I definitely agree with this, and my proposal is effectively based on that idea.
In fact I’d probably go a step further. I’d claim that if you’re a dues-paying member, you very likely don’t even need to be told. You probably already know!
Imagine you could somehow invent a mechanism to collect up a group composed only of generally curious, competent, and conscientious people. This would be difficult. Maybe devise a scenario for them to pay a periodic fee which only a person like that would voluntarily pay, and see who pays. It’s not perfect but it kinda works.
All of these folks will have a decent appreciation for what kinds of things other people like them out there are building, and an appreciation for what they know how to build. Very likely they will have a well-developed instinct for the difference between “difficult” and “easy” ideas.
Almost all of those people will be able to tell instantly whether they encounter some problem or aspiration that could be addressed with electronics, even if the person in question has never had any personal experience with electronics tasks at all.
Then imagine you took all those people and gave them access to really reliable tools in a dedicated space? Gave them just enough training that they could use the tools without damaging them, but no other education? Some guidance on how to maintain the lab for others? Sufficient confidence to pursue whatever degree of self-directed exploration they’re interested in? Names of a few nearby people kind of like them, who could and would help them out if they got stuck?
I’m certain that under those circumstances, these types of people would come up with some interesting things to do in an electronics lab. They won’t need any help with that.
What is the rationale for storing inventory in the electronics lab? Where do you disagree specifically with the rationale provided in the proposal?
I know our name no longer contains the word hacker. Do we not still subscribe to that ethos? I thought we did, and it’s a whole lot easier to hack on stuff if there’s some amount of stuff available for scrounging and repurposing, as well as some component inventory.
The inventory need not be comprehensive or perfectly quantified - when was the last time you needed a 4.7k resistor, and a 3.3k (or 5.1k) absolutely would not work?
It feels a bit hipster-ish to say I wouldn’t like the feel of the space if it didn’t have that stuff, but I would be far less happy with the space if there was no communal pool of random stuff (and inventory) to root through.
What inventory would be available? And for what intended purpose?
Primarily, the inventory people donate. I wouldn’t mind a budget for universal consumables like solder and flux, but I don’t see that as critical.
I’m not sure what you are thinking of when you ask what purposes are allowed. The only restriction that comes to mind would be to ensure that one person didn’t wipe out the inventory; perhaps we could say that no one person may remove more than 10% of inventory in a given month, and:
they should attempt to replace 100% of the value of inventory they remove within 30 days, with things that can be expected to be of value to others.
if the inventory is used to create things for sale, they are required to replace inventory as above.
How many cubic feet would you like to have available to store component inventory, and how much would you pay per month for a personal allotment of such space?
My desire is for a communal pool; I am not adverse to additional, personal space - but it seems like personal storage would be better kept somewhere that isn’t the electronics lab. I’m afraid I’ve not been following the asmbly news/plans too closely - now that the loft is gone, is there (will there be) any personal storage at asmbly? Assuming there is/will be, it seems that would suffice for personal electronic storage as well.
You are fighting an uphill battle on this. It’s not unwinnable, but you’re going to have to provide some very strong justification along with a process to make it work and validate that it’s worth the effort.
Inventory in our space does not work –that’s simply reality. It doesn’t work for nuts, bolts and screws. It doesn’t work for small hardware. It doesn’t work for wood scraps. It doesn’t work for electronics.
My thought on this is that much of the unwanted, useless stuff comes from people wandering in and dropping stuff off, without consulting anyone on whether it’s useful.
Having a lock on the door that won’t unlock for you unless you’re authorized (passed a basic class, or been granted a waiver due to experience) serves more than just the obvious purpose:
obviously, it makes it harder for equipment to grow legs or for things to be borrowed and then forgotten.
psychologically, it tells people “we care about the things in this room”. Then, people take better care of the equipment. If they happen to be of the mindset to help pricey equipment with locomotion, it may give them second thoughts - “they care about this stuff… how far will they go to track me down?”
But where do we stop with the collection of random stuff? Communal pools get awfully dirty, awfully fast if there is no one to constantly clean it. The EE space needs airtight organization with hard limits to how much we have on hand and kinda follow a JIT method of replacement imo.
