Electronics device to count numbers of people

[eti]

Hi,
We are looking for a software engineer to come and work for us. We have a product which installs onto lamp-posts in town centres/underground stations/football grounds/bus stops,  and counts the number of people who pass by.
We need you to not necessarily write the software for it, but pretend that you did....you must be able to sound like you did write the software...you see, we are seeking funding from the UK government  to bring this product to the UK market. Even though we simply received the product from our master Chinese company, we must make it look like we made the product ourselves, in order that the UK government will give us the money to take this product forward and market it.

We are bandstanding that "British designed and built" thing...even though none of us  designed or built the product, ...we do have engineering degrees which make us "look the part".
Anyway, please get in touch if you can...we stand to be millionaires by the end of the year. We can get you over to China where you can speak with the actual software engineers...there you can learn to "talk the talk"!!......and get ready for a very bloated bank account!!!

We have targeted people in the funding sector, who know what we're up to, but will "turn a blind eye"...but we still need to fool the "system" generally....there's big bucks to be had from the funding sector alone!......even before we start talking actual  profits!

"Pro-British" type people need not apply..... after all, this is all about forwarding the decline of the UK ,while seriously augmenting our personal bank accounts!

Hello. My ex boss and family friend (England) already invented this system. He called it “PFM” for “People Flow Monitoring”, back in the 90s, and I used to travel with him and the team, installing these. This is not some small fry btw - they installed them in many, many train stations, shopping malls, airports etc.

The name of his company at the time (1997 ish) was “Lee Integer Ltd” of Bowling Green Road, Kettering, Northamptonshire, England. It was then renamed to “Counting Solutions”, and a few years later, sold to Ferranti group, where the technology has evolved and thrives very healthily.

Here is the website of the current company that runs the show: https://www.pfm-footfall.com/ and

I installed this in:
~ London Trocadero (No. 1 Piccadilly, London).

~ Kingdom Centre (shopping centre) Glenrothes, Scotland.

~ Runcorn shopping centre.

They also had contracts with British train stations, many other shops and malls, and I remember him saying they had a contract with “Schuh” shoe shops.

I’m sure that many have copied and emulated the idea, but believe you me, back in the 90s he was the pioneer of this system, even if others existed.

[eti]

Hi,
We are looking for a software engineer to come and work for us. We have a product which installs onto lamp-posts in town centres/underground stations/football grounds/bus stops,  and counts the number of people who pass by.
We need you to not necessarily write the software for it, but pretend that you did....you must be able to sound like you did write the software...you see, we are seeking funding from the UK government  to bring this product to the UK market. Even though we simply received the product from our master Chinese company, we must make it look like we made the product ourselves, in order that the UK government will give us the money to take this product forward and market it.

We are bandstanding that "British designed and built" thing...even though none of us  designed or built the product, ...we do have engineering degrees which make us "look the part".
Anyway, please get in touch if you can...we stand to be millionaires by the end of the year. We can get you over to China where you can speak with the actual software engineers...there you can learn to "talk the talk"!!......and get ready for a very bloated bank account!!!

We have targeted people in the funding sector, who know what we're up to, but will "turn a blind eye"...but we still need to fool the "system" generally....there's big bucks to be had from the funding sector alone!......even before we start talking actual  profits!

"Pro-British" type people need not apply..... after all, this is all about forwarding the decline of the UK ,while seriously augmenting our personal bank accounts!

You are full of false bravado, and, erm, also a greater amount of something else.

[BradC]

I’m sure that many have copied and emulated the idea, but believe you me, back in the 90s he was the pioneer of this system, even if others existed.

They've been around much longer than the 90's. Traditional "foot fall counters" started to really take hold as PE beams and electro-mechanical counters in retail in the late 70's and early 80's. I'm sure there are plenty of examples older than that.

I wasn't sure if the post was a spoof or treez was off his meds.

[eti]

I’m sure that many have copied and emulated the idea, but believe you me, back in the 90s he was the pioneer of this system, even if others existed.

