ESawdust Tour (Electronic Sausage Making)
Synopsis - the whole point of this article is: “projects are messy”. When I’m in the middle of building, I am always thinking - “A ‘professional’ machinist, woodworker, or EE would know where everything is and would have the decks clear except for what he’s working on at the time”. I envision this ideal engineer out there with a pristine machine shop or clean-room quality lab amiably knocking out cool stuff right and left. I labor thinking everyone who’s doing things like this must be orderly. Me? Ha. I’m always looking for my wire strippers, phillips, or multimeter buried under the archeological layers of schematics and spools of wire. Maybe you’re the pro who has it orderly, but I throw this out for public consumption because for me, this is my reality when I’m in the middle of prototyping or building projects. Look at this as a small tour of ESawdust labs - such as they are.
[Afterthought: maybe this article is more about what defines an ideal “office” for a “maker” or “builder” which involves embedded hardware, software, metal, wood, power tools and paint. Not saying I have the ideal setup (far from it), but if you have thoughts on productive prototyping environments - tweet me at @esawdust and let me know]
When I did pure software development, my desktop was, for lack of a better word, tidy. Embedded hardware and software development? Not so much tidy. My wife might say it resembles Iron Man’s basement lab without all the anthropomorphic, voice activated robots but complete with all the magic blue smoke and blood-letting injuries.
Here are some shots of my desktop (lab) and garage shop where I build stuff. These are typical of most of my projects whether speed timing or vehicle location systems. If you click on the photos you can get an enlarged shot (if you’re electronically masochistic - aka: you get excited watching a train wreck.)
Laser hand-sensor boards being built - laser’s wired, but that’s it:
Diagnostic testing of speed timing display:
Laser sensor debug:
Paint and pin striping for target:
Sometimes things spill into my living room or eat-in kitchen area as they did when we built out a large AVL system:
Scads of Sparkfun GPS boards with Sirf III’s:
My business partner, Steve Fontana. Look at all those Olimex SAM7 P256 boards!!!
GPS Testing:
Cable making and assembly. Large rubber mats come in very handy - you can buy rubber floor mats at Home Depot that work pretty well if you turn them upside down:
Shipping 40 AVL units to Ft. Carson:
Some of you astute wise-guys would instantly recognize that my wife must have been gone for the weekend(s) when all this went down - we even took over the ktichen for final-testing workspace:
Q&A
Q. Doesn’t ESawdust need a “real office”?
A. Yes, we need a real office. What we need is a big office warehouse like Sparkfun (and we need a pick and place machine like theirs, too
Q. Are we ISO 9000 certified?
A. Huh?
This is what the ESawdust prototyping and small volume manufacturing looks like - for better or worse, that’s where we’re at!
Hope you enjoyed and were insipred by this small tour of ESawdust. Things really are still being designed and built in the garage - it’s not a myth. “Build it...because you can” - ESawdust.
Landon Cox
What’s your ideal office lab for building cool stuff? Tweet me at @ESawdust with your ideas.
[Afterthought: maybe this article is more about what defines an ideal “office” for a “maker” or “builder” which involves embedded hardware, software, metal, wood, power tools and paint. Not saying I have the ideal setup (far from it), but if you have thoughts on productive prototyping environments - tweet me at @esawdust and let me know]
When I did pure software development, my desktop was, for lack of a better word, tidy. Embedded hardware and software development? Not so much tidy. My wife might say it resembles Iron Man’s basement lab without all the anthropomorphic, voice activated robots but complete with all the magic blue smoke and blood-letting injuries.
Here are some shots of my desktop (lab) and garage shop where I build stuff. These are typical of most of my projects whether speed timing or vehicle location systems. If you click on the photos you can get an enlarged shot (if you’re electronically masochistic - aka: you get excited watching a train wreck.)
Laser hand-sensor boards being built - laser’s wired, but that’s it:
Diagnostic testing of speed timing display:
Laser sensor debug:
Paint and pin striping for target:
Sometimes things spill into my living room or eat-in kitchen area as they did when we built out a large AVL system:
Scads of Sparkfun GPS boards with Sirf III’s:
My business partner, Steve Fontana. Look at all those Olimex SAM7 P256 boards!!!
GPS Testing:
Cable making and assembly. Large rubber mats come in very handy - you can buy rubber floor mats at Home Depot that work pretty well if you turn them upside down:
Shipping 40 AVL units to Ft. Carson:
Some of you astute wise-guys would instantly recognize that my wife must have been gone for the weekend(s) when all this went down - we even took over the ktichen for final-testing workspace:
Q&A
Q. Doesn’t ESawdust need a “real office”?
A. Yes, we need a real office. What we need is a big office warehouse like Sparkfun (and we need a pick and place machine like theirs, too
Q. Are we ISO 9000 certified?
A. Huh?
This is what the ESawdust prototyping and small volume manufacturing looks like - for better or worse, that’s where we’re at!
Hope you enjoyed and were insipred by this small tour of ESawdust. Things really are still being designed and built in the garage - it’s not a myth. “Build it...because you can” - ESawdust.
Landon Cox
What’s your ideal office lab for building cool stuff? Tweet me at @ESawdust with your ideas.
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