Embedded - 160: Chowdered up the Spoilboard

Episode Date: July 12, 2016

Daniel Hienzsch (@rheingoldheavy) and Majenta Strongheart (majentastronghe_art) gave us suggestions on setting up a home shop and information on setting up a maker space. Daniel is the resident engineer at SupplyFrame's Pasadena Design Lab. He still the owns and runs RheingoldHeavy.com, a company devoted to educational boards, as we talked about on episode 115: Datasheeps. Majenta's web page is MajentaStrongheart.com. We talked more about School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Sarah Petkus in 142: New and Improved Appendages.

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Alicia White alongside Christopher White. We have a return guest, Dan Hinch, to talk about his new gig. And he's brought along his summer intern, Magenta Strongheart. We're going to talk about tools, and not software tools either. Hi, Dan. Magenta. Thanks for joining us. Hey, guys. Hi.

Dan, for listeners who didn't hear about DataSheeps, could you tell us about yourself? Yeah. Hi, I am Daniel Hinch. I was on the show previously about a year ago on the DataSheeps episode. I am the founder of Rheingold Heavy, which is an educational electronics company. And I now work as the resident engineer here at the Supply Frame Design Lab in Pasadena. That means they give you a little cot in the corner? You have to sleep there? Yeah, but I don't ever actually get to use it. Magenta, welcome. And could you tell us about yourself?

Thank you. I'm Magenta, welcome. And could you tell us about yourself? Thank you. I'm Magenta Strongheart. I'm going into my senior year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And I'm mostly interested in industrial design and sculpture there, but I've taken classes in almost every department from art and tech to performance to writing and so on. We recently had another graduate of that same school, Sarah Petkis with her robot licking, no, with her leg licking robot. Yeah. Was that noodle feet? That was noodle feet. Yes.

I remember that from the super con. And her robot army. It was very cool. So we've heard a little bit about your art school and how coolly different it is, but I expect we'll hear more. Cooly? Interestingly. I just never heard that as an adverb.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, I love it. Okay, so now we are going to do lightning round where we ask you questions and hope for like this bam, bam, bam, fast thing to happen. And if we are doing our jobs properly, we won't then ask you why or get into more detail with your short answers. Bound to happen someday. Someday that will happen, yes. Chris, why don't you go first?

All right. Favorite processor or electrical component of all time? I'm going to leap in with the 386DX because that was the first processor I ever worked with. Wow. I'm going way back. Magenta, what about you? I don't know if I have a favorite processor or electrical component. I don't do much with electronics. Yet.

Yet, yeah. We're going to work on that. We have 10 days. Introvert or extrovert? Extrovert. Which time of day? Give me some context on that. In general, you know, basic.

On average. On average. I put up a very good extroverted facade, but I'm thinking constantly about you in the background. What is the most important to your job? A whiteboard, a soldering iron, or keyboard slash mouse? For me, I'd say, does it have to be one of the above, or can I pick something else? You can do whatever you want. It's your show.

No, it's my show. Pencil and paper for me. For this job, the whiteboard has actually been pretty important. Magenta actually insisted that we, that we, that we update the whiteboard a couple of days ago. We had to like close and lock the conference room door so that no one could bother us so that we could sit there and diligently go through the whiteboard a couple days ago, we had to close and lock the conference room door so that no one could bother

us, so that we could sit there and diligently go through the whiteboard and reassign our priorities. It's our to-do list platform. Yeah, there are a lot of electronic ones, which make it easy to delete everything at once. I've never seen anybody

successful at using those. Alec, who you guys are familiar with, the CTO of SupplyFrame, and Steve Flagg, the CEO, were over here looking at the design lab and they actually saw our whiteboard and they kind of looked at each other and went, yeah, who needs Trello? Like, yeah, but, you know,

unless you want to mount a 90-inch flat-screen TV with Trello constantly running on it, a whiteboard seems a fairly decent option at this point. When you're all in the same area, that works. And it's so satisfying to cross things off the list on a whiteboard. When you're creating a new product or tool or thing, should you compromise more in favor of making it easy for new users, or should you make it more difficult for users to learn, but also a lot more powerful?

And for those of you who are software engineers, this is the Emacs or VI question. Ugh. None of the above. Okay, but really, the question is, easy for new users or more powerful for experienced users? I don't think the two have to be mutually exclusive, really. I mean, that's just care and design. Yeah, ideally, it'd be flexible for both. Yeah.

Or you have two different products. What was the question? Because they're such different markets. Given limited resources, time, availability, brain space, should you make things easy for new users or should you make it as powerful as possible but maybe more difficult to learn? Depends on who has more money, the new users or the veterans.

Right, that's the Altium versus Fritzing argument. You know, I mean that's really the sort of the, you know, minimum viable product right there. You got to come up with something and go see which one actually wants to buy it. And if it's the new users, then you tailor it towards the new users. If the experienced users want it, then you tailor it towards the experienced users. Let your market

dictate what it is that you're making. And that's the last time I'm going to say anything like that for the next hour. Well, and I'm taking that question out of rotation. Thanks a lot. okay should we bring back the dinosaurs and if so which dinosaur hmm yes uh couldn't possibly tell you which one but i think we should basically rope off all of north dakota and just make a whole bunch and see which ones survive. All right. Maybe not the flying ones then. Oh, that was the one I was going to say,

the pterodactyls. Big walls. Yeah, right. That works so well. Just put a ceiling over all of North Dakota. It would snow less than. The Dakota Dinosaur Dome.

It sells itself. And I agree with pterodactyl, although I'm not sure they're all that different from those brown pelicans at the beach. Favorite fictional robot? I'm going to go with the elevators in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That's a little obscure, but still really good.

Jimmy Neutron's dog, but I can't remember his name. Alright. Both obscure. Dog, cat, or ferret? Nice marmot dog yeah definitely dog for me too and neptune or saturn the the the gods or the planets uh i i gotta go with saturn neptune the god

all right let's wrap this up uh magenta when you are in school what is a day like for you um that's a tricky question we have um longer classes they're usually well studio classes are six hours long um and typically once a week unless you do like a split um evening class that'll be three hours each time twice a week um so this last semester was really nice because my week sort of went from like really intense at the beginning on Mondays to tapering down to no class on Friday. But I'm also an RA on campus and a TA, and I work in the wood and metal shop. So I pretty much go from class to one of my jobs, back to class, to the studio working on stuff. I repeat every day. back to class, to the studio, working on stuff. I remember what that was like.

