Have you ever done something that you knew wasn’t quite right but you did it anyway. Perhaps as a child you snuck a piece of candy that you shouldn’t have. Maybe you have parked where it wasn’t allowed using the ages old excuse “I will only be inside for five minutes tops”. I can only imagine that is what my colleague was thinking when he began work on one of his little projects.
His career in itself would would make a fascinating book. Starting out working in electronics back when it was literally a pile of resistors, capacitors, transistors and lots and lots of wires. These parts were simply put together with wires holding things in their place – soldering parts was not yet a method of construction.
Depending on your feelings about intellectual property you may either admire or hate him. To this day it is not fully clear what he did back in the day before the Berlin wall fell, but I do know that he did do some reverse engineering of existing hardware as well as creating suitable replacements for said hardware back in the Soviet Union.
Fast forward to today and his current job is software development and support which is certainly a far cry from his hardware roots. So I guess it is to be expected that waving a hardware project in his face was much like offering an alcoholic a drink – you simply should not start as you cannot stop.
It turns out that Mathew’s colleague Calvin was the one who started it. Calvin was looking for something to do while working out of town and somehow got it into his pointy little head that he would fool around with electronics. He went to the local electronic megastore and it turned out that they were selling electronic kit advents calendars which was basically learn how to make a LED blink one day at a time.
It didn’t take too long before Calvin started to encounter difficulties, part of it was because the language of electronics was not familiar to him but part of it was because the instructions were also in a foreign language. Well, Mathew understood both and was more than willing to help out. Every time I visited their room I saw something new posted on the wall or some scribble laying on the desk.
Only later did I learn that they were also planning a small electronic project that they could hopefully sell on ebay. The project was that of a LED cube. A LED cube is pretty much as the name says, a number of LEDs that have been built into a cube shape where the LED’s blink on and off in various patterns.
To do all of this would require electronics knowledge, quite a few electronic components as well as some tools. You might be thinking that certainly one of them has a basement, a work room or a garage that would be suitable for this task. I failed to mention one small fact, both Mathew and Calvin were external consultants for the company. These guys were hired guns who came in from out of town and were staying in a hotel.
That is what makes this story unique, these guys purchased small amounts of the required materials and tools and brought them to work. So during the day they were Clark Kent working as mild manner computer professionals while at night they brought out the tools and parts to build what might someday, dare I say it, a fledgling company?
Well, it take a lot of time to train up a novice in the dark arts of electronics and before the task could be started in earnest they ran into a small difficulty. The client decided that they would need to provide their services remotely starting next month. This created quite a problem as they had pretty much set up shop right here at work and now they need to shut things down. After all, the client probably wouldn’t be all that happy to learn they were using their premises for unsanctioned activities that in their theoretical worst case could cause a fire. So they began to reverse the tide.
Well, to the uninitiated they just looked like a couple of guys leaving work at the end of the day but if you had x-ray eyes you could see the following items slowly being transported out of the client’s building at the end of each day.
- Oscilloscope
- Dremmel
- Hot glue gun
- De-soldering iron
- Two soldering irons
- Helping hand
- Four different spools of solder
- A small container of kolophonium (wood resin)
- A couple of different types flux
- Soldering paste
- Tips for applying soldering paste
- Wiring pen
- Two jewelers headsets
- Various magnifying glasses
- Safety goggles
- Breathing masks
- A pile of custom pcb’s boards unsoldered
- A pile of custom pcb’s boards with microcontroller and SMD parts
- PCB board cleaner
- Approximately one thousand 5mm RGB leds
- Approximately one thousand 1cm RGB leds
- Hundreds 5mm leds of various colors
- Hundreds of through hole resistors covering quite a few different values
- Bags full with switches, resistors, integrated circuits, and dozens of microprocessors
- IR receivers and IR leds
- Half a dozen breadboards
- Small speakers
- Spray paint
- Exacto knife
- Box cutter
- Caliper
- Hex wrenches
- Screw drivers
- Mini screw driver set
- A few sets of pliers
- Flush cutter
- Eight pair of tweezers
- 16 dc power supplies of varying output current
- Power cords
- ITX mini tower case
- Water cooled cpu cooler
- One raspberry pi
- Several raspberry pi cases
- Several arduinos
- Several different types of AVR programmers
The crazy thing about this story is that this wasn’t something happening at a small mom and pop store, nor was it happening at small regional office that had a lot of autonomy. No it was happening at a Fortune 500 company with a reasonably large international influence.
Although these circumstances are perhaps not overly common, it is the type of story that could only happen at large company. Fancy ISO standards and internal rules is not substitution for a management that is not paying attention to what is happening on its own premises. Too much political infighting to remember that despite the fact they worked for different departments they all work for the same company.
What happened to the consultants you may ask? Well, they eventually went separate ways without even producing a single LED cube. What is happening at your company right now?