Sarah Dory graduated with two degrees that make her uniquely qualified to work on groundbreaking technology and assist clients in technical theatrical productions; Theater and Electrical Engineering.

From the small town of Greencastle, Indiana, Dory describes her childhood as quiet, fun, and full of support.

“It was kind of a Norman Rockwell type childhood in the sense that there we were insulated from adult and world issues and I remember spending summers running around the neighborhood with my friends. The neighbors didn’t mind and we played outside a lot!” Dory says.

Her community helped shape one of her passions with their summer plays.

“One of my favorite memories is the Putnam County Playhouse. It’s this barn in the middle of rural Putnam County (Indiana) that was converted to a stage where we do four productions in the summer for the community.” Dory says.

Dory graduated with a degree in Theater Design and Technology with an emphasis in Scenic Design and a second degree in Electrical Engineering. She mentions that those majors represent who she is and what her passions are. To her, these passions are a lot more similar than we think.

For her, scenic design is all about the audience’s perception. Her process includes visualizing the play and designing the stage environment to ensure the actors come in and out on time. She says reading the play is the first task for scenic design, one that she enjoys doing.

“My favorite part is teaching the kids scenic painting. For the Warrick County Summer Musical, we work with highschoolers. There are adult staff, but the majority of my stage crew are students. So it’s a fun process for me to pass along those skills and teach a new generation.”

Dory has worked on several significant theatrical productions at the University of Evansville, her alma mater. Now on her time off, she works with the local communities on their summer musicals.

“I wasn’t an actor. I actually like to be behind the scenes. I work with schools within both Vanderburgh and Warrick County helping them design their productions.” Dory says.

With Ciholas, Dory has worked on many different projects, including several client theatrical productions using our ultra-wideband tracking technology to track actors, musicians, and other items on stage. She has made good use of her experience, passion, and two degrees!

For more than 20 years, we have specialized in providing custom engineering for clients in a variety of industries. By that, we mean people hire us to invent things for them.

“People come to us with their particular problem or a particular product they need to build or take to the next level. However, they don’t necessarily have all the expertise or all of the knowledge to build it. We provide that expertise and knowledge so that they can use high- tech in their product and change their industry,” says president Mike Ciholas.

Today, almost all industries have high-tech components. There are smart watches, smart refrigerators, smart cars. You name it; there is probably a smart version. All these industries are undergoing rapid change and need to introduce more and better technology to stay on the cutting edge of their industry.

“We enable our customers to use high-tech to their best advantage to compete in their industry,” he says.

“We have worked with big and small projects to achieve our customer’s goals. We do a lot of work with antennas and wireless devices, but our capabilities don’t end there,” Ciholas says..

Our business started with our desire to invent and build high-tech devices. What we have become is a company that can propel our clients to be disruptors in their industry. Our skills include a wide array of abilities, including conceptual design, ultra-wideband real-time location, image processing, intellectual property rights, and more.

We do a lot of work with antennas and wireless devices. Everything we build has a wireless component to it. Every antenna is different in size, shape, and performance characteristics.

In our efforts to maximize the effectiveness of our antenna designs, we needed a test setup that would allow us to automatically sweep the antenna through multiple orientations. We couldn’t find any, so we decided to make one!

“Our needs were not met by what we could buy.” Says president, Mike Ciholas.

“We have to invent a lot of antennas that go on various devices. They need to be small, different frequencies, have different characteristics and in the process of doing that to test an antenna properly, you have to look at it in all of its directions.” Ciholas says.

In the past to test our antennas we had to manually change its position over and over. After going through various concepts, we finally settled on a device that is able to test our antennas by changing the elevation and angles in a systematic, automated way.

Mechanical Engineer Aidan Kunkle helped to bring Mike’s vision into reality.

“For radio signals, their path is deformed with the presence of metal so the goal was to make a device that had as little metal as possible.” Says Kunkle.

Our device is made out of plywood, plastic fasteners and glue. “These things seem old fashioned but they’re non-metallic.” He says.

Our antenna positioner can work in two orientations simultaneously and test various orientations without the presence of a person manually moving it. The results are recorded in a program that allows us to analyze the antenna and make decisions based on the recorded characteristics.

