We recently added six new low-power variants to our Motoron line of basic serial motor controllers: four Mxx550 1- and 2-channel versions, as well as 3-channel versions for Arduino (M3S550) and Raspberry Pi (M3H550).
The new M1T550, M1U550, M2T550, and M2U550 are single- and dual-channel serial motor controllers in a micro footprint. With a maximum motor supply voltage of 22 V, the Mxx550 versions are a great way to control small motors powered by power supplies up to 12 V and battery packs up to 12 cells in series for alkaline, NiCd, and NiMH, or up to 4 cells in series for LiPo. These are lower-voltage, pin-compatible versions of the Mxx256 models we released earlier this year, which have a maximum motor voltage of 48 V and can deliver slightly more current but are otherwise almost identical.
Here is the full array of tiny Motoron options, including I²C and UART serial interface versions:
Motoron motor controllers micro versions |
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M1T550 M1U550 |
M2T550 M2U550 |
M1T256 M1U256 |
M2T256 M2U256 |
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Control interface: | I²C or UART serial | |||
Motor channels: | 1 (single) | 2 (dual) | 1 (single) | 2 (dual) |
Minimum motor supply voltage: |
1.8 V | 4.5 V | ||
Absolute max motor supply voltage: |
22 V | 48 V | ||
Recommended max nominal battery voltage: |
16 V | 36 V | ||
Max continuous current per channel: |
1.8 A | 1.6 A | 2.2 A | 1.8 A |
Available versions with I²C: |
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Available verions with UART serial: |
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Price: | $12.49 – $14.49 | $15.95 – $17.95 | $16.95 – $18.95 | $23.95 – $25.95 |
We also released larger (but still small!), 3-channel versions in Arduino (M3S550) and Raspberry Pi (M3H550) compatible form factors. These again have a maximum motor supply voltage of 22 V and correspond to the 48 V max M3S256 and M3H256 versions we released in 2022. Here is the full line of larger Motoron serial motor controllers, including the even higher-power, dual-channel Motorons in full-size Arduino Shield or Raspberry Pi Hat form factors:
Motoron motor controllers Arduino and Raspberry Pi form factor versions |
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M3S550 M3H550 |
M3S256 M3H256 |
M2S24v14 M2H24v14 |
M2S24v16 M2H24v16 |
M2S18v18 M2H18v18 |
M2S18v20 M2H18v20 |
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Control interface: | I²C | |||||
Motor channels: | 3 (triple) | 2 (dual) | ||||
Minimum motor supply voltage: |
1.8 V | 4.5 V | 6.5 V | |||
Absolute max motor supply voltage: |
22 V | 48 V | 40 V | 30 V | ||
Recommended max nominal battery voltage: |
16 V | 36 V | 28 V | 18 V | ||
Max continuous current per channel: |
1.7 A | 2 A | 14 A | 16 A | 18 A | 20 A |
Available versions for Arduino: |
M3S550 | M3S256 | M2S24v14 | M2S24v16 | M2S18v18 | M2S18v20 |
Available versions for Raspberry Pi: |
M3H550 | M3H256 | M2H24v14 | M2H24v16 | M2H18v18 | M2H18v20 |
Price: | $20.95 – $30.95 | $34.95 – $44.95 | $59.95 – $69.95 | $115.95 – $124.95 | $59.95 – $69.96 | $95.95 – $104.95 |
The great thing about the Motorons is that you can easily string together or stack multiple controllers, mixing and matching sizes to fit your application. For example, you could use one high-power dual motor version for drive motors on a mobile robot and then add a smaller 3-channel motor controller for additional actuators. This arrangement with three stacked Motorons on an Arduino Uno allows simple control of up to 9 motors:
The common protocol between versions also makes it easy to change motor sizes and to reuse your code between projects. Want to make a bigger version of your first prototype? Just use a higher-power Motoron! Want to make a tiny robot next time? Use a tiny Motoron! Want to… you get the idea.
While the 3-channel boards are designed to stack on Arduinos or Raspberry Pis, they are also easy to use on breadboards:
It may be easy to view the six new Mxx550 Motorons as just lower-voltage versions of the previously available Mxx256 Motorons, but I am especially excited about them because we are able to offer them at a very low price, extending the legacy of the Dual Serial Motor controllers that were among our first products over 20 years ago. We are launching the 2-channel M2T550 and M2U550 at just $15.95, a lower price than the original Dual Serial Motor controller from 2001 (without even adjusting for inflation!).
The chip shortages of the past several years have made it especially difficult to introduce new products and to keep their prices down, but things are finally seeming to get better on that front. You can see in the tables above that the higher-power 2-channel Motorons are much more expensive; those prices are still elevated because we are limited on some critical components we use there and in our other products. We should be able to manufacture plenty of the new Motorons without being constrained in a similar way.
I am super excited to introduce our newest robot, the 3pi+ 2040. This robot combines the 3pi+ chassis, which we initially released in late 2020, with the power of the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. Here is a quick overview of its features:
This summer will mark 15 years since we released our original 3pi robot, which was designed to be fast enough to be competitive in line following and maze solving events. The high speed offers interesting programming challenges not present in typical robot kits of that era; here is a video from back then in which Ben demonstrates his 3pi learning a maze and then going extra fast on longer straightaways:
Although we developed our first injection-molded parts (wheels, ball caster, and motor mounting brackets) for that design, it was still largely a “PCB on wheels” kind of robot. The next-generation 3pi+, with a chassis mechanically independent of any circuit board, had been in development for several years when the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020. We kept working on it throughout that year, culminating with the November release of the 3pi+ 32U4.
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The 3pi+ delivered the most-requested feature missing from the 3pi, wheel encoders, along with many other improvements including a full IMU, bumpers, and programmability over USB (the 3pi required an external AVR programmer). With its support in the Arduino environment, the ATmega32U4 continues to offer a good entry point for working with microcontrollers, but the 8-bit architecture and 32 KB of program memory feel increasingly outdated and constraining, especially with the new sensors available on the 3pi+.
That brings us to the new 3pi+ 2040, powered by the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller (32-bit dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+) with 16 MB (128 Mbit) of flash memory. The robot ships preloaded with a MicroPython interpreter, so you can get started right away by plugging into its USB C port and editing the included example Python programs with your favorite text editor. No special programmers or programming software are required, and you can write MicroPython code from practically any desktop or mobile operating system as long as it has a text editor and the ability to copy files to a USB drive. For a basic Python IDE that lets you run code interactively, we are recommending the Mu editor. (See the User’s Guide for instructions on setting it up.)
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There are many other programming environments and languages that you can use with the 3pi+. Since it shares the same RP2040 processor as the Raspberry Pi Pico, anything that works for the Pico should be usable on the 3pi+, including C, C++, and the Arduino environment. We already include some basic C examples in our example code repository, and we plan to write more examples and expand the software support for this robot. Do you have a favorite IDE that works with the Pico? Is there some language or system you’d like to run on the 3pi+?
The menu of pre-installed demo programs on the 3pi+ 2040 Robot. |
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Early adopter special: We are initially offering the 3pi+ 2040 Robot as a limited release intended for advanced customers who have had some experience with robotics or Raspberry Pi RP2040 programming (e.g. with a Raspberry Pi Pico). The initial release is available with 30:1 MP motors (the “Standard Edition”), either assembled for 38% off or in kit form for 50% off. Early adopter robots will generally need to be backordered as they are built to order; we expect to ship within a business day of ordering. The robot hardware is finalized so the only changes we expect for the full product release are in the initial firmware configuration and pre-installed example programs. Documentation will also continue to be developed as we release the robot to a wider customer base. Early adopters who publicly share their 3pi+ 2040 experiences will be eligible for an additional robot with an extra $25 discount.
Wow, it’s been almost a year since my last update about how Pololu has been impacted by the global supply chain disruptions and chip shortages. And unfortunately, not much has improved. In today’s post, I will cover a few representative component stock histories and then go over other areas of our business that have been impacted and what we are doing to get through this situation.
In the case of one important part I mentioned last year, we are still waiting for an order placed in late 2020 without having received anything since a partial shipment in March 2021! Here is what our internal stock chart looks like for that component:
When I wrote about this component in November of 2021, we still had 461 units in stock, and the manufacturer was giving me specific updates about where we were in line and how I could expect parts by Q1 2022 or maybe even by the end of 2021. Well, we are now getting close to the end of 2022, and they are not even giving me updates anymore on when I can expect these parts that I ordered in 2020! We have gone almost a year without being able to make or sell the products that use that chip.
That first example of still waiting for an order from 2020 is not typical. Unfortunately, we are seeing more and more of this pattern:
This is a component we ran out of over the summer of 2021, but we received some shipments in August of that year, and then more in early February of this year. But since then, nothing, and we are about to run out again despite our attempts to carefully ration the parts. It’s been over 14 months since I placed my oldest unfilled order for these parts, and the current expected ship date is February 2023.
Another pattern we are seeing more of looks like this:
Here, we were in a pretty good stock situation at the beginning of the year on a component we didn’t use that many of. However, as we raised prices on other products or ran out of stock completely, our customers moved to some of our recommended alternatives and cleared us out of those, and hence the sudden dropoff of those parts in April of this year. The additional problem with components like these is that we did not have as many on order because our historical usage was not that high, so it might take an extra long time to get that back to decent stock levels.
We commonly use the same components in several different products. One of the main ways we are dealing with the shortages is to substantially reduce our inventory of completed products so that we can be sure the components we do have are going toward products that are getting sold immediately.
One big downside of reduced ready-to-sell inventory is that it’s difficult for customers to tell what is really, really unavailable because we’ve been out of parts for a year and what is actually available as soon as we make some more. To give you some automated guidance, we introduced a “supply outlook” feature to our website. Here is how that looks at the moment:
The calculations of what we can make are quite complicated given that we have thousands of different components going into thousands of different products, and the products (and the associated inventory) can be in various stages of production. Components stop being available once they are soldered onto a board, but that board might still go through many more processing steps before being ready and available for sale. The in stock and “in final production stages” quantities should be spot on, but we variously round down the “enough components” estimate to keep it conservative. The numbers can be outdated quickly since we are selling and making products all the time, but we regenerate those numbers several times a day to be as up-to-date as possible.
The supply outlook feature does not factor in components we have on order, though this year has proven that would be almost useless anyway (I’m not sure if I prefer the suppliers who give me no estimate of a ship date or those who have been saying “next week” for months). On our to-do list is to get more manual/human notes so that we can have updates like, “we are estimated to receive components in March 2024”.
I wish that last line was exaggeration. Unfortunately, I am getting more and more order confirmations with lead times of well over a year and estimated ship dates in late 2024. For parts I ordered early this year, we are approaching three-year lead time estimates for components.
Although the chip shortages are the most nerve-wracking aspect of the current environment, other aspects of our business are also affected by the supply chain problems, and it’s getting more and more uncomfortable.
Old ACs on Pololu building roof, waiting for replacement. Las Vegas Strip in the background. |
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Pololu window tinting, July 2022. |
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We have been very fortunate at Pololu because we have a broad range of products and do our own design and production, so we have been able to adjust what we make based on what components are available. I don’t understand how more small manufacturers are not going out of business, though I am anecdotally starting to hear more about companies facing financial difficulties. Contract manufacturers in particular have it tough when they have to pay for the components they can get while waiting forever for the last few components and not getting paid until they can complete the final product.
My main hope is that just as we could not see how bad the shortages would be, we cannot see how close we are to the end. If it took two years to get a part that shipped today, it might be reasonable to estimate it will take two years to get a part we order now, or even to tack on an extra year for good measure, but eventually things will be better. I expect inventories everywhere are building up (ours are, just not of the last few critical parts!), and the coming global recession that seems to be forecasted from all sides (e.g. by the IPC) could accelerate chip manufacturers finally catching up to the extra demand from the last few years.
Since we are a small business, broader economic downturns can sometimes work in our favor. Our customer base is such a tiny portion of the world, and some of them could do well even if on average the global economy does not. If the slowdown leads to parts we need becoming available sooner, that might overall be better for us. Some of our best supplier relationships came out of the 2008 downturn, when companies started caring about our business after losing some of their bigger customers. We also got a good deal on renting part of the building we are in after it sat vacant for a couple of years, and that served us especially well as we gradually expanded to the whole building over the past ten years.
It’s unsettling that after two years of parts shortages, it does not seem to be getting any better. The situation might even be worse than it was a year ago, but we won’t really know until we are out of it and things are actually good again. I know it has been difficult for our customers, especially those who built our products into their own products or curricula and are counting on us to keep their operations moving. Please know that we are working very hard to keep our stock and production levels up with the minimal possible disruptions, and thank you very much for your continued business and support.
Nearly two years of operations under the COVID-19 pandemic are behind us. Like many other businesses around the world, our biggest challenges have moved from direct health and safety concerns to secondary disruptions, most notably the supply chain issues and the global chip shortage that has been making news and shutting down factories since last year. Initially, we were relatively isolated from the shortages because we had maintained a high inventory, often stocking a year or more of critical components. However, as the disruptions dragged on, our reserves were depleted, and we have had to resort to increasingly drastic measures to keep operating at all.
I apologize to our customers who are frustrated by our worsening response times, price increases, and unavailability of products. I hope showing you some of what we are dealing with will make it easier to understand.
Here is a screenshot from our internal system showing the inventory history of a relatively unremarkable component (a small MOSFET) that we have been using for almost ten years now:
Inventory history for a component with shortages in 2021. |
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The stock history is representative for a typical component that we gradually put into more product designs so that the rate of usage keeps increasing and the amount of stock we keep on hand gradually increases, too. Usage of this part ramped up in 2018, to around 35 thousand pieces per year. We last received some shipments in mid-2020 that put us in a seemingly-secure place, but the situation became less comfortable as we got into 2021, and the past several months have been downright alarming since we might only have enough parts for two more months, while the estimated shipment dates for my orders are well into 2022. And this is with us putting the brakes on parts usage!
Slowing down component consumption is really not fun since our main options are just not making any of a product at all (sometimes we are forced into that option anyway once we run out of parts) or raising prices. Higher prices can make it confusing for customers to select among alternatives since we expect the more expensive product to generally be the better one. To help communicate that some products’ prices and availability are temporarily distorted, we added several rationing-related entries to our list of product status designations. You can see the status of each product along with stock and pricing information:
We initially focused on reducing volume discounts, and building the rationing designations into our system let us automatically exclude rationed items from sales and other special promotions. It has been almost six months since we started officially designating products as rationed, and unfortunately, what we expected to be a temporary measure for a few select items has gradually affected more and more products as component shipments keep getting delayed.
Here is the inventory history for another component, a more expensive and specialized part than the previous one:
10-year inventory history for a component being rationed in 2021. |
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There were already some supply issues with the part in 2017 that led us to keep slightly higher inventory of that component, and you can see the change in the pattern as we ramped up our rationing efforts. We buy the part on reels of 1,000 pieces, so the upward jumps in the graph are multiples of a thousand, and we used to use up fairly high quantities in each manufacturing run, so the downward jumps were fairly sizable, too. For instance, we might make five hundred of a product at a time and just put it all in stock on the website and not make more for a couple of months. Starting in the second quarter of this year, you can see how the inventory graph is a lot smoother as we made much smaller production runs to preserve flexibility in which products to use the components.
This strategy does help us maximize the usage of the parts we have on hand, but it comes with many costs. Production is less efficient since the machine setup is the same whether we are making twenty units of a product or a thousand units. We also have much more internal scrutinizing, planning, and checking of which products to make since accidentally making the wrong product is a much bigger problem than it used to be—it could now mean prolonged inability to make a different, otherwise unrelated product. It’s also more difficult on customers who do want to buy in bigger volumes since we used to have more stock available on our website, and customers could just order. Now, when we show 29 of a motor controller in stock and a customer needs 50, they have to talk to us about how soon we can make the additional 21. This also strains our support staff resources and reduces the service quality for all customers. And the sad thing is that we are doing a lot more work to produce and sell fewer products.
You might be surprised to hear that our total inventory is actually at an all-time high. And apparently, that is fairly common, even among the biggest companies, including the main electronics distributors. When I was talking to my Arrow Electronics rep last month, he said his warehouse is full. I asked of what, and he said he didn’t know, but apparently not the parts he needs.
I spend a lot of time trying to understand what we do have. We have thousands of unique components, and on average we have thousands of each one, so we have many millions of components to keep track of. Most products use many different components, and most components get used in many different products. If we are missing one part out of fifty to make a product, we can’t make the product. And usage rates for the same component are different in different products; what are we supposed to do when we have five thousand left of a component that we use in a $5 product that used to sell thousands of units a month and in a $100 product that sells hundreds of units a month, and the earliest estimated delivery of more components is eight months out? So far, we have mostly raised the prices on the $5 product, sometimes very substantially, while not changing the price on the $100 product, and that lets us keep some finished products available to offer.
There are more and more components that have been on order for over a year now, and meanwhile estimated ship dates for new orders are well into 2023 (not 2022!). It’s a scary time to be an electronics manufacturer.
As I mentioned, we are going through a lot more effort to make fewer completed products, and that contributes to increased costs and higher prices independent of what we are doing with rationing. On top of that, prices for most of the components we have been using for a long time have risen substantially, even as our order volumes increase. Most increases have been in the 10% to 20% range, but several are 50% or more.
Then there are parts that we now buy in smaller quantities from catalog distributors like Digi-Key and Mouser (when we find stock there), and those prices can be several times higher. Some parts I bought a year ago for twelve cents each in quantities of fifty thousand are now costing 25 cents each in those bigger volumes, and if I order just a few hundred or a few thousand, they can cost a dollar each. If we just need one of those on a product we sell for $100, it’s not that big of a deal, but if there are three of those components on a product that used to cost $5, the price is going to have to go up, sometimes dramatically.
Non-electronics component and material costs are also going up, though those have generally been in the more modest 5% to 20% range, but shipping costs are up a lot, so that disproportionately affects heavier and bulkier items. We have had to reprice some of our stepper motors primarily because of the shipping costs to get them here, while we have thus far been able to avoid raising costs on our micro metal gearmotors (though volume discounts are smaller than they used to be). Most of our products involve at least some processing in the US, but we are able to ship some items directly from our China warehouse to other countries to reduce the impact of shipping costs and the tariffs on many products coming into the US from China.
The broader supply chain issues are a problem, too, even though it’s not as bad as with the chip shortages. Most of our mechanical parts, from injection molded plastic parts to motors and servos, come from China, and we are more directly involved in getting them shipped here (unlike the electronics parts, which are also mostly made overseas but which we buy from American distributors who deal with getting the parts into the US). Fortunately, most of our components are small and light so we ship a lot by air anyway, but we do ship heavier and bulkier items by boat and have had our share of days looking at all the ships waiting off the coast of California and wondering when ours would finally get to dock. It seems like regular delays by various carriers like FedEx and UPS are also getting worse, and we have now had at least a couple of instances where really important parts we were waiting months for made it to the US or even to Nevada and then got lost.
I have been writing mostly about components and how it affects electronics we manufacture, which is most of our business, but the other small manufacturers whose products we resell are in the same environment, and so we are seeing price increases and extended unavailability of products from them, too.
Delivery delays and other problems are affecting our shipments to our customers, too. Unfortunately, we are again mostly at the mercy of the large shipping companies and the general situation that has led to reduced service levels around the world. Many of the providers have suspended guarantees of delivery times or extended the times they say delivery will take. We have recently added UPS to our standard shipping offerings during checkout, so our customers at least have some more options in case one service is particularly bad in their area.
As I wrote a few years ago, we buy our electronics components through major authorized distributors, and we have so far not had to resort to going to secondary sellers and brokers (with the associated risks of ending up with counterfeit parts). From my talking to manufacturers’ representatives, my impression is that the semiconductor companies are just genuinely facing a combination of increased demand and reduced capacity as the pandemic interfered with their operations that are spread throughout the world. For example, ST was telling me about one motor driver that gets the silicon processed in Italy, then tested (still in silicon wafer form) in Singapore, and then chopped up and packaged in Malaysia. In this one instance, the silicon is done, and as operations resume in Malaysia, they should be able to get me some of the parts by the end of the year. But for other parts from the same company, such as microcontrollers, they don’t even have enough allocated to my general western North America region to meaningfully talk about where in the queue we are.
When I first heard predictions in early 2021 that the chip shortages would drag on through the end of the year, I didn’t really believe it. It’s increasingly clear that those predictions were right, but at least 2022 is not that far away anymore! And while we do have many orders with expected ship dates two years out (late 2023), we also have several with expected ship dates in early 2022 (and some parts have been trickling in, so it’s not as if we were completely choked off on all supply).
As we approach the holiday season when we traditionally have our biggest sale, we are assessing which products we can make and possibly discount. We have a few new releases this year that we are very excited about, but new products are especially difficult to ramp up, especially if they use new components we didn’t already have on order a year ago.
Despite the various challenges presented by the evolving pandemic and associated disruptions, we have generally been able to keep operating relatively smoothly this year. I know there are many small businesses of all types struggling or even having to shut down completely, and I am very grateful that we have avoided such extreme scenarios. Thank you to all of the employees at Pololu for so reliably keeping everything running, and thank you to all of our customers for your continued business. I wish everyone a safe and happy conclusion to the year and look forward to things improving on all fronts in 2022.
Today marks 20 years since we first shipped a Pololu product, on April 9, 2001! Join me for some reminiscing on where we were twenty years ago and for an update on how we are doing now, more than a year into the coronavirus pandemic.
I think I started Pololu in 2000. Probably in the fall, though I know for sure I was working on firmware for a servo controller (this one) over the summer of 2000. I had worked on other product ideas before that, too, but by November 2000 I had made the first board layout that had the name “Pololu” on it:
IR Beacon PCB showing “Pololu” name and copyright 2000; picture date 12 November 2000. |
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Here are a couple more pictures of the first prototypes, apparently taken on November 12, 2000. That “v1.2” was the version that became Pololu’s first product. I have seen the picture on that product page over the years, but I had forgotten that we still had to do microcontroller development with special windowed ceramic packages back then, with a separate UV eraser device you stuck the chip in for about ten minutes to erase it. (Production parts would then get made with microcontrollers in cheaper plastic packages that were only programmable once.)
The picture on the right shows Paul’s and my initials on the back side of that PCB design, and Paul registered the pololu.com domain on November 18, 2000. Here is a reconstruction, based on the Internet Archive, of how the Pololu web site probably looked in February 2001:
Reconstruction of how pololu.com looked in February 2001. |
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Candice, Paul, and I formally incorporated Pololu in early 2001, while Paul and I were still undergraduates living in dorm rooms (Candice had graduated a year earlier and was working at The MathWorks). Here are some pictures in the dorm in that time frame (how do we not have any better pictures?):
And then we get to April 9, 2001, for which we have the first recorded order. This is what pops up when we open System 2, our system for running most of the company:
All-time sales chart showing first order on 9 April 2001. |
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When we started making that system in 2007, we imported the old data, including the fifteen orders we processed in 2001. Order number one was actually just a free sample to Mr. Hughes, my high school science teacher; we would get our first real sale to a paying customer on May 2.
Most of our time was devoted to school, though we did keep working on products we thought we would eventually release, especially when we could incorporate it into our classwork. This first prototype of our Orangutan robot controller (flash programmable microcontroller with a serial bootloader, plus integrated motor drivers) was also part of our final project for our 6.836: Embodied Intelligence class:
Original Orangutan robot controller prototypes, 21 April 2001. |
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Paul and I were class of 2001, so we were close to done with our undergraduate degrees, and I was effectively a grad student that last semester of my fourth year. I skipped the graduation ceremony, but the lab I was working at was right next to the site anyway, and Paul spotted me one of his diplomas so I could feel a little more festive.