I repeat every day. Although I was the computer lab. Although the rest of that is the same, but computer lab instead. Man, I thought three-hour lab classes were bad. Six hours. Yeah. The three-hour, six-hour thing is not too conducive to liberal arts classes. They struggle a little bit.

I was telling Dan about that. Just three-hour lectures are not always the most fun. But these are classes where you were physically making things. I'm thinking ceramics, done studios in sculpture, industrial design, which is referred to as designed objects at our school, performance, writing, fibers. This sounds like fun. Sign me up. Yeah. One of my favorites was woodshop. Oh, yeah. Or woodworking was the class. And that really launched me into working at the woodshop or woodworking was the class.

And that really launched me into working at the woodshop on campus, which has been an incredible job. Just learned so much in that position alone. It's been awesome. Yes. When I was one of the shop helpers in the metal shop, that was so cool. Yeah. Dan, your new job is not selling components and helping people use them in teaching classes and writing blog posts. It is something very different. Well, yes and no.

The only thing that doesn't really carry over is that I don't have to do any retail sales here. But there's still a lot of education. There's still helping people with electronics components. Um, there's, there's also helping people with milling machines and CNC routers and laser cutters and 3d printers too, though. Uh, so there's a, there's a large, uh, educational aspect to it. Um, but obviously there's the, you know, the, I am actually in charge of a facility now. So there's all the administrative aspect of that as well. Like figuring out where the consumables are and who took the last one? Yeah. And when you have interesting individuals come in off the street that want to threaten to sue you for something that happened before you started working here and probably doesn't directly relate to you. You're the person that gets to go greet them at the front door.

That happened earlier this week by a gentleman that walked in who had the magnificent name of Arrogant Hollywood. Well, it's been a good show, everyone. Now that we know that Arrogant Hollywood is litigious. I don't think we're going to be able to say anything else that's going to top that.

Yeah, you should check out his GoFundMe page. Oh, wow. Listening to you talk about being a respectable administrator reminds me of Lando Calrissian for some reason. Actually, I've started referring to people I don't know as just Rando Calrissian recently. So you have the Design Lab, and it has a whole bunch of different tools. We saw a picture on your Twitter recently of several other mills, as well as some automatic, I believe it's supposed to be a milling machine, but at the time it was drawing

things. Yep. What kind of tools do you have there? Uh, well, we've got, uh, sort of a wide, a very wide general variety. We've got, uh, what you would commonly associate as just general hand tools. So everything from hammers to screwdrivers to driver drills. We have some chisels and stuff like that. We've got some general office supplies, some really, really high-end CAD cam stations. Then we've got an electronics workbench, which has soldering irons, hot air stations. It has a couple of Keysight oscilloscopes on it, some Fluke multimeters. Then we have a rapid prototyping room that has

some Delta 3D printers, some Cartesian 3D printers, one PolyJet 3D printer. You're going to have to define all of those just so you know, but go ahead. Sure, sure, sure. And then a laser cutter. So the Cartesian 3D printer is one that works in sort of what you expect when you think of an X and a Y axis. So it will move in a direct sort of horizontal or to and from you and up and down motion. So that's sort of the normal one. That's the one most people have or think of.

That's exactly the one that you normally think of when you think of a 3D printer. The Delta has three arms that are of equal length that descend down to a printing head in the middle. And then they raise and lower those three arms to achieve the same x y coordinate system but it moves in sort of a more sort of funky loopy fashion and the the benefit of that

is that you get this really really huge build volume and they look really funky when they're printing i sort of see these things out of the corner of my eye all day long and they it looks like war of the worlds going on in there with these sort of arms just sort of moving left and right and sideways uh and then we have the polyjet which is uh basically like an it's an inkjet printer that prints uh this stuff from stratasys called uh not poly called vero white. Uh, and, uh, and then it cures it with a UV lamp. So you can get really, really,

really fine detail with that. Uh, it just happens to be very expensive. It's $600 a kilogram. Wow. Yeah. So it's a little bit more than the sort of typical $35 for a kilogram of, uh,

of PLA, uh, printer filament. And then, uh, and then we have the heavy equipment room, which has a Tormach PC&C 1100 milling machine, ShopBot PRS Alpha 9648,

which is what you saw me drawing with. And then a really, really cool saw stop table saw, and then drill press, bands saw, belt sander, those sorts of tools as well. I'm so jealous. So would you say you have enough there to make any sort of project within certain volume constraints? Yes and no. What are you missing?

What are you still on the market for? Keep your eye on. So we don't have any welding capability here. We don't have any precision bending or shearing here. So if we needed to bend sheet metal or shear sheet metal, so to cut sheet metal very precisely, we don't have the ability to do that. Yeah, we have that in our metal shop. The water cutter?

No. Oh, now you're just bragging. And they didn't mention a water cutter either. That would be cool. We don't have a water cutter and we don't have a plasma cutter. Wow. I kind of stopped the spending on tools because I didn't want to go too far down any particular path because that would definitely start to influence the people that you choose to come work in this place because if you spend all this money on a whole bunch of welding equipment,

then you're going to start looking for projects that are going to use the very expensive welding equipment that you bought. And I wanted to make sure that we were sort of generalized. Well, when people come, it's not open to the public. People apply for a residency, is that what they're called? Right, yeah. So we have an online application for a residency here. And then the 8 to 5, Monday through Friday, goal of the facility is to provide a very focused atmosphere for those design and engineering teams to come and work on their projects.

So there is no contention for time on the machines. There's no problems with anybody running out of sort of scrap or stock material here to do prototyping with. Like it is well stocked to be able to support, you know, for three or four engineering teams all working at the same time so that no one's stepping on each other's toes and they can actually really, really focus on getting their work done. And do people pay to do this? No, actually, at least for this first round, we're actually paying them. The residents are receiving $2,000 a month

for a three-month residency. Supply frame works very weirdly. And I'm going to blow everybody's mind now because we're also not taking any intellectual property. So whatever you bring in here to work on is yours to keep. We don't

take anything in it. So we actually pay you to come here, use our tools, buy you materials to use our tools. And then after three months, you're allowed to take everything that you worked on and developed and go do with it what you will. What are you, the story of design and engineering. people doing really, really difficult, really, really good technical work and not necessarily related directly to technology. Supply Frame is obviously an electronics company, but this isn't electronics focused at all. We have one project that is definitely very heavy in electronics. We have another project, which is a guy building action figures. So, you know,

it's using technology in order to achieve the project's goals but not necessarily exclusive to technology. I'm very suspicious about things that are free. Yeah. And writing about it, that part,

I can get that. And it is, of course, good advertising because Supply Frame and Hackaday definitely have a bit of a presence there. But this does seem odd. You have a CTO, CEO? What is Flag? Flag is the ceo uh who very much believes in supporting technology and design for its own purpose for sure and for art yeah and and there's there's no uh it's not a coincidence that the design lab is located here in pasadena. That is, it has a very, very specific meaning within the context of what technology is in the greater Los Angeles area where, you know, technology development was really focused around LAX for the longest time, which is where all the defense contractors are.