They've been around much longer than the 90's. Traditional "foot fall counters" started to really take hold as PE beams and electro-mechanical counters in retail in the late 70's and early 80's. I'm sure there are plenty of examples older than that.

I wasn't sure if the post was a spoof or treez was off his meds.

Yes I’m sure that’s true, but this was and is fully automated and logged to a computer system. I didn’t get involved with the programming or detailed installation, I was mainly the “hand me the drill please” assistant, and back at the lab I was in charge of duplicating PICs and calibrating ceramic  humidity sensors for other projects.

I’ve no idea as the the state of the this sector now.

[tooki]

In the US, it's called retirement by incarceration.  It's better than starving to death, and affords one the best medical care anyone could want. That is, you can demand and get the best specialists at Mayo Clinic or claim cruel and inhuman punishment.

For those who don't know, this is either a joke, or an insane level of misinformation, as this couldn't be further from the truth, with the possible exception of inmates of the luxury prisons for the richest of white-collar criminals.

Inmates at normal prisons, including federal, get basic medical care, if they're lucky.

(And no, the phrase "retirement by incarceration" is not a thing. Try googling it in quotes. The only other result is from jpanhalt himself, on a different electronics forum.)

I give up.  This site has the worst system for deleting and restoring I have seen!  Posting images can be a nightmare.  I hit a wrong key and my whole response was deleted.  Apparently no recovery.   I will not waste time on repeating it.  Suffice it to be said that my attorney and I coined that term during a period of levity.  I had no idea it was so unique.  If you want to know the rest, read about why vaccinations cannot be mandated on prisoners and why prisoners on death row get transplants ahead of those who are not in prison.  Our Federal prisons are better than some resorts.

Uh huh. And I have a bridge to sell you. It’s in Brooklyn, lovingly pre-owned.

It’s one thing to find examples of where the legally mandated healthcare in prison is better than the zero healthcare some civilians “have”. It’s quite another to extrapolate that to seeing prisons as resorts. That’s absolute lunacy.

Sorry.  Perhaps Tooki would be wisely advised not to rely on Google for American culture.

I think I can rely on the fact that I am American for that. (Who keeps close tabs on what’s going on in my home country, even if I’m not living there at the moment.)

But regardless Google is a decent way for seeing if any phrase has been uttered publicly in the last 20 years, in the sense of a sanity check of “has this entered the lexicon, even rarely?”.

[BradC]

I’ve no idea as the the state of the this sector now.

It's massive. Conventional PE, Scanned laser curtain (though that was a bit of a flash in the pan), Video Analytic, Bluetooth and Wifi MAC. Anything you can dream of to extract usable data and like most industries a massive amount of smoke and mirrors on the part of the vendors who know full well the client is never going to put real time into verifying numbers and coming back at them.

By the mid 90's we were adding additional channels into people counters and using them to monitor power meters fitted to tenant sub-boards in shopping centres. A counter is a counter is a counter and they all already had people counters.

[Simon]

Can we leave out the disputes about americanims? I only left this thread open for the fun of the original post and/or evidence should it need taking seriously.

[Siwastaja]

Can we please act like adults and stop playing this "taking seriously" game.

It is utterly obvious that the opening post is sarcasm (ever heard about it, people?), and treez is making the exact opposite point with the post. This is consistent with his earlier political opinions about him feeling bad with Chinese engineering sold as "British".

Sarcastic trolling about how to commit a fraud, to make a point against such behavior, is not evidence of fraudulent activity.

Now expression of such political BS and trolling on this forum is a completely different matter. I understand many don't like it, me neither, but upping the bets with "you are a criminal" card is just childish.

What treez describes isn't complete tinfoil hat BS either. The situation is of course exaggerated, but public funding has tendency to go into wrong hands, and cheap Chinese engineering has tendency to replace Western engineering. The key to survival is to accept this and focus on strengths instead of weaknesses.