MIT class of 2001 graduation, 8 June 2001. |
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This was all still before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which we experienced quite intensely because of the two flights originating from Boston. Paul had moved out of Massachusetts by then, and I had moved out of the dorms to an apartment in Watertown. Paul visited Candice and me there in February 2002, where we at least remembered to take a picture of our board of directors meeting:
Pololu directors meeting in Watertown, Massachusetts, 3 February 2002. |
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I ended up skipping my second chance to be in the graduation ceremony and moved out of Massachusetts after wrapping up my master’s degree requirements by the end of May. You can see pictures from the next ten years of Pololu in my Ten years in Las Vegas update almost nine years ago.
Besides just focusing on Candice, Paul, and myself, I think it would be fun to look at where some of our other key people were twenty years ago, in 2001. There are fifteen of us still at Pololu who have been here at least ten years, which also means we have been working together since before we were at our current building. Unfortunately, not everyone has ready access to good pictures from 2001!
Ben had these two physical pictures that he scanned for me:
That second one is actually four years older, probably from May 1997, close to our high school graduation. I seem to be holding an RC transmitter and part of a robot arm.
Fang, meanwhile, was in college in China, and it would still be many years before she would even meet Paul:
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David was also there for Paul’s graduation, so that must be when I first met him.
He would still go through most of high school and four years of college before moving out to join us in 2008. If you have used any of our USB products, you have benefited from his great work.
David’s college friend RyanTM also moved here from Illinois to join us later that year. These pictures from late 2000 were the closest he could find to 20 years ago:
Ryan gradually became involved in almost all aspects of Pololu, including our facilities and production; since the pandemic started, he has been working mostly remotely and has been able to focus more on our IT needs.
David’s and RyanTM’s college friend Kevin worked at Intel for two years before coming out to join us in 2010.
Kevin and RyanTM were in the same grade at the same high school, but they wouldn’t meet until their sophomore year in the fall of 2001.
Linnea has been with Pololu the longest out of people who were not my friends from school. She also finished college in 2001, at the University of Wisconsin, and moved to Las Vegas that year. She would join us six years later after responding to an ad for an office assistant/shipping clerk.
We had already filled the position she applied for, but we hired her as a laser cutting quoter; she then moved through various roles at Pololu and has now been our HR manager for many years.
Arthur, our operations manager, has also been with us since 2007. Here is his school picture from 20 years ago, when he was a seventh grader in California!
He recalls, “I moved to Vegas without any reason or real plan other than to get away, and when I got here I was totally NOT looking for a job right away. I really only applied here because ‘laser operator’ sounded so cool.”
You might recognize Emily from our videos; she has also had many roles in Pololu, from pick and place machine operator to product designer. She grew up in Vegas and was starting high school in 2000/2001. Here is one of her videos!
That last picture on the right is at the same climbing gym where Ben, Candice, Fang, Paul, and I eventually met her in 2008 when she was finishing up her physics degree at UNLV; she joined us in 2009.
Jennifer joined us in 2008 and effectively was the shipping department. She became the shipping manager as we grew, but she also became more and more involved in the non-technical customer service side. She has been dominating our Halloween costume contests for years, so it’s fitting that the only pictures she could find from 2001 were from Halloween.
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We were already moving toward her working exclusively in customer service, and once the pandemic hit, that accelerated the transition; she has been working mostly remotely for the past year, with occasional visits in person just to make sure she can still help out in shipping if we need it.
RyanB is our current shipping manager, and he has been with us since early 2010. Here he is back in Minnesota in the summer of 2001:
You might recognize him on the forklift from some of my new equipment arrival posts like this one.
Damian is the youngest among those who have been at Pololu over ten years; here he is back in late 2001, “probably in fourth grade”:
He joined us in 2010 a year after finishing high school and is now in charge of our electronics production equipment and processes.
Rocky is the fifteenth person who has been with us since 2010 or earlier, and he started on the same day as Damian.
Rocky’s “picture from 2001 I hope”. |
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Rocky was working on his mechanical engineering degree at UNLV for his first many years at Pololu, and there were stretches where he was here part time, but he’s been here full time since he graduated in 2018, working on things like quality control and characterization of our gearmotors.
Pololu Valley – As I was looking through old pictures, I was hoping to find one of Candice and me at Pololu Valley in Hawaii. We were there in 2001, and it turns out that’s the last time Candice was in Hawaii (and I only went back once after that, due to a family emergency in 2008). Apparently I took all the pictures and selfies were not so much a thing yet.
The extra data in the picture files indicates this was the day after Christmas in 2001. I don’t remember if we were already thinking of moving to Las Vegas at that point, but I am sure I was not thinking that would be the last time we were there for the next twenty years; otherwise, I definitely would have taken better pictures!
We hit this twenty-year milestone soon after we passed the one-year anniversary of Nevada businesses getting shut down in response to the coronavirus, which happened on March 18. That makes reflecting on the past 20 years especially strange, with the world as it was just thirteen months ago seeming so foreign now. Life has its ups and downs, and we are not where I perhaps naively dreamed we would be by now, but I am also extremely grateful that we are still functioning at all. When I wrote that first blog post the weekend after the shutdowns started, I really thought we might not make it. I was telling everyone, even these long-term employees I just wrote about above, to go file for unemployment insurance because we wouldn’t be able to pay them.
It took me about five years to get over Dez dying, in the sense that it wasn’t on my mind all the time and that I could feel joyful and think about celebrating successes without flinching at the thought of some disaster blindsiding me. This feeling last March was not as bad, but it still really sucked. I mention these things because I do not want to seem indifferent to the pain and suffering for the millions around the world for whom this pandemic has been that life-shattering event. I also want to write down, before I forget it, how awful and terrifying my situation felt in March 2020, and to help convey the depth of the gratitude I feel toward those who helped Pololu make it this far.
I was already cautiously optimistic in my last update from late February, and since then there has been a very unexpectedly positive development: we started getting vaccinated at the beginning of March! Literally the day after I wrote in my internal company blog that it might still be a few months before we get our vaccines, Nevada opened up eligibility to manufacturing and other sectors applicable to Pololu. On March 3, I got my first shot!
Jan and Paul got their first COVID vaccines on 3 March 2021 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. |
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And, two weeks ago, I got my second one! We have also been informally tracking how many of us have gotten the vaccines, and watching these counts go up has been a huge morale boost.
The chart is a lower bound since it only includes people who have shared more specific details for the purposes of generating the chart; I think the actual count of people who have gotten at least one shot is already past 40. There are just over fifty of us now, so that’s around 80%! And over half of us already have the second shot or a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
With the vaccination numbers similarly going up around the country and around the world, and with growing evidence that they work, it’s easy to be optimistic that the worst really is behind us this time. There’s a lot of work to be done, but we have a great team to do it. Thank you so very much to all the customers, suppliers, collaborators, and Pololu employees, past and present, who have kept us in business for 20 years, including this last very difficult year.
And thank you Ben, Fang, Paul, and Candice for doing this with me. I’ve gotten to work with my best friends for two decades, and practically speaking, for my whole life. Thank you for making it awesome!
We are approaching a year since governments in the US started shutting down businesses in response to the pandemic, and by this time last year, the then-novel coronavirus was already causing what we naively considered to be severe disruption to our operations because of the restrictions that were implemented in China. (We have an office in Shenzhen, and many parts we use, such as bare printed circuit boards, come from China even when our China office is not involved).
The past year has been so filled with ups and downs that it’s difficult to recall how things were when. In my last update in mid-November, I almost wrote something about no one at Pololu having tested positive for COVID yet. That same week, we had several employees test positive as we were caught up in Nevada’s surge in cases. Nevada, like many other states, newly tightened restrictions on businesses and public gatherings, and we scaled back in-person staff to only those necessary on premises for basic operations. Over the holiday period, we had an additional 10-15 people who had been back return to being off-site, leaving around 30 on-site. Fortunately, we seem to have prevented any coronavirus transmission here, and those who did get sick have recovered without serious complications.
Nevada’s government-mandated “pause” was extended twice, and some of the restrictions finally began easing in mid-February. We did have some additional isolated COVID cases among our employees this year, but we have been able to maintain production and shipping throughout this time. It looks like new infection rates are coming down and vaccination rates are going up, which makes it easy to be optimistic that the worst is finally behind us. Like everyone else in the world, we don’t know what changes are still ahead and how close we are to full (or at least substantial) resumption of activities, but it was a big relief at least to make it through 2020, and now the first two months of 2021.
Looking back, we were fortunate to be where we were when the pandemic hit us. One major example is that we did some fairly substantial renovations from 2018-2019, and we spent most of 2019 with big holes in our floors and many areas of the building impassable. I had this hole outside my office starting in February 2019, and the stairs weren’t even usable until July (and they were finally finished even later)!
And our production area looks much better today than it did for most of 2019:
And while it’s still sad to see how empty and underutilized our breakroom has been for the past year, it still beats the piles of dirt we had inside less than a year before.
2020 was stressful enough as it was, and I am very grateful we wrapped up the remodeling by the time the pandemic hit. I feel so sorry for all the businesses who made similar recent investments before the pandemic and then had their businesses completely shut down. At least we are still able to use the space, and I hope it will eventually see more use as it gets safer to have more people in the building.
So, where does that leave us going forward? I’m reminded of a false “proof” by induction, that I can carry infinite weight because I know I can carry some weight and for any weight I can carry, I can carry one gram more. It’s easy to take it for granted and get lulled into complacency that since we’ve made it this far, we’ll make it forever. (That keeps being true until it’s not.) However, I do want to recognize that while in some sense we lost a year, in many ways, we are in a better place than we were a year ago. One way we are acknowledging this is to update our donation requests to be less about our survival. I am hesitant to completely remove those requests and declare victory since that would be an unwarranted arrogance, so I would rather reframe the donation requests as an invitation to support us if you like what we do, similar to how you might donate to content creators on YouTube or Patreon.
Our operations are still stretched fairly thin since we have about 30% fewer people doing almost the same amount of work as we did a year ago. Some things are more difficult to do now than before, but we also have a more experienced core team and we keep working on our processes to do things better. Our emphasis is on normal production and order fulfillment, which I hope has gone well enough that most customers will not have noticed any changes. New challenges, including component shortages and other supply chain disruptions, keep cropping up, but that was also true of just normal life before the pandemic, too. Some of our extra support and special services like product customizations have been affected, but we will work on improving those and on more effective ways to address the very broad range of challenges our customers face.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us and helped us get through this past year. We hope the worst is behind us, and we will keep working hard to contribute to a better future for all of us.
I am thrilled to announce the release of our newest robot, the 3pi+! This new platform is a major upgrade from the original 3pi robot we introduced twelve years ago. At 97 mm, the diameter is just 1mm larger than the original, and the general concept of a tiny, fast robot powered by four AAA batteries and two micro metal gearmotors remains the same. However, just about everything has been redesigned from the ground up to add the extra features everyone has been asking for.
First off, the 3pi+ is now a platform that encompasses a range of products, not just one particular robot. This is enabled primarily by the chassis now being an independent structure rather than being a specific circuit board with motors strapped on:
3pi+ Chassis Kit (No Motors or Electronics). |
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The chassis incorporates the battery holders, motor mounts, and ball caster. An outer bumper skirt is removable and the motors can instead be held in by separate clips (also included in the kit). The left-most picture shows the chassis with motors installed but without the bumper skirt or motor clips, and the next two pictures show the motor clips installed:
Making the chassis separate from any electronics means that you can use it with your own electronics and that we can make various versions with different capabilities and microcontrollers.
The first full 3pi+ robot we are launching is the 3pi+ 32U4, which is based on an Arduino-compatible ATmega32U4 microcontroller from Microchip (formerly from Atmel). Like the original 3pi, the 3pi+ 32U4 has five integrated downward-looking reflectance sensors, making the robot a great starting point for line following and line-maze events.
The 3pi+ 32U4 offers many major improvements over the original 3pi, including:
3pi+ 32U4 Robot features, top view. |
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3pi+ 32U4 Robot features, bottom view. |
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The 3pi+ 32U4 is also available with three motor options for different usage scenarios:
3pi+ 32U4 Version | Products | Micro Metal Gearmotor | Top Speed | Comments |
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Standard Edition | assembled or kit | 30:1 MP 6V | 1.5 m/s | great all-around balance between controllability and speed, with top theoretical speed above that of the original 3pi |
Turtle Edition | assembled or kit | 75:1 LP 6V | 0.4 m/s | longest battery life, easiest to control, appropriate for swarm robot projects or classrooms where you might not want robots flying around the floor (or desktop) too quickly |
Hyper Edition | assembled or kit | 15:1 HPCB 6V | ~4 m/s | ridiculous speed, which can definitely be fun. But, controlling that speed can be difficult, which can make the robot more prone to self-destruction (or at least self-inflicted damage), so we recommend this only for advanced users |
These three 3pi+ 32U4 motor options are available in assembled or kit form, and for those who want to do your own thing, the parts are available separately so that you can pick some other motor or gear ratio.
Normally we would have an introductory special for this big of a new product release, but since we are about to launch our annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale, you can get a great discount on the new 3pi+ there!
This week marks eight months since business shutdowns began in Nevada in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Here is an update about how we have been surviving at Pololu since my last detailed post in April, when we got our PPP loan.
We managed to reach a record sales quarter for Q1 despite the last few weeks being under the Nevada emergency measures and February onward being disrupted by the shutdowns affecting our China operations. Sales really dropped in April and even more in May, leading to Q2 sales ending up the worst since 2013. The money we received in April from the PPP loan allowed us to keep paying those employees who were still working and to cover health insurance and other benefits for the rest. We submitted our PPP loan forgiveness application in early July on the day our bank released their application and kept in constant contact with our bank rep while we maintained core operations with a minimal staff.
The initial loan application had been approved very quickly, so we were hoping to get a resolution on the forgiveness similarly quickly to let us know where we stood regarding how much we would be in debt. We made some tough staffing decisions in July and August, and that turned out to be a very good move because the loan forgiveness process ended up taking a lot longer. We started the year with around 80 employees, and by the end of August, we had reduced that to around 55, of which about ten work only remotely. Everyone else has now formally quit or been laid off, with some hope that most of them could eventually return once the pandemic is under control.
Q3 brought several special high-volume sales, including components going into coronavirus testing equipment around the world, which helped Q3 sales inch past our Q1 sales for a new all-time record sales quarter. Perhaps some of that was also impacted by orders delayed from Q2 and from schools buying more kits for the resumption of classes in the fall. It sure felt like things were going in a good direction, which I guess is how a lot of the world felt.
The news did not stay good for long as sales dropped a lot again in October, falling below our April low (but not getting as bad as May) as the new wave of COVID cases swept Europe and brought in renewed shutdowns in many countries there. November has so far also been weak as the coronavirus continues to surge across the globe.
We got one bit of good news for Pololu last week when our PPP loan forgiveness went through! We did not get our whole loan forgiven, but it was over 90% of the loan amount, which is a substantial amount of money that covers a lot of our losses from Q2 and lets us approach the end of the year with a bit of cash reserves instead of being in a hole. It’s a huge relief knowing we should be able to ride out the holiday season without having to do further layoffs.
We are of course working hard to do more than just to get by for another few months. Some of the staff we brought back in the summer are working on new and exciting products, including resumption of projects we had been working on long before the coronavirus hit. We have not even done proper announcements of some of the items that are already released, including our 3-channel wide field of view (FOV) distance sensor module.
That was a very challenging project that I still intend to write about in a separate blog post. Right now, I have one more product to tease that we are pushing to release in time for the holidays!
Speaking of the holidays, normally we would be gearing up for our biggest sale of the year, our Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale that has run from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through the following Monday. This also made that period very busy for our shipping and manufacturing departments. Since we are working with a reduced staff this year and many people are already stretched thin covering multiple roles, we will be scaling back the intensity of the sale and running it longer in the hopes of distributing the load on those departments. Last year, we introduced a design-your-own-doorbuster promotion, and that was pretty fun to run, so we’ll try to do that again (though we’ll probably be less open to selling things at a loss just to be in the holiday spirit).
Only six more weeks of this crazy year to go! I am so grateful to everyone who has helped us get this far, from all the customers who kept ordering to the employees who stuck with me through the scariest times to everyone who has made a donation. Thank you very much and stay healthy and safe, everybody!
We are into May, and after almost 8 weeks of shutdowns and emergency operations, most of the world’s attention seems to be moving toward reopening and how to return to some semblance of normal, or at least longer-term sustainable operations. With no particular medical solution even on the horizon, it’s clear that we have a long way to go, and a city like Las Vegas is going to be hurt especially hard and for a long time by changes people will adopt until they are comfortable flying for fun again. Pololu has managed to hold up much better than I initially feared during the first week of mandated shutdowns, and I am especially grateful to all of our customers and staff members who have worked hard to get us this far.
It is with this backdrop of gratitude for making it this far while realizing we still have a long way to go that I am especially excited to announce our first new products released since the pandemic hit!
In all, we have eight new wheels for micro and standard sized servos. These are red and white versions of the four sizes we released in black back in January. Since we are operating with a minimum staff on site, we don’t have many actual pictures of the new wheels in action, so I will use the pictures with older black wheels for the rest of the post.
Black Pololu Wheels for Standard and Micro Servos – 90, 70, 60, and 40 mm diameters. |
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We have small, 40 mm and 60 mm sizes that are compatible with micro servo splines with 20 teeth and a 4.8 mm diameter and can be used with the following continuous rotation servos that we carry:
We have larger 70 mm and 90 mm sizes that are compatible with standard servo splines with 25 teeth and a 5.8 mm diameter and can be used with the following continuous rotation servos we carry:
If you plan on using the wheels with a servo not listed above, be sure to check your servo’s specifications for compatibility as servo splines are not standardized.
I was never especially fond of continuous-rotation servos, but there’s no denying that they’re often a quick and relatively simple way to get something moving, both from the electronics side (since the motor controller is built into the servo) and the software side. I am a fan of building your own unique robots, so I am happy we now have a range of size and color choices to give you more problem-solving options and variety in your robots.
Like many of our plastic products, these wheels were designed by us in Las Vegas and then injection molded in China. Since we already had the design and molds finished before we released the black versions, these new products are not the most new from a design perspective. We made the black ones first, and red and white were supposed to follow shortly after the Chinese New Year holiday. As we all got reminded, things don’t always go according to plan. And now, what should have been a minor new product has additional sentimental meaning as our first new product since the coronavirus upended our lives and a symbol of our determination to carry on.
We had been announcing new products along with introductory discounts for the last few years, and I wavered for a bit about doing extra discounts for these wheels. Shipping costs have gone up dramatically, and we’re trying to raise whatever money we can, so extra discounts are not the first thing I felt like doing. But the whole point is that we do want to celebrate at least a little! So, hooray for the continuation of the new product discount tradition:
The first hundred customers to use coupon code SERVOWHEELS can get 22% off up to 3 pairs of each size! And, if you are one of the lucky ones not especially financially hurt by the pandemic and are interested in these wheels, please consider getting them without the coupon or even donating to help Pololu keep operating. We have set up item 2400 for donating in $1 increments.
Thank you to all of you who have donated to us or otherwise supported us over the past two months. Stay safe and healthy, everybody!
We are into week 6 of emergency operations. Our day-to-day routines are largely unchanged from what they were last week (we continue to ship all orders on time with a reduced on-site staff), so please see my earlier posts for more details about that. After more than a month of a new normal setting in, we are striving for a balance of avoiding complacency in daily operations while planning for a future that will likely never be back to how things were a few months ago.
On the complacency front, we were reminded of the stakes when one of our employees unexpectedly passed away at the end of last week from a sudden illness that, from the limited information we have available, was not related to the coronavirus. She was not part of our reduced, on-site staff, so I last saw her in person six weeks ago, and she was in contact a few weeks ago. As the toll of the pandemic mounts, more and more of us are going to be hit increasingly personally, from losing jobs and businesses to missing out on pivotal moments like being present at a child’s birth, to literally life and death experiences made even more painful by new restrictions on being with loved ones and being able to mourn.
However things play out and however bad they get, let’s try to be part of making things better. We can be responsible, supportive, useful, thoughtful, helpful. Many of us are suffering, and probably the only ones not afraid are the ones too unaware to know they should feel some fear. But we can acknowledge the fear without letting it completely overpower us, and we can still look for places in our lives where we can make a difference and decide to make things better.
The rest of this post is about a longer-term strategy I am thinking about in response to the pandemic: moving toward more open-source projects (both for software and hardware). I would very much appreciate any thoughts and advice people have on the subject.
I wrote about open-source hardware exactly eight years ago this week. I just read it for the first time in maybe five years, and although I feel like I could have written the same thing recently, in many ways I’m a different person than I was then, with the usual progress one would hope for from living another 25% longer, supplemented with extra jolts to my system from things like my baby dying the day before he was born over five years ago and the coronavirus pandemic we have all been shocked by this year. It took me most of those five years to really be able to move on from Dez dying, and when I was locking up Pololu on the Friday a month ago after the first week of escalating government-mandated shutdowns, I really thought I might not be reopening it for weeks and that there would be little chance of Pololu surviving.
Having weathered the past five weeks of emergency operations and being one of the lucky businesses to get temporary funding via the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP loan), my outlook about Pololu making it has substantially improved, and with solvency likely assured for at least a few months, I am thinking about strategic changes for medium and long-term survival in a very different world where the future looks especially uncertain. Here are some of the changes to the world and to Pololu that make open-source projects much more compelling than eight years ago:
Longer-term changes preceding the coronavirus pandemic:
Laser cutting Zumo blades at Pololu on 22 April 2020. |
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Previously-known arguments for open source that have new weight because of the pandemic:
New arguments for open source specifically because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In short, the heightened uncertainty about business collapses, shortage of money, and physical separation/decentralization that the coronavirus crisis is forcing on us all substantially tip the balance in favor of moving toward more open source projects in organizations like Pololu.
I would appreciate any advice or thoughts any of you have on the topic. Here a few areas you might be able to comment on:
After almost a month of emergency operations, during which we have continued to ship all orders, our Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan came through, which should buy us at least another several months of continued operation! I will get to more about that later in this post, but first, here is a summary of how we have gotten this far:
The main big news for us is that our Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan went through, which should guarantee that we can meet our minimal expenses for at least a few months even if we had to completely stop operations in Las Vegas. This also gives us some breathing room to plan a month or two down the road instead of just day to day or week to week. One of the main questions facing us regarding the loan is how much of it will remain a loan and how much might be forgiven. It looks like our options range somewhere between these two extremes:
The exact rules for what will be forgiven are still getting clarified, so this is adding yet another level of uncertainty that makes any decision making difficult. Still, after four weeks of scrambling to have a plan for the next day and then the next week, it feels like a luxury to be able to even be talking about next month, even if we do not know when more people will be able to start going back to work again.
What’s clear is that while a loan might buy us some short-term time, we still need to figure out a way to operate profitably with the various restrictions that are likely to stay with us even as states and countries begin reopening their economies.
Pick and place machine maintenance, 9 April 2020. |
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I am very grateful for the donations that continue to come in. There are too many for me to respond to individually, even for those of you I know! So, sorry I am not able to say so individually, and please know that I do see them coming in and that it means a lot. They have helped us get through the first rough month, where there were days (especially early on) where I really thought Pololu would not be able to make it through. I know it cannot be part of the long-term plan, but given the extraordinary time we are going through, every bit helps to give us a bit more time and a bit more encouragement.