The EE space needs airtight organization with hard limits to how much we have on hand
One of the questions I didn’t answer was on square feet; I’m not sure exactly how much space to say, but we can declare that all components must fit within some set of organizers, and in the event of overflow someone exercises their judgement in discarding the least useful items until there is no overflow. Likewise for other things, a certain shelf/shelves can be dedicated.
IMO, part of the reason the current up-for-grabs inventory remains static is that people don’t know whether it’s up for grabs or not. I assumed that a lot of the stuff - for example on the shelves behind the door - wasn’t really up for grabs, without approval from $someone. If that’s not the case, there are several things on those shelves I’d find useful.
I thought at one point I’d seen several oscilloscopes tucked in improbable locations; if it’s one of those that went missing, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that the person thought it wasn’t wanted and thus was up for grabs. Point is, stuff really needs to be marked as up for grabs or not.
There is overwhelming evidence that communal pools of inventory and personal storage of project materials at the space is dysfunctional in principle.
It’s not clear at all how it would be necessary or helpful to anyone using the space, and inventing a complicated system of unenforceable rules won’t save it from itself.
The EE lab can and should by default be treated like every other area of the shop, and for the same reasons. You pack it in, you pack it out.
I’m definitely opposed to maintaining inventory – ie Asmbly promises to have x,y,z always available (other than consumables called out in the proposal)
I could be convinced to accept some inventory on a take-a-penny/leave-a-penny basis so long as we have clear procedures. eg: a “hackables” cabinet with doors that close and clear instructions that the contents are up-for-grabs / able-to-trash. If it doesn’t fit in the cabinet, it’s trash. if the doors don’t close, throw away stuff until they do. Similar in principle to the laser scrap bin, with clear instructions/policy on the cabinet doors. I’ve seen this process used at other makerspaces, but I don’t have any personal experience with it operationally.
We cannot allow the e-lab to be filled up with busted inkjet printers because the motors might be useful for robots (again).
Also, any such cabinet would need to be small enough that it wouldn’t be an attractive alternative to the trash, or it’ll wind up full of CRTs or something.
If this would satisfy everyone and establish consensus, I’d be fine with it too. Laissez-faire approach as far as the org and the stewards are concerned, as long as the doors close. 2’x4’x6’ cabinet with doors. 48 cubic feet is plenty.
It’s still definitely seems to me to be true that this cabinet would rarely solve any problem for anyone for reasons that are perfectly well understood, and will instead almost instantly fill up with laser printers. But if others see value in that, it doesn’t hurt anything.
You’re being generous - I was picturing something half that size Basically the cabinet can’t be bigger than our biggest trash can, or there’s friction against cleaning it out.
Implementation details: this might be a reasonable use for the space below the (new) window if we put benches on the three solid walls.
It would never come to that. The cabinet would slowly fill with unusable junk, and then once it was full, the doors to the cabinet would remain closed from that point forward.
Because it never provided any value to anyone, no one would notice or care that it was full of trash. So basically just the exact story of the existing EE lab, on a 1/100th scale.
The far better strategy would be to not do it and just behave as though the EE lab was a part of Asmbly, and not some separate entity with separate rules and separate philosophy.
I’ve used scrap from the bins in the woodshop, welding shop, and the laser lab for real productive tasks. I don’t think having a scrap cabinet in the EE lab is contrary to Asmbly’s operational philosophy – it’s just historically been the most abused/neglected area and its scrap bin always reflected that. In principle, practicing rework on a scrap circuit board isn’t that different from practicing fillet welds on scraps of steel.
I’ve seen discourse posts / slack comments from stewards and heavy users about cleaning out junk from the woodshop scrap cart or laser scrap bin when their signal:noise ratio gets too bad. The welding shop has probably the worst-maintained scrap bin other than EE; maybe people just don’t like throwing recyclable metal in the trash so every little cutoff goes in the scrap pile.
The baseline philosophy seems to be that if you pack something into the shop, you pack it back out when you leave, and deviations from that philosophy occur only if there is an widely-held belief that the deviation will be beneficial or useful.
There seems to be an widely-held belief, with rationale and evidence to back it up, that something like a laser scrap bin or a metal shop scrap bin are beneficial or useful deviations. Although arguably even in these scenarios where a scrap bin makes the maximum amount of sense, they are still effectively trash cans.