That's where Northrop Grumman is. That's where Raytheon is. Boeing is out there, Lockheed Martin. But over here in Pasadena, we have ArtCenter, we have Caltech, we have JPL. There's a lot of science that's going on here. And I don't mean to disparage those that are designing iPhone apps or mobile apps or things like that. But that's not, obviously, SupplyFrame, again, being a very hardware-focused company, is not what we're focused on. We're really focused on people that are building physical things, on building objects that you can hold in your hand that achieve a mechanical purpose maybe. And then we have, you know, between Caltech and JPL, we've got a very strong hard science research component in the community as well.

So I think you guys are familiar with the HDDG talks up in San Francisco that Supply Frame does, the Hack, not Hackaday, the Hardware Didactic Galactic. Yeah, I gave one of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we do an equivalent thing down here called the Hackaday Los Angeles Meetup. That makes a lot more sense. And we're able to draw on the scientists and researchers at Caltech and JPL to come here and give us talks. So while there's obviously, it's in the name, there's a lot more hardware focus in the talks that we have up north.

The idea is that we're going to get more sort of science and research related talks going on down here because that's what really comprises the technological community of Pasadena. You have some hardware and software. I know iRobot has a location down there because Chris Feck was looking for people to work there. So when you say down there, what do you mean? Pasadena area. Oh, really? Yeah.

Interesting. Because the phrase that's commonly associated now with the Los Angeles area is the, quote, Silicon Beach, which is the area over by Venice. And there are obviously a lot of tech meetups and stuff like that, that happened over in that area. By Venice? No. Really?

Yeah. I would have thought Irvine. See, we could have moved to Santa Monica. Irvine has got a lot of. Biotech. Yeah. Biotech.

And I was going to say like healthcare and finance industry is really located down there. And I hear West Covina is wonderful. It's only two hours from the beach. Foreign traffic. Nobody's going to get that. Moving along. Yeah, I was going to say that the problem with the Silicon Beach is that it's on the other side of Sepulveda. And unless you're from Los Angeles, no one knows what that means.

So you can just edit that part out. Oh, this, this will never air. Okay. So you have a room full of several rooms full of tools that you get to play with and you have to manage and help other people play with. Do you teach them how to use some

of these more complex tools or do you kind of say here's a tutorial have at don't chop your arm off you know uh someone suggested that we should have a uh an iot app that keeps track of the amount of fingers that are in the design lab at any particular time and if we're doing our job right, it should always be divisible by 10. So I do, the way I worked it out is I'd actually visited the think box at Case Western Reserve, and they give me a really good idea on an equipment classification system. So sort of following on that,

I came up with four tiers of equipment. The first tier is stuff like laser printers and the microwave in the kitchen. The typical office supply stuff is all tier one. You can walk in off the street, start using it, no questions asked, have that. ID and password is taped to the front of the monitor. Class two stuff is basically any hand tool that doesn't plug into the wall. Yeah, you can only really hurt yourself with those. Yeah, unless you're working at it.

Exactly. You have to manually point something at somebody's eye and then squeeze the diagonal cutters to try to put somebody's eye out. Well, if you have a lathe, that's got to be an increase to class because you can hurt everybody in the room if you do that properly. That's improperly. If you do it properly, you will in fact hurt everybody in the workshop. So yeah, so the class two is the unpowered hand tools. Class three is powered hand tools. So everything from the cordless driver drill to the soldering iron to the hot air station. All of that stuff is

considered class three and class three equipment. You have to read through a tutorial and then you have to demonstrate safe use of that equipment to me as the resident engineer. Don't lick the drill bits when they're on. Huh? Don't lick the drill bits when they're on. That's a bad way to lubricate your drilling and tapping system. Very bad. And then we have a class four, which is all the heavy fabrication equipment. So that's the milling machine, the table saw and the CNC router. And for that, you have to go through a, you have to read a training document. You have to go through one-on-one training with me. And then even after that, before you perform any cutting operation on there, I have to approve your cutting tool, the cutting operations, and any fixturing that you're doing.

So that all makes sense. I mean, there's some liability there and probably having you look over a design would be good, actually. Well, I'm trying to formalize the idea that it's always better to have two eyes looking at something, or not two eyes, two sets of eyes looking at something. We need to track those too. Exactly. Amount of eyes and fingers in the lab. Just have somebody double-check your work, particularly when you're working with the machining equipment that is very unforgiving once you set it on a specific path. That milling head is going to spin at 2,700 RPM. There's nothing you can do to stop it other than hitting the e-stop.

It's going to move from four inches to two inches in the axis that you specified. And if you happen to have put a clamp or a vice in the way, it's going to run right into that. It doesn't have its own set of eyes to look for that sort of stuff. So, you know, I've certainly made sufficient quantities of mistakes, which Magenta has been dutifully documenting

and has now actually mounted to violent pink acrylic and apparently will go on the wall somewhere. She hasn't decided whether it's the wall of shame or the wall of fame yet. All the ways to make Dan bleed. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so while now I am thoroughly envious of your setup there and trying to plan exactly what I should put in this application, I really wanted to have you on the show to talk about what tools I can have. where you get a lot of control and you get a lot of time on them and wet tools are better to have somewhere where you have some oversight, whether because you want safety or another pair of eyes checking

or even just because they're finicky and it's better to have somebody else unclog the filament extruder. Yeah. finicky and it's better to have somebody else unclog the filament extruder yeah so given a budget of say two thousand dollars a year what tools should i start with for doing maker things well uh so it's and i imagine you're talking from the standpoint of i have two thousand,000 and I want to spend it, but not on a specific project, right? Yeah, you know, sometimes there are things that I want for specific things, but sometimes I just want to know what's out there, what I could get. And that will drive my projects as much as my projects driving my tools. Right. Well, if you've got $2,000 to spend, and more importantly, you have the free time

to really focus on doing something, of all the stuff that I'm working with here, and I know I could probably be a little biased in saying this, but electronics really is an easy entry point because if you're not familiar with it, there are a ton of really cool, low cost, easy to use things that get you up and running and, and exploring super fast. Uh, whether it's, uh, you know, in the Arduino framework, or, uh, if you're, if you're a little bit more familiar with coding and tool chains, you can go with any number of other development boards that are now available. You can do IoT projects and stuff like that, sensing, remote sensing, local sensing.