If you can, please consider donating to help Pololu make it through this challenging time and to emerge stronger than ever. We have set up item 2400 for donating in $1 increments.
We have added a feature to our online checkout system to allow for orders to be placed with a “pay now, ship later” option that lets you authorize us to charge the payment for an order as soon as it comes in, possibly well ahead of when the order would actually ship. We started working on this feature at a time when we thought complete shutdown of our operations was imminent, when it might have been weeks or even months before we could reopen. As I wrote at the top of this update, we have been able to ship all orders, and I expect to continue shipping, but this option still allows us to prioritize shipments and reduce stress with orders that come in later in the day and can get shipped the next day. We have already received dozens of orders with this option selected, and it is also encouraging just to see that our customers are trying to help us out. Thank you to all of you who have selected that option!
We offer a few of our products with some of the optional (but usually used) through-hole connectors soldered in. If you are able to solder, please consider ordering the non-soldered versions if there is plentiful stock of them. We do all of the through-hole soldering by hand, and most of our manual assemblers were older or otherwise in the higher-risk population for COVID-19, so they are not currently working here. And if you’re at home doing a non-critical project, now is a good time to do a little extra soldering, right?
On a related note, it’s a little bit easier for us if you order the item that has more stock. Each product page has links to relevant parametric comparison tables that can help you identify similar products that might have more available stock:
You can check available quantity of similar products on the parametric comparison table. |
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If your application could get by with either an item of which we have 300 in stock or one of which we have 12 units, please get the product that we have much more of. It’s probably a more popular version that we make more often, and it keeps the less popular version available for those who might really need it.
We have had to severely cut back on our technical support. If you are one those people with extra time on your hands now and are familiar with any of our products, please consider helping out our other customers on our forum.
If you know anybody that could afford to help us out, please let them know and ask them to contribute.
Part of the reason I have been going into more details in some areas of these updates is so you might be able to better give us advice about how we could make things better. Maybe you’re also working at a small business facing similar challenges, and you have some good suggestions. Maybe your uncle has a vacant building nearby. One suggestion I’ve heard repeatedly is about gift certificates, which we are looking into; if you know of particularly good ways of implementing that or things to be careful about, please let us know.
Monday, 13 April 2020 update – we got our PPP loan!
Today, April 6, marks the beginning of our fourth week of emergency operations. We are still hanging on, and it looks like we will be able to maintain operations similar to those of the past three weeks (i.e. continue shipping all orders with a minimal staff on site) at least through the end of April, by which point I hope some of the emergency loans we have applied for might start coming in.
Today I am just posting some quick updates about frequently asked questions; please see my last two posts for more information about how we are coping with the coronavirus emergency:
We are very grateful for the many donations that continue to come in. As we trim our expenses, those donations become a larger fraction of what we need to get by. I know it’s asking so much for donations with no strings attached, and it means a great deal at a time when we are scrambling to make ends meet. To the many of you making us special proposals and suggestions, thank you and please keep them coming. We do not have the resources now to reply to them individually, but they do affect what we are considering offering and how we continue to operate.
If you can, please consider donating to help Pololu make it. We have set up item 2400 for donating in $1 increments.
We are especially grateful for any routine orders that do not require special considerations. We are also happy to help with emergency orders involving efforts to fight the pandemic. For smaller, non-emergency inquiries, please understand that we are trying to maintain most of our usual operations with a much more limited staff while having to take on a lot of extra work (new HR issues for navigating layoffs vs. waiting for possible stimulus funds, coming up with new operating/safety procedures, rerouting incoming and outgoing packages among constantly changing rules for each country and carrier, etc.). Please help us reduce our workload by cutting back on non-critical inquiries. For regular orders, prices and stock are all on the web site. Tracking numbers are included in shipment confirmation emails. Invoices are available on the website when you log in. For technical support, please consider our forum.
One of the most common questions or recommendations we get is about applying for emergency loans. We applied for an SBA economic injury disaster loan (EIDL) almost two weeks ago and followed up with the $10k advance application provided by the new CARES Act. We have been working with our bank all weekend to apply for the new Paycheck Protection Program loan, the applications for which have just started becoming available. My understanding is that the SBA is also scrambling as it is suddenly charged with processing more than 10x what they usually do over the whole year over the next several weeks. We received some confirmation about the EIDL loan being received but there’s been no visible progress on that, and in general, it’s difficult to know what to expect in terms of if, when, and how much we might be able to receive in emergency loans.
Given that uncertainty, it is especially urgent for us to cut costs where we can and to bring in whatever money we can to keep covering basic expenses. We are definitely hoping we qualify for some assistance and that it will come soon, so we are doing everything we can to keep all those applications moving forward while also trying to maintain operations independent of any guarantee of anything coming from that.
We received a few responses questioning our treatment of employees while asking for donations. They are far outnumbered by positive responses, and I suspect the negative responses come from people who have little appreciation of the realities of running a small business, especially amid this level of disruption. Nevertheless, I believe more people might be wondering about what we are doing, and I am proud of our response given the circumstances, so I would like to highlight what we have done so far.
Some of the responses questioned the “over half of our staff is unpaid in one way or another” phrasing. We had about 75 employees at the beginning of March, and over half of them are now either laid off, on unpaid leave, or volunteering to take a pay cut. This is just a basic reality of payroll being by far our biggest expense, and if people cannot come in to work and money stops coming in, there is nothing to pay them from. We are doing everything we can to keep Pololu in a viable state so that there is something for everyone to come back to in a few weeks or months.
Here is some of the rest of our response:
Pololu laser cutting department on 6 April 2020. |
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Pololu laser cutting department on 6 April 2020. |
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Pololu packaging department on 6 April 2020. |
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Pololu quality control on 6 April 2020. |
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Pololu shipping department on 6 April 2020. |
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Pololu SMT pick and place production line on 6 April 2020. |
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Soldering at Pololu on 6 April 2020. |
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Pololu testing department on 6 April 2020. |
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If you can, please consider donating to help Pololu make it. We have set up item 2400 for donating in $1 increments.
We have added a feature to our online checkout system to allow for orders to be placed with a “pay now, ship later” option that lets you authorize us to charge the payment for an order as soon as it comes in, possibly well ahead of when the order would actually ship. We started working on this feature at a time when we thought complete shutdown of our operations was imminent, when it might have been weeks or even months before we could reopen. As I wrote at the top of this update, we have been able to ship all orders, and I expect to continue shipping, but this option still allows us to prioritize shipments and reduce stress with orders that come in later in the day and can get shipped the next day. We have already received dozens of orders with this option selected, and it is also encouraging just to see that our customers are trying to help us out. Thank you to all of you who have selected that option!
We offer a few of our products with some of the optional (but usually used) through-hole connectors soldered in. If you are able to solder, please consider ordering the non-soldered versions if there is plentiful stock of them. We do all of the through-hole soldering by hand, and most of our manual assemblers were older or otherwise in the higher-risk population for COVID-19, so they are not currently working here. And if you’re at home doing a non-critical project, now is a good time to do a little extra soldering, right?
On a related note, it’s a little bit easier for us if you order the item that has more stock. Each product page has links to relevant parametric comparison tables that can help you identify similar products that might have more available stock:
You can check available quantity of similar products on the parametric comparison table. |
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If your application could get by with either an item of which we have 300 in stock or one of which we have 12 units, please get the product that we have much more of. It’s probably a more popular version that we make more often, and it keeps the less popular version available for those who might really need it.
We have had to severely cut back on our technical support. If you are one those people with extra time on your hands now and are familiar with any of our products, please consider helping out our other customers on our forum.
If you know anybody that could afford to help us out, please let them know and ask them to contribute.
Part of the reason I have been going into more details in some areas of these updates is so you might be able to better give us advice about how we could make things better. Maybe you’re also working at a small business facing similar challenges, and you have some good suggestions. Maybe your uncle has a vacant building nearby. One suggestion I’ve heard repeatedly is about gift certificates, which we are looking into; if you know of particularly good ways of implementing that or things to be careful about, please let us know.
Monday, 13 April 2020 update – we got our PPP loan!
Quick summary: Pololu has filled all orders and continues to operate, including shipping products to important customers fighting COVID-19 around the world. Thank you for all of your help and donations, which are really making a difference. We are preparing for extended operations under emergency conditions and evaluating all available avenues for support. Cash donations remain the most useful and immediate way to help, but there are other ways you can help us. Donate here.
Please see new update posted Monday, 6 April 2020.
Still shipping, 30 March 2020. |
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It has been a week since I posted about Pololu’s dire circumstances brought about by the new coronavirus pandemic. My outlook today is much more positive than it was back then, in large part thanks to the support we have received during the past week. We are by no means out of the woods yet, as a company, as a country, and as a planet. I write today’s post to provide an update on how we are doing, to try to address the questions I am getting repeated from many people, to share our general outlook for moving forward, and to renew my appeal for help in any way possible. Since there are many topics that might be of varying degrees of interest to each of you, I will try to organize this with more sections and headings:
We have operated for eight business days now with a skeleton crew of approximately 20 staff members on site and 10-20 more people assisting via remote connections from home. We have shipped every order for in-stock items that has been placed during that time, and we have limited production capacity for special orders beyond what is in stock.
We have had no new local business shutdown orders that would affect us since Friday the 20th, and we have received dozens if not hundreds of customer requests and certifications from customers that have been declared essential businesses or services within their jurisdictions, and as suppliers to those organizations, we are essential by extension as well. We also continue to get many confirmations of our products and services (e.g. laser cutting) being used directly in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, so we will keep shipping orders as long as delivery services keep operating.
You can see available stock for each product live on our website, and if your order consists of just in-stock items, we should be able to ship your order within a day.
Available stock is shown on each product page. |
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Each product page has links to relevant parametric comparison tables that can help you identify similar products that might have more available stock:
Each product page has links to relevant parametric comparison tables. |
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You can check available quantity of similar products on the parametric comparison table. |
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Our China facility in Shenzhen is also partially operational, and we are able to ship some special volume orders directly from there. The available shipping carriers and destinations are changing day by day as countries respond to the pandemic, but we are working with customers to route critical orders as quickly as possible. Please note that all of our electronics products are manufactured at our Las Vegas, Nevada, USA facility, so shipments directly from China are only available for select products, mostly motors and other mechanical components that we have machined or injection molded there.
We also have hundreds of distributors around the world that might be operational and have stock closer to you. We will be working with them in the coming days to update the distributors page with information about those businesses confirmed to still be in operation.
We have received thousands of dollars in donations since my original post. I have tried to send at least a few personal thank you emails every day, but there have been more donations than I can keep up with. It is extremely motivating to see the breadth of donations we are receiving from all over the world, from customers we haven’t heard from in a long time, to family members of employees, to former employees, to people that, as far as we can tell, have had no previous association with Pololu. To all of you whom I have not thanked yet individually, thank you!!! I am making sure everyone at Pololu knows about your support. The value of the money we receive in donations is multiplied both by the psychological boost it gives us and by getting factored into various lines of credit that we have available to us that are automatically calculated based on the rolling average revenue appearing in our accounts.
Several Pololu employees who are part of our continuing operations have volunteered reductions in their own pay so that we might conserve our limited cash on hand and continue payments and insurance for those employees that are most in need. PT from Adafruit also responded to my call for help and gave me some useful perspective and helped spread the word about our situation even as Adafruit conducted its own emergency operations out of New York, the US epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.
The donations and support are all the more meaningful at a time like this, where nearly everyone is impacted and the future so uncertain.
If you can, please consider donating to help Pololu make it through this difficult time. You can use item 2400 to donate in $1 increments. I will also post other ways you can help us at the end of this update.
After payroll, the building rent is our biggest expense and obligation, so I of course reached out to my landlord right away to see what their position was. Unfortunately, the building we are in was just sold in the last 6 months, so we do not have the long working history we had with the previous landlord. I am posting a little more detail here than I would normally be comfortable with, but we are in an extraordinary emergency and I am hearing the same questions and suggestions from multiple people, so I want to share this information because I believe it could be useful in getting us help and advice.
We are the only tenant in a building that is approximately 86,000 square feet. The building had been vacant, I think for years, after the previous economic downturn, and we moved in here at the end of 2011, taking part of the first floor. In 2013, the landlord received an offer for the second floor. It was a time when we were growing rapidly, and the building was not at all well set up for sharing with multiple tenants, so we made the owner an offer for the space and reached an agreement that was expensive but affordable for us and at a lower rate for the landlord than the competing offer but without the need to do any new construction. Over the next several years, we agreed to extensions in the lease and a gradual takeover of the remainder of the first floor, so that we would officially have the building to ourselves and the landlord could stop looking for other tenants to fill the remaining space.
In 2018, we negotiated a new extension of the lease. The building was still in its as-is state from 2009 or whenever the previous tenants moved out, and it was a particularly impractical floorplan based on the previous tenant’s operations. The landlord preferred putting some money into renovating the space and increasing our rent over keeping the rent at a bare minimum, and so even though our cost went up again, we were getting a more usable space with plenty of room for growth at still a decent total cost. The renovations took longer than expected and ran through most of 2019. Some kind of family change caused the landlord to unexpectedly have to sell the building, which got us to where we are today: with a new owner, in a building that is bigger than we need but well set up for us, and with what I think is a pretty good rate.
The new landlord thinks it’s an incredibly good rate and thinks the market rate (of course before this pandemic hit) should be closer to double what we are paying now. We have more than four more years left on our lease, and from his perspective, he might even prefer us to be out of the building. I suspect he has dozens or even more tenants from all over suddenly asking for reductions or notifying him that they won’t be able to make rent, and given his view of what we are paying relative to what the space is worth, we are going to be low on the list of tenants he wants to make special exceptions for. So for now, if we believe we can be back to full operation in the next few months and then resume the growth path we were on, it is very important for us not to give the landlord any pretext for evicting us. I realize some of what he told me might be for negotiation, but I believe he was generally up-front with me. (And I’ve been using the singular “owner” or “landlord” or “he” for the landlord in both the current and previous landlord cases, but really I am talking about my contacts for the ownership groups.)
I related the history of how we got here so that people who know more about this kind of thing might be able to give me better advice and so that people who look at some of the pictures I am posting don’t feel that we are wasting money on an extravagant work space. Yes, we could fit our current operations into a 50,000 square foot space. But building rent agreements can be quite long-term, and with the amount we have invested in equipment and improvements here, moving would be very expensive, even if we could find an appropriate space. And the value of our contract depends a lot on how things play out. If there is a long-term depression that we cannot survive, the contract is an anchor that will drag us down and potentially finish us. If things get better relatively quickly, the contract protects us and gives us stability, letting us operate at a relatively good rate, without having to interrupt everything to move.
I should also make sure it’s clear that I completely understand my landlord’s perspective (who of course has his own mortgages and employees to keep paying), and it’s good to know that he’s open to arrangements that could be mutually beneficial. Perhaps some more spaces will open up as other businesses close, and if we get forced to stop operating for an extended period of time, that interruption might also be a good time to move. For the time being, though, I think we just need to hang on for a few months, and if that is the case, we have to keep paying the full rent.
After days of trying on the overloaded SBA disaster loan website, we got our loan application submitted at 2:30AM on Tuesday. It’s not clear how long it will be before there is some progress with that or how much assistance we would qualify for.
We are also paying attention to the new stimulus bill that was just passed to see how it might apply to us. So far, it looks like it will be at least a few more weeks before the details get worked out to a level that we can do something with. The initial impression I am getting is that the way the support is structured, we might be incentivized to do things that would be bad for us if the support doesn’t pan out. For example, it is paramount for us to cut back on expenditures so that we have some cash to pay the most critical bills as long as possible. That includes laying off non-essential staff right away. Yet that might reduce or even eliminate some of the support we might qualify for.
There’s also a huge difference between getting a loan and that loan being forgiven. If the model for our collective response to the pandemic is that the government orders us to pause operations, then gives me money to distribute to my employees, I am happy to do my part in that arrangement. If, on the other hand, the proposal amounts to me personally being on the hook for the rest of my life to pay back a loan I took just to pay people that weren’t allowed to work, that’s not actually helping, and it would make more sense for those employees to just get paid directly from the unemployment aspects of the support bill.
We might also be facing a situation where the new support measures might encourage people who could be working to stay home and collect unemployment instead. So far, we have gotten by without pushing anyone who does not want to be here to be here. This will be a challenge for society in general as we all try to pause and then recover in this unprecedented situation. Many individuals want to work, but it might be better for the community if they don’t, and in compensating them for preventing them from working, we might be discouraging other people whom we do need to be working.
The past two weeks of operation have made me optimistic that we could keep operating as we have for at least several more months. This past week was especially good because we had relative stability in how we operated, and it allowed us to spend a little time on getting ahead and start preparing for operating under these emergency measures for an extended period. A few engineers who had been working on production processes and were out the first week came in and started assessing our workflow with new distancing and isolation considerations. Having a lot of space is coming in handy, at least in terms of making it easier for people to work far apart from each other. We gathered in the same room once during the whole time, to select permanent spots in the break room:
Pololu skeleton crew permanent table assignment meeting, March 2020. |
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(Those who have individual offices are encouraged to eat there, but in general, those are the people who are already home and connected remotely.)
We are also working on improving remote connection and working options where possible, including getting more computers and monitors to employees’ homes.
With the outlook unclear on how much government support we might get and when, it’s clear we need to transition to an operating mode where we can be largely self-sufficient financially without burning out before we get there. Here, the donations we have received have been tremendously helpful in buying us time to get back on our feet.
If you can, please consider donating to help Pololu make it. We have set up item 2400 for donating in $1 increments.
In the past week, we added a feature to our online checkout system to allow for orders to be placed with a “pay now, ship later” option that lets you authorize us to charge the payment for an order as soon as it comes in, possibly well ahead of when the order would actually ship. We started working on this feature at a time when we thought complete shutdown of our operations was imminent, when it might have been weeks or even months before we could reopen. As I wrote at the top of this update, we have been able to ship all orders, and I expect to continue shipping, but this option still allows us to prioritize shipments and reduce stress with orders that come in later in the day and can get shipped the next day. We have already received dozens of orders with this option selected, and it is also encouraging just to see that our customers are trying to help us out. Thank you to all of you who have selected that option!
We offer a few of our products with some of the optional (but usually used) through-hole connectors soldered in. If you are able to solder, please consider ordering the non-soldered versions if there is plentiful stock of them. We do all of the through-hole soldering by hand, and most of our manual assemblers were older or otherwise in the higher-risk population for COVID-19, so they are not currently working here. And if you’re at home doing a non-critical project, now is a good time to do a little extra soldering, right?
On a related note, it’s a little bit easier for us if you order the item that has more stock. Going back to the screenshot I have at the beginning of this post, it’s easy to see our stock levels of similar products:
You can check available quantity of similar products on the parametric comparison table. |
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If your application could get by with either an item of which we have 300 in stock or one of which we have 12 units, please get the product that we have much more of. It’s probably a more popular version that we make more often, and it keeps the less popular version available for those who might really need it.
We have had to severely cut back on our technical support. If you are one those people with extra time on your hands now and are familiar with any of our products, please consider helping out our other customers on our forum.
If you know anybody that could afford to help us out, please let them know and ask them to contribute.
Part of the reason I went into more details in some areas is so you might be able to better give us advice about how we could make things better. Maybe you’re also working at a small business facing similar challenges, and you have some good suggestions. Maybe your uncle has a vacant building nearby. One suggestion I’ve heard repeatedly is about gift certificates, which we are looking into; if you know of particularly good ways of implementing that or things to be careful about, please let us know.
Please see new update posted Monday, 6 April 2020.
TL;DR: Pololu is hurting. Skeleton crew is shipping important products to customers fighting COVID-19 around the world. Most employees facing layoffs. Please donate to help us keep operating and spread the word. Donate here.
Impromptu picture of most of the company from August 2019, when it was still safe for this many people to gather. |
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Please see new update posted Sunday, 29 March 2020.
The last time I posted on this blog was in November 2018, sixteen months ago. We have been very busy at Pololu since then, and there is so much good and positive to share about what we did in 2019 and so far in 2020. Unfortunately, what is compelling me to post this update and plea for help is the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic that is engulfing our planet.
Nevada, where we are located, was one of the earlier states to mandate sweeping reductions in activity, with the governor announcing on the night of Tuesday, March 17, that all nonessential businesses statewide were to shut down starting on Wednesday. We immediately began contacting all of our employees on Tuesday night not to come in the next morning while trying to plan for a shutdown of operations and looking for clarity about the extent to which the order applied to a company like Pololu. On Wednesday through Friday, we operated with a skeleton crew of around twenty of us, making sure we got orders out and received important incoming shipments.
Pololu is probably not the kind of company that first comes to mind when you think of Las Vegas. We design, make, and sell thousands of products from our location just a few miles from the famous Strip. Here is our building when I was locking up Friday night, with the light from the Luxor pyramid lighting up the clouds:
Pololu building exterior on the night of Friday, 20 March 2020. |
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Inside, we have millions of dollars of equipment on which we have made millions of electronics boards that we have shipped all over the world. This is the newest of our three electronics production lines that we just finished setting up earlier this year, with machines that were all installed in 2018 and 2019:
Pololu’s newest SMT production line, March 2020. |
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We have around two dozen pieces of big equipment, each one of which was a substantial undertaking just to install, with the electrical work alone costing tens of thousands of dollars in the most demanding cases. Here is the delivery of our latest laser cutter in November:
LaserCube delivery November 2019. |
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We finally completed installation last month, and here is a picture I took for fun three weeks ago, with our first laser cutter from 2003 inside the new one:
Pololu’s first laser cutter from 2003 inside the newest one, March 2020. |
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I post these pictures to help illustrate that an operation like ours takes a huge amount of effort to build up. I’ve been working on it for twenty years, and there are about 75 more people working on it with me now. We make and ship physical things, so we can’t just do this over a remote computer connection.
And what do we make? For the most part, we make components, like motor controllers and sensors, that go into bigger systems. We do not know most of the applications our products go into, and we cannot disclose some of the more intriguing ones that we do know about. But we have specific confirmation that our products are being used around the world in this fight against the new coronavirus, from components in prototypes for ventilators to components in PCR equipment, including ones used for coronavirus testing.
Are we essential, or essential enough to keep operating? With the changes we had already implemented prior to the governor’s order (for example, we suspended order pick-ups, so we are not open to the public), it seems clear that we are legally allowed to operate in accord with the clarifications the government has been issuing since Friday. Even before the ordered closures, we had done things like stagger our production work benches and spread out the tables in the break room:
Staggered workbenches in production area, March 2020. |
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Spread out tables in break room, March 2020. |
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(FYI several groups of our employees live and carpool together, so a few chairs at one table seemed ok to have as an option. We’re probably going to spread out chairs more and go to one assigned table per employee tomorrow.)
We are scrambling to stay in operation and to do it as safely and ethically as possible. The strain of trying to run this size of operation with two dozen people is enormous, especially while constantly having to prepare for being shut down externally and dealing with more and more uncertainties about components we need arriving. We are trying to get more people set up to work remotely, but I am posting these pictures to try to show how we cannot just run with remote workers. We are prioritizing shipping what was already made and making priority products that we know are for especially important customers.