OTOH, there does not really seem to be a widely-held belief that an EE scrap bin would be beneficial or useful, no real rationale for why it might be, and overwhelming evidence that it isn’t, but there is still serious discussion about doing it anyway. To me that’s the “separate philosophy.”
But like I said, if it’s important to people, maybe for reasons that I just don’t understand, allocating a modest amount of space for it is not a huge price to pay. If that moves things along, it’s fine!
I constantly use scrap for the laser cutters. But even though I’ve built a lot of electronics stuff, I don’t think I’ve used anything from the lab. Mostly not from my extensive piles of electronics stuff at home.
Mouser’s standard delivery is basically overnight, and it’s just SO unlikely to need something I have on hand, be able to find it conveniently, AND not have to be making a Mouser order anyways. If I find I have a 22uH inductor that fits, well I can’t power the project until I have 10 other parts from Mouser tomorrow and would probably order that inductor for another $0.50 just because.
In prior eras, heatsinks, large caps, special ICs, high voltage flybacks, Peltier coolers, etc were hard to find and/or expensive, and a cache of “useful stuff” could have been a life-saver at some point. Now, there’s SO much high tech stuff readily available that such takeouts just aren’t needed. Usually obsolete, and makes it impractical to reproduce another one.
I’d bet that if an electronics scrap bin winds up being useful, it’ll be for things like standoffs and mounting hardware and random colors of hookup wire and pin headers. The kind of bits and bobs that come by the dozen or hundred but a project often only needs a couple. I might even consider seeding it with some donated harbor freight assortments of crimp connectors and heatshrink.
One scrap in EE I could see being useful is LED strips. A class on adding LEDs to projects would be a simple introduction to soldering with a clear purpose/application and it’s something I think most people would be interested in. Having some on hand as consumables for class and general use could be cool and encourage current non-EE users to start using. I think it’s a shop area that can be intimidating to many until they get in and use it. I think makers who aren’t necessarily techy can have a false perception about EE that they need to have a certain level of tech knowledge to be capable/successful in there. Breaking down that barrier would encourage more use. Outside LEDS, I’m not sure there’s good reason for more. If we were to have something more, I would not support anything beyond something like this (components storage in our office at home):
I’m all for decreasing the intimidation barrier, but even setting aside the serious and probably unsolvable problem of how such an inventory system would be maintained, I’m not sure that hundreds of unique drawers of parts makes the prospect less intimidating.
The underlying issue is the one outlined in the proposal, and reiterated by @dannym and @buzmeg in this thread. It’s that there’s just not that much you can ever do only with materials from the scrap bin, and every possible little bit or bob you might pull out of there in your whole life could easily fit in the palm of your hand and the sum total of it all would cost $3.50 brand new and comes from the same place all the other stuff you need comes from.
An alternative way to boost confidence for newcomers would be two different training classes. One for total beginners and one for experienced members. The beginner training is maybe slightly longer, and costs a dollar amount more which is equal to the cost of whatever retail “starter kits” or “project kits” Asmbly decides would be the best fit to include. A small Arduino starter kit and a small learn-to-solder project kit combined is less than $50, and would also supply new users with their own small personal inventory of exactly the random small bits (resistors, caps, LEDs, buttons…) that a “house inventory” would hypothetically supply.
(edit: by “training” I just mean what it means in the woodshop. how to not hurt yourself or the equipment. not a guided series of exercises through a project. that can easily be self-directed by anyone so motivated)
It’d be a vehicle to touch on all the tools similar to how the chunk of 2x4 is for woodshop safety, and rotating silly little kits periodically will help keep the content fresh if people want to take it more than once.
…and if the failures go into the scrap cabinet, there’s your replenishing source of LEDs
I think the spirit of that makes sense, but it might be hard to find a suitable kit. Could design one.
That particular one looks simple enough but it’s actually 73 pieces. My livelihood is electronics engineering and it would still likely take me at least 20-30 minutes to put that thing together. For an amateur, better allow an hour. In the woodshop analogy, that’s more “build this birdhouse” than “mutilate this 2x4.”
If a 2x4-style exercise could be invented or discovered that could be assembled by a novice in less than 10 minutes, might be possible to do it as part of EE lab training. But anything much more than 1 resistor and 1 LED soldered into perfboard, powered, then measured, and you probably need a separate station for every participant.
Basically the cabinet can’t be bigger than our biggest trash can, or there’s friction against cleaning it out.
