a little kid pulling things apart, you know, deconstructing all these things. But quite a few years down the track and having some knowledge and understanding of individual components, I was charged with the task of being able to repair this thing, and I did, and we put it back into service again.

So paying to have something worth a quarter of a million dollars repaired rather than completely replaced was a real victory for the mining company. And it was also testament to the electronics maintenance capability of our region. Yeah, and, and there’s a real push now for, you know, circular economics where we repair rather than throw away.

But hey, we’re not talking about items that are worth 50 bucks here. We’re talking about items that are substantially expensive and also critical pieces of infrastructure. If, you know, if airports can’t do acoustic monitoring based on identification of temperature inversions in the atmosphere, then they won’t be able to do their reports.

And that may affect flights. And likewise with the mining sector if they can’t do their analytics on temperature inversions and they’ve got problems with potentially sound being carried to areas where they don’t want the sound to be carried as well as dust being sent. So in both instances, this is very, very critical piece of equipment.

So, yeah, I think electronics, you know, the real, the, the interesting thing is that when I started my apprenticeship with Sanyo, I was told back in the 80s, hey, this is the future. And people would say, no, it’s actually the now and then rocket, rocket forward to 20, 25 and people saying, hey, electronics is the future. Go, well, it’s the now.

And you know, Michael Faraday, still my Michael Faraday. And yeah, so it’s really interesting. It’s a trade and an engineering discipline that has always been there and it always will be.

Yeah. And on that, I guess, where do you see it in the next five to 10 years? I see artificial intelligence having a real impact, positive or otherwise, in engineering disciplines. I’m not a design engineer, but I can talk to the trade level maintenance side of things.

There will always be the need for humans to be able to commission, repair, calibrate complex electronic systems out in the field or in the laboratory and to perpetuate the existence of qualified and skilled workers. It’s very, very important for the vocational education sector to remain very closely aligned with industry, to make sure that what’s being trained is completely in keeping with contemporary industrial requirements. And likewise the university sector needs to work very closely hand in hand with industry.

And we saw that typified in Pittsburgh where there was fantastic collaboration with industry would have a need, the university sector would come up with, with an engineered design to service that need. And then the vocational sector would come in to be able to back that up with on the ground implementation and maintenance. So industry, higher education and vocational education would need really to be able to foster those wonderful opportunities down the track.

So in order to perpetuate electronics as an industry, there needs to be really heavy collaboration between those three sectors. Does it feel like perhaps with kind of the move towards more AI, that those disciplines are becoming even more specialised and even more technical? Yes and no. I think once again, talking from the trade level perspective, AI at the moment is only able to derive answers to things based on achievable information.

My daughter’s doing a PhD at the moment in a history based humanities area and quite a lot of the reference texts that she is using are ancient. You can’t find this stuff on the Internet. And so if you try to derive an artificial intelligence outcome, the outcome will have no bearing on some of these ancient texts because it just simply can’t access them.

And so until such a time that every single thing is digitized by Google back to the technical side of things, there still needs to be human intervention. If equipment that’s being commissioned and maintained, if that equipment needs to be kept running, AI is not going to look after that at all. There still needs to be human intervention on the ground.

It could be remote locations, also industrial disciplines that just simply deny the opportunity to, to have any form of automation or synthetically derived analysis or answers given. So the humans will definitely be needed for that. As far as the design engineering is concerned.

I witness design engineers being really clever when they pose maybe an open AI platform with a task to pull together some code. But that design engineer needs to have a very deep understanding of what that code should look like, such that if the AI system comes up with an answer, the design engineer can say, that’s not the answer that I’m looking for. And they can pose it then back to the AI system.

So it’s this handshaking and this conversation that happens between the human and the AI system to come up with an answer. So, so remember, I remember at school one of the things that I did listen to was that in mathematics, that very early on the teacher was saying that you have to be able to estimate what an answer is going to look like when you do a calculation. If that calculation looks similar to what you estimated, then there’s a better than even chance you’re on the right track.

Yeah. So likewise with design engineers, if they’re relying on AI, if they have a bit of an understanding of what it should look like, then they’re on the right track. But for somebody that would just go in blindly, not being a subject matter expert per se, and expect an AI system to come up with an answer, it may end up hanging that engineer out to dry.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. So I guess at the moment there’s lots of talk around skill shortages across various industries. How do you think we prepare and transition people as demand changes? There’ll be deficiencies of workers in one area and there’ll be a glut of workers in other areas and people can transition between disciplines.

