[APPROVED] Electronics Lab Rebuild Proposal

Operations Proposal Considerations
21

Haha okay, because it was specifically requested, here’s an iron fist. Tough love incoming:

None of this technical discussion makes any difference whatsoever to the actual problem, because the actual problem is not a technical problem. You can look at that room for 20 seconds and tell what the actual problems might be, but here’s an example list of things which the problem definitely isn’t:

  • The presence or absence of advanced or obscure oscilloscope capabilities
  • A soldering iron with a slightly longer time-constant but which is functioning perfectly well
  • Jacket polymer selection for the spool of wire occasionally used for rework

And here’s an example list of some things about the EE lab which you might fairly conclude contribute to the actual problem:

  • Stuffed with junk, rather dirty and cluttered
  • Not one single functioning piece of basic equipment
  • No coherent vision for the space, minimal ownership, minimal patronage
  • A degree of inertia which apparently approaches infinite

The proposal I put together was meant to try to address those problems as well as they can possibly be addressed within the $5k budget figure I was told. My recommendations were optimized to be easily executable with minimal friction because that’s what seems to be needed. They aren’t meant to be answers to the Asmbly EE lab fashion quiz, and now we need to figure out how correct those answers are.

No prospective user of this lab will have their problem-solving experience improved or worsened in the slightest depending on which model of brand new, perfectly functioning multimeter is available to them. I understand the desire to optimize, but please don’t get so bogged down discussing the difference between the 97% solution and the 98% solution that the space remains stuck in its present 4% solution state forever.

I would try to focus on the things which seem to be the actual problems, and see what kind of shapes the solutions to those problems might take.

3 Likes
22

Well said.

The discussion phase of a proposal can yield valuable feedback, but it’s ultimately the proposer’s decision what feedback to integrate prior to making a funding request. The whole point of being a steward of an area is to call the shots, because if everyone’s in charge nobody’s in charge.

I’m personally perhaps not as careful as I should be in these discussion threads – yes, I’m on the board, but I’m just throwing ideas at the wall same as everybody else. If you took any of my comments as mandates, my apologies. I’m absolutely not interested in micromanaging a project like this :slight_smile:

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23

Logistics wise, I really like adding OpenPath swipe on the door (we have one currently that could be allocated to this right @Jon?) and IMO it is essential to put a window in above where the sewing cut table is currently for it to feel less cave-like and also for feeling like a safe space as a woman. I don’t think this would interfere with the potential for a design wall (that could go to the left of the EE lab door), but with the work @jamesfreeman @JennChilds and others have done to clear out the left half of coworking, I think we’re probably not super far from moving textiles/sewing in there (right half would remain coworking).

Budget wise, I’m not opposed to spending what is currently laid out but that does delay how soon we could move forward on this. If we were able to source furniture pieces that are same spec and quality for cheaper or do a targeted fundraiser for this to raise a significant portion of cost, then I could see this moving forward pretty quickly. We’ll be putting out an annual report next month that will include finance info and we’ll also be working on setting up a more formal budget so that there’s more transparency in that realm in terms of what’s available to spend. I think the first bit of pandemic times was largely us scraping by and this past year or so since @wdnatx took over managing finances we’ve finally gotten to where we are building up and can do a lot more. Looking forward to continuing on that in 2022 and investing into rebuilding areas of the space like EE lab that need some serious love.

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24

One of the things I like about this project plan is we can take it in steps. Prep the room, set up benches as budget allows and get some feedback from early users so we can make adjustments as required.

I’m pretty sure we have at least one bench that’s worth keeping, but I haven’t examined them in detail. It’s entirely possible that the value of having matching setups outweighs the savings from re-using bits and bobs of old furniture.

I don’t object to putting a lock on the door, but we can’t really do that until we have classes up and running so members can reasonably obtain access. If the lab’s only available to stewards and donors it’s not a member amenity.

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25

+1 to the window.

Making all areas into safe spaces is very important to me. Particularly as we improve and reorganize.

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26

A window into the main lobby would definitely be great. That idea seems to be unanimously liked, thanks for the reminder @jamesfreeman. Especially if the room requires other construction tasks like rewiring, adding a window seems pretty attainable.

Putting that room behind a special OpenPath list isn’t meant to exclude anyone; functionally one would hope that the equipment in the EE lab would be related to the members the same as any other. Basically you promise not to use it unless you’ve been trained to use it, but training is unconditionally available to everybody, and we all regard this arrangement as acceptable.

Does putting a lock on the door accomplish anything, if everyone is able to gain the ability to unlock the lock? That’s a good question and the answer might be no. But it’s also true that a person is just physically not capable of walking off with a bandsaw, whereas a person is easily able to walk off with an oscilloscope. Evidently that’s why the lab no longer has an oscilloscope. Not clear what to do about that either, but these are exactly the kinds of things that would need to be figured out.