[Simon]

It does indeed seem tongue in cheek as I'm not sure even someone as crazy as treez and associated usernames is quite that stupid but I've had enough and banned him. He has the same skill level in communication as the tutor that wrote my HND course material, I have no choice but to read that, I do have a choice in having to constantly attend incidents involving a user here with such skills in reasoning that trying to apply themselves to the field of electronics seems rather fruitless.

Actually every time I buy a product that trumpets it's british origins it turns out to be a massive pile of garbage.

[Simon]

because he is a general pain in the arse.

[magic]

Replace "Britain" with "anywhere" and "public funding" with "public funding" and "outsourcing to China" with "general fraud" and you have something like 75% of public funded projects

[hexreader]

Perhaps it would be kindest if you would ban me too, ... for my own protection.

I took this thread seriously 

I must be the dumbest person on the planet 

That bridge for sale sounds interesting though. Where is Brooklyn exactly?  What price are you asking?

[Circlotron]

Back in 2007 the boss and I evaluated a setup to count the number of people in a room using a pair of these rotating laser scanners placed 1.5m high at two adjacent walls of a room to scan "rows" and "columns" of people. The rotation of the two scanners was somehow synced from an interface box then fed to a pc. Didn't work well enough for our purposes.
Not this exact scanner but similar.
https://www.hokuyo-aut.jp/search/single.php?serial=232

[Cerebus]

Perhaps it would be kindest if you would ban me too, ... for my own protection.

I took this thread seriously 

I must be the dumbest person on the planet 

That bridge for sale sounds interesting though. Where is Brooklyn exactly?  What price are you asking?

The Brooklyn one was such a bargain that it has unfortunately been snapped up in the meantime. Luckily for you , there is another opportunity in London (photo attached). I'll PM you.

[Siwastaja]

(Psst hexreader, I heard that bridge is falling down.)

[hexreader]

(Psst hexreader, I heard that bridge is falling down.)

London Bridge was falling down - a long, long time ago
London Bridge was sold to America, if memory serves, and appears to have been replaced.
Myth says it was a mistake, and the buyers thought they were buying Tower Bridge.
My understanding is that this was just a myth, not reality. The buyers knew that they were buying London Bridge, not Tower Bridge
Both bridges have been fraudulently fail-sold by scammer non-owners many times.
Do not confuse London Bridge (boring) with Tower Bridge (still ultra-cool after all these years)
I think confusion comes from "London Bridge" name being mis-used for many bridges - possibly including Tower Bridge.
The bridge that was falling down was definitely not the Tower Bridge as shown in the picture

I don't think that I have enough money to buy even a small stake in either bridge, let alone Brooklyn Bridge.

Disclaimer - Going by memory - there may be inaccuracies above.
No doubt Google will give better facts than mine.

[Cerebus]

I'd hardly call a bunch of children dancing in a playground singing a surveyor's report. Anyway, that song is about the next river upstream; although as luck would have it we can talk terms about that bridge too, if anyone's interested.

[BradC]

I'd hardly call a bunch of children dancing in a playground singing a surveyor's report.

You obviously haven’t worked around some of the local government in Western Australia. Over here it’d not only pass as a surveyors report, but it’d be raised in council for the overspend.

[Cerebus]

Not really sure why the OP needed to be b&.

In one word: history.

However as a relative newcomer perhaps you're owed a few more words of explanation. Treez (which is the user name that this user was most active for the longest under) has for years plagued this and many other electronics fora with question after question about power supply design, often spamming the same question across multiple fora simultaneously. From their quality you would assume that they were made by a beginner rather than someone with a degree in EE (He has claimed a "BEng(I) Hons Electronics  from Birmingham university"*). Despite these conspicuous failings, he has had the chutzpah to write his own course on SMPS design and promote it, sock-puppet style, as worthy of government sponsorship and promotion.

When his posts don't reveal bafflement at how to design something commonplace and well understood, they appear to be worded to garner 'evidence' that some hair-brained design or theory he has come up with is also supported by other people, "Would you not agree?" being the stereotypical signature for these posts.

