I promised a while back to write an article describing what I’ve been through in starting a micro-manufacturing operation. There are a lot of books available to guide you through becoming independent, starting a website, and also starting a business. However there is a huge aspect to all of it that is neglected or just given lip service. It turns out that striking out on your own is a huge emotional and mental head game.

When I started down the micro-manufacturing path, part of it was to create a wireless tool set that I could use myself, and part of it was to create a business that could sustain myself and my family while I continued to work on open source software. While there was a lot of technical hurdles that had to be overcome, what I was completely unprepared for was the mental aspect of it all.

While I was trying to design products, build the website, figure out manufacturing, create documentation, generate content, understand accounting, source parts, and the millions of other things that it takes to start up a manufacturing operation, I spent a lot of time by myself and in my head. I had to confront a side of myself that I tried to suppress for a long time. It’s a very ugly side of me that is the culmination of all the emotional baggage I’ve accumulated over my lifetime.

When you go down the path of starting any business, there’s one huge thing you have to deal with: uncertainty. How you deal with it depends on a lot of factors. Preparation, experience, and skill level will take you to a certain point but you’ll eventually find that you’ll be facing situations that are completely new to you. This is where the head games start.

Hey everyone.

I know some people are probably wondering if I'm still alive. I've been in isolation-mode trying to get the shop up (yes...still). It's probably been one of the toughest things I've ever done in my life. However I did have some time to work on the Chibi stack and cleared up a few things that were bothering me. One of them was some nasty frame loss when multiple frames come in closely spaced. This would occur if you did something like broadcast a request to multiple nodes and they all returned a response simultaneously. Only one of those frames would get through and the rest would get lost. The current release fixes that so you should be able to receive multiple frames simultaneously with no loss up to the maximum size of the receive buffer which you can configure in the code

I added version numbering rather than just using release dates for reference. Version numbers are much more intuitive. You'll also find support for the ATMega32U4/AT86RF212 combination. I'm actually making a Chibi 900MHz board and needed this for testing. I'm really enjoying working with 900 MHz because the range is better and there is less attenuation through objects. However I'm still a fan of 2.4 GHz just for the variety of available chips, antennas, front ends, and modules to interoperate with. 

You probably won't hear much from me until the shop is up because I really need to get that out of the way so I can continue with all of my other projects. Multi-tasking that with everything else was just not working. So much has gone on in the past few months that I do have quite a bit of material to post and topics to talk about. Hopefully that should all fall in place after things settle down. In the meantime, check out the latest Chibi software:

Chibi Project Page Link

Greetings everyone. I have some good news and bad news. The bad news is the shop is delayed again. Just when I finished my taxes and thought I was clear to go, I got an email from my antenna supplier that my shipment was delayed due to stock issues. Although its possible to open the shop without antennas, I was hoping to be able to have all the components necessary for a WSN node so that people can order things in one shipment. It's kind of petty, but since its my first shop opening, I wanted it to be fairly complete.

Howdy everyone!

It's been awhile since my last post. Things are still hectic around here. The Michael Jackson Tribute concert unfortunately fell through. I think there were some management issues with the production company, but that was actually a good thing for me. I was probably the only one smiling when they announced that we were cancelled from the show. With the extra time, I've been scrambling to put the finishing touches on the product designs and get the shop up. I'm pretty excited about it, but its been much, much, much more work than I ever expected. I've also been busting some ass to finish off all of my tax returns since the Japan deadline is March 15th. Overall, the schedule has been really ugly lately. 

On the plus side, I should be getting more active on blog posts soon because I'm going to need to write a lot of tutorials on how to use the boards that I'm designing. The shop will mostly focus on WSN developers since from my experience, we're an often ignored group, yet vital to  bringing wireless sensors to the world. I won't get into it too much here since there will be a separate post about it when the shop is ready to go live.

Just as a word of warning, I'm neither an RF expert nor pretend to be one. I spent most of my days in the university ditching classes, hanging out at coffee shops, and attending dance rehearsals. I spent the next decade and a half pretending to work at my various jobs. I'm the furthest thing you can get from an PhD'd RF engineer. But if you're willing to accept all that and are still willing to believe me, then read on:

I made a very interesting discovery recently while I was trying to improve the range of my 2.4 GHz wireless boards. I was getting limited range out of the on-board SMD antennas that I was using and was doing testing on multiple boards to see if it was due to the variance of the discrete RF components or if it was an inherent property of the system.

The funny thing was that in my sample of about five boards, one board constantly demonstrated a high received signal and transmitter output, almost twice that of the other boards. I was keeping detailed notes of the component values on all the boards so I copied the exact same component values on another board but couldn’t duplicate the results. The complete matching circuit was identical and I even replaced the radio and the balun to see if those were causing the discrepancy.

I spent about two days investigating this and trying to get to the bottom of why that one board was constantly outperforming the rest of them. I finally found the solution and it was staring at me in the face.

On all of my radio boards, I have two antenna options. One of them is for the onboard SMD antenna and the other is for the right angle SMA connector which can interface to external antennas. You can choose between the options by moving a capacitor to either the SMD antenna path or the SMA path. The board that was constantly outperforming the others had the capacitor in the SMA path rather than the SMD path. The strange thing was that there was no external antenna connected to the SMA.

When I was in the bay area a couple of months ago to visit my sister, she told me about a new series she was writing on Corporate Dropouts . Those are people that have left their jobs to pursue something more meaningful to themselves. Since I just so happened to be a corporate dropout, she interviewed me on why I decided to take that path and what motivated me to continue. She also included a picture of me on the front page from a couple years ago when I was a bit...heavier...thanks sis.

Anyways, if you're interested in checking it out, you can find it here. You might also want to check out her other articles on Corporate Dropouts because I think it's fascinating. People actually doing what they believed in...who woulda thunk it!

Link

I was just watching the PBS FrontLine documentary on the Digital Nation and it completely irritated me. Here were professors from MIT, one of the best technical institutions in the US, complaining about the students’ use of technology. I can’t even say that this is ironic, as much as it is just plain stupid.

The crux of the argument is that students these days are completely distracted because of the internet. They’re in the classroom, but rather than listening to the lecture, they’re googling things, reading articles, or probably chatting with their significant other. The professor is frustrated because he gave a simple exam that just tested on whether the students were paying attention in class and the students score poorly. The immediate thought that came into my head was why was the professor blaming the students rather than his teaching methods.

I teach classes at the Tokyo Hackerspace. My first class was a basic electronics class that was done with a lecture format and I took three hours to deliver everything I thought participants needed to know about electronics. It was enough information to give them a firm foundation and understand the basics of voltage, current, resistance, capacitance, and simple design patterns. That was a mistake, and the problem wasn’t the participants, it was with my assumption that they wanted to know the basics of electronics.

I finally realized that the problem was that I was telling them the basics so they could build on top of it. But without experiencing it for themselves, they would never understand why you need to limit the current of an LED or why you need to have bulk capacitors on a power supply. One of the reasons why the new MAKE: Electronics book is so great is because they encourage readers to break things as well as make them.

Anyways, I finally grasped the concept that people want to discover things for themselves. They want to understand why certain things are the way they are, rather than just be told it. They want to build things and customize them to make it their own and put their stamp on it. This is the proper way to teach people and has been for centuries, where the old master/apprentice relationships still existed.