I don’t know how much longer we will be able to run. Maybe a few more days? Perhaps even fewer of us can get some especially critical orders out for longer, as long as the shipping companies keep shipping our packages. Things keep changing, so it’s hard to say. But if we are not shipping orders, or just a small fraction of the usual ones, money won’t be coming in. I have told my employees that they should not count on another paycheck beyond the one they just got on Friday. We will keep paying for health insurance for everyone as long as we can, and we are looking into the ramifications that would have for things like unemployment insurance.
There is no way we can survive a shutdown of many weeks or even months. We tried to have redundancies in our operations, with as many backups as reasonable. We even have two compressors that we alternate each week, so that all our machines are not crippled if one of the compressors has an issue:
We alternate which compressor runs every week. |
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But we just are not prepared for the level of shutdown we are facing. And so here I am, writing this post on Sunday night after coming up with a plan for tomorrow for my employees and writing to my landlord for help, begging anyone who reads this to help. I know many people and small businesses everywhere are hurting now. I am sure everyone who has put their life into their business feels like theirs is special. We have the facility and the machines and the people who know how to churn out millions of units of hundreds of designs that people around the world use. We have an awesome team. We just need the money to survive until we can start running again.
Pololu executive meeting Sunday morning, 22 March 2020. |
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We are of course looking everywhere for help, and will be applying for whatever disaster relief is available as it becomes available. This is an unprecedented time for us, as I know it is for everyone. I know it is so much to ask for money with no strings attached, especially at a time like this, but that is what will most let us pay our obligations and our employees without diverting resources into extra accounting and agreements. We have set up an emergency product on our website that will allow anyone to donate money to Pololu.
You can use item 2400 to donate in $1 increments. This is still part of our regular website, so checkout will ask you for a shipping address, but there is now a “no shipment” option on the next step of checkout. We’ll work on making it smoother.
If you cannot personally donate, perhaps you know of someone who could. Maybe it’s someone who likes making things and wants to support a company like Pololu. Maybe it’s someone in Nevada who knows nothing about robotics but would like to support diversification of our economy. I threw this post together quickly and marketing was never my strong suit, but I will be updating our pages with more information about why Pololu is especially worthy of your support.
We (the off-site portion of the team!) will also be working on a feature to let you order non-critical items that we would ship once we can resume operations but with permission to charge your credit cards immediately so that we can keep our employees paid. (Update 3/25/20: This feature is now available. You can find the option during step 3 of checkout.)
If you got this far, thank you for your consideration and for any help you can give. Stay safe and try to be kind and useful to those around you.
Please see new update posted Sunday, 29 March 2020.
When I think of a robot, I usually picture a mobile robot, which generally means it is powered by a battery. Most of our motor controller products are built with that kind of bias in mind, too. But there are obviously many permanent installations that still call for motion, from 3D printers and robot arms to kinetic sculptures and motion simulators. And powering those can be complicated and expensive, with power supplies capable of powering bigger motors often costing more than the motors and the motor controllers. One difficulty is that power supplies are often not particularly good for absorbing the little pulses of power that motors and motor controllers sometimes send back out (typically when a motor is slowing down). The ramifications can be very bad since the supply voltages can quickly get destructively high when the current has nowhere to go. Many better power supplies have over-voltage protection, but that just means the power supply shuts down. While that’s better than expensive parts going up in smoke, it can still keep your project from functioning.
The simplest solution to the problem is often a transient voltage suppressor, or TVS, which is a big zener diode optimized for handling big current spikes. Unfortunately, TVS diodes typically do not have a tight enough tolerance for use with power supplies with over-voltage protection. For example, a 12V power supply might have 5% tolerance, meaning the output voltage could be as high as 12.6V, so the protection device must not kick in below 12.6V. If the over-voltage protection is triggered by a 15% deviation, any voltage spikes must be kept below 13.8V. Most basic TVSes do not have tight enough tolerances to ensure operation in that window.
So, we developed a shunt regulator that should help with that kind of scenario. A simplified schematic diagram of the shunt regulator is shown below. Basically, a circuit monitors the voltage and controls a MOSFET that allows current to flow through a shunt resistance that sets the maximum current the device can sink.
Simplified schematic diagram of the Shunt Regulators. |
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We offer the shunt regulators with a variety of voltage set points and shunt resistances. Available variations include fixed resistances and multi-turn potentiometers for the voltage set point, different shunt resistances for the load, and different power ratings for the shunt resistance (the higher-power versions have twenty more resistors populated on the back side of the board).
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One version of the shunt regulator is populated with an especially high shunt resistance with minimal power rating; this unit is intended for use with an external shunt resistance:
Shunt Regulator: 33.0 V, 32.8Ω, 3W. |
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The available versions are shown in the table below:
Voltage | ||||||
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13.2 V | 26.4 V | 33.0 V | Fine-adjust LV | Fine-adjust HV | ||
Power | 3 W | – | – | #3780 32.8 Ω |
– | – |
9 W | #3770 1.33 Ω |
#3774 4.00 Ω |
#3776 4.00 Ω |
– | – | |
15 W | #3771 1.50 Ω |
#3775 2.80 Ω |
#3777 4.10 Ω |
#3778 1.50 Ω |
#3779 4.10 Ω |
This product is more for advanced users at this point since it can be difficult to determine how much power your motor is dumping back onto the power supply, but since we have the products working and several customers waiting to use them, we are going ahead with releasing them. We expect to develop additional resources and to put up verified regulator/motor controller combinations over time.
The basic regulators are quite inexpensive, and we are offering an introductory special as we are with all new products this year, so you might want to pick some up to play around with. The first hundred customers to use coupon code SHUNTREGS get 30% off on up to three units (per version).
Pololu step-down voltage regulator D36V6Fx/D24V6Fx/D24V3Fx next to a 7805 voltage regulator in TO-220 package. |
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Wrapping up our new product releases for the month and for the summer is our new D36V6x family of step-down voltage regulators. These small regulator modules support a large input voltage range and are a great alternative to old three-terminal linear voltage regulators that waste a lot of power and get really hot. These new regulators can take an input voltage anywhere from a few tenths of a volt over the set output voltage up through an absolute max of 50 V, and they can deliver up to 600 mA. We have them available in seven fixed voltage options and two adjustable versions:
Pololu step-down voltage regulator D36V6Ax/D24V6Ax/D24V3Ax, bottom view with dimensions. |
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You might notice that the board for the adjustable version shows a 2010 copyright year (the fixed version is an even smaller board, and we did not fit the year on there). That’s because these new regulators are actually old designs updated with new regulator chips that use the same package and pinout. The older products were our D24V3x and D24V6x families of regulators, which were based on the Texas Instruments LMR14203 and LMR14206 ICs. For the new D36V6x family, we are moving up to the newer LMR16006 regulator. This chip has several exciting new features that we think will make it our favorite general-purpose regulator for many of our products: higher maximum voltage, better low-dropout performance, and better quiescent current.
The LMR16006 has a 60 V maximum input voltage, up from the 42 V of the LMR1420x parts. Even 42 V covered most of our typical applications, but it’s not quite enough for 36V nominal applications, which are getting more common. Our more advanced, integrated products such as motor controllers are often limited by some complex part or circuit, such as a motor driver, and we would like the overall operating range of the product not to be reduced by the regulator. Many stepper motor drivers, such as TI’s DRV8825 or the Toshiba TB67S249FTG and TB67S279FTG that we released carriers for in June, support maximum input voltages of 45 or 50 volts. It’s nice not to be limited by your regulator when you are making systems with those kinds of parts.
For our new D36V6x modules, we are limited to the 50 V maximum of the capacitors from Vin to ground. Unfortunately, capacitor options get a lot more restricted (and expensive) once we go beyond 50 V, so we decided to stick with our old boards so that we could continue to offer these regulator modules at a low price while still providing some substantial improvements. We might still make a new board with higher-voltage capacitors for those who would like to make full use of the regulator’s 60 V maximum. (For anyone thinking of just removing the caps and putting on your own external ones, you might also want to change the diode, which is also a 60 V part.)
Having a higher maximum input voltage is nice, but often we’re trying to squeeze the most we can out of a dying battery, so it’s nice to have a low dropout, which is the voltage the regulator needs between the input and output. The older LMR1420x parts had an annoying quality of the dropout voltage going up as the load current went down. The newer LMR16006 has a nice, low dropout as the current goes down, so if you don’t need much current, you can get 5 V out with just 5.2 or 5.3 volts in. Here is a comparison of the dropout performance of the old and new regulators:
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The new regulators also have much lower quiescent current, which is the current the regulator uses when it’s just sitting there and your load isn’t drawing anything. On the old regulators, the quiescent current was under 2 mA, and we did not characterize it beyond that. For these new regulators, it’s typically under 200 microamps, ten to twenty times better than the old regulators. I realize it’s not that amazing for modern regulators, but it’s nice to know that your low-cost, general-purpose regulator module isn’t wasting a lot of power.
Typical quiescent currents of Step-Down Voltage Regulator D36V6Fx. |
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Even when we put a new chip onto an old circuit board as I have described, we still test and characterize with different parts to get a good overall result. In the case of these regulators, where the circuit is quite simple, this phase of development is much more time consuming than laying out a circuit board. We build and test dozens of prototypes with different inductances, and even though you can’t see it in the pictures, we build the different voltage versions of the regulators with different inductors to get the best performance we can (within a given inductor type and size).
So how about getting a few to have around for general-purpose use on your next project? You can get one for just $3 as part of our introductory promotion using coupon code D36V6XINTRO, limited to the first 100 customers and to three per item (so you could get up to 27 regulators at that price if you get three of each voltage version). It’s always difficult for us to predict which versions will be how popular, so initial stock is limited, but we make these here in Las Vegas, so even if the version you want goes out of stock, you can backorder it with the promotional price, and we should be able to ship within a day or two.
This week, we released what we expect to be the extremes of our new line of QTR HD reflectance sensor arrays, with two sizes of a single-sensor board on the small end and a massive 31-sensor array for the maximum size. This picture shows the relative sizes of the boards, along with some of the intermediate sizes we have available:
The QTR Reflectance Sensor Arrays are available in many different sizes. |
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We made the two single-sensor sizes because we could make good arguments for each one. Part of the point of doing a single-sensor board is to make it really small, so you can fit it into tight spaces. But “really small” means different things depending on the dimensions you care about. So we have one version that is only 5 mm (0.2") wide, with components on both sides of the PCB, and one version that is 7.5 mm (0.3") wide, with components on just one side. The 7.5 mm wide version is a little thinner and flatter because it doesn’t have parts on one side, can be used with a 3×1, single row connector, and costs slightly less because of the single-sided assembly.
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As I mentioned in some of my earlier posts (here and here) about this new line of sensor arrays, we are using two sensor types: more economical units we are calling “QTR”, and higher-performance units with lenses that we are calling “QTRX”. The main appeal of the QTRX sensors is that they can give the same readings at much lower IR emitter currents, which can really make a big difference for big sensor arrays. But if you crank up the current in those QTRX sensors, you can also get more distance. We did not do that on the QTRX arrays because the sensor modules leak light out the sides and interfere with each other when they are closely spaced, but with these single-channel boards, we are also making available the QTRX sensors with the higher 30 mA maximum emitter current, which allows for a range of up to about 8 cm (about 3 inches). We are calling these sensors QTRXL.
This video (taken with an old camera that does not have as much IR filtering as most newer cameras) shows the IR light leakage around the side of the QTRX sensor module:
I should point out that all of these new QTR modules offer variable brightness control by varying the current through the emitter using the control pin. However, if you want to take advantage of the maximum brightness and range, and have several sensors close to each other, you will need some barriers between them to prevent them from blinding each other (or just turn on one emitter at a time).
The 31-sensor arrays are huge! Well, at least compared to the tiny single-sensor boards.
QTRX-HD-31RC Reflectance Sensor Array. |
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The routing on those boards is quite complex because adjacent IR emitters are not just wired in series (because we want to have separate even/odd emitter control, plus the alternate density population options I discussed in this post), so we ended up having to go to a 4-layer PCB to route it. This did let us make the vertical dimension a little lower, so the board is just 16.5 mm tall, compared to the 20 mm board height for the versions with 15 and fewer sensors. The 31-channel board is also 0.062" (1.6 mm) thick, compared to the thinner 0.040" (1 mm) boards we use for the lower channel counts. You can compare all the dimensions of the various boards in the detailed dimension diagram (1MB pdf).
The sixteen new boards we released this week brings the total available in this new QTR HD product line to 40. You can see the options neatly summarized in the tables below to pick the best array for your application.
QTR sensors 2.9 V to 5.5 V; 30 mA max LED current(1); 5 mm optimal range |
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Board width |
Configuration | Max board current(2) |
Max range | Output type |
Name | 1-piece price |
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5.0 mm | 1 sensor (HD) |
32 mA | 30 mm | analog | QTR-HD-01A | $2.33 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTR-HD-01RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
7.5 mm | 1 sensor (MD) |
32 mA | 30 mm | analog | QTR-MD-01A | $2.15 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTR-MD-01RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
10.2 mm | 4 mm × 2 |
32 mA | 30 mm | analog | QTR-HD-02A | $2.74 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTR-HD-02RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
17.0 mm | 4 mm × 4 |
62 mA | 40 mm | analog | QTR-HD-04A | $4.04 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTR-HD-04RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
29.0 mm | 8 mm × 4 |
62 mA | 40 mm | analog | QTR-MD-04A | $4.22 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTR-MD-04RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4 mm × 7 |
125 mA | 40 mm | analog | QTR-HD-07A | $6.88 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTR-HD-07RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
61.0 mm | 8 mm × 8 |
125 mA | 40 mm | analog | QTR-MD-08A | $7.95 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTR-MD-08RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4 mm × 15 |
250 mA | 50 mm | analog | QTR-HD-15A | $13.86 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTR-HD-15RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
125.0 mm | 4 mm × 31 |
495 mA | 50 mm | analog | QTR-HD-31A | $27.82 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTR-HD-31RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
QTRX sensors 2.9 V to 5.5 V; 3.5 mA max LED current(1); 10 mm optimal range |
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Board width |
Configuration | Max board current(2) |
Max range | Output type |
Name | 1-piece price |
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5.0 mm | 1 sensor (HD) |
5 mA | 30 mm | analog | QTRX-HD-01A | $3.07 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRX-HD-01RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
7.5 mm | 1 sensor (MD) |
5 mA | 30 mm | analog | QTRX-MD-01A | $2.89 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRX-MD-01RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
10.2 mm | 4 mm × 2 |
5 mA | 30 mm | analog | QTRX-HD-02A | $4.22 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRX-HD-02RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
17.0 mm | 4 mm × 4 |
9 mA | 40 mm | analog | QTRX-HD-04A | $7.00 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRX-HD-04RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
29.0 mm | 8 mm × 4 |
9 mA | 40 mm | analog | QTRX-MD-04A | $7.18 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRX-MD-04RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4 mm × 7 |
17 mA | 40 mm | analog | QTRX-HD-07A | $12.06 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRX-HD-07RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
61.0 mm | 8 mm × 8 |
17 mA | 40 mm | analog | QTRX-MD-08A | $13.87 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRX-MD-08RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4 mm × 15 |
34 mA | 50 mm | analog | QTRX-HD-15A | $24.96 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRX-HD-15RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
125.0 mm | 4 mm × 31 |
68 mA | 50 mm | analog | QTRX-HD-31A | $50.76 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRX-HD-31RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
QTRXL sensors 2.9 V to 5.5 V; 30 mA max LED current(1); 20 mm optimal range |
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Board width |
Configuration | Max board current(2) |
Max range | Output type |
Name | 1-piece price |
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5.0 mm | 1 sensor (HD) |
32 mA | 80 mm | analog | QTRXL-HD-01A | $3.07 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRXL-HD-01RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
7.5 mm | 1 sensor (MD) |
32 mA | 80 mm | analog | QTRXL-MD-01A | $2.89 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RC (digital) | QTRXL-MD-01RC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1 Can be dynamically reduced to any of 32 available dimming levels. 2 With all LEDs on at max brightness setting. |
Our introductory promotions are still going strong! Be one of the first 100 customers to use coupon code QTRINTRO and get any of these new sensors at half price! (Limit 3 per item per customer.)
I’m super excited to announce our newest product, the Robot Arm Kit for Romi. The Romi arm is designed to mount to the back half of a Romi chassis with two fixed servos controlling the height and angle of the gripper through a nifty linkage system.
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The gripper itself uses a micro servo with two parallel fingers or paddles that open and close through a rack and pinion arrangement. Here is a quick video demonstration of a Romi chassis with the arm attachment:
You can see the available range of motion in the drawings below:
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The kit ships with all mechanical parts, including special servos with a fourth wire for reading the position of the output shaft:
Contents of the Robot Arm Kit for Romi. |
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We are also making the gripper used on the arm available as a standalone Micro Gripper Kit with Position Feedback Servo. Here is a picture of the assembled gripper:
Fully assembled Micro Gripper with Position Feedback Servo. |
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Products like this arm kit, with many injection-molded components, are some of the most complicated and time-consuming products we make. As those of you who have followed our growth over the past decade are probably aware, we try to develop our more complete robot kits incrementally, starting with components like just a wheel or a motor bracket, and then using those components in the more integrated robots. For example, we came out with this line of wheels in 2010:
Pololu Wheels with 90, 80, 70, and 60 mm diameters in three colors: blue, red, and yellow. |
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The Romi and Balboa robots, which use those wheels, did not come out until 2016 and 2017.
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If you look at the parts that go into just the gripper portion, you can see that each of the components is roughly as complicated as one of those wheels, and you can’t really do much with just one of those parts:
Contents of the Micro Gripper Kit with Position Feedback Servo. |
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So, a lot of work goes into designing these kits. We also do not machine the molds or do the injection molding in-house (we did that on the first few parts for the 3pi robot), so that adds a lot of delays compared to our electronics boards, which we make in the same building that we design them in. We do 3D print prototypes to maximize the chances that we get the designs right, but there are invariably little modifications that we end up having to make when the components are this complicated, which is why it takes us years to go from the initial idea to the released kit.
We are at least sticking to our incremental product release approach as far as integration with electronics goes: at the time of the Romi arm attachment release, we do not have a specific solution for controlling the robot, which we will be working on next. Therefore, this kit is currently intended for advanced users who are comfortable powering and controlling several servos on their own.
As with all of our new product releases this year, we are offering substantial introductory discounts for the first customers to try out our new designs. You can use coupon code ROMIARMINTRO to get the whole arm for just $49 and code GRIPPERINTRO to get just the gripper for only $13. Each coupon is limited to 100 uses and 3 units per customer.
All the student engineering interns we had over the summer from out-of-town colleges are headed back to school, so I get to announce the release of products they worked on over the summer. The new QTR sensors we are releasing today include the 15-channel version laid out by seventeen-year-old Chris H.
Hadouken! (2018 summer engineering intern Chris couldn’t come up with a clever pun to use for this picture of him posing with a circuit board he designed.) |
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You can see more about our new line of QTR reflectance sensor arrays in the first blog post I wrote about them a few weeks ago. One cool design and manufacturing aspect I did not mention then is that we designed these boards so that they could be populated at various densities. For example, that lets us make an 8-channel version with 8 mm sensor pitch on the same board that also works as a 15-channel array with 4 mm sensor pitch:
QTRX-MD-08RC Reflectance Sensor Array. |
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Here are some diagrams showing some of the thought that went into the soon-to-be released 31-channel version, which can also be populated to be an 8 mm pitch, 16-sensor array; a 12 mm pitch, 11-channel array; and a 20 mm pitch, 7-channel array:
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With so many combinations of sensor types and output circuits, we won’t make every one of the possible arrangements a stock product, but the idea is that if you have an application where a particular sensor pitch is ideal for you, we can quickly make some for you without having to lay out new PCBs.
We expect eight channels on an 8 mm pitch to be a popular variant, so those will be stock products. We have also added the corresponding 4-channel version (using the same boards used for the full-density, 7-channel product), so this new product announcement covers twelve new stock sensor arrays:
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Our introductory promotions are still going strong! Be one of the first 100 customers using coupon code QTRINTRO and snag any of these new sensors at half price! (Limit 3 per item per customer.)
I have some exciting new wheels to tell you about (available as an 80×10mm black pair and an 80×10mm white pair). With a few small exceptions, all of the wheels we have made so far were for press fits (more properly called interference fit) onto 3mm D shafts such as those on our micro metal gearmotors. The press fit is simple and convenient for smaller motors and wheels, but there is an inherent trade-off between how hard you have to push to get the wheel on the shaft and how well the wheel stays on the shaft. As we contemplated designing some new wheels for our growing lines of 20D gearmotors and 25D gearmotors with 4mm output shafts (and higher power), I wanted something better. Our wheels already worked with our machined hubs with set screws, like this:
But the machined hubs are expensive, more expensive than the rest of the wheel. There’s also the much more minor issue of the machined hub option only allowing for the wheel to be placed at the very end of the shaft unless you drilled out the plastic wheel to have a hole larger than the shaft. I wanted to have an all-plastic, injection moldable solution that involved multiple parts that would somehow clamp the wheel onto an axle, kind of like a chuck on a drill.
My initial idea was to have just two parts: the outer wheel and an inner, interchangeable collet that would get wedged between the wheel and axle. But our mechanical engineers were not able to come up with a single part that could both compress onto the shaft and attach rigidly to the outer wheel. Because the parts are so small, the resolution of our 3D printer limited the effectiveness of prototypes, so we worked with scaled-up models. This picture shows one earlier model next to the final production parts for scale:
The other side of that model shows what we were thinking about for holding nuts in place on the back side of the wheel:
At that point, we were at a three-component design, plus the three screws and nuts, which was turning out to be difficult to assemble onto a shaft, even if it worked. The screw heads needed to be accessible from the outside of the wheel so they could be tightened, and that left the nuts near the motor where they were difficult to access, and trying to make the wheel hold the nuts required the wheel to be toward the motor and the collet piece on the outside, which was less aesthetically appealing.
So, in the end, we gave up on my all-plastic goal and designed a single stamped plate with threaded holes that clamps the wheel onto the collet insert. It definitely makes the assembly much easier, as you can see from this expanded view:
Having a design that seems like it might work on a 3D printed mock-up is still quite different from getting it working on the final, injection-molded parts. The clamping action of the collet inserts might have given us a little more margin for error than our usual press-fit wheels, but on those, a wrong fit is relatively straightforward to adjust: start with the fit a little on the loose side, and if it’s too loose, make the pin (and hole) smaller until it’s tight enough. With the new wheels, there were many more things that could go wrong, including alignment (wobbling). There was also the unknown of how much torque the hubs would take.
In the end, I think we arrived at a nice performance point. The wheels cannot take as much torque as if they were screwed on to the machined hub with set screw, but they can do much more than just the press fit hubs while putting less strain on the motor output shafts during installation. It’s possible to assemble the wheels with a little wobble, but if it’s a concern in your application, you can fiddle with how you tighten the three screws to get it as lined up as you like.
We started with our 80×10mm wheels, and made inserts that work with 3mm and 4mm shafts, both round and D-shaped:
Since the concept seems to be working, we will be working on different wheel sizes and inserts for larger shafts later this year.
As with all our new product introductions this year, we are having an introductory special. Be among the first 100 customers to use coupon code MULTIHUBINTRO (click to add the coupon code to your cart) and get 33% off on up to three sets.
I don’t blame you if you have no idea why the new Stability Conversion Kit for Balboa is so exciting. With a name like that, you probably couldn’t even guess what it is, let alone why it’s exciting. But let me keep you guessing while I share a little about the first robot I built, which is kind of a hint. It’s pure coincidence that I happened to get reunited with it just as we were preparing to release this new product I’m announcing here.
