EW BrightSparks 2023 profile: Toby Lane, Ignys

Now in its sixth year of awards, EW BrightSparks sees Electronics Weekly highlight and celebrate some of the brightest and most talented young engineers in the UK today.

Here, in our series on the latest EW BrightSparks of 2023, we profile Toby Lane who was a hardware engineer at Ignys in Nottingham at the time of the awards, and is now at Amodo Design in Sheffield.

Achievements

His nominators described him as “a rare breed of engineer who actually enjoys documenting processes and he thrives off contributing to the team”. They summarised Toby’s impact as follows:

“Toby Lane is an incredibly competent hardware engineer working for Ignys design consultancy. He has been instrumental in driving processes, taking on a test jig role and has delighted customers with his involvement in idea generation workshops. He believes strongly in continuous improvement.”

He was, for example, “a wizard at soldering and solving assembly problems”, doing amazing work on troubleshooting and solving issues with products with a real flare for identifying faults during repairs and rework. Specifically, he has worked on complex board design as part of a tracking and monitoring project.

Toby also went out of his way to take on new learning, such as doing exceptional work on thermal testing with the Ignys environmental test chambers. Basically, being willing to take on any project that would give him the opportunity to learn or help his team.

Being mentored by two of the Ignys team, he quickly picked up valuable techniques to test equipment and troubleshoot, using tools such as test equipment, oscilloscope, spectrum analysers and chambers.

Notably, Toby has shown flare for documenting his working process, we were told:

“He does an excellent job of documenting that process and working out not just the current project he is on but anything else fundamentally key to the test jig process that he can replicate in another project later. He’s done a good job of documenting things in a way that is fundamentally key to our team and customer’s success. He’s really championed our work in this area. It’s a big field, big area, key part of what we do as a business.”

And as an example of his ability to fix a customer problem:

“He was instrumental in tracking down the manufacturing defects in a project including gerber file and copper layer issues caused externally, Toby matched this up and proved it, diagnosing power supply problems and faulty silicon (this is notoriously hard to diagnose as you assume parts do what they say they do). He identified the issue, worked out how to repeat it (to test the diagnosis) and the final fix of the problem were all things he was deeply involved with.”

In terms of his skillsets, Toby has proved very strong at PCB layout especially for minimising EMI. His nominators wrote:

“Hardware troubleshooting and fault finding are both strengths of his. He is exceptional at board rework, soldering and generally hacking hardware together without error when there are time pressures. Toby is a rare type of engineer who actually enjoys the documentation part of the job! Whether that is writing a spec or block diagram, to writing a report on the outcome of some testing Toby enjoys it. He is good at learning to use new tools and software and picking them up quickly. He is currently looking into how we can smoothly migrate all of our existing Ignys Altium libraries into Altium 365.”

Toby also helped run new Idea Generation workshops, alongside the Ignys MD, for an energy company, which received excellent feedback in testimonials.

His test jig work has also been showcased at Engineering and Manufacturing week – the Ignys team brought a demonstrator jig to the show as well as Electro Test Expo.

Outside of work, Toby has been working on an engineering project that combines his career with his main hobby of rock climbing, we learned.

“I am working on developing a force gauge that can be used to plot force production (generally for training the fingers) against time and investigating how this can be used to optimise training blocks within a periodic training plan.”

Finally, Toby was part of Igny’s vision to plant 30,000 trees by 2030, planting a tree for each day of consultancy. This vision was started in June 2022.