Meet Team Member Don Miles

Don has been at Energenecs since 2009. We asked him about his job as a Computer Aided Design (CAD) Technician and his interesting astronomy hobby.

How did you get involved in CAD design?

My dad influenced me because he was a “fix it” rather than “replace it” type of person. He grew up on a farm as a kid and learned to repair a lot of things and taught us to fix everything you can.

I went to Waukesha County Technical College (WCTC) for a robotics class after high school. The class was well rounded, they taught electrical theory and practical applications. Companies donated older robots to the school and we would take them apart, modify, then put them back together.

We learned welding, hydraulics, pneumatics, a bunch of different things! The instructors were excellent and I really enjoyed it. After WCTC, I worked at various companies that made automated machines doing the wiring and assembly, and ultimately got interested in the drawing/design end of it. I’d work in the shop building panels during the day, go home to eat supper, then come back and learn CAD on my own time from one of the CAD guys in the evenings.

One of the places I worked was a company that made water/steam sampling equipment for nuclear & fossil power plants which was very interesting. No matter the industry, controls are all kind of the same thing. You are telling a device to do something and waiting for feedback to make sure it happened. After that, I worked in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). We controlled large air handlers on the roofs of buildings that were big enough to drive a large vehicle through!

I have basically been in the controls industry since the early 1980s in one field or another, whether it’s air, water or wastewater, I’ve done controls forever!

What is a typical day at Energenecs like for you?

I may work on one job for three weeks or on four different projects in a day. I get rough sketch drawings from a Project Manager, and see if we have done anything like it before. Through the years I have created a database of the projects that I share with all the Project Managers. So if we are looking for a particular part that was used on a project, for example, a radio that is used with a certain programmable logic controller (PLC), we have probably done something similar to it, and start from there. Those draft drawings are given to the Project Managers to review. Any of their comments are incorporated into the drawing set to create a completed set of Submittal drawings. The Project Managers submit it to the consulting engineer or the end customer. They approve or make changes, then it will come back to me to turn those drawings into a Production Release set. That set goes to our UL shop for building. When the Energenecs fabricators have completed the build, if there were any changes, they come back to me or Brian Fuller, another CAD designer on the Energenecs team. We update the drawings so the installers, field guys or customers have the most accurate drawings to work from.

What do you like to do
in your free time?

I’m into astronomy, stargazing and dark sky stuff. I own a simple telescope that’s specifically for looking at spots on the sun. That telescope has special filters that block out all of the bad stuff that would blind you instantly. I also have a couple of other ones for night time viewing.

The more high tech hydrogen alpha solar telescopes (which I do not own, but have viewed with it) cost anywhere from $1k-10k, but the images you can get are breathtaking! The sun looks like brain matter; and you can actually see the slow constant motion of the surface of the Sun.

How did you become involved in astronomy?

I worked at a place in Oconomowoc (the place that did the water sampling for power plants), and was talking to one of the guys who had a place up north. He mentioned sitting around the campfire watching satellites in the sky go by. I thought, are you serious? I couldn’t believe you could see a satellite. I went out the next clear night and yes! you could see satellites, it was amazing! That was the start of it.

Where do you go for viewing in Wisconsin?

Statistics for clear dark skies are terrible in Wisconsin, so you take it when you can get it here!

I belonged to the Northern Cross Science Foundation which promotes astronomy and related sciences, and to foster public education in these fields. We would go to Bayshore mall in downtown Milwaukee, and they would shut off lights in the immediate area so we could set up telescopes and show people planets and the moon. There are a ton of people that have never seen a good view of the moon, and it’s amazing.

Newport State Park on the tip of the Door Peninsula was named to the International Dark Sky Association’s list of 48 fantastic dark skies around the world. I have yet to visit, but it is one of the few places in the Midwest where there are dark skies.

The astronomy club members frequently set up their own personal telescopes outside the observatory at Harrington State Park beach (which is just north of Port Washington) for public viewing nights. The club has their 20” telescope inside the observatory that is open one weekend a month for campers or anyone that’s in the park for free viewing.

Also Yerkes Observatory, in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, houses the largest refracting telescope in existence built for astronomical research, with a main lens that’s 40” in diameter. The observatory was a facility of the University of Chicago located on a 77-acre site near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. It opened in 1897 and was closed in 2018. As of April 2020 The University of Chicago transferred ownership to the Yerkes Future Foundation (YFF). YFF is restoring the historic observatory for public tours in April 2022, then a fuller slate of public hours and programs for the summer of 2022.