I know for sure that I built my first robot in eighth grade, for the science and engineering fair for which everyone in my school had to do a project, which means I must have started working on it in 1992 when I was twelve years old. The better projects in my school went on to the local, island-wide science fair in Hilo, and the better projects there went on to the state fair in Honolulu. (I was initially not among those chosen to go on from the Big Island, I think because of some judging process mistake, but my science teacher and probably others lobbied to get me there.) There was time between the different stages, so I kept working on it through the spring of 1993, which would now make it over 25 years old. I probably added the labels in later stages in response to some advice to better present what I made.
Jan’s first robot, “Robot Line Tracker,” built 1992-1993. |
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When Paul saw the robot for the first time in my office this morning, he immediately recognized a piece of it: “That looks like the gearbox from my first robot!” I was a bit skeptical, but he immediately backed it up by pulling out Gordon McComb’s Robot Builder’s Bonanza and showing me the project he had followed from the book. (In another amusing twist, it turns out that the copy of the book Paul had in his office is my old book, though I hadn’t gotten it until high school, and I didn’t realize until today that the gearbox in the book was the same one I had used.)
I’m pretty sure I got the gearbox from Edmund Scientific, because their printed catalogs and Radio Shack (nearest one in Kona, 40 miles away) were initially my only sources for anything electronics-related. The wheels were from some broken radio control toy. The ball caster was long a point of frustration. In earlier versions of the robot, I had tried more common swivel casters and then a ball caster I made from a ping pong ball in a toilet paper tube, but neither was very reliable. I was very happy to eventually find the metal ball caster that I used in the final version, which you can see here along with the three IR LED and phototransistor pairs used for detecting a two-inch white line on a black background:
That heavy, noisy caster was not ideal, but at least it didn’t jam at a bad angle like the swivel caster or collapse like my ping pong ball and cardboard creations. I am mentioning all these details because it was so much work just to put a basic chassis together, without even getting to the electronics part. The electronics are not something I want to cover in this blog post, but I should mention that I was very fortunate to find a mentor at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope headquarters right across the road from my school. CFHT had a nice electronics lab stocked with all kinds of components they just gave me and tools they let me use, and I got lots of help from John Horne when I was in 8th grade and then from many others there while I was in high school.
So, to bring this back to Pololu’s new product: the Stability Conversion Kit for Balboa is primarily a ball caster attachment for the Balboa chassis:
That might sound pretty basic, but using it fundamentally transforms the Balboa into a very different kind of robot. As a reminder, Balboa is a two-wheeled, balancing robot:
You can read more about the balancing robot in my blog post introducing the Balboa robot. It’s a very capable platform that we spent many years developing, but making a balancing robot is not easy, and it’s probably not the best type of robot to build as your first robot. We did not even release the chassis as a separate product independent of electronics because it would be difficult to do much with it. The new stability conversion kit completely changes that. With the ball caster, the chassis can be used as a much more beginner-friendly differential-drive mobile base with three points of contact with the ground:
We offer the ball caster attachment by itself, for those who want to use it with a complete Balboa 32U4 robot kit to immediately get up and running without developing their own electronics. We also now offer the Balboa Chassis with Stability Conversion Kit, which includes all the mechanical components for the chassis other than wheels and motors:
Balboa Chassis with Stability Conversion Kit (No Motors, Wheels, or Electronics). |
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As with the original Balboa 32U4 kit that includes electronics, we deliberately do not include motors and wheels so that you can pick your own to customize the look and performance of your robot. This diagram shows the possible chassis angles with four different wheel sizes ranging from 60 mm through 90 mm:
Variety of chassis angles available when using different wheels on the Balboa Chassis with Stability Conversion. |
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Micro metal gearmotor HPCB with extended motor shaft. |
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For motors, we recommend our 30:1 HPCB, 50:1 HPCB, or 75:1 HPCB micro metal gearmotors with extended back shafts that can be used with encoders. Even if you do not plan on using encoders on your robot at first, it’s nice to have the option down the road.
And options are what our chassis kits are all about, whether you select our Zumo tracked chassis, Romi round chassis, or now the new Balboa chassis. One of my guiding principles in developing our robot platforms is that I want to help you, our customers, build your robot, not just the particular one we designed.
I realize there are many kids interested in robotics who are not as fortunate as I was to have Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope headquarters across the street from my middle school, and that for many of them (and their parents and teachers), all of the options we offer can be overwhelming. Over the next several years, we will be working on sensors and other modules specifically for the Balboa, along with combination bundles and tutorials that will make Balboa a platform that students can begin with as a basic first robot in middle school and keep expanding through higher levels of their education.
I’ll end this product introduction as I have all my product announcements this year, with an introductory special to encourage you to try the Balboa chassis out for yourself. Be among the first 100 customers to use coupon code BALBOACHASSIS (click to add the coupon code to your cart) and get 15% off on Balboa-related products (limit 4 per product).
Installation of our new Mycronic MY600 that arrived earlier this month is going smoothly. Here are a few pictures and a video from our first test print on a Pololu PCB panel.
Ninoos from Mycronic showing us how to use the MY600 solder paste jet printer. |
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First Pololu test panel in our new Mycronic MY600 solder paste jet printer. |
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The gantry is supported only on the left side! |
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First print on a Pololu PCB panel using Mycronic MY600 solder paste jet printer. |
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MY600 jet printer first print: Looks like we need a little more solder paste under the central chip and a little less on the leads. |
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That footage of the jet printer in action is not sped up!
In my February post about our new equipment, I wrote about why I did not get a jet printer for solder paste. Well, I ended up getting one after all, and it arrived today.
We have a great building, but we don’t have loading docks, which always makes these big equipment deliveries a bit more of an adventure. Despite assurances that the crate would be at the back of the truck (and that it would have a lift gate that could handle the weight), it arrived way at the front.
18 May 2018: yet another heavy machine (MY600 jet printer) arrives deep in a truck. |
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At least it wasn’t as big of a crate in as deep of a truck as this time. The Mycronic MY600 jet printer is not the biggest machine, but it weighs a ton because of its granite base. And by “it weighs a ton”, I mean literally more than two tons. Especially with the weight of the crate and the other accessories in there, it was way too much for the lift gate. We tried to get two pallet trucks under it but could not get it to move, even after repositioning the truck to make the crate moving downhill.
Because of the crate’s weight and weight distribution, we couldn’t drag it downhill even with two pallet trucks. |
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The big forklift we rented had not arrived yet, but our smaller forklift was able to add enough pulling power to get the crate to the back of the truck.
Dragging the MY600 jet printer crate out of the truck with our smaller forklift. |
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MY600 jet printer crate almost to the back of the truck. |
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I like noticing that silver Honda in the back of some of these pictures. Here it is almost sixteen years ago (more about our first ten years in Vegas here):
Leaving Watertown, MA on 30 May 2002. |
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The big forklift arrived just in time to keep us from attempting some small forklift plus lift gate kind of stunt.
10,000 pound forklift with long forks arrived just in time. |
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The crate had a very lopsided weight distribution, and the crate had some peculiar skids that required some precision alignment to get the fork into the pocket. (The small gap was too small for the pallet trucks, which contributed to the earlier difficulty in moving the crate with pallet trucks.)
Couldn’t they have given us a few more inches for the fork to fit? |
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Ryan lining up the forks just right to get under the MY600 jet printer crate. |
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I really liked truck driver Sharrieff, with a great “we’re going to work together and we’re going to get this crate down” attitude. I just noticed now as I wrote this up that he’s the owner of his trucking company.
Woo, the crate is safely on the ground! |
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With the crate in our warehouse and the sides removed, it was easier to see why the weight distribution was so off-center.
First glimpse of the MY600 jet printer in its crate. |
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MY600 jet printer unwrapped. |
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And here it is in its temporary home next to the Europlacer stencil printer we got earlier this year:
Mycronic MY600 jet printer temporarily in position next to Europlacer stencil printer. |
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It’s a temporary home since we will be doing some major remodeling of our building later this year. At the moment we have two full SMT assembly lines, with the newest pick-and-place machine separately on its own in a batch setup. Once we free up more space on the main manufacturing floor, we should be putting the jet printer in line with the pick and place machine in a third complete line that should be ultra-optimized for efficient manufacturing in small quantities. Installation of the new jet printer isn’t until after Memorial Day, and I will be sure to post more updates once we have the machine in action.
We didn’t drop it! |
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This is the second new motor driver product in less than a week, and I’m really excited about this one: the TB9051FTG from Toshiba. The TB67H420FTG I posted about the other day has this new part beat for higher voltages, but its one shortcoming for our purposes is that it doesn’t work at lower voltages. This new TB9051 doesn’t go up into those voltages where it starts getting dangerous, but it covers a great operating range of 4.5 V to 28 V, with transient operation to 40 V, which means you can use this driver with everything from 6 V lead-acid batteries and 2-cell LiPo packs all the way up to 24 V systems and 6-cell LiPo packs, maybe even 7-cell packs. The operating voltage range is similar to another recent favorite of mine, Maxim’s MAX14870, but this new Toshiba part delivers almost double the current.
Pololu dual MC33926 motor driver (assembled) on a Raspberry Pi Model B+. |
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With its excellent operating voltage range and great current ability for an integrated package, I expect the TB9051 to be an ideal all-around DC brushed motor driver for most indoor robots and other projects that do not involve moving frighteningly large objects at potentially catastrophic speeds. The chip seems positioned to compete performance-wise with my previous almost-favorite chip, the Motorola Freescale NXP MC33926. That chip would have been my favorite if it had been easier to work with Freescale, and things have only gotten worse since NXP acquired them and then got distracted by yet another merger, this time with Qualcomm, which seems to have been in limbo forever. Maybe their sales are actually doing great, and we just have a hard time with them because they are busy with bigger customers. In any case, a part with great performance is not so great overall if it’s difficult to get it, so you can expect us to be updating some of those products that use the NXP part to use the Toshiba part instead.
One pretty obvious feature the TB9051 has over the MC33926 is its smaller size, from 8 mm x 8 mm down to 6 mm x 6 mm, which is great for getting these onto smaller boards in smaller spaces, but it might also have some ramifications for how it tolerates pushing the limits of the specs. We liked how the MC33926 was able to endure lots of abuse from customers who were pushing it because it was our highest-voltage integrated driver. The TB9051 is, like the MC33926, an automotive-rated part, so it is intended to last a long time in harsh conditions. It’s interesting to see how thick the packages for these chips are, and I like their thickness (similar to how I like the proportions on 737 airplanes):
Clockwise from upper left: packages of a 28-pin microcontroller, TB9051FTG, MC33926, TB67H420FTG, and TB6612FNG. |
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This video makes it seem like Toshiba is quite proud of their packaging accomplishment with the TB9051FTG:
Update: It looks like the above video might no longer be available on youtube, but it is still available on the Toshiba website.
Is the “competitor” in this video the MC33926? Sure seems like it to me. I know of no other part like that, and I keep looking.
Toshiba has not publicly posted a complete datasheet for the TB9051FTG yet, so the product page for our carrier only has a preliminary summary document. Our product page has more information about how to use the device, and we are working on getting a complete datasheet that we can post.
Since I expect this driver to hit a nice sweet spot for many of our customers’ general-purpose motor control needs, it’s a good candidate for using in some higher channel count products. We have not gone much beyond two motors (the TReX motor controllers have a third, unidirectional channel), and I would like to know what kind of interest there is in single boards that can control three or more motors. If you would like to see such products, please let me know.
As with all of our new product announcements, we are offering an introductory discount to make it extra easy to try out these new drivers. Be among the first 100 customers to use coupon code TB9051INTRO (click to add the coupon code to your cart) and get up to three units for just $4.95 each. We are still manufacturing our initial stock of these, and even if the quantity shown online goes to zero, you can backorder with the coupon price and chances are that we will be able to fill your order the same day.
A-Star 32U4 Mini pinout diagram. |
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I think of our new A-Star 32U4 Mini SV as more of an update than a genuinely new product. For those of you not already familiar with our A-Star 32U4 Minis, they are a series of ATmega32U4-based, USB-programmable controllers with integrated switching regulators that offer operating voltage ranges not available on typical Arduino-compatible products; the “SV” variant features a step-down converter that enables efficient operation with inputs as high as 40 V. The slight PCB update for this latest product was done primarily for manufacturing reasons (e.g. reset button footprint change, addition of a test point, and switching to an ENIG finish that has worked better for us for double-sided assembly), but I figured that while we were updating all our internal records for the new PCB, we might as well also upgrade the regulator.
There’s a difficulty to making small improvements to products when we have hundreds of distributors around the world since even if we clear out our inventory of older versions before shipping newer units, we cannot control the inventory at distributors’ warehouses. We’re all usually tolerant of products being a little better than advertised, but when we try out a product, and then buy another one, and it ends up being worse than the one we already had, it just doesn’t feel right. (That’s one reason we sometimes do not reveal exact components we use, to avoid over-specifying some aspect of a product that we feel is not that important and that we do not want to commit to.) Once the regulator was different (and better!) enough to merit changing the product specifications, we needed to change the product number, and hence we have a new product.
The regulator change is from the ISL85415 to the ISL85418, both made by Renesas (which acquired Intersil). The ISL85415 was the first of a great regulator family by Intersil, and they expanded the family with several pin-compatible versions with various current specifications. These new parts could also operate to 40 V instead of the 36 V of the original ISL85415, but even as various aspects of the datasheets got updated, the maximum voltage rating on the ISL85415 in particular did not.
Renesas website screen capture showing ISL85415 is only part in its family with 36 V maximum input. |
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I asked our Intersil contact about why only the ISL85415 wasn’t rated to 40 V. It sounded like it was getting made on the same process as the other parts, and that the higher voltage rating of the later parts in the family was more the result of better characterization (and thus confidence) in the process than in any modifications to the process. In other words, new ISL85415 parts can probably do 40 V just like the other parts, and the older ISL85415 parts probably the same; they just weren’t confident about calling them 40 V parts then. But who knows what the inside story is. Maybe they did tweak their recipes a bit, and once they had parts out in the world with the 36 V spec, they didn’t want to change it without changing the part number, just like we couldn’t just keep our old A-Star part number and also talk about the higher maximum input voltage.
A-Star 32U4 Mini ULV, LV, and SV. |
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In case you’re wondering why we didn’t just put the even better ISL85410 or ISL854102 with 1.0 A and 1.2 A outputs on the new board, it’s because the performance limit moved more to the inductor, and even if the better regulator chip takes up the same space, we would need a bigger inductor to take advantage of that. And the A-Star Minis are pretty packed designs, so there’s not much room for a bigger inductor.
So, to make a long story short, the main new feature of the updated A-Star 32U4 Mini SV is that it can now take up to 40 V input and give you up to 800 mA to work with. This chart shows you what the new regulator (in darker green) can do compared to the older one (lighter green) on the A-Star Mini. It looks like the old one already provided well over its 500 mA specification.
Typical maximum output current of the regulators on the A-Star 32U4 Mini boards. |
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To make this new product a little more exciting, we reassessed our costs and cut some of our margins in keeping with our push this year to be more competitive in our manufacturing. We have reduced the unit price from $19.95 to $14.95. And as usual for our new product releases this year, we’re offering an extra introductory discount: use coupon code ASMINISVINTRO to get up to three units for just $9.95. (Click to add the coupon code to your cart.) Our promotion banner shows the usual limit for the first 100 coupon uses, but since we’re also having our Arduino Day sale, we’re removing that restriction for the duration of the sale. If we run out of stock during the sale, you can still backorder with the discount, and we should be able to catch up with production within a few days.
After many months or years of work (depending on how you look at it), I am happy to introduce our newest motor controllers, the Jrk G2 USB Motor Controllers with Feedback, which we are releasing today in four power variants:
Jrk G2 18v19 |
Jrk G2 24v13 |
Jrk G2 18v27 |
Jrk G2 24v21 |
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Recommended max operating voltage: |
24 V(1) | 34 V(2) | 24 V(1) | 34 V(2) |
Max nominal battery voltage: |
18 V | 28 V | 18 V | 28 V |
Max continuous current (no additional cooling): |
19 A | 13 A | 27 A | 21 A |
Dimensions: | 1.4″ × 1.2″ | 1.7″ × 1.2″ |
1 30 V absolute max.
2 40 V absolute max.
The main purpose of the Jrk G2 family is to enable feedback-based control of DC brushed motors, simplifying closed-loop control of things like the position of an actuator. An example that is probably familiar to most of us is the common hobby servo that has an output shaft that can rotate to various positions as commanded over a simple interface. The Jrk motor controllers can be used for giant versions of those servos, and they can also be used in many other systems as long as you can somehow get feedback in the form of an analog voltage or a frequency. Analog voltage feedback is often easy to get from potentiometers that can serve as angle or position sensors.
The frequency feedback feature is handy for maintaining a speed of a motor independent of your supply voltage and motor load. You might use that kind of feature to run a treadmill at some set speed independent of the weight of the lab rats on it or to stir some jar of goop at a constant rate as the goop gradually thickens. With mobile robot applications, it can be handy to have a motor controller that will make your wheel go at the speed you set independent of whether the robot is on a hard floor or a carpet. (The Jrks do not support quadrature encoders, but you can use one channel of a quadrature encoder as the tachometer for the Jrk. In some applications, keeping track of absolute position is not necessary, or the quadrature encoder can be monitored directly by a main controller that could still benefit from the closed-loop speed control being taken care of by the motor controller.)
To control a wide range of motors in a variety of applications, it’s important to be able to configure a lot of parameters, which makes the Jrk’s USB connection and free configuration utility software extremely important. Even if you ultimately want to use your Jrk in a radio control installation or command it over I²C from your favorite embedded controller, it’s very convenient to be able to set everything up from your computer.
That screenshot is actually of the utility for the original Jrks, which we released almost 9 years ago (I announced those on the forum because we did not have this blog back then). You might notice on some older web pages that we referred to the original Jrks as our second-generation feedback controllers. The really original ancestor to today’s new motor controllers is this product we called simply Pololu 3A Motor Controller with Feedback, which we released at the beginning of 2005. Here are a picture and block diagram of that controller:
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Candice and I were probably still running Pololu out of our house back when we started work on that controller, and it’s probably the last product of ours for which Candice wrote some of the firmware. That controller led to the development of a larger, customized controller (similar to our SMC04 High-Power Motor Controller with Feedback) and an even higher-power version that was used on control cables of large autonomous parachutes for the military.
Back to the new Jrk G2 family: these new controllers are in many ways a refinement of the original Jrks, which have been used all over the world in applications from animatronic displays to motion simulators and even full-sized airplanes. The most noticeable improvement on the four Jrk G2 controllers we are releasing today is the increased power available from their discrete MOSFET H-bridges. The G2 high-power motor driver design is part of the reason for the “G2” in the new Jrk family name, though we plan on releasing lower-power, smaller Jrk G2 products later this year. The new driver technology, along with going to double-sided PCB assembly and four-layer PCBs, allowed us to make much higher-power controllers that are smaller than the old Jrk 12v12, which used to be our highest-power version.
The Jrk G2 24v13 and 24v21 in particular open up new application opportunities because they can operate off of 24 V power rails, making them appropriate for huge linear actuators (note that we only carry 12 V versions right now, partly because we did not have controllers that we could recommend for 24 V use). It’s exciting that these tiny boards can control such huge actuators, and the size difference is so big it’s difficult to convey in a picture:
The size difference makes it difficult to get a Jrk G2 24v13 and an industrial-duty linear actuator in the same picture. |
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Other features new to the G2 Jrks are an I²C interface option and an improved tachometer/frequency feedback mode that now offers pulse width measuring rather than only frequency counting to allow for better control of low-speed motors with lower-resolution encoders or tachometers. Here is a summary of the main features of the Jrk G2 motor controllers:
As with all of our new product releases this year, we are offering an extra introductory discount: the first 100 customers to use coupon code JRKG2INTRO can get 40% off up to three units. (Click to add the coupon code to your cart.)
Our new programmer, the Pololu USB AVR Programmer v2.1, was supposed to be a minor update to our existing programmer, coming right after the A-Star 328PB Micro that we released last month, with the main point of excitement being the Las Vegas-inspired $7.77 price. But as we were testing the combination of the programmer with the A-Star, we were getting brown-out resets on the programmer when it powered the A-Star. The relevant part of the circuit was just a P-channel MOSFET that connected the programmer’s own logic voltage (which we call VDD) to the VCC pin of the ISP connector:
MOSFET-based target VCC power control used on Pololu USB AVR Programmer v2. |
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The problem was caused by the MOSFET turning on too well (quickly and with low resistance), causing the logic voltage on the programmer to drop if the VCC of the target device had more than a few µF of discharged capacitance on it. The bigger the capacitance on VCC, the bigger the voltage drop on VDD, until eventually the drop was big enough to trigger the brown-out reset protection on the programmer’s microcontroller. We tried various firmware tricks with our existing hardware, such as turning on the MOSFET for very short pulses to gradually charge up the target device’s VCC capacitance, but none of them worked reliably enough. So in the end, we decided to redo our PCB and put in a dedicated high-side power switch with a controlled slew rate. The new programmer can now power target boards with up to about 33 µF on their logic supplies.
These are the two other improvements we made to the new v2.1 programmer over the older v2 programmer:
The v2.1 programmer is otherwise identical to the v2 programmer, which means it’s a USB AVR microcontroller programmer that can program targets at 3.3 V and 5 V and offers an extra UART-type TTL serial port (like the popular FTDI USB-to-serial adapters) that can be super handy for debugging, bootloading, or even general connection of your project to a USB port.
Pololu USB AVR Programmer v2.1, labeled top view. |
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The v2 programmer was already a good deal at under $12, but at $7.77, and with free shipping in the USA, we hope to make AVR development extremely accessible. The manufacturing improvements and other cost reduction initiatives I have been blogging about this year help us make this offer without losing money on it, but I am not expecting to be making money directly off of the programmers, either. My goal is to give you the best value in a basic tool you will use over and over as you build your own projects, with the hope that that will help you keep Pololu in mind the next time you need some electronics or robotics parts.
And, as usual for our new product releases this year, we’re offering an extra introductory discount: the first 100 customers to use coupon code AVRPROGINTRO get that already great $7.77 price dropped to $5.55 (limit 2 per customer). (Click to add the coupon code to your cart.)
My posts last month (here, here, and especially here) about the new electronics manufacturing equipment we installed focused on our new pick and place machine and stencil printer. This post is about the other major new machine we got at the same time, an automated optical inspection (AOI) machine from Mirtec.
AOI machines have cameras that move around over an assembled board to take a bunch of pictures that then get processed to determine whether or not the board is assembled correctly. The machines often have several cameras that enable taking pictures from various angles, along with fancy lighting to variously illuminate the boards and components being inspected. Our AOI machines have rings of LEDs of different colors at different angles, so that, for example, red light highlights a different portion of a solder fillet than blue light. This picture shows a panel of our Dual G2 High-Power Motor Drivers in one of our older AOI machines:
A panel of Dual G2 High-Power Motor Drivers illuminated by blue LEDs during automated optical inspection (AOI). |
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The tricks with lighting are basically attempts to generate more three-dimensional information than you can get with just 2D pictures out of a camera. What is exciting about our new machine is that in addition to the traditional lighting and cameras, it also has a sophisticated sensor for doing precise height measurements everywhere along a component. Machines with this kind of sensor are called 3D AOI machines.