“We can set this up to measure the antenna pattern, measure the antenna delay, and measure all the antenna characteristics and we can have it run overnight so in the morning we have all this data that tells us how good the antenna is.” Says Ciholas.

The antenna positioner is currently in use at Ciholas for internal development. We are in the process of commercializing it to make it possible for other companies to use.

Here are a few of the real company projects completed by our 2019 summer interns…

Ciholas interns spend their summers working on real projects, creating devices and solving technical problems like  the full-time engineers on staff.

This summer, our interns worked almost exclusively on projects related to our new precision tracking and location system — the Ciholas Ultra-Wideband system, or CUWB. The The CUWB system represents Ciholas’ first significant venture into creating and selling our own intellectual property. The system  uses ultra-wideband radio transmissions to calculate the real-time location of an object with extreme precision. Our system can track items to a precision of about ten centimeters. Other location systems that use bluetooth or wifi are nowhere near that precise.

“Let’s say you want to track a pallet in a warehouse, and you want to know it is on the third shelf, second rack,” said Director of Engineering Justin Bennett. “Those systems just aren’t precise enough to help you do something like that. We are precise enough.”

This summer our interns made valuable contributions to this CUWB system. Here are just a few examples of the projects our interns completed:

Automating data sharing

Conner Luebbehusen, a sophomore electrical engineering student at the University of Evansville, spent the summer developing a method for our engineers to automatically share new CUWB tools and updates with our customers.

This is a critical function because the CUWB system is not like an app on your phone. Once our customers purchase and install our hardware, they begin receiving sensor data , but it’s not always immediately clear to them how to use that data.

“It is not necessarily easy for our users to go from having sensor data to actually tracking a pallet in a warehouse,” Bennett said.

To make that job easier internally, Ciholas engineers have developed several tools that can do things like plot the data, print out an object’s precise location or create a database of positions. Prior to Luebbehusen’s work we did not have a reliable way of sharing those tools with customers. Instead, we provide written instructions on our website for them to follow. Many times customers called to have us walk them through those instructions. While our customers appreciate the detailed on-line documentation, the support calls were not sustainable as we continue to grow and sell more CUWB systems.

So, Luebbehusen took the summer months making those tools readily available to the public.

“It was not the easiest thing to do because when people write internal tools, they aren’t always thinking about the public having access to it,” Luebbehusen said. “So, there was a lot of cleanup to do.”

Luebbehusen also wanted the process to be simple for the Ciholas engineers to use. So, what he created was a program through which Ciholas employees can upload new tools to the software hosting site GitHub, where anyone can view and download them. To upload their tools, employees merely click a button.

“I really enjoyed doing it,” Luebbehusen said. “I learned a lot. I spent the first two weeks just reading code and trying to understand what it did. Now, I’m writing the code. That’s cool.

Keeping the system from crashing

Hagan Hollinger is only the second high school student to ever earn a Ciholas internship. Hollinger, a Mount Vernon High School senior, spent the summer creating an in-house test suite to ensure that firmware development updates don’t break the critical CUWB network timing requirements.

Firmware is basically software for hardware. Just about every piece of electronic equipment has what we call a “microcontroller,” which is a tiny computer that tells the electronics how to function. Those microcontrollers need instructions to operate that come in the form of firmware written by engineers.

In the CUWB system the firmware instructs the microcontroller on how to operate the Ultra-Wideband transceiver within the network. If two UWB signals are sent together, it can create interference in the network, and cause the system not to operate. The UWB signals are sent thousands of times per second and must be scheduled precisely not to overlap. A typical transmission is anywhere from 160 microseconds to one millisecond, with about 2 microseconds scheduled between transmissions.

“So, if somebody writes instructions in firmware that cause it to slip more than a microsecond, it causes a problem,” Bennett said.

To keep that from happening, Hollinger created a test that can be applied to any firmware update. First the test  measures the amount of time it takes for the command to travel to the device. It then calculates how long the update itself will take. If the travel and update time exceed the time allocated for the update, Hollinger’s program automatically stops it from sending.

“That took me all summer,” Hollinger said. “I learned quite a bit. They did a good job of treating me like I was an actual engineer and that I was doing important things.”

Predicting an object’s true location

Cameron Ruggles, a Purdue University senior studying computer science, spent his summer using advanced mathematics to better work with occluded sensor signals.