So how do we affect a situation where people can transition from one discipline to another? It’s actually really interesting. Very recently I visited with my family the war memorial in Canberra. And there’s examples of during wartime where people were plucked out of their common existences and put into wartime roles because of their existing skills.

For example, they’re people that are proficient in sailing. So where did they go in the navy and what were they doing within the navy? Well, they’re handling boats. You know why? Because they’ve been around boats the whole of their life.

So they’re very, very good. So there were electronics, perhaps that have made fantastic radio communications operators, people that were very, very good on horseback. Where do they get those people from? Guess what? Farmers on the land.

People that were really good at shooting guns. Once again, farmers on the land. So we’ve learned, I believe, already how to transition people from one area to another by identifying and celebrating their existing skills rather than try and put a square peg into a round hole.

But it’s fine for me to say that. I mean, people were forced in some instances into areas and they go, well, you know, I don’t really want to kill people, but I want to operate a boat, so that’s what I’ll do. But if we go back to your question about, in the context of the hunter, how do people transition from one.

One area to another? We need to have advocacy for industries that need to have their skills needs identified, as long as there’s passionate individuals that are advocating for that and. Or passionate Agencies that are able to do that. I mean, Newey tech people is a classic for that, celebrating and identifying industrial needs in engineering disciplines.

I mean, there’s a class classic example of it. If new tech people wasn’t involved in this space, then there’d be a void. And so if you’ve got an agency that’s advocating for needs and they’re able to articulate that needs message across to the broader community, there will be people within that community that go, you know what, I’ve got that skill set and I don’t want a job anymore.

I want to transition across to something that I love. And so I think, I think the formula is quite simple. There are opportunities out there and people grab those opportunities.

And I think there’s two sets of circumstances. People win the lottery metaphorically when they land a job that they love in an area that’s completely outside the norm for them. And the other thing is that somebody’s already advocated for them and there’s a pathway that’s been created.

But I think it’s all about communication. We have to keep that communication going and not live in these enclosed, siloed existences. You know, I took a walk through the, the Mayfield west business park some time ago and we’re not too far from the csiro, our research facility.

There are so many industrial buildings in that park and it was actually set up as a technology business park many years ago. And, and all you got to do is just go and knock on a door and say, hey, I’m not here to buy anything, I’m not here to sell you anything. But this is a really cool looking company.

Can you tell me a bit about it? And I practiced that and I learned so much. And I make an effort to walk around that business park as regularly as I can. And I will go into the occasional business so I can learn and understand what they do.

And then I can be an advocate as well. So as long as there’s these little advocates running around as part of the networking, we can help with the communications. Yeah, I like that.

I think one of the challenges I see sometimes is I guess, the employer changing their mindset as well. That, you know, someone might have a 7 out of 10 of the skills. They may not have all the skills yet, but that’s okay.

And I think it’s changing the employer mindset as well. Yes, absolutely. And you know, over the years I’ve learned to, it’s, it’s a very clever business owner that can identify personality traits that are going to bring goodness to A company rather than the skill set that’s on paper, the company owners know when they’ve employed somebody that can adapt and that can meld an existence within the company.

And, you know, not, not all business owners can do that or not all managers can do that. But if there’s people that are true leaders and have that X factor, they’ll be able to identify people through personality alone. Yeah, that can be able to adapt.

I feel like there’s been a better transition towards that, say, in the last five years than what they would have been, say, 10 or 15 years years ago. But, yeah, absolutely. And you know what, once again, I can refer back to Adam Amos with robotic systems.

You get onto the website there and you know, this is a few years ago, it would be, do you want to work with us? Or maybe. So you get on their, their website and you click a dropdown box and they say, make a video, send it to us. Tell us how creative you are.

We don’t care what you do. You can tell us how you bake a cake. We just want to learn about you and see if you’re funky enough.

You know, if you’ve got what we think that it takes to be with our company, we’ll create a job for you. And, you know, that flies in the face of that traditional model that we were brought up with at school, you know, through careers that you’ve got to search through the positions vacant and see if you can mold yourself to those directives. But now you’re absolutely right.

We’re seeing companies that are, that are moving the model toward identifying a really cool person and go, wow, this person can bring so much to our company. What aspect of our company should we change in able to foster growth so we can accommodate this person? Yeah. Very cool.