5-pin SOT-23 component getting set up for 3D automated optical inspection (AOI). |
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The machine we got is Mirtec’s latest AOI machine, the MV-3 OMNI, which is a desktop or batch version of their inline inspection machine that has the same technology. I ordered the machine with the optional stand, which turned out to be a good thing because for a desktop machine, this thing is huge. The crate was much larger than I expected, and while not requiring a 10,000 pound forklift rental like the pick and place machine, we did have to use our fork extensions.
Out of the crate, the machine and stand are quite a bit smaller. Something to keep in mind for anyone considering such a machine is that this one is too big to fit through a single three-foot door.
We had an especially busy week, with the installation and training for the AOI machine happening at the same time we were doing the Europlacer pick and place machine and stencil printer installation that I wrote about earlier.
Mirtec MV-3 OMNI 3D AOI machine training. |
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Our Yestech AOI machines are visible in the background of that last training photo. (They are also featured in our The Manufacturing of A-Star 32U4 Micro video.) We already performed 100% AOI on every board we made before we got this latest machine. We are happy with those machines, and since we had two, capacity and redundancy were not primary motivations for getting this new one. With any piece of equipment like this, the challenge is to find every possible defect without generating a lot of false positives. If the settings are too lax, or the machine is not capable enough, defects will make it through, but it’s not enough to just flag every mismatched pixel since the ultimate authority is still the human operator that inspects every spot the machine identifies as suspect. If the machine inundates the operator with a thousand possible defects for every actual defect, the operator is likely to miss the one actual problem. It’s difficult to characterize this since there are many different components and every design is different, plus how we set up or train the machines also matters a lot.
3D automated optical inspection (AOI) setup for Pololu DRV8825 stepper motor driver carrier. |
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So, the main motivation for getting this new machine was the hope that it will give us more capabilities going forward to have the highest possible confidence in the quality of our products. The new machine is almost twice the cost of the older ones, and especially with the 3D capability, it should be able to deliver that. Our first impressions have been very positive, but to really know, it will take some time to get familiar with the machine’s strengths and weaknesses and to integrate it well into our manufacturing processes.
3D automated optical inspection (AOI) setup for Pololu Dual VNH5019 Motor Driver Shield for Arduino. |
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I am a little proud (but mostly embarrassed) that I still do basically all of the electronics component purchasing for Pololu. Today I am writing about buying components because their prices have a huge impact on the end price of our products, especially when we work to cut down other costs as I have been discussing lately. Buying parts when trying to compete globally is more frustrating than you might think, and I hope that writing this will help trigger some conversations that will help us do better and also encourage component manufacturers and distributors to better support small electronics manufacturers in the United States.
I buy almost all of the electronic components that go into our products from suppliers in the United States. That includes integrated circuits, discrete semiconductor products like transistors and diodes, resistors, capacitors, inductors, and so on. The only parts I do not buy in America are components like connectors and electromechanical devices like switches and buzzers. This post is mostly about buying components in the US from US suppliers, but I will briefly touch on the non-US components to provide some background and comparison.
There are two main reasons for those non-US components: they are much cheaper than similar parts in the US and we can evaluate that they are good enough. That second reason is important because counterfeits and fake parts are a big problem in the electronics industry. We can look at something like a 0.1" male header or an electromagnetic buzzer and see basically what it is. Once we can be confident that a component or supplier is good enough for the level of performance and reliability we need from our products, we can look at prices to see whether it’s worth the extra hassle (and that amount of hassle keeps going down) to get the components overseas, which pretty much means China (and Taiwan, in case that distinction is meaningful). And that price difference can be huge. When I started getting connectors directly from Taiwan over ten years ago, the price difference was approaching a factor of ten, meaning that for around a thousand dollars I could buy what would cost me ten thousand domestically. Some of the price differences seem to be getting smaller, but the components still seem to be easily three to five times cheaper in China. Early on (around 2005), local salespeople would ask me what prices I was getting in China, thinking they had some better deal or connection than I knew of; nowadays, they don’t even ask or try to compete.
With all the other component types, even for the most basic parts like resistors and capacitors, we are not really qualified to evaluate them, and I would not want to be responsible for doing quality control for millions of units even if we could analyze one particular instance of a resistor or capacitor and conclude that it is good enough. So, I only buy components from reputable brands through their authorized distributors, which means I buy basically all our components through American companies (with one exception I’ll get to soon that almost doesn’t feel like an exception, anyway). Those companies also tend to be the biggest electronic parts distributors in the world.
I still buy some components from the catalog-type sources that are probably familiar even to most students and hobbyists, like Digi-Key, Mouser, and Newark. Once upon a time, these companies printed large catalogs that were the best way to find out what kinds of components even existed (especially when I was growing up in Hawaii). Digi-Key stopped printing catalogs a few years ago; Newark apparently still does. In any case, these kinds of sources now have good online resources for finding parts, they tend to have a lot of parts in stock, and they are set up for small quantities, which is why they are great resources for individuals, too. Usually, it’s very easy to buy components from these sources, and I rarely interact with anyone when I do since I usually just place the orders through the web sites at their listed prices.
However, the prices usually are not the best at those most convenient sources, especially when my minimum quantities tend to be full reels with thousands of parts rather than a few individual parts. So for most of my electronics purchasing, I go with big distributors like Arrow, Avnet, and Future Electronics. These companies have local offices (though for Las Vegas, “local” tends to mean in Phoenix, Arizona or somewhere in Southern California) that have salespeople that I can talk to that can help me get lower prices. Future Electronics, being a Canadian company, is the exception that I mentioned earlier; but, working with them is basically the same as working with Avnet or Arrow since they have the local staff and things like a distribution center near Memphis, Tennessee (here is a video about it).
Back when I was a student and before I started Pololu, I thought electronics distributors just bought components from manufacturers and then sold them with some markup on their cost. I think some of that did happen and still happens today, but it’s less common and less practical now because there are so many different, specialized components that they cannot all just be sitting in stock somewhere, waiting for the unlikely scenario that someone would come along and buy them. When I buy from distributors like Digi-Key and Mouser, I am almost always buying something they have in stock; when I buy from Arrow and Future, it’s almost never something they have in stock (or it’s something they have in stock because they had good reason to expect me to order).
But there was a much bigger misconception in my naive view than just the timing of when a distributor bought some parts relative to when the end customer ordered them. The major thing I learned in the early years of running Pololu is that component manufacturers charge the distributors different prices for the same components, based on the end customer! In some ways, that’s frustrating because it means I have to do a lot more work to get a good price. I have to convince each distributor and each manufacturer to give me a good price, and sometimes I have to do that with each component. It can also be a good thing in that if I do establish a good relationship with some manufacturer and distributor, the hassle per part goes down over time as they get to know our business and what factors are important to us. And some of them probably do give me a globally competitive price sometimes.
The difficulty, and what prompted me to write this post, is with those manufacturers that do not. (That or counterfeits, which is sometimes the explanation or excuse I get back from manufacturer’s representatives.) Well, the really specific thing that led me to write this post is the AVR Freaks thread about my last post, in which I introduced our new A-Star 328PB Micro:
AVR Freaks post about A-Star 328PB Micro announcement, the motivation for this blog post. |
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The poster mentions a board similar to Pololu’s with an ATmega328P for $1.70 (and wonders about the chip authenticity). I went to look at the part price on Digi-Key, and this is what I saw:
Screenshot of Digi-Key price for ATmega328P with prices highlighted, retrieved 25 February 2018. |
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I have highlighted the relevant fields, which are the lowest prices: $1.77 each at 100 pieces, and alternately, on a reel of 2000 pieces for $1.83. 100 pieces is kind of low for a highest price break. A long time ago, I tried out the higher volume quote request option that is suggested under the 100-piece price, and after some back-and-forth, Digi-Key gave me an official volume quote for higher quantities with the exact same price as at the 100-piece break:
Excerpt from quantity price quote from Digi-Key (from around 2010) |
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I tried it a few more times with some other parts, but it was basically the same result every time, so I have not tried special pricing with Digi-Key since. That was close to ten years ago, so maybe it’s different now, and maybe it would be different if I had asked for 10k or 100k pieces.
Back to the original point: you can get the whole assembled board from China, in single-piece quantities, for less than the price of just the one component, even in volume quantities. And this Atmel/Microchip example is far from atypical or anywhere near the worst case. Here is an AliExpress listing for a small development board for the STM32F103C8T6 microcontroller:
AliExpress listing for an STM32F103 development board for $1.79 including shipping, captured 25 February 2018. |
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In this case, Digi-Key has prices listed for higher quantities than in the earlier example, and the 2400-piece reel has the best unit price of $3.04:
Screenshot of Digi-Key price for STM32F103C8T6, retrieved 25 February 2018. |
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I have been working on pricing for similar STM32 parts, and even at twenty thousand pieces (not through Digi-Key), they are not getting to the prices of just one of these complete boards, with double-sided assembly and a bunch of additional components (and free shipping!—though that is some separate scam that I do not blame the electronics component manufacturers and distributors for). Something clearly doesn’t add up, right?
As I mentioned earlier, some manufacturers will say the parts in the cheap boards from China are counterfeits. I believe that is the explanation in some cases, and we have our share of frustrations with knock-offs and counterfeits of our own products. But I had one experience around five years ago that makes me very skeptical that that is anywhere near the whole story. One of our more successful early products, at least by number of units sold, was a basic carrier for Allegro’s A4988 stepper motor driver. I remember being frustrated because Allegro seemed to have some deal in place with Digi-Key that gave them the best prices (and unlike the examples above, Digi-Key did have volume breaks up to many tens of thousands on that part). Digi-Key has been getting better on prices, but still, paying “Digi-Key prices” seemed like an insult when I was buying tens of thousands of these parts at a time.
It became more of a problem when the knock-offs of our boards started appearing on eBay and other sites for basically the same prices as just our component costs. I kept trying to get my suppliers to help me with my prices until I got the parts from Asia via Future Electronics. They assured me these were genuine parts through their global partners or subsidiaries, and they could do that for me because they were not authorized distributors for Allegro in the United States. So, that alone was a good indication that these parts were out there, through reputable sources, at lower prices than I could get in the US. But the conclusion to this story gets better: someone who could do something about it at Allegro finally got word that I was getting these parts elsewhere (they noticed the sales abruptly went away, and they wanted to see my invoices from other vendors) and reduced my authorized price, through Arrow, to almost half of what it had been.
This was over the course of maybe two years, and while it did help and we lowered our prices, I believe we missed out on a lot of potential sales because it took so long to get the prices down. The sad thing is that there are probably many more missed opportunities, not even just for Pololu, because of how components get priced in the US. The manufacturers seem more willing to cut prices after demand is proven and they start losing sales rather than up front to make the sales happen in the first place. And to be clear, I am not talking about small quantities like broken reels and cut tape that require extra handling and processing. I also understand that these modern 32-bit microcontrollers like the STM32 are such amazing achievements that it seems really unappreciative to complain about one costing $2. It’s just that when the same parts are costing one dollar somewhere else, we need to figure out how to get that price if we want to be globally competitive with our products.
Since I know many of you are also interested in open-source hardware, I should mention the ramifications component pricing has for openness with our designs. One of the factors that goes into how much information we release is how good I think our component price is. It’s easier to share key components that we use if I think we can keep making our products competitively.
Back to some of the comments that led me to start writing on this topic. I hope I have shown you a different kind of behind-the-scenes view than just the machines that go into making our products. Some of that “twice as expensive as a similar board from Ali / Ebay” goes all the way down to the basic component level. I hope you can see that I am working on addressing that. I would be interested in what other small manufacturers in America (and in other countries besides China) do. Should I just start sourcing more components from China? Should I be using smaller distributors in the US? (I am skeptical that would make a big difference because of my understanding that manufacturers are basically setting the prices). Or is there something else I’m completely missing? I know some of you who read my posts work for the electronics manufacturers and distributors; can you help push for getting better component pricing in the US? For all of you who like making electronics, wouldn’t it be nice to have the option (or for your kids to have the option) to do that without having to live in China or being limited to industries like aerospace and military where components costs might not matter as much?
Today we are releasing our newest A-Star programmable controller, the A-Star 328PB Micro. It is basically our version of the ubiquitous Arduino Pro Mini type products, but with the newer ATmega328PB microcontroller. The board itself is pretty straightforward (though the updated AVR is exciting), so the main thing I want to share in this post is our history with the Atmel ATmega328PB microcontrollers (this was before Microchip acquired Atmel) and how this product would not have existed without our lower-cost manufacturing initiative that I have been discussing.
We have been using the ATmega8, and then the ATmega48, ATmega168, and ATmega328P, since 2004 in many of our user-programmable products because of their versatility and excellent free compiler support (which also made Arduino possible). We first heard about the ATmega328PB in early 2014. The product kept being delayed, and I did not get a quote for them until October 2015. I ordered a reel right away; it arrived in March 2016. Over those two years, we put our AVR-related efforts into the ATmega32U4, releasing several A-Star 32U4 programmable controllers and using it on robots like the Zumo 32U4. The ATmega32U4 was a superior part with native USB and more I/O lines, making it a better fit for many of our applications. By the time we finally got the ATmega328PB parts, we had the A-Star 32U4 Micro available for just $12.75, making it less exciting to put effort into a lower-performance product that might end up costing almost the same amount.
Original ATmega168-based Baby Orangutan robot controller from 2005 (left) next to A-Star 32U4 Micro boards. |
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The new manufacturing equipment I ordered in the fall of 2017, along with the availability of our latest AVR programmer, brought attention back to the feasibility of a basic ATmega328PB carrier. I was hesitant to put effort into a product where we could not offer something substantially more compelling than what was already available. Despite the ATmega328PB being out in the wild for almost two years, it still had not really made it into many Arduino products, so I thought that perhaps we could offer something there. But more importantly, I wanted to see how low we could price it. I was aware of Arduino Pro Mini clones available on eBay and the AliExpress-type sites for under $3. Most official Arduino Pro Mini type products cost more like $10. For this project to be worthwhile, I wanted to get under $5.
It turns out we had to squeeze quite a bit just to get to the upper limit of that “under $5” goal, and so we are releasing this product at a unit retail price of $4.95. It’s not the under-$3 you can find for the absolute cheapest clones, but if you get the A-Star 328PB Micro from us, you are getting a well-supported, well-made product (each unit is 100% automatically visually inspected and 100% functionally tested) and supporting a company that is doing more than just copying products that are already out there.
It is my hope that by being able to offer the A-Star 328PB Micro for under $5, we are offering something meaningful, giving you a new option for general-purpose controllers at the price of a cheap lunch. I am interested to hear what you think. Is the 328PB interesting when you can get USB for not much more? Is the price low enough for you to buy from us instead of getting it from China?
We are offering the A-Star 328PB Micro in four voltage and frequency combinations:
A-Star 328PB Micro pinout diagram. |
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The A-Star 328PB Micro provides access to all 24 I/O lines of the microcontroller and ships with an Arduino-compatible serial bootloader; you can also use an AVR in-system programmer (ISP) for access to the entire chip. We recommend our USB AVR Programmer v2, which supports both programming interfaces and can be configured to run at either 3.3 V or 5 V.
Last but not least, we are continuing our plan of offering new products at the highest quantity price break at single unit quantities as an introductory celebration. That means that for the first 100 customers, you can get an A-Star 328PB Micro for just $3.87! (Must use coupon code AS328PBINTRO; click to add the coupon code to your cart.)
While we assemble (and design and document and ship and support) the boards here in Las Vegas, we still get the bare PC boards from China, where they are currently on holiday celebrating Chinese New Year. That is constraining how many units we can make at the moment, so we are limiting shipments to 5 units per customer. However, the introductory coupon has no quantity limit, and you can order more than five at that price if you would like. Backordered units are likely to ship within a few weeks.
Image from TI Robotics System Learning Kit introductory video courtesy of university.ti.com. |
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Texas Instruments just launched their new Robotics System Learning Kit (TI-RSLK), a complete robotics kit and curriculum aimed at university students and based on our Romi platform. Twenty modules with lecture notes, lab activities, and over a hundred videos are all publicly available now.
Image from TI Robotics System Learning Kit curriculum overview web page courtesy of university.ti.com. |
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Several kits specifically for the course will be available soon through element14.
We are just starting to go through the ton of content ourselves since we were not directly involved in creating any of the course materials (except to the extent that TI used documentation from our products). We are excited about robotics and engineering education, and I am very interested to hear what you think of what TI is offering. Let me know, and I can pass your comments back to our contacts at TI, who of course are interested in the feedback, too.
Image from TI Robotics System Learning Kit introductory video courtesy of university.ti.com. |
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The versatile Romi chassis is available in a variety of colors as just a mechanical kit for those who want to do all of their own electronics development. We also offer a growing selection of supporting electronics that include the Motor Driver and Power Distribution Board that TI is using in the TI-RSLK (along with their own microcontroller and LaunchPad modular development system). The more integrated Romi 32U4 Control Board includes an Arduino-compatible ATmega32U4 microcontroller and is ready for expansion with a Raspberry Pi or compatible embedded computer module.
The new equipment I have been sharing for the past two weeks (here and here) represents our biggest manufacturing capacity increase in five years. Today I will go into more detail about the pick and place machine and stencil printer we got, along with what it means for our customers.
Assembling a circuit board with surface-mounted components involves three main steps: printing solder paste on a bare circuit board, placing the components on the board, and then sending the board through an oven, which melts the solder paste, soldering the components to the board. You can see the steps in this video we made a while ago about how the A-Star 32U4 Micro gets made:
At the end of 2012, we got two very different pick and place machines, an SM421F from Samsung (which has since sold their electronics assembly equipment business to Hanwha) and an iineo from Europlacer. Both machines are very versatile, designed to place everything from the smallest components to large and tall parts, and we have run all of our products on both machines. I got both machines back then because each manufacturer made a compelling case, and I wanted to try both. The new machine we installed this month is another Europlacer machine. So… does that mean it’s better?
First off, the Europlacer machine is much bigger and more expensive than the Samsung/Hanwha machines, so the real comparison for this round of new equipment was two Hanwha machines vs. one from Europlacer. Each SM482 Plus has 120 feeder slots, so two of those machines have very similar feeder capacity to the 264 slots of the iineo+. The pair of Hanwha machines is also similar to the Europlacer option in terms of combined size and price. I should also say that we have had a great experience with both machines and vendors, and I do not regret having bought either of those machines in 2012. The Hanwha machine route had one major advantage: the machines, even individually, are faster than the Europlacer in the straight parts per hour component placement rate; with two of them, it should be no contest, with a combined advertised placement rate of around 60,000 components per hour vs. around 15,000 for the Europlacer machine. Having two smaller machines would also give us some more flexibility (we could operate them as two separate machines, running different products, as opposed to one big machine) and redundancy, so that we could keep at least some production running if one machine went down. The redundancy argument probably would have pushed me in the direction of the Hanwha, two-machine route, if we didn’t already have any other machines.
But we did already have a Europlacer machine, so getting a second one would give us that redundancy. And despite the sustained placement rate being four times lower, we expect the Europlacer to actually be the faster option for our purposes. That’s because our products tend to be relatively small and simple, but we have hundreds of different products (and I want it to be thousands soon), so we need to be able to run many different products a day efficiently. We might get some of that efficiency from the Europlacer software, though it’s not that clear to me that there really is that much difference between the machines (as opposed to operator familiarity). The interchangeable carts should also help eventually, though I do not expect that to make much of an impact until we have more of them, and so far we just have enough to basically fill each machine. What I think matters the most is the huge feeder count on a single machine, minimizing the amount of component changes that have to be made from one product to the next. It’s inevitable that the raw throughput will be lower when the placement head has to on average travel farther from the board being assembled to the part in the machine, but for our mix of quantities, it’s worth it.
132 feeder locations across four carts on the back side of the Europlacer iineo+ machine. There are 132 more on the other side! |
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For solder paste printing, I thought some more about a jet printer. The general idea is that the printer has the solder paste in a cartridge that moves all over the bare circuit board and squirts some on every pad, as opposed to squeegeeing a bead of solder paste through a stencil the way solder paste is more typically applied. I have been looking at MyData’s jet printers since they came out probably over ten years ago now, and the prospect of not needing stencils and being able to vary deposit thicknesses keeps being attractive, especially for our scenario where I want to be able to do just a few panels each of many different designs every day. But, at more than double the cost of a traditional stencil printer, the cost seems difficult to justify, especially since we cut our own stencils in-house. So, I ended up ordering another stencil printer from Europlacer since we are happy with the one we already have. MyData is now Mycronic, and you can see more about their jet printer at the Mycronic Jet Printer page.
The technician from Europlacer performing the installations was disappointed that we were pairing the nice new color-coordinated stencil printer with our Samsung pick and place machine. |
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What does all this mean for our customers? (Other than a higher likelihood of getting to see an awesome machine running when you come visit us.) Partly I am sharing this because I expect most of you like making things, like to see how things get made, and would love to have machines like this of your own. More importantly, I want to remind you of the effort we are going through to bring you better products at lower prices. Having more of this extremely flexible manufacturing capacity means we can keep churning out new prototypes quickly and then be able to manufacture the products at a globally competitive price. Over the coming months, we will be assessing our manufacturing costs and lowering prices on many of our popular products, and new products will have lower prices as soon as we introduce them.
We are kicking that off with a substantial price cut on our popular time of flight distance sensors:
VL6180X Time-of-Flight Distance Sensor Carrier with Voltage Regulator, 60cm max |
VL53L0X Time-of-Flight Distance Sensor Carrier with Voltage Regulator, 200cm Max |
And to help everyone share in our excitement, we’re offering the new, low, 100-piece pricing at single-unit quantities to the first 100 customers using coupon codes 2489PRICECUT and 2490PRICECUT (Click to add both coupon codes to your cart).
Some more of our new equipment showed up yesterday, and installation has been progressing all week. Here are a few more pictures.
Stencil printer selfie! |
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New Europlacer pick and place machine on the left, older one on the right. |
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Stencil printer ready for first print. |
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We like the Europlacer’s huge number of feeder slots. |
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First production board on new Europlacer iineo+ pick and place machine, 7 February 2018. |
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Europlacer’s iineo pick and place machine is one of the biggest and most versatile I know of, with space for up to 264 feeders (each feeder can hold a different component). For comparison, our Samsung pick and place machine, which itself has a decent feeder capacity compared to most machines, has 120 slots. We do not have any individual products that come close to requiring that many different components, but having such a huge feeder capacity means that we can run many different boards without having to change out a lot of parts. The feeders are also on carts that we can move around and between machines, which are also networked so that we can do things like set up new products on one machine and then run with the same setup on the other. I will write more soon about how this fits into our future plans, and about the other exciting new machine that is in the background of some of these pictures.
We got a big delivery at Pololu yesterday. Here are some pictures for you to share in the excitement!
Seeing the truck pulling in with the crate on a flatbed trailer was a welcome sight after the difficulty last time, when we had to fish the crate lengthwise out of a covered trailer. |
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Getting to uncrate the machine outside in short sleeves in January is just one of the perks of operating out of Las Vegas. |
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Almost set for installation next week! |
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I will post more about the machine and others we are installing once we have them up and running. For those of you wondering what it is, it is a pick and place machine, which is the kind of robot we use to build your robot parts. Here is a video of one of our existing machines in operation assembling a Zumo reflectance sensor array.