It's a really cool way of exploring what is, honest to God, high tech in today's day and age. And you don't have to spend a ton of money to do it, or at least to get started, right? But it's like anything else, the more you get interested in cool, uh, but they can be somewhat limiting if you don't have any, uh, practice in modeling yourself. Uh, so if you don't have a way to generate a model of your own, so if you want to mount, uh, a new light to your bike, or you want to fix some bracket that snapped somewhere, if you don't have the skills to actually be able to model that yourself, you're sort of limited to what you can find that other people have done. Which is pretty cool.

I mean, people have put up a lot of things, but yes, absolutely. It has, it has been a barrier for me for 3d printing because I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to learn CAD this week either.

Not last week, not next week. You can go out and you can buy yourself a really, really good block of wood and a really, really good whittling knife. But you're going to wind up with a bunch of wood shavings and probably a cut thumb. And on top of it, the time it takes you to actually, even if you have excellent modeling skills, 3D printers are by no means appliances. You don't just plug it in and it just works. Every single one of them that I've run across all require care and feeding. You don't say. Exactly. And constant, constant care and feeding. Even your bigger, expensive ones?

Well, the bigger, expensive one that costs an arm and a leg to print even small models runs absolutely flawlessly. That's the inkjet one. Yeah, the Stratasys Objet 24, but that one was $25,000. Okay, so I can have that in 13 and a half years exactly how much do the laser cutters run for uh laser cutter you could get in six years i've got the primo stuff there well there is that and and we did sign up to get a glow forge which was outside of our budget but i was pretty excited about it. And that's a laser cutter. Yeah. I just think it's awesome how many different materials you can use on it. And then when it comes to the issue of modeling and stuff, it's, I think, a much lower barrier in that sense. You just need a path, a line,

or it can come from a photo. There's so many different easy-to-learn softwares for that. Or if you're a fan of Adobe, you can just stick with Illustrator. But yeah, and it seems so low-maintenance so far in my experience with it. It's not super finicky, and it's pretty reliable in my experience with it. It's not super finicky and it's pretty reliable in my opinion.

It's fast enough that you can make mistakes and correct. Yeah, totally. 3D printers, my experience is you start something and then four hours later you discover that it's not going to work. Yeah, unless you have multiple, you're able to run, it really adds up. God, we are so like, oh, you you start your print you come back four hours later you discover you made a mistake like yeah so we didn't have to send it out to have it fabricated

somewhere three months later we get it back and go oh we made a mistake yeah yeah and i agree with the laser cutters were really phenomenal we got got to play with them at Tech Shop. And they had all of these different things you could do. I could do paper and make snowflakes. I could cut Lexander, other plastic, and make cases. You could just etch stuff with scorch marks. Etch leather stuff. I had so much fun making plain leather wallets turn into magical, amazing things.

Yeah, we just did our leather test. It was super exciting. Although you can get into trouble if you use the wrong material and then it generates a gas and then that's bad. Yeah. I guess that's why you have Dan. He comes in and he breathes deep.

Dan, there's toxins in here come clear them does this smell bad I'd be pretty confident saying that the laser cutter is one of the most popular digital fabrication tools at my school and of the tools used at the design lab which one is your

favorite you can go ahead and answer that one oh yeah it was for magenta And of the tools used at the design lab, which one is your favorite? You can go ahead and answer that one. Oh yeah. It was for magenta. Um, I don't know. That's so hard.

Okay. Dan, you fill in, fill in while she thinks. I know exactly what her favorite tool is, even if she can't think of it right now. The nail gun. Oh geez. Oh yeah.

The air compressor in general. The air compressor is awesome. I didn't realize how reasonable they were. I'm totally going to invest in one of those the first chance I get. On the other hand, that seems like the sort of thing I wouldn't skimp on. Yeah, I would.

Yeah. So I went to a local hardware store with absolutely zero intention to buy a pneumatic nail gun. And I'm like, do-do-do-do, walking down the aisle, to the local hardware store with, with absolutely zero intention to buy a pneumatic nail gun. Uh, and I, I'm like, do, do,

do, do walking down the aisle and, and I see their, their pneumatic nail gun section. I thought, Oh, well, I'll just stop and have a look because I'm not going to spend $800 on a

nailing gun system right now. Uh, and they had, and this was just absolutely brilliant marketing on their part. They had the pneumatic tank for $199. And then right next to it, they had the pneumatic tank with three tools and all the fasteners you need to actually start using the tools right away, also for $199. I was so completely consumed. Oh, at that point, they're giving you things for free

well exactly how could I how can anybody walk by that without buying it so I immediately you know the design lab was the proud owner of a nail gun of two different sizes and a staple gun so

but that thing is as cool to use as you would imagine Christopher is very excited about this I'm so not taking him to Home Depot after this so Magenta is that your favorite tool or do you want to offer up a different one probably be between but I can only narrow it down to three

is that okay it has to be at Okay. Is that okay? Yeah. It has to be at the shop, right? At the design lab. Yeah, that was, that was. Yeah. Okay.

Probably between the laser cutter, the pneumatic system, and the shop bot, which is the large CNC milling machine, the four foot by eight foot. And the shop bot is one of those things that it can build itself sort of kind of it's got a lot of metal in it and it's not uh it's not really capable of cutting metal itself but that said it's do you guys know. Unistrat is basically like a supersized Tinker toy system. Okay. With nuts and bolts instead of like pegs and holes. Are those the triangular ones? No.

Okay, go ahead. I think this is like U-channel steel. Okay. I think this is like U-channel steel. So I think the very, very, very first shop bot made in the late 90s, early 2000s was actually made of Unistret. And now it's just a larger, more robust version of that. But you look at it and there's no confusion at all as to how that thing works. Everything is out in the open. All the gearing is plain to see where the stepper motors are. The spindle is very clear to see how it's going to move. It's very obvious that you're working with a large piece of fabrication equipment.

So you said it was four by eight? Yeah, four foot by eight foot. So what would you work on that would require a size like that? I'm trying to imagine what I would mill that would be. Motorcycle. Throw a sheet of plywood on there and turn it into Ikea furniture in 20 minutes. Yeah. Okay.