I guess so far, I think we could say that you’ve had a pretty impressive career so far. Thank you. A few different directions along the way that are really inspiring to those wanting to join the electronic space.

Yes. What’s some advice that you’ve maybe had along the way that’s really stuck in your head? What’s really stuck in my head is that you can’t hide passion. You just can’t hide passion.

We all know those passionate people and we all know what their skills are associated with that if you are persistent and if you are consistent and you back yourself, you will get there. And I’ve got this really cool metaphor for this. I rode motorcycles for quite a few years, and there’s this really cool road not far from here called The Putty Road.

And the Putty Road can be really dangerous. And on the weekends there can be some people get out there and pretty powerful sports bikes and then carve up in these curvy roads. And there’s a saying that when you’re on a powerful sports bike, when you’re going through a corner, if you look there, you will go there.

And what that means is that when you’re pulling into a corner on a high speed motorcycle, if you drop your eyes and you look down at the road close to, to the front wheel, you’ll go there and you’ll probably crash. But if you look through the corner, out the other side to where you’re going to go, you will go there. So if you look there, you will go there.

So if you have passion that can’t be hidden and if you have persistence and if you are consistent and if you look there to the outcome that you want to achieve, you will go there. What I mean by that is, and I really wish, I really wish that I could have had the maturity at school to drink this information in, but I get it now. I’ll never forget in a careers class when we were all talking about what we wanted to do, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.

I didn’t know, tinker with things, blow things up, you know. But there was this guy in the class that said that he wanted to be a fighter jet pilot and all the kids laughed at him and said, what you a fighter jet pilot? And I reflect on that, I think, why? What was so wrong about that kid wanting to be a fighter jet pilot? Why? I mean, that sounds like a pretty cool goal. Yeah.

Why did everybody think it was funny and tease him to the point where he thought, well, maybe I’m not good enough to be a fighter jet pilot. So determine what you want to do so you can look there, go there. How do you get there, work your way back? I mean, I’ve got a nephew who’s just graduated from medicine.

How did he get there? He got through his medical degree. How did he get into a medical degree? He needed to do some prerequisite courses to be able to get into it. How did he even get into the prerequisite courses? He needed to apply himself at school, you know, simple.

And so with electronics, if you want to be an electronics tradesperson, you serve an apprenticeship. How do you get into an apprenticeship? You find someone to bloody employ you, you know, and then, and then you see it, you’re training with tafe and so if, if you are. If you already have the passion and you already have the drive and you know what the outcome is, you’ve got the game pretty well stitched up.

How you would go about patching all of those gaps is to find some decent mentoring and back yourself. Back yourself. Back yourself.

I am so glad that I rode my bike into Bob Cowan’s workshop that day. I reckon I wouldn’t be here talking to you now if it wasn’t for that moment. So this.

Take it upon yourself to organize your own work experience off your own bat and be proud that you can do it. You don’t need to rely on anybody else to do that. So what? Sacrifice a couple of weeks of school holidays or university semester break or whatever? Just get the heck out of there.

Volunteer your services. Get out there and play in an area that you think you might want to. Want to play in.

And I believe that that’s the formula. Very cool. And otherwise, I just getting to know you.

What do you do in your spare time? Oh, I’ve been in performance skiff racing for many years and. And when business was pretty good, I was able to buy a couple of racing yachts. And I.

I’ve done six Sydney to Hobart yacht races. Pretty cool. Yeah.

Done. I’ve done some quiet, easy ones and I’ve done some yucky ones. And I’m a commercial beekeeper as well.

And right now I’m doing my best to try and stay sane with the Varroa mite incursion. And I’m a bit of a rat bag. On my farm, I love anything powered by diesel engines.

So if it’s a bulldoze or an excavator tractor, doesn’t matter. Yeah. I.

I really love making improvements on the property. And if it’s not chasing cattle or. Or managing what’s left of the bees, then I’m generally found on a machine on my property.

So do you sell your own honey? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

So before the Varroa mite incursion hit, I was extracting around about 1.2 tons of honey in an extraction. Yeah.

Then we would do approximately three honey extractions in a season. How many hives to get that much honey? Well, that. That sits at around about 40 hives.

Okay. Yeah. Healthy hives.

Yeah. Very cool. I find the whole beekeeping really intriguing.

Yeah, it’s hard work. It’s really hard work. I know when I got up over 25 hives, I thought, oh, my goodness, what have I done? Because, you know, if you’re on a property full time, that’s okay.