Since my last post about free shipping in the USA, we expanded the program to include orders consisting of $40 or more in free add-on shipping items. And today, we added almost 300 different metal gearmotors to our selection of products that ship for free in the USA. (Don’t worry, we don’t pile up actual good production motors like we did in that picture; those were returned by an infamous, once-skyrocketing startup.)
I am excited to announce our first voltage regulators with multi-turn trimmer potentiometers! I have wanted to add multi-turn pots to our products for a long time, but the problem has been that they are really expensive. They also tend to be quite big, at least compared to many of our boards, which we try to keep compact, and the smaller, surface-mounted ones are especially expensive. My latest round of looking for lower-cost options did not pan out, but I decided to just give it a try with the expensive parts.
The new S9V11x regulators that feature these potentiometers are buck-boost regulators that can output a voltage that is lower, the same, or higher than the input voltage. There are also versions with a multi-turn pot for adjusting the undervoltage cutoff threshold, so that if you use these with batteries, you can prevent overdischarging them. With twelve turns of adjustment available, it’s much easier to precisely set the voltages on the modules than with the single-turn potentiometers we have used on other adjustable regulators.
The output and cutoff multi-turn adjustment potentiometers on the S9V11x voltage regulators. |
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While I have been talking mostly about the potentiometers, the main regulator is pretty magical, too, giving you quite a bit of power over a broad operating input range in a small size.
Typical maximum continuous output current of Step-Up/Step-Down Voltage Regulator S9V11x |
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Our stock products are available in several combinations of adjustable and fixed output voltage and cutoff. If you have a higher-volume application, we can make them with fixed voltages wherever you need them. You could initially prototype your design with the adjustable version and then get fixed ones made once you know exactly what voltage you need.
Regulator | Input (V) | Output (V) | Low-voltage cutoff | Size | Price | |
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#2868 S9V11MACMA | 2* – 16 | 2.5 – 9 (fine-adjust) | fine-adjust | 0.50″ × 0.60″ × 0.25″ | $13.95 | |
#2869 S9V11MA | 2.5 – 9 (fine-adjust) | – | $10.95 | |||
#2870 S9V11F5S6CMA | 5 (6 V selectable) | fine-adjust | $10.95 | |||
#2871 S9V11F3S5CMA | 3.3 (5 V selectable) | fine-adjust | $10.95 | |||
#2872 S9V11F3S5 | 3.3 (5 V selectable) | – | 0.50″ × 0.60″ × 0.17″ | $7.95 | ||
#2873 S9V11F3S5C3 | 3.3 (5 V selectable) | 3 V (fixed) | $7.95 | |||
#2836 S9V11F5 | 5 | – | 0.30″ × 0.45″ × 0.17″ | $8.95 | ||
* The regulator has a minimum start-up voltage of 3 V, but it can operate down to 2 V after startup. It is disabled when the input voltage is below the low-voltage cutoff. |
I am very interested to see what people think of the multi-turn adjustment feature. If these new regulators sell decently or customers ask for it, we will add the multi-turn potentiometers to our other regulator offerings. Is the extra expense worth it? Or do you know of a good, low-cost, multi-turn potentiometer we could consider for future products like this?
Some of my happiest memories of building Pololu, and therefore of my life, are of my friends Ben and Paul moving to Las Vegas to work on it with me. Ben was my best friend in high school, but we had not stayed in touch well after that. I met Paul at MIT, and he was involved with Pololu from the beginning, in 2000, and after he graduated, he visited Candice and me in Massachusetts and then in Las Vegas from time to time. Ben and I reconnected in late 2006, and he moved to Las Vegas shortly thereafter; Paul finally joined us (with his wife Fang) full time after the summer of 2007.
So we have been at this as a team for over ten years now. It’s long enough that it’s difficult to remember things being different. As I started writing this, I figured that our first Black Friday sale must have been in 2007, too. But apparently we did not have our first one until 2009 (though Ben pointed out, with a hint of resentment, that he might have been pushing for it sooner). I have happy memories of last-minute sale preparations and then staying up past midnight to watch the sales come in, wondering how long the doorbuster deals would last. Some years we were at home, instant-messaging each other; other years, we were at the office making sure everything worked as expected.
Even now, our Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale is probably the project Paul, Ben, and I work on together most intensely. There are of course others involved in getting ready for the sale, and there are lots of other projects the three of us all work on. But there’s a really hard deadline, which we typically do not have to deal with, which leads to late nights together. And preparing for the sale involves deciding which products we care about a lot and that we want to highlight, and since it’s our company, it’s our call on how much we want to push by offering products at or sometimes below cost, in the spirit of not only merchandising but also good fun. It’s a time to look back on the products we have released this year, and, as I am doing now, reminisce about Black Friday sales past.
(We do not recommend actually running a Balboa in the snow.) |
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I am giving this background not only to share some of what I am thankful for, but to give our customers and newer employees some understanding of our perspective and what goes into these sales. It’s personal. It’s something fun for me, a kind of reversal of the excitement of looking for good deals as a shopper on Black Friday. When I used to be more directly involved in getting things made and shipped, I would usually go to stores in the evening, to see what deals might be left that other shoppers weren’t interested in. In the past few years, I’ve had the luxury of doing some brick and mortar Black Friday shopping in the morning, though usually I’m still shopping for things like vacuum cleaners for Pololu at stores like Home Depot.
We listen to what our customers say, and we try to put something in our deals for everyone. Of course, part of the point is to offer some extreme discounts, so we limit the quantities and the durations on those deals. But we still try to set the limits such that the doorbusters will last at least a few hours, so if you care and try a little, they should be available. If you’re one of those people who don’t like waking up early or sorting through special offers, I remind you that we work hard to offer good prices to begin with, and we are offering discounts site wide for the duration of the sale. And if you are a student or parent who really had your heart set on a Zumo or Balboa robot for Christmas but miss out on the doorbuster for some reason, and that extra discount makes the difference in being able to afford it, let us know. We want deserving people to have these robots, and we’ll try to help you out.
Now, on to details about the sale this year, since we will be making some big changes from years past. In a break from past years, when we had a single set of doorbuster coupons that went active on the first day of the sale and the same items were on sale for the duration of the sale (Wednesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday), we will have different door busters for different days. We have also upgraded our coupon system so that we can control the time they are active, not just the day, so that we can make doorbusters go active at a time more appropriate for our customers in the United States.
Our new free shipping system should allow many of the sale items to ship for free or at a low cost, which should make it practical to make several orders over the course of the sale. We might combine some orders into single shipments to reduce our shipping expenses, but please note that because of the volume of orders we get during the sale, we will not be able to accommodate requests to combine orders to reduce shipping charges.
I hope you get to spend the holidays doing things that bring meaning to your life, with the people you love.
Oh, and if you were expecting to see a preview of the sale, it’s up on the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale page now. Keep checking back throughout next week as we reveal more great deals!
We sell a lot of motor drivers, which makes sense since you usually need motors to build robots, and motor drivers tend to be the kind of product you cannot really build yourself on a breadboard. One of our more popular products is the dual VNH5019 shield for the Arduino:
Pololu dual VNH5019 motor driver shield, assembled and connected to an Arduino Uno R3. |
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That product is based on ST’s massive VNH5019 motor driver chip, which is a successor to the VNH3SP30 driver we initially started selling back in 2005:
Older version of the High-Current Motor Driver Carrier. |
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When I first heard of the chip (at one of the first LVBots meetings), it seemed like someone must have misremembered the spec since it was inconceivable for a single integrated chip to deliver 30 amps. And to some extent, that was valid—you would have to do a lot of extra thermal management work to get 30 A out of that chip without it overheating. But the chip really could do in excess of 10 A, which was still amazing; the real limitation was in voltage, especially if you tried to use PWM at any moderate frequency. The VNH2SP30 was better about PWM frequency, letting us get to 20 kHz, but it had an upper operating limit of 16 V. The VNH5019 raised this to 24 V, getting us tantalizingly close to the 24V rail many would like to use. The problem is that 24 V is the limit, and we really need to be able to operate higher than that to account for the usual variations in nominally 24V power setups.
As far as I know, there is no integrated circuit that can deliver over ten amps at 24 V nominal (i.e. at least 30 V max); for that kind of power, you need to go to H-bridges with discrete MOSFETs. We have had those as stand-alone products for a while, too. But those still leave you with a lot of wiring to do if you want to drive two motors, which is typically the minimum for a mobile robot. The new product family we just released makes that easy by providing two high-power motor drivers in one Arduino shield-type package:
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As you can see from the pictures, the main difference in these Dual G2 High-Power Motor Driver Shields is in the MOSFETs: the white boards have larger, 5×6mm MOSFETs, and the blue boards have smaller, 3×3mm MOSFETs. These correspond to the two versions of the individual drivers:
Pololu G2 High-Power Motor Driver 24v21 and 24v13. |
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(The higher-power version on the left has the MOSFETs on the back side of the board.) We also offer each board with 30V and 40V MOSFETs, for four total options. The new dual motor drivers perform similarly to our single-channel G2 units, and like the single channel carriers, all of these dual drivers feature current sensing and an adjustable current limit that could be used to detect and protect against stall conditions. These are the individual performance points:
Dual G2 High- Power Motor Driver 18v22 Shield |
Dual G2 High- Power Motor Driver 18v18 Shield |
Dual G2 High- Power Motor Driver 24v18 Shield |
Dual G2 High- Power Motor Driver 24v14 Shield |
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Absolute max input voltage: |
30 V | 40 V | ||
Max nominal battery voltage: |
18 V | 28 V | ||
Max continuous current per channel: |
22 A | 18 A | 18 A | 14 A |
Default active current- limiting threshold: |
60 A | 50 A | 40 A | |
Current sense output: |
10 mV/A | 20 mV/A |
For drivers like these, power (heat) dissipation is generally the limiting factor. The copper area around the MOSFETs on both the white and blue versions of the drivers are about the same, so the lower-current blue units perform better then their smaller single channel G2 counter-parts, while the higher current white drivers do worse than the smaller single channel G2 carriers (which also use four layer PCBs for better performance). The power ratings we provide are the maximums without additional heat sinking or air flow and at room temperature. Please note that the boards will be extremely hot at those maximum currents, and the available current will be lower if the ambient temperature is higher.
Since many Arduino boards do not support higher input voltages, the new dual drivers also incorporate a 1A switching regulator so that a single higher-voltage supply can power the motors and Arduino. We have an Arduino library to help you get up and running quickly. And for those who want to use the board without an Arduino, all of the motor control connections are also brought out to a row of 0.1″ headers on one side of the board.
(And for those of you wanting to use this kind of driver with a Raspberry Pi, we have a Raspberry Pi HAT form-factor version coming soon!)
We are now offering free US shipping for $60 or more of Pololu-branded products with active statuses. |
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Since my post on Thursday afternoon, we have brought free shipping to dozens of products and free add-on shipping to hundreds more. Unfortunately, that still does not get you really free shipping for most of our thousands of products because many of them are individually too low-cost to make part-by-part free shipping feasible. We just do not have a way to ship you a $6 regulator or an $8 pair of wheels for free without having to inflate the price of the products. But today, we released phase two of our free shipping initiative, which allows us to offer free shipping in the US on orders of $60 or more of Pololu-branded products that have an active status. This should bring free shipping to most of our typical orders, which might include that set of wheels, a few motors, a motor driver, and maybe the $6 regulator.
You might be wondering what I meant by that somewhat awkward phrase, “Pololu-branded products that have an active status”. That’s actually related to yet another exciting new set of features we are bringing to the Pololu site. We are proud that we design and manufacture most of our products, and we want to make it easy to tell which items are made by us. For products from other brands, especially where we are authorized distributors or otherwise working with those brands, we want to make it clear that you are getting the product from that brand, and not some counterfeit or knock off. And sometimes we all just want something generic, like the ubiquitous 0.1" headers, where the manufacturer or brand does not really matter. In some of those cases, we might not want to reveal our suppliers, or we might want to have the flexibility to change suppliers without updating product specifications; explicitly calling out a product as generic should help make it clear what kind of a product you are getting.
Because many of our customers build their own products using our products as components, or design curricula around our products, I also want to better communicate the life cycle status of our products. We therefore added a “product status” field to our product listings so that you can quickly tell if a product is one that we expect to keep making for a long time or if we expect to be discontinuing it soon. I will go over the various product status designations in a separate blog post, but for the purposes of this free shipping announcement, the point is that the products we make and which are in our good graces will be considered toward the $60 free shipping minimum.
We will be updating the product brand and status fields for our products in the coming weeks; please let us know if a product you are interested in is not updated yet.
Everyone wants free shipping, right? Well, today I am happy to announce an important step in bringing free shipping to Pololu, at least for our US customers. We are beginning to offer free shipping in these two senses:
Some items are eligible for free shipping within the United States. If your shopping cart consists only of items eligible for free shipping, you will be presented with a “Free Shipping” shipping option during checkout. Free shipping will be shipped by a carrier and service we select, which will typically be the lowest-cost, slowest service. Currently, that would likely be First-Class Mail through the US Post Office or a ground service by FedEx, depending on the contents of the order.
Some items are eligible for free add-on shipping for orders within the United States. These are typically very light items that should not significantly impact our shipping cost, and we pass on those savings to you. No additional shipping will be charged for these items, independent of your shipping method. Orders that consist only of free add-on shipping items will cost the minimum shipping cost for each service as the item sizes and weights will not be added to the shipping cost calculation. Orders with at least one free shipping item and the rest free add-on shipping items will have a free shipping option.
Because items with free add-on shipping will not be considered in the calculation, it is possible for the shipping method you select to be invalid because the package exceeds the limit for that method. In such cases, we will substitute a similar shipping method. For example, if you pay for First-Class Mail as your shipping method but your order actually ends up weighing more than the limit for First Class Mail, we would ship by Priority Mail.
By controlling these two aspects of free shipping on an individual product level, we can really offer free shipping, without raising prices. We are rolling this feature out with a few items we would like to promote:
Products initially eligible for free shipping and free add-on shipping:
Pololu Dual VNH5019 Motor Driver Shield for Arduino |
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Tic T825 USB Multi-Interface Stepper Motor Controller (Connectors Soldered) |
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Tic T825 USB Multi-Interface Stepper Motor Controller |
Products initially eligible for free shipping only:
Zumo 32U4 Robot (Assembled with 50:1 HP Motors)Zumo 32U4 Robot (Assembled with 75:1 HP Motors)Zumo 32U4 Robot (Assembled with 100:1 HP Motors) |
Products initially eligible for free add-on shipping only:
As we work on our system and monitor the results with these initial products, my goal is to make free shipping, or at least incrementally free shipping, available for more and more of our products. We still do not have a solution for those of you who write us angry emails about the ridiculousness of our charging $3.95 to ship a $2 part (and yes, I am aware of 39-cent listings with free shipping on AliExpress; for now, we cannot compete with them on price alone). But rest assured that since shipping is one of our biggest expenses, we will continue to work hard on keeping that cost as low as we can.
If you see a product that you feel should qualify for free shipping or free add-on shipping but does not, please contact us, and we can evaluate the product’s eligibility. I would also like to hear what you think of this approach and whether you expect it will be helpful to you.
Update (31 October 2017): We are now offering lots more free shipping.
It’s been more than two years since my last post. I thought I would post an update a year ago, when Eve was born, but that didn’t go very well, and the uncertainty about how things would turn out with her made it difficult to rally around her birth as some celebratory point from which to start moving on. I feel at once as if I have lost two years of my life, making no progress, and yet that my life has completely transformed in that time. But I know things have gotten better because I am usually free of the sadness and fear that still filled me a year ago, around Dez’s first birthday.
Candice was six months pregnant by then, with a girl. That should have been one more positive in a life full of positives, but it didn’t feel like it. I remember thinking at the end of 2015 that it shouldn’t feel like the worst year of my life, or that even if it was, I still had everything I had before: my (other) boys were fine, Pololu was getting by despite Candice and me basically being checked out all year, and I still had this wonderful setup where I got to work with my best friends.
There were things to be optimistic about, but the main thing I remember is fear. Every passing week meant one less week of waiting, but it also brought us closer to the final phase of the pregnancy; every week she grew meant she would have a better chance of making it, but a greater loss if she didn’t. I’m sure Candice was experiencing it much more intensely than I, so it was easy to support her, without even getting too nervous, when she decided to go to the hospital one night just to be sure, because she felt like maybe Eve was moving less. They kept her there overnight, with the generally comforting feedback that things seemed fine but they would keep monitoring things a little longer given our history. That was with six weeks to go in the pregnancy, and I remember thinking, how are we going to make it for six weeks constantly wondering if we should go to the hospital?
In the morning, Candice let me know they were going to keep monitoring her, because some of the readings weren’t quite what they wanted. Something like, a good reading is in the range of 100 to 200, and they were getting 102, so it was just barely okay, but they would feel better if it were not so close to the limit. It was slightly disconcerting, but it seemed much better to stay there out of an abundance of caution than to discharge her with any doubts.
Around noon, Candice called me to tell me I should go to the hospital right away if I wanted to be there in time for Eve to be born. Eve’s heart rate wasn’t stable, and given what happened with Dez, the doctor decided it was safer to cut her out than to leave her in. That turned out to be a good call, because there was a blood clot in the umbilical cord. If the hospital staff had sent Candice home, as they were close to doing several times, or if she had not gone in the night before, Eve would have died.
3-day-old Eve looking out from her incubator. |
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So we were spared the six weeks of waiting for Eve’s due date, trading it in for about a month of visiting her at the hospital. At least everyone seemed confident that she would be fine, so it wasn’t especially scary. Candice had to do some heroic pumping every two hours, which meant she basically did not get to sleep for more than an hour at a time, and she visited Eve every day. I kept being sick around then, so I did not get to hold Eve until about three weeks after she was born.
It hasn’t even been a year since she came home, yet it seems so long ago, and I’m having a difficult time remembering it. I do not remember it being particularly joyous, though I’m sure there was some new mix of relief and fear. I also don’t remember how long it took for Candice to realize that there was something wrong with Eve’s feeding, though it must have been pretty quick. Eve wouldn’t eat, and what little she did, she would usually throw up. It doesn’t make for fun reading or writing, so I’ll just say Candice spent most of the past year trying to feed Eve and taking her for various tests to find out what was wrong with her digestive system. And since she didn’t eat, Eve didn’t grow as she was supposed to, which led to all kinds of other worries.
Eve turned one last month. We did not feel like celebrating. Eve had at least gotten to the tenth percentile for weight, but she wasn’t talking, didn’t seem to recognize her name, and generally seemed developmentally delayed enough that the doctors recommended we start getting her evaluated for that and into some kind of special intervention programs. It’s good my sister happened to be visiting then and pushed us to at least get a cake and celebrate Eve’s birthday.
I still flinch at the thought of celebrating, because of the birthday party I had a few days before Dez died, and maybe also the festive Christmas and New Year season right before that. Something like if I let myself be too happy, I might be blindsided again. In general, though, I think my basic optimism is still there, even if I’m more emotionally fragile than I used to be. I like to think that Dez would be cool, and I wouldn’t want my parents to be sad the rest of their lives if I died, so I figure he wouldn’t want me to be sad the rest of my life about him, either. It’s kind of working, and I was definitely able to enjoy his second birthday a lot more than his first. I think it’s more difficult for Candice, though. She has been out of the office for over a year now, which can’t help with getting life back to normal. I think whatever relief she had from noticing something was strange with Eve and getting to the hospital in time is offset by guilt or at least regret that she did not do the same for Dez.
I think I have bigger swings in my mood now, and there’s more variability in how I react to the troubles and tragedies others face. Hearing about some other parent’s loss triggers more sadness than direct memories I have of Dez now. As I write this, I am in a very good mood, maybe the best I have been since Dez died, and completely different than it was a few weeks ago when I finally started writing this blog post. I had various other sadder or darker thoughts or observations about the past two years that I thought I might include, but I don’t feel like getting into that and would rather stay in this positive, happier state. The nice thing about that kind of state, when it’s for real, is that I can’t get myself to be sad even if I try, but I don’t really want to test it.
Eve starting to eat. |
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It’s extra easy to be optimistic now because of how much Eve has progressed in the few weeks since her birthday. She’s finally eating better, so maybe whatever medicine we’re trying now is working. She started saying things and repeating sounds, responding to her name, and she even started waving when she sees me, so it’s easy to imagine that she’ll catch up to where she should be and eventually be a normal, healthy girl.
I am grateful for all the people in my life who helped me and Candice make it through the past two years. I would like to again thank everyone at Pololu for their support and understanding and for keeping the company running smoothly. Thank you also to everyone in the broader Pololu community who opened up to me about their own experiences with loss or otherwise shared their lives with me. I am looking forward to a great year. We have a lot of new products in development, and I am excited about getting back to more typical writing for the Pololu blog, but please feel free to continue talking to me about everything else in life.
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This blog post is about some personal difficulty I’m going through: last month, my baby died unexpectedly a day or two before he was born. I could just collect my thoughts in my private journal, but I am sharing my experience here on the Pololu blog because most of the people I interact with and care about are related to Pololu, be they friends, employees, vendors, or customers. Just about everyone at Pololu knew of my eager anticipation of this new baby, and any visitors were aware that I might miss our meetings with short notice depending on when the baby arrived. I don’t have the time and sometimes the energy to answer every well-intentioned question about how I’m doing from people who know and every friendly follow-up from those who don’t (“hope you’re not losing too much sleep with that new baby in the house!”), so I hope this post will serve as something I can point to for those who want a real answer. I think writing with an audience in mind will also help organize my thoughts while avoiding wallowing in self-pity or over-dramatizing the whole thing.
For me, the purpose in having the company and the purpose of life are very intertwined and something that I am still trying to figure out. Over the past few years, I have at least gotten as far as knowing that we should value truth, beauty, and the human individual. But even concepts like “human individual” are difficult to pin down, as exemplified in the case of a baby dying the day before it is born. As robotics, artificial intelligence, and biomedical engineering advance, we will all have to confront what it means to be alive and to be human.
I also believe it’s important not to separate our professional lives from our personal lives, and for me in particular, Pololu is very tied to my identity. It would therefore be inappropriate not to address such a significant event in my life with those I spend much of my time with. And even in the case of occasional customers on the other side of the world, I would rather they think of Pololu as a group of people with their own hopes and dreams rather than some anonymous source of robot parts.
I’ll begin with my baby’s name since it’s an important part of identifying him as an individual (names are important!). Plus, for those who are into that kind of thing, it turned out to be eerily prophetic.
Having lived with people mispronouncing my name my whole life, I want my kids to have simple names that are easy to pronounce just by looking at them, but I also want them to be unique and not to have specific meanings. I also want them to be reasonably compatible with Czech and all its declensions and Japanese since those are the primary languages we use at home. My first three boys’ names are Tek, Kip, and Sen. I wanted my new boy’s name to sound very different from the first three and to start with a different letter so they’d all have different initials. Kevin had already made a name generator for us the last time around, and we discussed updating it in a company chat room back in August:
August 19 chat log about naming Dez. |
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According to another chat log, I started asking people what they thought of “Dez” a week later. The most famous person with that name was probably the football player, whose full name is apparently Desmond; I was okay with that since the dorm that Candice and I lived in at MIT was also called Desmond (in New House 5). The Czechs we asked were generally okay with it, as were most of the Japanese people we asked.
But my mom didn’t like it. In Japanese, the name would be pronounced as “Dezu”, and especially with the typical “-kun” or “-chan” diminutive honorific suffix, it sounded to her like what you might call a recluse or hermit, someone who did not get out much.