And this is really the important thing is that you can throw a sheet of plywood on there, turn it into Ikea furniture in 20 minutes and then do it again and again and again and again with almost infinite repeatability. That would be pretty cool. And I usually think about little things because I'm interested in making cases and little

widgets that store my electronics and do things, but maybe I've been thinking too small. Yeah, this is definitely capable of doing bookcase, really quality furniture sort of stuff. I mean, you can just go to a good lumber store, not a hardware store, not a Home Depot or a Lowe's or something like that, but to an old school lumber store and buy yourself a sheet of good Baltic birch plywood and throw it on there and you've got,

provided you've got a good design going in, you can have really, really high quality furniture coming off of there. So is this your favorite tool, Dan? You know, uh, Dan has a very complicated relationship with the shop. Uh, you know, I, when I, so when I first started here, we had the Tormach, and the Tormach was only one-third assembled. And I didn't know exactly which third it was, which is almost worse than not having it assembled at all. Yeah, there would be some temptation to just disassemble it all and start over. Yeah, exactly.

You know, and sure enough, I went and put the other two thirds together, powered it up and the Y-axis wouldn't move. And I thought the Y-axis had actually been assembled and it had been assembled, but no one had actually tightened down the coupling between the motor and the actual ball screw. So that was a little tricky to discover. But the shop lot was actually still in a crate when I got here. A very, very large, very heavy crate. And I assembled that thing. Actually, you know, I've got a quick little story about that.

Not about dinosaur eggs, but of large random crates. I went to go tour basically a fab lab over at Northrop Grumman and, uh, and Tony, the guy that runs it was showing me around sort of this warehouse area. That's just past the double doors at the back of the shop. And it literally looks like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark back there. I mean, it's rows and rows and rows and rows of random crates with just a designator number on it. And he said, you want to come see my favorite crate in this whole place? I'm like, well, how can you say no to that question?

Yes, of course. So we're walking down the aisle and we come to this crate that is about four feet tall and probably, I got to say, close to like 20 foot by 20 foot. This thing is gigantic. It's gigantic. And it only has a one word designator on it, caramel. That's it. It's got like this one word designator and then the name of the guy that sent it into storage back probably in the late 80s, who probably doesn't even work at Northrop Grumman anymore. He has no idea what's in this crate. It's been there forever.

It's covered in dust, just one 20 foot by 20 foot by four foot caramel. You push a button and it becomes a house. I don't know. You push a button and suddenly the eastern seaboard sinks into the sea god knows sorry what were we talking about your favorite tool which sounded like it was uh the the complicated one-third put together i think it was a 3d printer uh no that was the the cnc mill the tormach was one third put together the Tormach. Oh, the other CNC machine. Yeah.

So I really like the Tormach, but I am very intimidated by it because I'm, based on my own personal experience in history, I'm much more familiar with working in wood. So anything that involves metal, like metal milling and welding, is just foreign to me. So I tend to find that a little intimidating. So I'm very familiar with wood. So I do like using the shop bot because once I get a design good, I know it's going to cut everything exactly the way I want it. And it's very easy to do angles and curves and very flowing designs on there. But probably my single favorite piece of equipment in the entire place is the other mill, which is why I keep taking pictures of the things. So we had the other mill CEO, Danielle Applestone on, and that is a desktop milling machine that a lot of people are using to make boards but the boards

come and they're metal on both sides and you mill out the metal and there's plastic underneath and so the metal that's left is the connection and you can make a little board on it and you can actually do this pretty fine so you can make a pretty complex board if you want to try it today on a two-layer board. But a lot of other people are also using them for milling jewelry or toys or little things. What are you using them for? Well, I've primarily been using them for doing circuit boards. And I use them on behalf of my work at Rheingold Heavy as well. And then I also use them here to help the residents get up and running with some of their

test circuits. What I've really discovered for the other mills, especially when it comes to the electrical engineering, is that it's really useful in testing subsystems. So if you have one aspect of your circuit, you have a particular sensor you need to work with, you have a particular signal you need to work with, you can build that individual circuit and test it out and prove it out and make sure it's working and do that with all the subsystems

that are on the circuit that you're working with. And then basically what you have is a library of verified working schematics, and you have an integration effort after that, an integration challenge, which is, at least to my mind, a lot easier to perform than trying to sort of, build everything from the ground up at once. So I, uh, so I wind up milling a lot of breakout boards with them, uh, so that, you know, you can test pretty much anything other than QFN, QFP, uh, certainly no BGAs, stuff like that, uh, which are for, for those that don't know are different types of, uh, very, very small electronics footprints't know, are different types of very, very small electronics

footprints. But I got down to, I just did a SOT 26, which is a really, really tiny six-pin surface mount board. I got it to mill that out and was able to solder it too. So that was the smallest that I've gotten so far. But the other mills are capable of doing so much more than just electronics. I mean, they can mill and engrave just a whole host of other things, including aluminum. They obviously don't have the volume of a gigantic milling machine like the Tormach, but they can do two-inch by two-inch by two-inch blocks all day long. And they're pretty self-running i mean you have to know what you're doing to set it up but you it is sort of like you said with the shop bot you put

it in it does what it did last time and it usually works yeah uh there are some questions around the software uh they have they have the other plan and they have the other plan public beta. And the two pieces of software are definitely of two different minds where the other plan, end quote, is very hands-off. You tell it the material that you're milling. You can upload your design as either a set of Gerber files if you want to do a circuit board, or you could do an Eagle board file as well. You can also upload SVG files if you want to do engraving or profile cutting. So there's some overlap with that in the laser cutter. Although the laser cutter, of course, couldn't do aluminum, but the other mill can do leather the the other milk and well you'd have to be really careful you could do wood you could

absolutely do wood um and uh and the thing that the other mill can do that the laser cutter can't is that it can do a very precise uh 3d engraving right so if So if you think like a recessed image in a piece of wood, the other mill can do that all day long, whereas, I mean, you're kind of limited to sort of, you know, 90-degree edges in everything that you're doing with the laser cutter. Okay, so my question earlier was, given my budget, what should I get? And I should note that Christopher has already spent $200 of our budget. In the world's cheapest 3D printer.

On the Monoprice printer that Hackaday's Brian Benchoff told us about. Thanks, Brian. It's fine. And it has actually been a lot neater than I expected. It is finicky and requires some hand-holding. But at least probably 70% of that is because I don't have any idea what I'm doing. Yeah, and I don't think it requires that much more hand-holding than every other 3D printer out there that is less than $24,000. There is a secret trick to 3D printers.