27

The window idea belongs to @Keiarra

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28

Deciding on a door lock isn’t a blocking issue – that’s easy to retrofit whenever we decide to do it, without disrupting anything else going on in the room.

29

Ya, you could even install the lock and have it just be the same access control list as the main doors, and decide later if there should be a separate list. The whole thing could just be a software change.

I think it’s only blocking in a kinda abstract sense, that probably it would be wise to come up with a set of rules and expectations about the space first before setting about the physical labor of rebuilding it. What it’s for, who it’s for, how it’s used, and how it’s managed, etc. And probably access control (or lack thereof) would be part of that. Those are the things where there’s real benefit in getting them right, everything else is secondary (but much more fun).

30

I’d prefer to leave the door open, occupancy sensor on the lights, and lock down the portable equipment. We had 24/7-access unsupervised labs in college and every bench had a lock cable looped through adhesive plates on each piece of equipment. Something like this https://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Desktop-Peripherals-Locking-K64665US

(another reason I like the upper shelves - lock all the equipment on the upper shelf, provide long cables to reach your test setup on the main bench).

Requiring people to badge into the room provides an additional layer of accountability, but I’m not convinced it’s sufficiently foolproof to bother implementing.

31

You can Kensington lock practically every scope I have ever seen (this would probably be an advantage of new benches as they generally accommodate these locks). If you have enough scopes, that’s not an issue. Locks become an issue when you only have one scope and it’s on the “wrong” table.

The window is a really good idea. I generally keep the door to the elab open when I’m in it precisely because it feels like a cave otherwise.

While I am perfectly fine with the proposal, the one thing I would like to caution people about is that while “You can drive people away with crap” is tautologically true the converse “If you build it, they will come.” is not automatically true. In all of maker-type spaces I have been associated with, the electronics area is generally extremely underused. I’m happy to let anyone with a clear vision take over and drive the process.

“What classes in electronics are we going to teach?” is a big question that drives the lab direction. It would be great to get some feedback from non-electronic trained members. I don’t have good ideas on this. I’m too far away from beginner level to trust my judgement.

Two big problems nowadays surrounding an elab are 1) most electronic projects don’t activate an electronics lab nowadays–most problems are software more than hardware (a quick look at Circuit Cellar or Elektor pretty much confirms that) and 2) electronics equipment just isn’t that expensive anymore–a couple months of membership buys you a not small amount of your own personal equipment. Pretty much the only thing which is generally out of reach for normal people is an oscilloscope–and even a 100MHz scope isn’t terribly expensive these days.

32

This is another fundamental question. What is the lab for?

It seems like there is a line drawn between the EE lab and basically the whole rest of the shop. Pretty much all other classes are about how to operate tools in a basic way without hurting the tools or hurting yourself, and that’s it. It’s entirely up to members what to figure out what they want to do with the tools after that.

But that does not seem to be how the EE lab is understood. Is there some educational expectation around that discipline that’s radically different than the approach taken for the other disciplines? And if so, why is that? Or is there a set of woodworking or machining or textile curriculum that I just don’t know about?

33

For me, the lab is a place to find everything you need to fix/repair/debug something all set up and ready to go, so I don’t have to spend an hour finding gear and cables and whatnot and spreading it all over the dining room table before I can actually do anything. I’m sure others have different ideas.

You raise a good point about training, but what you perhaps don’t know about is that we’re actively developing skills classes for the woodshop and I expect other areas will follow. It’s something that’s been asked for for ages and we think we might actually be able to pull it off in 2022. Talk about EE classes jumps right to skills, because “how to use an oscilloscope” is a pretty boring class without some context to wrap around it.

Although I’d totally get behind starting at the beginning-beginning by doing something like a “learn to solder” class with a silly blinkenlight trinket.

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34

I feel like I’ve seen a variety of projects where lighting is a desired component of a larger piece, be it wood, acrylic, metal. Learning to do this seems like a natural extension of work members are doing in other areas. It feels more like the scope of “I’ve found this kit, but need to make a few tweaks for it to work on my project”

Or folks who want to make guitars learning how to solder all the pieces in correctly.

Thinking of the electronics lab in terms of what it can do to enhance the work done in other spaces

5 Likes
35

This is a really good question, so let me try to bash on it a bit.

The two most utilized types of equipment in a makerspace are generally the wood CNC and the lasers. Why? These are the two types of equipment that people most easily convert from idea straight to finished product. Signs, carving, engraving all easily transition to gift ideas, displays, etc. Or, these things are used in the first steps of something more complex (CNC carving a guitar, for example)

The next most utilized equipment tends to be the woodworking equipment. This is generally “I have a project for my house, but don’t want to buy and/or don’t have the space for the equipment”. Or trying out to see if you like something before throwing all in–ie. penmaking or bowl carving on the lathe.