Our CUWB system uses timed radio signals to determine the location of an object. Those radio signals can become blocked — or occluded. This happens frequently in warehouses, for example. When it does, the signal actually bounces off other objects, taking a “multipath” back to the sensor.

“It would actually be better if we didn’t get the signal at all,” Bennett said. “But, it turns out, we get the signal, and because it took this multipath to get there, we get bad data.”

That bad data causes the location on the monitor to bounce and gitter — sometimes erratically.

There’s no way to stop occlusion from ever happening. So, Ruggle’s job this summer was to find a way for the system to work better by anticipating this rogue data. He did this by learning about something called a Kalman filter, which is an algorithm that takes in noisy sensor data and makes accurate predictions of the sensor values based on mathematical modeling. The Kalman filter takes into account the physical characteristics of the object being tracked and applies them to the data to improve the outcome. In the case of the CUWB system, Ruggle’s was able to take in noise position data and predict the actual position of the object improving overall accuracy.

(Originally posted on a VLOG by the Economic Development Coalition for Southwest Indiana)

When you think about technology you think about Boston corridor you might think about Silicon Valley, even Austin Texas. were here today to talk about southwest Indiana and this amazing company called Ciholas. come on in and we’ll tell you more.

I’m with mike Ciholas with Ciholas, the company the technology company based here in Indiana’s great southwest. so, Mike tell me a little bit about what is Ciholas.

Ciholas is a contract engineering firm, what that means is that we do things for clients, we provide technology to them. Technology is a confusing and complex subject, and people don’t know what technology can and can’t do, and we provide the engineering staff. That allows modern technology to be added to other people’s business. So, our typical client is another business that is involved in some industry, and they need to use technology, and it’s hard for them to use that technology with their own staff. Then they hire us to do contract engineering. so basically, we invent things for people.

So, you have a lot of engineers on staff here and you’re helping those companies that maybe have an idea, or a concept, and then you’re helping them put it into practice?

Yes, well, even more than that, we have their problems. So, they have some sort of issue that they need to solve, and they think technology will solve it, and they don’t necessarily know how the technology will solve it. So, they can come and describe their problems to us, and then we can invent an idea for them. Sometimes they come with their own ideas, and sometimes those are good, and sometimes they’re not. Then we can invent another idea that might be better for them, and then we can realize that idea, we can make it real, and make it work for them. And very often, the client doesn’t believe they can do something. We can enable them to do something they didn’t think they could do.

So, this started when? when did you start here?

When the company really started was in the mid 90’s when I was a one-man consulting company. I was doing this as my full time advocation. I would come and work for people as a one-man consulting company. Then, starting in about 1999, I hired my first employee, and then I hired my second, and then we moved into a bigger facility, and we hired more employees, and then moved into a bigger facility, and then we run that up to present day and now we’re in a 35,000 square foot facility with 40 engineers.

Which is a pretty amazing, and most of those engineers are a lot of those who came from the University of Evansville, university of southern Indiana or individuals that might have gone off to school but decided to come back.

Yes, most of our staff has some sort of local connection. Either they grew up here, have family here, or they came to school here. And so, we are cultivating the local connections. The university of Evansville is by far our strongest path, so we have about 23 engineers from the University of Evansville, we have a few from USI that’s a growing number now, we have people from Purdue, Rose Holman and so forth.

So, the kinds of things that you do here, what can you tell us? I know that there’s a lot of things you can’t tell us, what can you tell us about the kinds of technology that you do.

Well, it’s typically fairly sophisticated electronic devices that involve software, electronics, and usually has some sort of wireless component, because wireless is a big deal in modern times. Radios, sensors, high speed, it’s technology that is usually not very common. We’re inventing something new, and that creates a lot of patents for my clients. We have a whole wall full of patents that go along with this. We will show you some examples of things we have invented that we can discuss. As you said, most of our projects are confidential. Some of our clients consider it secret that we even work for them because they don’t want the fact that we do things for the client to get out because we’re kind of their secret. We have done things that have flown in space, we have done things that have traced coal miners underground, we’ve done things in sports timing, for example, all of Usain Bolts current world records were timed on equipment invented and developed here.

Wow, that’s pretty amazing, and right here in southwest Indiana. One of the other really interesting things that you’re working on is the Museum of the Bible project, and part of that technology, your technology, is used in that facility. How so? Can you tell us about it?