But if you’re only going there on weekends then man, how do you, do you have like a, is there like an electronic, what do you call it? Spin off? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the spinner. So it’s a semi automated little factory that I pulled together to food standard and yeah, and there’s an uncapping machine where you put the frames in and it will do say a thousand frames in a day, quite easily uncap and then they go into the honey spinner and then the honey goes into, to a holding tank and you know, the air bubbles and, and the, the residual wax will all go to the surface and you can skim that off and then send that off to the bottling plant. Yeah, yeah.

So working with regional communities, building trust is a really important factor to get I guess, the right outcomes. How do you build trust with those communities? Awesome question. I’ve been through this.

Farmers know farmers, they really do. And you know, there’s this adage that people on the land are really attuned to filtering out waffle and fluff. Well, you know what, people in the city are just as good as doing that.

It’s. People are people wherever you go. It’s just that the context is different.

Before I launched into the project for TAFE New South Wales in agriculture, my areas of agriculture that are involved in were certainly not around 600 horsepower machines and a 40 meter across seed planters with, you know, 20,000 litre seed bins for example. But I needed to be able to have familiarity with that in order to make some conscious decisions about this framework that I was developing for technology and agriculture for tafe. So what I did was I took some time away from the organization and I went and worked on a farm and I worked on a farm in Pilliga between Walgett and Weewar.

Very big cotton and wheat operation and you know, there’s big machines out there, there’s 50, 000 liter diesel tanks sitting next to big diesel engines that are pumping water into ring ring dams from tailwater returns. And you know, there’s, there’s flooded irrigation, there’s, there’s dry land operations and you can’t launch into something unless you’ve, you’ve got to learn it. Experience, you know.

And so after I went through that I was able to add that skill set, knowledge and understanding into my agriculture backpack of knowledge and, or backpack of capability. And so if we come back to how do you build trust within a regional community, you can’t, you, you can’t just say, oh, I’m Going to go to this community and I’m going to sell stuff to them. It would be a very, very brave person that would walk into a forum that is populated with growers that are overseeing 10 million dollar wheat crops and that person tells them what they need, respectfully, they will just go, yeah, mate, whatever, and they’ll walk away and leave you to it.

To gain trust in a regional community, you need to have that special X factor. The farmers need to be dealing with a farmer, I believe, and that farmer needs to be able to relate information to them in a way that they can understand. And that person that’s relating that information needs to also be able to understand what the farmers are saying.

Never ever in a million years go out to an arena like that and dictate to people and tell them what they need that will go pear shaped very, very quickly. The best way, I believe, to integrate into an arena like that is to listen and to learn, listen and learn. And when you think that you’ve shut up for long enough, shut up for even longer and just wait and wait and wait and eventually you will see a challenge.

And then if you think that you can rise to that challenge and assist somebody in overcoming that challenge, launch into it. What I’ve learned is that there are so many challenges out on the land, but if you try and attack all of those challenges, you’ll get nothing done. If you just pare it back to doing one thing and do that one thing very, very well, then you will start integrating and you will become respected.

But you also need to be there for the long haul. In outlying communities, there are always people that have gone out to these communities to sell the new next best thing and then often, you know, that person’s never seen again. Yeah.

And there’s broken hearts, broken equipment and trust diminishing. But if you’re an integral part of that community and you’re tapping into the skills base of that community as well. For example, Novacom.

It’s very important to us that if we need to outsource capability for a regional community, we will look into that community for capability that’s already there. Because the last thing that we want to do is do anybody out of work or out of income potential by outsourcing capability when we could have used that capability from within. Yeah, I think that’s a really important thing for all projects, really.

Even here in the hunter, like if you’re building some new infrastructure. Yes, I know. Sometimes it’s built into contracts where they have to have, you know, X amount of people that are local.

Oh yeah, yeah. And things like that. Yeah.

I think that’s really important for the local community, local jobs kind of factor as well. And you know what I really love about the novacom, an emergent group stance on this is it’s not just bunged on. It’s not, oh, you know, we’re not going to bring this person in because it’s not, it’s not within the, the designated percentage of capability is because we’re bloody well gonna use the capability within that community.

And so we’ve got some very, very good local relationships in some of these regional centers and it works both ways. You know, if we help people out with opportunities, they will also help out and advocate for us out in the field as well. Very good.

Awesome. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

You’re very welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.