A very warm welcome those of you who joined our community in April and May 2017

Hi Lynsay


Thanks for the warm welcome; I have been in a safety critical design and development role for the last 10 years and after becoming an IET member last year I noticed the safety community and thought that it would be good to connect with other safety engineers to exchange thoughts, opinions and ideas on the challenges of this field. My technical expertise is within electronic circuit design and therefore it would be of of particualr interest to exchange opinions here regarding best practice for safety system design, including opportunities offered with new technology, methods for speeding up and optimising design and develpment and there will be much common ground with all the different engineering disciplines.


As an example of a possible discussion I would like to have; I have avoided the use of microcontrollers in certain areas of our safety critical signalling devices due to the perceived risks posed by certain failure modes however this is very much a default approach inherited by default from my peers and something I wish to now evaluate in more detail and possibly challenge so what are other engineers thoughts here? do other safety engineers also recognise these risks? are there alternative microcontrollers that have acceptable risk levels and / or design techniqus that can be used to mitigate the risks to a satisfactory level?.


There is also the different approaches to safety risk assesment and different standards etc. that are all of interest.


That is all for now but will look forward to developing communications with the group.


Regards


Matt

Hi Lynsay


Thanks for the warm welcome; I have been in a safety critical design and development role for the last 10 years and after becoming an IET member last year I noticed the safety community and thought that it would be good to connect with other safety engineers to exchange thoughts, opinions and ideas on the challenges of this field. My technical expertise is within electronic circuit design and therefore it would be of of particualr interest to exchange opinions here regarding best practice for safety system design, including opportunities offered with new technology, methods for speeding up and optimising design and develpment and there will be much common ground with all the different engineering disciplines.


As an example of a possible discussion I would like to have; I have avoided the use of microcontrollers in certain areas of our safety critical signalling devices due to the perceived risks posed by certain failure modes however this is very much a default approach inherited by default from my peers and something I wish to now evaluate in more detail and possibly challenge so what are other engineers thoughts here? do other safety engineers also recognise these risks? are there alternative microcontrollers that have acceptable risk levels and / or design techniqus that can be used to mitigate the risks to a satisfactory level?.


There is also the different approaches to safety risk assesment and different standards etc. that are all of interest.


That is all for now but will look forward to developing communications with the group.


Regards


Matt