The Museum of the Bible is a 430,000 square foot facility in Washington D.C. It’s 2 blocks South of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. It’s a Museum dedicated to the history of the Bible, the Museum has seven floors. Each floor has a different focus. My particular favorite floor is floor 4, which is the actual history of the Bible itself. Floor 2 is the cultural impact of the Bible. In that Museum they decided, very specifically, to use very advanced technology to tell the stories that they wanted to tell. The technology they got from us was something called Ultra-wideband tracking (UWB). UWB tracking in the simplest terms, is an indoor GPS system that is highly accurate, accurate within a few inches. They provide devices to visitors called digital guides. It’s a tablet device that you carry around, and we provided the technology that is inside the tablet that will track where the tablet is, and what way it’s facing inside the entire museum.

I can imagine that this technology would have other kinds of applications, not just for the museum. Can you talk about some of the things that this technology allows you to do?

Yes, Ciholas is a world leader in developing UWB tracking technology, and we have several patents and several devices related to it. We have found applications throughout the world related to tracking athletes, tracking equipment and supplies in factories, tracking machinery, providing proximity around machinery so it doesn’t run over people, providing safety interlocks on equipment, we’ve tracked horses, we’ve tracked dogs.

You tracked horses? But animals, you can track animals then in a way?

Yes.

We’ve even tracked things like basketballs, footballs, tracked sports equipment.

So, you’re looking at the trajectory of let’s say a football as your throwing it, and your analyzing it as maybe as a quarterback or running back or as a receiver, you can be able to tell how that’s actually interacting with the equipment?

As you may know, sports analytics is a very big and growing field, and so collecting the data off of the athletes and off the sports equipment provides additional analysis that you can do, you know, like what is the spin rate of a pass that a quarterback throws, what is his velocity, what is his acceleration, how fast does a running back respond or cut. Those kinds of things can be collected from the information from tracking them using this UWB system.

That’s pretty amazing in itself. Well, you’re doing this amazing stuff around the world, but from a location here in Warrick county, Indiana’s great southwest. What makes this region attractive to you.

Well the first thing is that my wife got a job here, so we moved here.

That always helps.

That always helps

And as a one-man consulting company, I could do my work anywhere. So, wherever she needed to go for her job was the first reason we’re here. After we got here, we found that the benefits of this region we’re fantastic. It’s very centrally located in the US, which makes travel for me very easy to go to my clients, and we work nationwide and globally. It’s got a very reasonable climate, very reasonable cost of living, has very good people, low crime, access to local resources is very good. We’re kind of the, instead of the Silicon Valley, were kind of the Silicon Prairie of Southwest Indiana. We’re bringing high technology to this area which helps a lot with the brain drain problem that sometimes areas like this have. You have that whatever local talent there is, seeks the coast, and the other areas where they can get higher paying jobs, and here we can keep those people employed in the region that they would like to stay.

You talk about students you have from the university of Evansville, university of southern Indiana, Purdue, rose Holman, I mean great universities, do you find sometimes it’s more of a challenge to attract talent here? Or are you growing your own?

Well, we take students basically with a bachelor’s degree, sort of fresh out of school, so a majority of our staff are relatively young, relatively inexperienced engineers. We invest a certain amount of time to get them up to professional standards and so forth, so were not looking necessarily to hire sort of ready to go experts from the outside. We’re kind of cultivating the local talent that way, and the local universities do a fantastic job. University of Evansville, USI, Purdue, they all do a very good job of turning out really qualified candidates that have a lot of capability. We’re giving an option for those candidates to stay in Southwest Indiana and continue to do high tech things here while living in this area.

Because obviously what you do is incredibly high tech. So, what does the future hold for Ciholas, your company?

The future for Ciholas is very bright. We are working globally and working with companies all over the world to take some of the technology were inventing here and distribute it. Whereas we started as mostly a contract engineering firm working on other people’s devices, we’ve also started inventing things on our own and licensing that to other companies around the world. That part of the business is going to grow and eventually become the dominate part of the business. That will allow us to grow at a faster rate, generate more revenue, and have more impact in the world.

Well, I want to thank Mike Ciholas for being here and stay tuned for the kinds of technologies you’re going to see coming out of Indiana’s great southwest.