And that secret trick is that you need to document everything that you're doing because it's all about tweaking the settings within whatever software you are using to control the 3D printer. And you have got to keep track of what you're tweaking and what the end results are well there goes that scientific method to figure out which which variable needs

the tweaking well and it's you know it it you get confident with oh i printed this thing so this other thing should be fine and then it just completely doesn't work for mysterious reasons so well you got pretty pretty cocky with you know it printed well and and then you just completely doesn't work for mysterious reasons. Well, you got pretty cocky with, you know, it printed well and then you moved the whole thing. Yeah. And then suddenly it stopped printing well. I'm like, maybe? Well, but that was at the same time I started printing more complex objects.

Fair enough. Have you used the Monoprice printer? No, I haven't. You have the better tools. I have different tools. Yeah. How did you choose your 3D printers? The 3D printers were actually chosen for me before I got here.

So I haven't been here at the Design Lab since the ideation of the concept. This was an idea that really developed over probably the last year and a half. And I've only been here since February. So the facility was fairly built out, less the furniture and the equipment by the time I got here. And then I used the equipment list that they had to do the majority of the equipment procurement. So, yeah, somebody else, and I think it was probably Matt Bergeron, had decided on which 3D printers were going to be purchased. Okay. So compare and contrast isn't going to work. Well, you can have Matt on the show.

Oh, yeah, he's been on the show we talked about something entirely different yeah you asked him like uh little or big indian and i was like you're gonna ask me that question in the in the quickfire round no okay we can do now i have no idea what that means i just remembered listening to that going yeah that's the sort of thing that Matt could talk about forever. Okay. So budget aside, what tools should I get for home versus going somewhere else, a community college, a tool, a tech shop, a design lab,

because they require oversight or finickiness that I shouldn't deal with? What tools would you want to have in your garage? Given, well, so, so that's a, that's actually a good question because you're making a really, really large presumption there, which is that I have a garage. And this is, well, I mean that, cause that's a, that's a huge thing, particularly down here in LA,

where I'm never going to be able to afford a house. I have, I have lusted after a place that had a garage because I own two motorcycles. Basically, for the 12 years I've lived down here, and I'm never going to get a place that has a garage. So it's always limited to what sort of woodworking, what sort of crafting and fabricating can I either do in the home office or on the balcony of my apartment, right? So while I would absolutely love to have a shop bought, even given absolutely no budgetary constraint, I don't have a place to put it. So, you know. So that's actually a better question. What do you have or what do you want? I would go to a maker shop. I would go to a tech shop or something like that for that large fabrication equipment, for the milling machine, for the shop bot, for the laser cutter that requires its own ventilation system. the sort of places that I've had the opportunity to live in. But other mills, 3D printers, those sorts of things, those are really, really fantastic slash interesting.

I think the other mills are fantastic. They are definitely compact. That's why the electronics hobbying is very conducive to my lifestyle because it takes up a reasonable amount of room in an office that has also had to double as scuba instructor headquarters, as rock climbing headquarters, as motorcycle maintenance headquarters. There's a lot of things that are competing for a very limited amount of space. And I think that's the same with anybody. So, Magenta, same question. What would you buy for yourself? And I know you're a student, and so your budget's probably even less than $2,000, but let's pretend you had a bigger budget and a little bit of space. Yeah. Yeah. It's tricky. And it's something that, um, my classmates and

I all sort of face when we graduate and no longer have access to the incredible resources at our institution. Um, and it's something you have to, you know, think about, like, what are you going to invest and want to cart around after you leave the school? Um, versus what could you go in on like a co-op studio with someone and you know share tools or go to these maker spaces which is why the maker spaces have been really awesome because it's sort of it's one option to solve that problem but I for myself I'm not sure I'm really interested in the CNC, like tabletop CNC mills that are sort of in between the other mill

and the shop bot, like the Shapeco tabletop CNC where you can make it a few, there's a few different bedside options, but they're not quite as small as the other mill. And I honestly don't know if I would be interested in getting a 3D printer. Most of my experiences have been rather frustrating. They always, for me, need a lot of sort of, like you guys have been saying,

hand-holding, upkeep, maintenance, very finicky, not very reliable. And I always want something that I'd prefer, something I can count on. So I would definitely be going to the makerspaces for the laser cutter. But I would just love like a full wood shop or even a miniature wood shop. I think that's something I'm really going to miss. And that's something that can take like a really long time to develop. Even just like your library of hand tools. You know, I was just talking to Dan about how expensive clamps are. That like blows my mind.

And you don't want to keep out on that. Yeah. And you need a variety. Like you're never going to need, or not never, but oftentimes you need different kinds of clamps because there's so many different, you know, ways you're going to need, um, or not never, but oftentimes you need different kinds of clamps because there's so many different, you know, ways you're going to put something together and need to hold it down. Or if it has a curved edge or, you know, all these things, um, that play into that. So that's something I definitely think about when I'm working in the shops at school, I'm like, Oh, I'm going to miss all these, even just all the little tools, you know, because it's rare that you can build that inventory for yourself in not a very long time.

I have to admit that Chris and I registered at Sears for shop tools. And we both thought that we were being selfish and that the other one would want something else. That is an inspiring idea. So yeah, it worked out pretty well, actually. I'll write that one down for sure. Dan, what tool do you think is going to break first? He probably already knows. I can tell you the ones that I've already broken

let's see I've crashed the shop bot at least twice I've snapped one end mill and then I absolutely mangled the first sharpie that I tried to use to draw with see I did that

this encounter is broken just the accessories are broken they're oh okay yeah yeah there's that um i uh i haven't yeah we haven't actually fully like needed to call maintenance out to fix something that i've destroyed um the uh you know i've got a surprising quantity of like bits for hand tools that, uh, that I sort of like purchased as sort of like a, you know, not, not a throwaway, but sort of like a, I don't need to put any thought into this. Uh, and they turned out to be absolute crap. And, uh, and I'm really surprised. Like I, I remember working on cars when I was a kid that they never broke. Like you a socket, the socket worked, and the socket worked for 15 years, and you never thought about it once.

And I've had sockets crack. I've had driver bits just completely snap in half. I had a socket that I was working on a quad, a tiny quad, last week, and it just broke in half. It just doesn't make any sense. They're made of tissue paper now. Yeah, apparently. And this is, I think the stuff I bought was from Craftsman. So I'm not, you know, it used to be stuff that seemed to be made of quality when I was a kid.

Maybe, you know, something in the intervening 20 years has happened. Maybe, Daniel, maybe something has happened in 20 years. I like that we all picture Dan is like 23 years old now. Cause when he was a kid and it's been 20 years. What? Exactly. Exactly. Uh,

yeah. So, um, so I've, I've snapped a fair number of bits. I've mangled a fair number of, uh, of sockets.

