A couple months ago I applied for a program in its first year for hardware startup companies. Called HAXLR8R, the goal of the program is to make manufacturing in China more accessible to startups by providing workspace and tools and mentors and experts to ten teams for three months in Shenzhen. After those three months, the participants spend a week in San Francisco and give a demo to investors.

I found out recently that I was accepted for my project on the Portable Electronic Scoreboard. I’ve been working on this project for a while, and now is a good time to go to China because I need to take it to production, and this is a great way to do it.

Over the next few months I’ll be updating a new blog that I created called Engineer In Shenzhen, which will have personal posts about what I’m going through, and advice and articles for other people who are interested in the process and what it takes to work in China and outsource manufacturing.

If you want a postcard, make sure I have a current address for you. I’ll try to keep everyone updated with progress as I can.

After Erin took me on a ski trip to Salt Lake City for Christmas 2010, I was far behind in the Christmas Karma. For 2011 I planned to take her to a resort in Wisconsin Dells, which is sort of like the Las Vegas of Wisconsin, except with water parks instead of casinos.  Of the many resorts, I decided on Kalahari based on recommendations of others and some research on the web. But just telling her wasn’t a great way to do the presentation. I wanted her to unwrap something.

I’ve been working for a while on a portable electronic scoreboard, so I had all the materials to make a good LED sign with the name. The day before we were to leave for Kansas, I started the project. The idea was to make a big LED sign that said Kalahari on it. It would be battery powered, and a switch would turn it on when the box was opened so that it wasn’t on the entire time and running out of battery. That was as far as I got in planning before I started building.

I borrowed a rechargeable battery from Sector67 to use as the power supply, then laid out the LEDs on a prototyping perf board covered with sticky black nylon paper. It took a couple tries to get it all to fit on the available board with legible letters and decent spacing. Then I found a switch that would work. The circuit was simple. The switch connected the + voltage to the board and the ground went directly to the board. The LEDs were connected with a resistor and two LEDs in series, and all those strings were in parallel. This meant a huge current drain, but I was limited to a power supply with only 6 volts, so I didn’t have much choice. This also meant a LOT of soldering and a lot of current limiting resistors. There was an odd number of LEDs, so I put an extra one on the back side so that the circuits were all the same.

With all these LEDs packed into a small space, it was very bright, so I struggled with a few different ways to do the presentation. I ended up taping the board behind a piece of paper so that the paper would diffuse the light a little. It ended up working great. The paper covered everything, including the switch. When the box was closed it was off, and when it was opened the switch was triggered, turning on the sign.

The girlfriend was happy, so the project was a success.

The next time I do something like this I’ll use less LEDs and instead of doing a sign of LEDs I think it would be better to have a piece that had letters cut out and was backlit by only a few LEDs. I also would have spent a lot more time on what was surrounding the sign. Using regular paper and crayon to draw was the best I could do with the limited time and resources I had, but it wasn’t enough for me. Construction took far longer than I expected, and I was a little disappointed with the results. I was working late into the night to solder it all together, and I barely had any time to work on the rest of the package. I can do better.

It occurred to me that a lot of people may be out of the loop with what has been and will be happening over the next while. Here’s a short description of the plan:

Erin is going to graduate school in Madison, WI, and I am moving with her.

On July 31 our apartment lease in Richland expired.  On August 15 our apartment lease in Madison begins. For the two weeks in between, we are house-sitting for a friend and storing our stuff in their garage. On August 15 we pack everything up again and begin our 3 day trek across the nation, putting us in Madison on the 17th. We’ll live there for a couple years while she gets a Masters in GIS (Geographic Information Systems).

In anticipation of this move and change in lifestyle, I’ve made quite a few changes already. A few days ago I sold my car; its useful life had was ending and was getting to a point where it would need more and more maintenance and repairs. Since I work from home, and Erin will be taking public transportation in Madison, and parking is expensive, it made sense to only keep her car. In January, I left my job at PNNL to start my own business. I was subcontracting back to the lab for a few months after that to retain some stable income as I built up my own business. I am currently freelancing a little (and open to new work if you have leads), but also working on the portable electronic scoreboard and an automated dog-sitting application. When we move I’ll continue working on them; in fact changing my location doesn’t change a thing about how I do my work other than that my office will soon have better windows.