The tier down from this tends to be the metal shop equipment. Welding and grinding and such generally get better utilization because they’re useful for working on a car. Metal milling machines and lathes are generally weakly utilized except by a few people in the space who have unusual recurring needs. They also exhibit some of the misfeatures of the electronic lab–you really need quite a bit of your own auxiliary equipment–dials, calipers, punches, scribes, cutting bits of various configurations, etc.–to utilize it well.

3D printing equipment is right around the metal shop utilization, generally. It really depends upon how good your printers are and how sophisticated your userbase is. Much like the electronic shop–the issue is that 3D printers just aren’t that expensive and if you start needing one for more than just one-off things, you’re better off buying your own.

Finally, there is electronics stuff. The issue is that “What project have you done in the last 10 years that needed only electronics?” The answer for most people is: “Nothing.” You did a guitar–well that was mostly wood and electronics was an afterthought. You did some cabinets with lighting–the wood was the problem and the lighting was just a kit with maybe some tweaks.

Here’s a good example locally: The space had a home-built entry system. The board wanted something much better. Did someone build it out electronic building blocks and put it together? Of course not: while the electronics are straightforward (some BLE chips with relay drivers in a 3D case is less than a month of weekend work) the software load would have been enormous (100s of hours combined with cloud and mobile programming knowledge).

So, the problem is that old-school 555 timer projects just aren’t that useful in a world where you have a supercomputer in your pocket. Everybody minimizes the amount of stuff done in hardware and maximizes the amount of stuff done in software.

Mostly, you get high electronics lab utilization in places that also do robotics. This also utilizes your machine shop side as well. However, most robotics is expensive and tends to drive people to have their own equipment.

Hopefully this points out some of the differences in how and why things are utilized in the space.

36

I’m starting with the assumption that an EE lab is actually a desirable thing to have. This seems to be the organizational position. I actually agree that it isn’t obviously true that having an EE lab is a good thing, but if we accept that it is as an axiom, then not having an EE lab isn’t really an option. If it’s good to have one, then we should have one.

So lets be clear about it: is it actually desirable for Asmbly to establish a working electronics lab? Or should the capability be “deprecated” and that space be allocated in a more effective way? Both options are perfectly defensible and reasonable, but there seems to be some serious internal dissonance about whether to pursue this at all.

  • Build EE Lab
  • Deprecate and Repurpose

0 voters

37

I’m starting from the same assumption. I do believe that it is good to have an elab.

However, if you want utilization, you need projects. It seems like modern projects in an elab come from people teaching things like Processing and Arduino and Raspberry Pi (and SiFive coming up?). And that then drives the elab needs (the oscilloscopes, for example, are required for decoding bugs in digital protocols).

I can teach how to build guitar amps–but I would be mostly teaching to a small number of old greybeards like myself. More numerous young musicians are notoriously both poor and non technical–and they’re probably sitting on a computer anyhow.

Another example: think about how much elab usage there was to build Tarkin (which has some pretty amazing electronics in it). There you go.

1 Like
38

If it’s actually true that “Having a working EE lab would be a benefit to Asmbly” is the consensus view, then that’s the thing to do, and it isn’t actually necessary to try to anticipate what all it might be used for or by whom. You can just do it because everyone agrees it should be done.

FWIW, the proposal I laid out specifically had in mind use cases like saving @Jon from having to rebuild a lab for himself every time he needed one, or @stepho exploring “electronics-adjacent” projects light lighting.

Or even me. I went in there the other week while I was helping to do some inspection stuff on a vending machine with somebody, just looking for a bench supply and a continuity tester to do some extremely basic checks. Nothing usable in there, couldn’t do anything. It was more than a little embarrassing tbh.

So if there’s going to be a lab,
and it seems like people would be interested in using a lab if there was a lab,
and we already have space allocated for a lab,
and a decent start of a plan for a lab,
and having a lab really doesn’t cost much money,
why not just finish the plan and build a lab, and see what follows and evolve from there?

Is there any other option?

1 Like
39

FWIW, I think the electronics lab and the autobay share a lot of the same problems for a lot of the same reasons. In Maslow’s hierarchy of Makerspace needs I’d say the E-lab is more fundamental than autobay, so I support working on it first.

If we can launch “learn to solder” and “lightstrips and lasers” classes in 2022, I hope we’ll be working on “change your own brakes” classes in 2024.

2 Likes
40

How about this. Don’t tell me that I need to learn Arduino. Tell me what I can do with Arduino. What can I do with Rasberry Pi? For people that build a piece of furniture on occasion, stuff around the house. List cool projects, etc., if you want to go beyond the EE crowd. FWIW, @stepho was spot on about lighting. I used the lab for soldering up my LED tape. While the irons may not be great, they’re a hell of a lot better than what I have.

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