I have, uh, I have chowdered up the spoil board on the, uh, on the shop bot to no end. Uh, so on the, on the shop bot, there's a piece of sacrificial, uh, wood that you put down and you clamp everything to that so that when you actually go to, to cut your Ikea furniture out of whatever it is that your stock material is, you can cut right through the bottom of your stock material and not worry about what it is that you're cutting into.

Yeah. And that's called the spoil board. And through various different mistakes on my part, I have managed to just gouge the ever-living hell out of that thing. I mean, it's about every two weeks I have to climb on top of the thing with a big old Juggawood putty and resurface it. So that's another one of my claims to fame. I haven't really broken anything yet. The thing that I think will probably break first just in and of itself will probably be one of the 3D printers.

I mean, they've, because they just haven't really worked. Like, like it's not, it hasn't been like, there hasn't been a single day when I've walked in, turned on the 3D printer and then, you know, it's seven o'clock at night and I turned the 3d printer off and I had a day of uninterrupted joy using the thing. Like the, the, the extruder jams, the, uh, the hot end doesn't heat up. I have to reconfigure the Z axis. Uh, the filament snaps, the filaments tied around itself somehow. Uh, they're just, you know, at some point I'm going to walk in there and, and the thing is just going to be, you know, just vomiting melted filament all over the place and, and I'll just decide to throw it in the trash. I've already had that. I've done that, you know, and, and literally one of our, one of our 3d printers, uh, is sort of an open, not, not open in the philosophical sense, but open in the design sense of the, like it's a very open design. You can see everything that's going on. And the way it calibrates itself is to home all the axes. So it moves to the full extent of the X axis,

the Y axis and the Z axis. And when it, and it drops down on the Z axis, it drops all the way down, figures out where the proximity switches, and then it sits there and it waits down on the Z-axis. It drops all the way down, figures out where the proximity switch is, and then it sits there and it waits for the hot end to heat up. And after it achieves a certain temperature, the extruder starts to spin to force filament through there. But the extruder is positioned right over the control Arduino and the ribbon cables.

So it's literally sitting there spitting all over itself while it's waiting to do its print. Just absolutely baffling. Why would you design something to do that? 3D printers are idiots. They have just some of the worst names for companies, too. I just don't get it.

This feels like it's a rant that could go on and oh yeah and i and mind you all the people that work at these companies are very lovely individuals and i don't mean to disparage any of them but 3d printers are a tool that just they've been being promised for so long and you work with one for a little while and then you work with an other mill or or laser cutter and you're like uh one of these things is not like the other and i don't want to play anymore yeah except except that you can get people that are literally like 3d printer whisperers and uh we have uh this one gentleman, Bruce Dominguez, uh, who is one of the residents here currently, and he is literally a 3d printer whisperer.

This dude can make any 3d printer that I have seen him work with so far, just absolutely hum. And it just makes no sense to me. Like I can sit there and try and get it to print out a calibration cube that doesn't have, that doesn't look like something from the thing. Right. And he goes in there and he, he just prints out his, uh, his action figure and it comes out completely clean support structure, just snaps right off. Like that's not fair, man. But of course he's been, you know, he's been working with the things forever. All right. Magenta, you only have another week or two there. What have you been working on?

All kinds of stuff. It's been a really dynamic position, which I'm really grateful for. I've got to help build some stuff for the shop, from little stands for the machines to cabinets to hold safety equipment to the games for the open house night. And then also just a lot of positions where I'm really learning a ton, like getting to write up the sort of guide for the settings for the laser cutter. So just testing all the materials. You get sort of a sense of the settings from the manual. And then I had experience with different laser cutters at my school.

So the Trotec and Universal, but this is an epilog machine, so it's been a little bit different. But yeah, it's been really great to learn sort of the behind the scenes of those machines, because I only use them sort of walking in, making an appointment, and being able to ask for help with anything that I was having trouble with. And now I get to see how they're put together, what's required to maintenance them, which is something I'm really, I think, going to value in the future when I hopefully have some of these machines to myself, for myself. Same with the shop bot, getting to learn witness what they're working on has been awesome. Observe the different projects and how they go about, you know, their process for prototyping has been just really incredible hands-on experience. Yeah. Are there any tools from the design lab you're going to miss when you go back to school?

Probably the Tormach. I really hope I get to play around with that a little bit more before I go, because that is something we don't really have at my school. The ability to like CNC metal on three axes. We have a CNC plasma cutter, which is pretty awesome. Sort of like a huge laser cutter for sheet metal. But nothing quite like the Tormach. So I think I'll probably miss that. And then the rest is mostly available at my school. So I spend plenty of time with the other machines. Well, and now you'll be more mindful of all of the setup and maintenance.

Yeah, definitely. Dan, if you had time and tools enough, which it sounds like you do have tools enough, but time enough, what would you build? Well, if I had the time and tools to build anything and the expertise with which to do it, I've always, always, always wanted to build Kaneda's motorcycle from Akira.

But I don't have the ability to do that because I just don't have the skill. Which is kind of a bummer. It's actually really been one of the fantastic things about having Magenta here is that she brings a lot of design skill that I just don't have. If somebody needs a box, I'll build it square. I'll build it super, super square. But Magenta's got an ability to make it square and pretty at the same time. And I just, I just don't have that skill. Um, you know, I, uh, one of the things I'm really interested in working on is making my own solder mask,

which is one of the major drawbacks for milling boards on the other mill is that you have bare copper all over the place and there's no resist to keep your soldering work in the appropriate location. And that gets to be the problem when you get down into the smaller sizes of footprints. So I think that's going to be sort of the project that I want to work on is figuring out some way I can do solder mask myself. There are any number of different ways that I've been thinking about doing it, but that's probably the most easily approachable one

short of trying to build my own motorcycle. You don't have to build the whole motorcycle. You can build it in parts like you do with the board. You can build a 3D print one. I hear 3D printing is really cool. Yeah, and I hear 3D scanners are all the rage. I have a little action figure, so I should be able to make an SVG of his motorcycle

and then just scale it up. It'd be a snap-together motorcycle. Exactly. Super easy. We'll just make it with JB Weld. You don't need a 3D scanner. You just use a Kinect, right? A what?

The Microsoft, the Xbox, the Kinect thing the connect oh oh right that's fun stuff that i never get to play with wow with magenta gone you'll have more time right they actually uh i uh tom the one of the operations guys over at the corporate office which is like three blocks away from here sent me a message on gchat the other day. And he said, so we're sending a box over. I said, great. So what is it? And he says, it's an HTC Vive. I have to tell you, they're a lot of fun. But I literally have no idea what I'm supposed to do with it. Oh, after the show, we'll help you with that. It's not important. Knowing what to do with it is not important.

