Triax understands the complexities of an active construction site, which is why we work every day to streamline processes, boost efficiency, and provide value to our clients. Everything we do is in the interest of our customers and making projects safer, better, and faster – whether that’s our Client Engagement team in the field or our engineers who are designing, developing, and supporting our products. Today we’re introducing you to Mark Wagner, our Senior Electrical Engineer.

I have 30 years of broad experience in industrial controls, dimensional metrology, aerospace and defense, turbine development, automotive sensors, and naval defense, working my way up from the ranks from Electronics Technician. I became interested in electronics around age 9; my father was a career technologist with GE, which seeded my interest in the field of engineering and how things worked. I’m also a licensed FAA pilot with Single Engine Land and Instrument Airplane certificates, and I fly fixed-wing drones (radio-controlled aircraft)!

Working at Triax Technologies allows me to fully utilize my broad background in engineering, including EMI (electro-magnetic interference), radio frequency engineering, high-performance printed circuit board design as well as material science. The Triax environment is very collaborative, leveraging the skills and talents of each member to meet overall organizational goals, while simultaneously allowing for individual growth.  Our goal is to deliver high-tech, highly valuable and highly reliable products, and the challenge of designing compact, battery-powered, always on products was very appealing. 

Spot-r products are intensely software-based because of the IoT/networking challenges of an active construction site where tough building materials, limited power source and a transient workforce are the rule. Our talented software engineers focus on the “logical architecture” aspects of our products, starting with “what’s needed” and “what’s feasible” in the real-world setting, building up from there with modern hardware. My focus is on advancing/providing the custom hardware platforms that our software runs on to ensure reliable performance, and I’m slowly introducing advanced techniques used in rugged military designs while staying true to our cutting-edge product roadmap. As a technology company focused on making projects safer (in addition to faster and better), our expectations for reliability are much higher than that of consumer electronics – our consumers depend on it.

Given the often extreme and unpredictable and remote location of our project sites, our products are designed for a wide temperature and voltage range. Wherever possible, our products have sensors to help indicate the “health” of a product before it is unable to communicate with the outside world/back office, should an unlikely problem occur. We build our products so that we can determine when power is getting low, so action can be taken before a unit goes off-line.  My goal is to find new opportunities to make our devices even more fault-tolerant, minimizing downtime, allowing a planned response to maintenance.

You can connect with Mark on LinkedIn, where he regularly publishes articles about electrical engineering and PCB design.