Joel, Nick and Chris From Sparkfun’s Engineering Roundtable
SparkFun Electronics has been spreading the maker ethic through tutorials, kits and unique products to help make your hardware hacker dreams come true. On August 13th, SparkFun added The Engineering Roundtable to their lineup. The Engineering Roundtable features three of SparkFun’s engineering wizards talking about their latest projects, walking us through the build and giving pointers and tips to build your own projects.
The roundtable members come from different backgrounds but all have a love for DIY and helping other people develop their own skills. Joel Bartlett, a native of Colorado and one of the founding members of the Solid State Depot hacker space, spends his days writing tutorials and beta testing new products for SparkFun. Chris Taylor, one of the early members of the SparkFun engineering team, regularly attends The Burning Man Festival to flex his engineering muscles. Nick Poole, the “execution guy,” is the fabricator of the group with an interest in wearable electronics and computing.
I had a chance to pose a few questions to these engineering gurus, and they were more than happy to share some interesting stories and advice for aspiring engineers.
Q: Who were your engineering influences growing up?
Joel:
The biggest influence I had as a kid was my father. He was very good at hacking things to make them work for what he needed. He worked on cars most of his life and always had inventive ways of solving problems. He was also much more proficient in computers than I was as a child. It wasn’t until I went off to school that I surpassed him in computer and hardware knowledge. But I still look back to my memories of him building with his own hands, building the deck on out house, building the two-story garage out of trees from our own property. If he needed some tool or piece, he would make it himself. If he wasn’t sure if something would work, he’d try it anyway. He always kept it cheap and scrappy, but functional.
Chris:
Initially, all of my influences were books. I would check out science books from the library when I was around 10 (so no internet around) and skip to the electrical stuff and do all the experiments at home. When I started to show a long-term interest in the subject, my parents bought me Tesla’s biography and he immediately became my biggest influence. Once I read about Tesla, I was building things in the garage non-stop.
Nick:
My dad and grandfather were both huge influences for me. My dad’s a mechanical engineer and was always willing to help me build something crazy growing up. He also taught me, whether or not he meant to, how to determine whether or not something was practical early on in a project. Kids talk a lot and I was no exception, I think a lot of parents eventually just break down and start saying “oh, that sounds like a great idea, maybe one day you can do that” but the great thing about Dad is that even when I was a kid, if I said I wanted to do something he would brainstorm it with me just like if he were talking to another engineer. We’d dig up his old textbooks and do the math on things or talk about materials. I still call him whenever I have a hard engineering problem to solve. Of course he learned a lot from his dad as well, who was a federal mine inspector and a real DIY kind of guy.
Q: What was the first thing you built/hacked/modded/coded?
Joel:
My first unsuccessful hack ever was taking apart my PlayStation 2. I thought I could fix the faulty tray door myself. That wasn’t the case. It’s still in shambles somewhere. I always liked taking things apart as a kid, but I wasn’t so keen on putting them back together. I just liked seeing how they worked on the inside.
Chris:
The first thing I ever built (that was electrical and worked) was when I was ten and was a “flashlight”. I use that in quotes because it was just a D battery with an incandescent bulb taped to the top with a wire going to the negative terminal. The whole thing was glued into a toilet paper tube. I asked my Mom what kind of person build electrical things for a living, she said “an electrical engineer.” Ever since then, that’s what I wanted to be. The first thing I ever coded was a vulgar joke program in Visual Basic that I installed on my Middle School’s computers when I was 12 (Dave: They know now, Chris.) They never found out it was me. The first thing I ever modded was a very old radio. I replaced a resistor on my Grandmother’s radio so the volume would go higher.
Nick:
I grew up with a pretty well-stocked wood shop, so I did a lot of woodworking growing up. I also took apart toys like crazy, I loved taking apart toys. Two of the earliest things I remember doing as a hacker is getting a 2000-in-one electronics kit form RadioShack for Christmas and showing the neighborhood kids how to wire up an LED to a pushbutton, you’d think I’d invented the lightbulb, they were amazed. In fifth grade I learned about electrolysis and for a science project I tried to reinvent the rebreather so you could breath oxygen from seawater, obviously there were plenty of challenges to that problem which I wasn’t prepared to solve at that age.
Q: What is your most used tool?
Joel:
At home I use my Dremel the most. It’s so versatile. Soldering iron is a close second.
Chris:
My most used tool is a multimeter. ‘Nuff said. However, I espouse the benefits of this particular soldering iron every chance I get: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9450?
Nick:
Obviously I use a soldering iron a lot these days but honestly the two tools I would take on a deserted island would be needlenose pliers and a butane lighter. It’s hard to over-hype the utility of an open-flame. Some people at the office might contend that my most used tool is the laser-cutter, though. I’ve taken to designing everything as “planar forms” just so I can cut them with lasers… how cool is it that we can cut things with lasers?
Q: What advice would you give young makers?
Joel:
Start early. I came into the electronics game pretty late in life. I would have been a lot better off if I had learned more as a child. There is a steep learning curve, but if you can get past that at a younger age, the rest will come much easier.
Chris:
My advice to young makers is to ask questions if you get stuck and find a person you can ask questions. And if it isn’t a parent, have your parents find a person you can ask. I was a bit too proud of a kid to do this. I taught myself a lot of what I learned from books, and when I was stuck, I just searched through more books. If I had had a person there to ask, I likely would have learned much more, much faster.
Nick:
Don’t get discouraged if your first couple of projects don’t turn out just like you wanted. You learn something every time you try to make something even if you don’t succeed.
Also, I wish someone had told me this growing up: There’s no magic in building complex things, even the guys who designed your cell phone, your laptop, your parents’ car, they’re normal people like you and me taking it one step at a time. If you had the blueprints for the space shuttle, you could build one in your basement.
Q: Given no limits what would be the ultimate project for you?
Joel:
I dream of creating an entirely sustainable village for my family and friends. The Open Source Ecology Project has been a big influence, and I love everything they are doing. If I had no restraints, I would work on that full time, building everything I need, growing my own food, automating tasks that were once repetitive and labor intensive. Getting 100% off the grid would be the end goal, and a very hard one at that.
Chris:
This is a damned-near impossible question. If I really had no limits I’d start my own space program and build ten thousand schools where the teachers were paid a handsome salary. Realistically, though, from a purely fun DIY standpoint, something I could build myself, I’d build an electric railgun that would have the ability to literally hit the moon with a non-rocket projectile, just so I could have it carved into my tombstone that I was the first man to shoot the moon.
Nick:
Oh man, this is a tough question… I feel like it depends on what day you ask me. The humanitarian (and the cyberpunk) in me say that designing and building the first full prosthetic bodies for paralyzed people is the ultimate project. I’ve always been envious of bio-mechanical engineers because they work on such cool stuff.
There’s a cartoon-obsessed middle schooler deep inside me, though, saying “Giant Robot!” …One day I’ll build a giant robot.
I have to agree with Nick on that one a giant robot would be a cool thing to build. I want to thank Chris, Joel and Nick for taking the time to answer these questions and sharing their stories and inspiration with me.
The first episode of The Engineering Roundtable featured Chris and his E.L. Wire Burning Man sign the next episode airs on August 27th when Joel will take us through the ins and outs of cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration. Joel will show us how to build a tonoscope from easily-obtained components. Catch the next episode on the SparkFun Home Page and start exploring the fascinating world of visible sound. If you have a project you would like to see these guy’s tackle send it to marketing@sparkfun.com and we just might get to see that giant robot shoot the moon in a totally self-sufficient village.
[This article, by Dave Giancaspro, was originally published on Thursday.]