So I did the only thing I could think of to do with it since it's a piece of vr equipment is i stuck it in a dark closet because it doesn't really need to see the light of day right because it generates its own sunlight i i don't know i've i've been so focused on on uh on all the things that i have to build here that i've probably gotten distracted from the things that uh that i that i i don't want to say that i have to build here that I've probably gotten distracted from the things that, uh, that I, that I, I don't want to say that I want to build cause I certainly want to be here. One of the things that I, that I've done is talk with anytime I've been in, in, in, or whatever city I'm in, I always go hunt out the maker space there. And I always try to talk to whoever's running the place or the administrator. And, uh, what I've really learned is that for facilities like this, there are the projects that people are working on, their goals for the things that they're trying to

build. But the person that runs the place, the place becomes their project, right? So the whole facility as a whole, making sure that it's up and running every day, that the tools are working, that the residents have the support that they need, that people are making contact with the resources that they need. That really winds up being my project as a whole. So unfortunately, I don't get to put a pretty little bow on it at the end of the year and say, this is what I made. But it's very satisfying to see people walking in and using the tools and knowing that I was the one that put that tool together and that I was the one that calibrated it. And now it's actually performing its task. So I get a satisfaction out of that, but it's not canada's motorcycle well it's it's a little like my my stint in managing where i really expected to sort of hate managing because it isn't as

obviously productive as engineering but at some point i realized that this project had gotten done and my role in it had been to go to the occasional meeting say how can i throw money at this to make it go faster? And how are things this week? And I mean, you could have replaced me with an Arduino with a little speaker. That was all I ever said. And at the end, everybody was like, you did a great job on this project. It came in on time and under budget.

And I'm like, yeah, seriously? I got, all right, true. I am a little proud that they were done, but it was all them. And yet, it does take some oversight and some administration to make it all happen. So, I think, yeah, it's, you need like, Osh Park has the purple boards. You need a little fingerprint or stamp that you can add to these projects. Well, considering my skill with most of the equipment here, it'll probably be a little bit of my life's blood that winds up in everything that comes out of this shop. It's been less than six months. It'll get easier.

I am genetically predisposed to losing fingers in shops. Don't say that. My dad is a nine-finger wonder, and my grandfather is a nine-and-a-half-finger wonder. I hope you didn't lead with that in the interview. No, no, I didn't. I led with, do you see what an awesome job I did take the trash out at Supercon? I made the coffee. Magenta, I have one more question for you. And that is the same that we had for Dan. What would you build if you had time and tools enough? That is such a hard question.

I know, it's broad and it's like anything I mean besides like my art well do you have an art project that you're burning to to get started um sort of well burning to continue on um and it'll probably end up being part of my BFA piece, I think, for the final show, my graduate show piece. But other than that, I love working on gifts for people. Honestly, that's what I spend a lot of my not free time, my time that I make for it at school, making gifts with the resources available because you can make something so special for someone and it's like the ultimate like fun side of being like an object designer is designing something catered to someone you know really well that is something like they could use or need or would make them happy or excited um and so that's what I end up uh spending time on

when I get the chance and that's probably what I ended up, uh, spending time on when I get the chance. And that's probably what I would do here if I had the freedom. Cool. So I have a question for Magenta. Uh, so this is related to, uh, the different projects that she's working on. Uh, I'm sitting over here in the sort of kitchen area of the lab and we have a whole series of lockers over here. And in one of the lockers i have what

looks to me like a bunch of trash uh it looks like a bunch of packaging material and like cut up cardboard and stuff and what is that for you keep saying you're gonna do something with it and it's just sitting there yeah i hope i should just yeah that should be one of my goals before i leave to make use of it um I have this one project that I've been wanting to get back to that's the one thing about art school I feel like I start all these projects and get like the first iteration done for the final or when it's due for the project but I don't get the opportunity to keep working on them when I learned so much in that experience it could totally expand on it um And one of those projects is this like bubble wrap plaster tray project,

which is why I saved all the variety of bubble wrap we got from all the things we were ordering for the design lab over the last few weeks, because they came in a bunch of different shapes. There were long, thin bubbles and different things like that, that I thought would be fun to play around with. But basically, you make a little tray for the bubble wrap to rest in. And then you pour plaster on it. And plaster is awesome because you can make it different colors and whatever

and seal it in different ways. But it could totally be another material I'm interested in working with, like fine concrete or something or ceramic would be cool too. And you pour it over the bubble wrap and then make these trays once it's done with all these little pockets and it just makes a really cool texture. And I'm really into it. So that's why I saved that stuff. You've got 10 days. Hopefully I'll make it happen. Yeah.

It's a pretty simple project when it comes to projects. Just got to get the materials. We have the bubble wrap already. Only through careful planning. Exactly. All right. I think it's time to wrap up and go about the rest of weekend. Magenta, do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with?

Yeah, I think I wanted to mention just how important I think it is to embrace the unknown. And I think there's so much potential and opportunity for creativity in the unknown, especially when you're like on that magical point of learning something new. And I got really lucky with this job because I wasn't totally sure of what to expect. I corresponded a little bit with Dan before I got here about what my tasks and stuff would be, but

it's just been a surprise every day seeing what I get to work on and it's been really awesome. So embrace the unknown. It's usually worth it. Cool. Dan, you can follow that. So two things. The first one is I just want to reiterate what my closing thought was from the last time you guys were kind enough to have me on, which is to not be scared of the technology. And certainly there's a lot of fabrication equipment here that I was completely unfamiliar with when I started. And I am still intimidated by the Tormach. And you need to not let yourself be scared by these things that you're unfamiliar with. Everything in the first two pages of the instruction manual is going to tell you how to be safe around it. So as long as you're safe,

go in there and snap some tools and dull some edges and mangle some stock. Don't be scared of doing that. That's how you're going to wind up learning. And on the heels of that, what I would highly recommend as the final thought is to just RTFM. That's what we have you for my guess dan you read the manual how does this thing work my guests have been daniel hinch resident engineer at supply frames pasadena design lab

and magenta strongheart student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, currently an intern at aforementioned Design Lab. Thank you both so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you also to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And of course, thank you for listening. Hit the contact link on embedded.fm or email us show at embedded.fm if you'd like to say hello. Now a final thought from me. Well, from Ray Bradbury.

When I look back on my career, I realized that I blundered my way into success. Never once did I know what I was doing. I just did it. But I blundered with great enthusiasm and most of all, with love. Embedded FM is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive

any revenue from them. At this time, our sole sponsor remains Logical Elegance.