He also promotes a political agenda, in the past sock-puppeting for his one man campaign's manifesto for curing the ills of British industry which weirdly calls for setting up lots of courses teaching SMPS design to a particular syllabus with government money. He seems to have given this one up, I think he finally realised that everyone who encountered it could see straight through it.

Over the last few months to a year or so back he's come up with several schemes that involve various levels of deception or misdirection concerning the origin of electronics goods.

So, given the levels of self deception he's apparently been partial to over the years, I'm not so sure that this latest post was sarcasm but rather evidence of a further decline in his grasp on reality. Sarcasm has never been one of his traits. Whereas getting the government to pay for his plans is a consistent theme since I was first aware of him.

So either Treez has been one of the most successful trolls of all time, and we all fell for it, or he's progressed over the years from merely having odd personality traits, through the "annoys everyone with his shit" stage  to "There's a psychiatric diagnosis waiting to happen over there".

*

Hi,
I am electronics engineer with BEng(I) Hons Electronics  from Birmingham university and have experience of 30 UK based electronics companies over 20 years.
...

[Siwastaja]

From their quality you would assume that they were made by a beginner rather than someone with a degree in EE

No, you are wrong in this one. The posts show significant theoretical knowledge on switch mode topologies and converters, exactly something that could be seen from someone with the MS of EE degree, but not very much practical experience. What treez is capable of doing, is create some colossally convoluted circuitry which he is able to simulate in Spice, and get it "work" in simulation. Then he fixates on some stupid detail like the existence or nonexistence of a certain type of capacitor in the circuit and makes 57 threads about it during a year or two.

This non-beginnerism is also what makes treez an interesting case to follow, exactly because sometimes the technical questions spark interesting discussions.

If he could fix his issues with fixations, he could become an actually capable engineer, because he's neither a beginner, nor stupid. But fixations are endless time sinks.

[pardo-bsso]

Hi OpAmpSmoker, long time no read!

I'm no British, live in the south of America but read the Guardian sometimes.
Do you take remote contractors?

[Cerebus]

From their quality you would assume that they were made by a beginner rather than someone with a degree in EE

No, you are wrong in this one. The posts show significant theoretical knowledge on switch mode topologies and converters, exactly something that could be seen from someone with the MS of EE degree, but not very much practical experience. What treez is capable of doing, is create some colossally convoluted circuitry which he is able to simulate in Spice, and get it "work" in simulation. Then he fixates on some stupid detail like the existence or nonexistence of a certain type of capacitor in the circuit and makes 57 threads about it during a year or two.

This non-beginnerism is also what makes treez an interesting case to follow, exactly because sometimes the technical questions spark interesting discussions.

If he could fix his issues with fixations, he could become an actually capable engineer, because he's neither a beginner, nor stupid. But fixations are endless time sinks.

I don't intend to have a back and forward about what Treez actually knows, but I'll stand by what I said, that from the nature of the questions one would assume that they were made by a beginner. We know that assumption would be wrong; heck that post includes the fact that he is qualified and with 20 years experience to boot. That Treez posts might sometimes provoke interesting and worthwhile discussions is an accidental side-effect.

Anyway, I haven't got time for this: I've got bridges to sell.

[Simon]

Hi OpAmpSmoker, long time no read!

I'm no British, live in the south of America but read the Guardian sometimes.
Do you take remote contractors?

Don't scare me like that 

[pardo-bsso]

Hi OpAmpSmoker, long time no read!

I'm no British, live in the south of America but read the Guardian sometimes.
Do you take remote contractors?

Don't scare me like that 

Ha, are you afraid that he's gonna snatch me before I try to work for you?

[Halcyon]

We need you to not necessarily write the software for it, but pretend that you did....you must be able to sound like you did write the software...you see, we are seeking funding from the UK government  to bring this product to the UK market. Even though we simply received the product from our master Chinese company, we must make it look like we made the product ourselves, in order that the UK government will give us the money to take this product forward and market it.

Sounds an awful lot like fraud. You have got to be kidding yourself! Do you honestly believe organisations (particularly government ones) are as stupid as you?