The Eastern Washington chapter is drawing to a close and the next adventure begins shortly.

Back in college I occasionally did DJ gigs. It was a lot of fun and I did some pretty neat things to make it easier. I had a remote control for my WinTV card and I remapped the buttons to control WinAmp, so I could control the music while I was dancing on the floor. Another thing I did was build some lights for inside my computer case.

When I originally built it, the lights were controlled by the internal serial port, and I wrote some software to advance the lights. I was even able to integrate the sound volume into it and had some rudimentary beat detection going so that the lights would change on the beat. Unfortunately, the system slowly degraded over time. The first problem was that the beat detection didn’t work when I upgraded from Windows ME to Windows XP. The next problem was that the external power supply died. Finally, I switched to Linux, so the software I had written to control it wouldn’t work.

In January 2007 I cleaned things up quite a bit. First, I connected the power to the computer’s power supply, thus removing the dependence on an external plug. Next, I set it up with a 555 timer chip and inserted a potentiometer to vary the speed of the flashing. I had to replace a light bulb, but the refurbishing took only a few hours. Now it seems to be working fairly well. See the pics and the video. There are 5 lights throughout the case, and they flash in order.

The circuitry is very simple. I have a decade counter which increments every time it gets a pulse. Each time it increments it turns on a different transistor, which powers a different light. On pin 6 it goes to the reset pin so that the decade counter only counts 1-5 over and over again. The 555 timer provides the pulse to the decade counter. If you want more details about the circuitry, contact me.

Video of the computer lights show in action (Windows Media Video (WMV) format, no audio)

At the lab a model of the campus additions was placed on display in each of the buildings so that people could get an idea of how the campus was going to change. One day I made a little addition to the model. It stayed up for at least 4 months and moved from building to building.

The addition was the “Bob Baddeley Memorial Fountain,” and it was placed right in the middle of the display. It was made out of green cellophane taped to a piece of colored cardboard that was taped onto the piece of paper labeling it the memorial fountain, which was then taped to the display. I managed to get the scale believable, and the fountain just blended in with the rest of the display. At first I was sure it would disappear and I would get in trouble. After a few days, the display disappeared from my building. Later I got a message from a friend in another building asking me if I knew about it, because the display had been moved to his building and he had recognized the name. I knew about the display moving to two other buildings after that, and I never heard from anyone about it. I walked by it a few months later and it was still there.

I have been asked why it’s the Memorial fountain, as I’m not dead. My answer is two-fold: if I had been discovered by the wrong people, I might have been dead, and this way I can say it was a joke ahead of its time. I was also asked why I used my real name. In retrospect, I should have picked a more clever name, like a famous scientist or a random person. Oh well.

I have a set of speakers that I embedded into my coffee table. This actually made a lot of sense because it moved the speakers to the center of the room and away from the apartment walls and increased the stereo effect, as well as saving room in the cramped apartment. The speakers serve both my computer and my Playstation2. The speakers only have a single 1/8” plug, though, so I built a switch using a tin of mints (the mints were horrible anyway) that accepts the speaker plug and the plugs for the computer and the Playstation2. It’s a cute little thing and does exactly what I needed.

My digital camera needed some accessories, and the steadicam seemed like a perfect addition. Built out of simple parts from a hardware store (and a pie plate from ShopKo), this steadicam makes sure that while I’m taking video the camera stays level and steady.

The pictures should be pretty self-explanatory as far as building it. We were making two at once, so there’s twice as many parts as you’ll need. The parts can be acquired at most hardware stores. The purpose of the pie plate is to create a wide surface so that the steadicam can be set down and used like a tripod without tipping over. It works surprisingly well. One thing that is different from the pictures is that we discovered that the plastic screws were too wobbly, so we went with metal screws instead. The plastic wing nuts are still fine, though.