We’ve also established a tradition of our kids’ middle names being Japanese and starting with the same letter as the first. Since picking the name includes picking the characters, it’s more difficult to avoid assigning a meaning to the name. My mom had suggested 大木 in the past, but while the translation of “big tree” sounded fine to us, the sound of “Daiki” didn’t. Candice and I kind of liked just the first part in Japanese, though we were concerned about “Dai” sounding like “die” in English. But we figured it was the middle name so people wouldn’t say it much and Dai looked different enough from Die.
And so, if we considered the first, more English name in Japanese and the middle, Japanese name in English, the intentionally meaningless name we ended up with for our boy amounted to: without emerging, die.
Dez’s due date was Sunday, January 18. Our first three boys were all born well after their due dates, so Candice and I were generally expecting this guy to be late, too. Candice had weekly doctor visits on Wednesdays, but because the last visit revealed decreased amniotic fluid, the doctor wanted to see her a little sooner. The last regular checkup was on Monday the 12th, and things seemed in order then. Kick counts that night indicated the baby was still fine.
Wednesday, January 14 morning chat log between Candice and Ben. |
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Candice started getting real contractions at work the next afternoon. That evening, we did some final preparations, including going over the kids’ routines with Martina, a friend who would watch them for us if we had to go to the hospital at night (which is how it had gone with the last two babies). Candice couldn’t do kick counts that night because she kept having long contractions. She was slightly worried about it, but it was also normal not to feel anything during contractions. She was more concerned the next morning, when she still didn’t feel anything even when there were longer breaks between the contractions. We didn’t want to overreact since she had not particularly paid attention to the baby’s morning movement patterns before, but we decided she should go visit the doctor just in case. Candice wanted me to go with her in case there was some decision to make (e.g. do we want to induce labor or go for a C-section).
I got to the doctor’s office before Candice did, so I walked along Eastern in the hopes that I would see her drive up. I remember it being a nice sunny day and being full of nervous excitement despite mostly expecting nothing much to happen and to be on my way back to work within half an hour. Just in case, I was wearing my cheerleading shirt: a red edition of the Zumo “Push.” T-shirt, which I had worn when our last boy was born (Ben wore one when his daughter was born, too!). Candice entered the parking lot from a different street and parked behind the building, so I didn’t see her until she was walking toward me. Candice might have been more nervous than me, but I was happy, and I’m pretty sure she was happy.
After a few minutes in the waiting room, we were taken to an examination room where an assistant started pressing some wand to Candice’s belly. I heard some scratchy noises from a speaker, and wondered if I should be hearing more, but the doctor was there just a few seconds later and said we could just go straight to the room with the ultrasound machine. Candice updated the doctor on how things had gone in the two days since her last visit, and as I watched the image on the overhead monitor, it occurred to me that the last time I was with Candice at the doctor, we were also in that same room, confirming a miscarriage. That was about a year ago, twelve weeks into the pregnancy; it was at the visit where a heartbeat was first expected that there was none.
I never heard Dez’s heart beat.
There were probably only a few seconds for my anxiety to build as I recalled that last visit to this room, as I tried to remember doctor visits from previous pregnancies, wondering whether I should be hearing something by now, and as I noticed the doctor shaking his head, wondering what he would say.
“There’s no heartbeat.”
“Are you serious?” I’m pretty sure that was the first thing Candice said; she definitely said that or, “Seriously?” several more times in the next few minutes. The doctor confirmed that he would not joke about such a thing and pointed out some motionless blobs on the monitor that he said were the heart.
The doctor left the room for a few minutes to make arrangements at the hospital. Candice called her mom. I called Paul to let him know the baby had died and to ask him to post an update on the main Pololu chat room. I remember him asking what he was supposed to write, and I asked him to just say that the baby died, that we don’t know why yet, and that I would not be back at work today. I then called Martina to let her know; I got through those same basics—baby died; don’t know why—when I had to end the call since the doctor was back. We were to report to the hospital at 7:30 that night. Our doctor visit started shortly after the appointment time of 2:20, I called Paul at 2:38, and I called Martina at 2:39.
I drove Candice home. As soon as we got there, I realized I had left my backpack with cameras for the birth in my car. I went next door to Martina’s; she was home and drove me back to pick it up. I must have had tears in my eyes earlier, but I did not really start crying until I was in the car by myself, driving home.
We Skyped my mom in Japan. She felt really bad for Candice, knowing she was carrying a dead baby and having to go through the pain of childbirth without even the hope of the reward at the end. We told our eldest boy, who is six; he was sad that he wouldn’t be getting a new brother, but then he laughed nervously when he noticed that Candice and I were crying. Then we told the four-year-old; like his brother and everyone else we had told, his response was, “Why?”
Candice tried to take a nap. I didn’t want to be alone so I went to Martina’s to have dinner with my boys. Candice’s mom drove here from California as soon as she heard the news; she got here a little after 6:00. I was home again when she arrived, saw Candice, and burst into tears, lamenting that she couldn’t die so Dez could live.
A thought that I wasn’t really letting myself consider had been flitting around in my head: that we’d get to the hospital and they’d discover that there had been some mistake and tell us that the baby was still alive. That notion was expelled for good when the hospital called, asking us to hold on because they were full and to call them at 9:00 to see if they were still busy. I probably had my first thought of self pity then, thinking that of course they have to take care of the living babies first but being sad that our baby already mattered less.
Kids saying good night to Dez. |
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The nice part of the delay was that we got to do our usual night time routine and put our other three boys to bed. We let them know that their grandma would be staying with them and that Candice and I would be going to the hospital to get Dez out. When we put kids to bed, we make little crosses on each other’s foreheads and say “dobrou noc, andělíčka na pomoc”, which means something like, “good night, angels watch over you”. That night, the older boys spontaneously asked to see Candice’s stomach so they could say good night that way to Dez. This was not something they had done or asked for before.
We were admitted at the hospital around 10:20. Everyone there knew our situation, and everyone was very nice to us. Candice’s cervix was not dilated at all yet, which made me concerned that it would still take forever or end up having to be a C-section anyway. Our first boy was delivered by emergency C-section; the next two were successful VBACs. The main reason we chose our doctor was that he was one of only a few in Las Vegas that would even attempt VBACs, and this was our first time delivering in St. Rose Hospital because they only recently began allowing VBACs. My very limited understanding is that VBACs are preferable if they go well since we avoid a major surgery for the mother and improve the likelihood of being able to have kids in the future, but they’re also somehow more risky. It’s difficult to get a sense for the risk when the people most invested in the outcome besides the parents also have to consider their own medical liabilities. I’m grateful to our doctor for taking on the responsibility and helping us with the VBACs, but for all I know, other doctors might think he’s being reckless. In any case, all of our looking into VBACs was done long ago and with the assumption that the VBAC would be attempted in the context of a live baby; did that still make sense now? The night shift nurse taking care of Candice relayed my question to the doctor when she checked in with him; the impression I got of his reasoning is that given the previous successful VBACs, they could at least start inducing labor and see how it went.
The nurse started administering Pitocin a little after midnight. She also gave Candice a sleeping pill (Ambien), with the understanding that Candice would get an epidural once she started developing contractions that were painful. Since we live very close to the hospital, we agreed that I should go home and try to get some sleep, too. I left her room around 2:30 when Candice was just about asleep, and as I was leaving the maternity wing, I saw our doctor coming in to deliver another baby. Our very brief conversation was interrupted by a nurse’s call from down the hallway: “Doctor, she really wants to push!”
When I got home around three in the morning, Candice’s mom was still up; she couldn’t sleep. I gave her an update while I ate something and asked if she wanted to see the baby after it was born. She did, so we went over how to get to the hospital and made plans to meet in the lobby after she took care of the boys in the morning. I went to bed around 3:30, and though I sometimes have trouble sleeping, I fell asleep right away.
When I was back with Candice a little after eight in the morning, she was dilated to 7 cm and having regular contractions. Candice’s mom got there a little before nine. On the way to our room at the end of the hall, I pointed out two other doors besides ours that had pictures of a leaf with a drop, which the hospital used to make sure staff entering the room knew someone had died. We had asked the nurse the night before if dealing with dead babies was an everyday experience for her; she said no, but that at the moment there was one other case besides ours. Not having noticed the three marked doors before that morning, I wondered if the hospital was just getting a spare sad room ready or if another baby had died since last night.
Around 9:15, the doctor, having just delivered another baby, stopped by to check on Candice. I’m not sure if he was already planning on it or if he made the call based on what he saw, but after giving us enough notice for Candice’s mom to leave the room, he proceeded to break the amniotic sac. There was a lot of meconium in the amniotic fluid, which is apparently a sign the baby was distressed. I think the doctor was surprised when he told us the baby’s head was already very low and asked Candice if she wanted to push. Her response was along the lines of, “yeah, what else am I going to do?” She realized later that maybe he was asking if she was emotionally ready. But at the time, she was ready, and the baby came right out. It was by far the easiest of her deliveries.
I got to cut the umbilical cord, just as I had for our other three boys. The nurse quickly wrapped Dez up and placed him on Candice’s chest for a moment so she could look at him. When our other boys were born, I got to take pictures of all the gross details; they did not allow it at St. Rose. The nurse let me start taking pictures and video recordings once she took Dez off Candice’s chest and started cleaning him and measuring him. I wasn’t sure what I was going to see and how much time I would have, so as with a lot of kids’ events, I focused more on getting footage than on experiencing the experience.
Dez was born at 9:26 in the morning on January 15, 2015, three days ahead of his expected due date, weighing 7 pounds, 7 ounces (3375 grams) and measuring 20.5 inches (52 cm) in height. He was bigger than our first son and smaller than the next two. He had plenty of hair, just like his brothers.
I had not seen a dead body before, at least not that I remember. I had tried to prepare myself for something gruesome, but Dez basically looked like a newborn baby (they all come covered in blood and other icky stuff, which might have offered some camouflage). Basic features I had worried about while he was still alive, like fingers and toes, were all normal. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was open. It didn’t seem that far-fetched for him to just wake up and live.
He did not wake up, of course, the different trajectories of a living newborn and a dead one becoming more apparent with each passing moment. The front of his head, above the forehead, was sunken in, not because of a defect in his skull but because there was not blood pressure to push up the skin. His skin was really fragile, and it started peeling off as the nurse gently cleaned him.
Dez’s left hand had a single crease across the whole palm. |
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The doctor inspected Dez for any indication of what might have gone wrong. The umbilical cord and placenta seemed fine, and there was no indication of a cord accident. He made three observations that might be indications of a genetic defect: Dez’s ears maybe seemed a little low relative to his eyes, the back of his neck seemed kind of thick, and he had a single crease all the way across his left palm. The ears seemed kind of difficult to judge since the eyes were closed, and maybe the neck thing was just a consequence of how his body got manipulated. When I told her about the hand crease, Martina said she has a nephew with a palm like that who is fine.
We had been asking about an autopsy since we got to the hospital, but the people we asked didn’t really know any details and told us we could find out more about that later. As the doctor looked the baby over without finding any obvious explanation for why he had died, I asked if an autopsy was likely to reveal anything meaningful; he said he did not think so. I think that mostly convinced me. Candice says she might also have been slightly affected by her mom saying she would feel sorry for Dez getting cut up and that we should let him rest in peace. It was nice to have come to that conclusion independent of the cost since we later learned it was $3500.
After the doctor left, Candice and I were alone with Dez. The main nurse was in and out of the room cleaning up and checking up on Candice, and she also took some pictures of us holding and inspecting our baby. Candice’s mom had returned with some flowers while we still wanted to be alone, which is why I happen to be holding flowers in most of the pictures that have me, Candice, and Dez in them.
We invited Candice’s mom after maybe half an hour, and her interaction with the baby was so different than ours had been. She cried loudly and talked to him, including words that would roughly translate to “poor baby”. I had not felt much empathy for Dez before that. She did not want any pictures at first, but later she wanted some of herself cradling Dez, including on her phone so she could send them to Candice’s dad. When Candice and I had our turns to hold him again, there was less of an inspection. We sang him songs we used to sing to our other babies when we put them to sleep, and told him “dobrou noc, andělíčka na pomoc”.
By about 11:30, we were ready for the nurse to take Dez away. Some professional photographers were going to be available for us later, and we did have some clothes for Dez that Candice’s mom had brought, but we did not feel like posing for pictures and figured we probably had enough of our own pictures already. Candice still had to stay at the hospital so they could make sure she was recovering well; Candice’s mom and I left the hospital a little after noon.
I did not particularly want to be alone, but I also started dreading my first interaction with people, so I went to work to get that initial contact over with. I had several encounters where I think there was a mutual sentiment of, “oh crap, what am I supposed to say?”; others were less awkward about it. I am fortunate to get to work with my best friends. We got together in Ben’s office and I went over what had happened in the past 24 hours. Fang was generally still stunned, and Paul was notably quiet, so the few follow-up questions came from Ben. I think I consulted with them about what to do with Dez and that everyone was on board with cremation and no immediate funeral-type ceremony. I mentioned I had pictures of Dez but that I did not expect to want to look at them, and no one seemed particularly interested in seeing them. I worked for a few hours in my office after that, and when I was leaving, Linnea gave me a card for Candice and me from the people at Pololu.
I had dinner with our kids at Martina’s again. Candice’s mom had seemed eager to pick up Candice at the hospital, so we had agreed she would go. Right after she left, Candice called to ask if I could go after all because she wanted to go see Dez one more time with me. I did not want to see him again. Candice didn’t insist, and I didn’t go. (When she saw that I had written this, Candice said her intent was never to ask me to go, but to offer it as an option.)
When Candice got home, she had with her a pretty white box colorfully labeled “DEZ DAI”. I curled up on the couch and cried and cried, much more than I had at the hospital. There, there was still at least some kind of baby, plus there were distractions like concerns about how Candice was doing. Now, there was nothing, and I had to confront that reality and the contrast to past joyous returns from this type of hospital visit.
The box was prepared by our nurse with help from Jalen’s Gift Foundation, which was started recently by a local couple whose baby also died before he was born. Candice’s mom watched the kids while Candice and I went upstairs to be together and to look through the contents of the box. There was a booklet with Dez’s birth specs, with his hand prints and footprints, and a lock of his hair. There were molds of his feet and of his hand. There was a small album of pictures, along with the clothes and teddy bear that were used in the pictures. There was a nice letter from the nurse and a card from the hospital support staff. We cried together for maybe half an hour, then went back down to help get our boys ready for bed.
I had been trying to get in touch with my mom since late in the afternoon; I finally got to talk to her when she Skyped me at around 9:30. I let her know how things had gone. Her response was not what I was looking for: concern for Candice, reminders to be strong and to support her, and reminders not to forget about my other boys. I’m sure she was sad and sad for me, but maybe a video call just wasn’t the best way to get that across.
Candice was tired and went to bed a little after 10:30. Martina came over to visit after that. Martina and her husband are like second or third (after Paul and Fang) parents to my boys, and they had been talking up Dez’s arrival with our kids probably more than Candice and I had. I realized I wanted to show her the pictures of Dez, and she wanted to see them. She was the first person with whom I shared the pictures and the contents of the Dez box, besides Candice and her mom. Grieving with Martina gave me the emotional release I had been looking for with my mom: she was genuinely sad and grieving, too, so I didn’t have any feeling of having to explain or prove the significance of my loss to her, yet I could focus on my own loss in her presence without feeling like I was disrespecting her feelings. She was there for about two hours, long enough not to rush anything and for the conversation to meander to subjects beyond the events of the past few days, from stories of Candice’s and my early days to our ambitions to change the world.
I woke up the next day thinking about Dez. It was not that I woke up and then thought of Dez, or that I woke up in the middle of dreaming about him: I was thinking about him, and then I realized I was conscious and that it was morning. I don’t remember waking up like that before.
Martina’s visit made me realize I wanted to show the pictures to more people and that others might want to see them, too. I showed them to five people that day, starting with our babysitter Miki in the morning and ending with Ben that night. Apart from inviting Ben, whom I specifically asked to come visit to go over the pictures, I don’t think I was pushy at all about it, and everyone I asked wanted to see them.
Ben came over around 9, after putting his kids to bed, and was at my house until almost two in the morning. We did not start talking about Dez right away. I realized this year would mark 20 years of our friendship, which started in junior year of high school. Candice recalled Ben abruptly giving her the controller for his radio control glider as it was soaring above the ocean at Pololu Valley when they first met in 1999.
Going through the pictures was getting to be kind of routine for me, but it was the first time Candice looked at the pictures with someone else. Ben’s mom’s cancer returned while we were still in high school, and she died when he was in college; his dad died about five years ago. Ben’s dog also died earlier in January, and he made a joke at some point about how I was trying to one-up his loss. While talking about dealing with sadness and the loss of his parents, he recalled intentionally thinking things that made him hurt worse.
The next morning, two days after Dez was born and three days after we had learned he had died, was a Saturday. Martina was at our house bright and early to take the older boys to Japanese school, but despite staying up late and sleeping with earplugs, I woke up early feeling gung-ho enough that I wanted to take them. The school operates out of different local public schools each term depending on where they can get access, and I had not taken them to the current school before. Candice had written up detailed instructions for me when she was still anticipating having a new baby to take care of, and maybe I didn’t want that bit of preparation to go to waste.
Candice had already emailed the kids’ teachers and several classmates’ parents. Since the kids are still so small, we have to wait with them outside the classroom until the teachers take them in one-by-one. My older boy was telling those around him that his little brother had died, but I think most of the people in the crowded hallway didn’t know what he was talking about. I got condolences from the teachers and some of the parents. I chatted for a while with one of the dads I knew more, and he told me about how he had heard the news when he came home to his crying wife and how he had been thinking about that Eric Clapton song all night.
I remember thinking about that song quite a bit when my first kid was born, which was over 6 years ago, but I had not thought about it in a while. I thought about it as I drove to Pololu, wondering if the questions in the song were all one-directional, about the subject recognizing the singer if they met in heaven, or whether the other direction of the singer recognizing the subject also got consideration. My thoughts mostly dwelled on that second direction: if I ever saw Dez again, would I even recognize him?
I came up with a proof for myself about the existence of souls a long time ago. It’s based on a proof about irrational numbers that goes like this:
Theorem: An irrational number raised to an irrational exponent can be rational.
Proof: Consider ``sqrt(2)^sqrt(2)``. If that number is rational, we have an example, and we are done. If that number is irrational, we can take that number and raise it again to the ``sqrt(2)`` power: ``(sqrt(2)^(sqrt(2)))^sqrt(2)``. We can solve that and see that it’s a rational number:
``(sqrt(2)^(sqrt(2)))^sqrt(2) = sqrt(2)^(sqrt(2)*sqrt(2)) = sqrt(2)^2= 2``
Since one of those two cases must be true, we know that it’s possible for an irrational number raised to an irrational exponent to be rational.
What I like about the proof is that it kind of gives an example without actually giving an example. This Harvey Mudd “Math Fun Facts” page has a more formal treatment and additional information (including which case it turns out to be!).
My proof about souls is similar:
Theorem: I have a soul, a non-physical essence of me that is separate from my physical embodiment.
Proof: Consider that I might be purely an arrangement of some physical particles in a 3-dimensional space. If that is the case, we can assign each particle type a number and come up with a coordinate system for identifying where that particle goes, which is some more numbers. We could then jam each of those numbers together for every particle in my body, and we would have some really long number that exactly represented everything about me. That number would represent my soul, and that number would exist whether I lived or died, just like any other number exists independent of physical representation: erasing a pencil line in the shape of a “5”, for instance, or adding a sixth apple to a basket that previously had one less, does not destroy the indestructible concept we represent with the word “five”.
If, on the other hand, there is something about me that is not captured by that arrangement of particles alone, then there is necessarily something non-physical, beyond an arrangement of bits and pieces, that makes me what I am. This non-physical essence is then what we would call my soul.
As with the ``sqrt(2)^sqrt(2)`` proof, we don’t need to know which case is true to know I have a soul.
Some reasoning along these lines has been in my head for a while, but this blog post is the first place I wrote it down. This “proof” is quite hand-wavy, and having to actually write it out exposes the weaknesses even more. I remember Paul pointing out a limitation of the second case right away the first time I talked to him about this, over a decade ago: existence of some supernatural animating force does not guarantee that it doesn’t also just die when the physical body dies. That second case is really just a magical, anything-goes scenario since it’s specifically set up as something we cannot capture with a description based on our understanding of reality, so it doesn’t mean much: just because there’s something beyond the reality we can comprehend doesn’t mean it will be anything like we would like it to be.
The first case, the soul as some particular number, at least gives us the indestructibility most of us want in a soul, though accepting the notion that numbers exist without existence is perhaps an act of faith in itself. But even accepting that numbers are indestructible leaves us with other shortcomings, such as that these soul numbers existed long before we were born and even before any life existed. More importantly, it’s not as if the numbers can do anything on their own, like go seek each other out, and it might be impossibly difficult to ever find them. Thinking about DNA can give us a hint of how elusive each number can be: even if we have a mechanism for turning a number stored in a molecule into a living creature as in Jurassic Park, we still have to somehow find that number first.
As far back as I can remember, my visions of heaven or whatever happened after I died included getting to see dinosaurs. My ancestors, famous historical people and places, and other places in the universe were next. My parents eventually made some appearances, but they are still alive so that was always extra hypothetical, except maybe if my dad was with me to look at the dinosaurs. Corresponding thoughts about my kids, with whom I have not yet had any discussions about souls or an afterlife, were even more rare and hypothetical.
I am not sure if driving back from Japanese school to Pololu that Saturday morning was the first time I thought about Dez having a soul, but I know I hadn’t thought of it for a while after he was born and that I was disappointed in myself for not having thought of it sooner. I had believed we have souls all my life, and now, the first time someone really close to me died, I had forgotten about his soul. But the thought of his maybe having a soul brought me little consolation when I was questioning whether he was even a person.
I didn’t feel like working. I walked around the empty building trying to collect my thoughts, and they kept getting worse. My earlier sadness had been more emotional or sentimental: breaking down in tears when Candice came home from the hospital with a box of sad memories instead of a living baby was ultimately not that different from crying at a sad scene in a movie, and crying with Candice was mixed with a sadness and pity I might feel for any mother whose baby had just died. But that sadness had still been countered by rational thoughts of how it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t know anyone with a better life than mine. A week ago, I had had a great family, with an amazing wife and three wonderful boys, and I still had that. What about all those poor people who want children and cannot even have one? Yeah, this pregnancy did not turn out the way I had hoped, but it could have been much worse. At least we knew going into the delivery not to have our hopes up. It would have been so much worse if Candice had died. Those poor guys who go to the hospital full of excitement about meeting their new children, only to lose them and their wives! How much better did I have it than poor Miki, whose husband died suddenly 18 years ago when she was six months pregnant with her son! It would have been worse if this baby had been the girl I wanted. It would have been worse if Dez had died after several days, and worse yet if he had been born with some terrible condition that left him in pain until his inevitable early death. Poor Martina, who will worry for the rest of her life about her son with autism and who might never have the conversations with him that I take for granted with my six-year-old!
Now, even my rational side was turning pessimistic. I thought about how there wasn’t a single positive element in this whole experience, and that I could not help but rationally prefer that Dez had never existed. I would definitely not think that about my older boys, and even with the two-year-old, it would be a tough call: there’s a lot of happiness and good times over those first two years that can make up for the hard work and sleepless nights (which are mostly endured by Candice, anyway). If I preferred my child dying at six to his never existing, and I preferred Dez’s never existing to the way he lived and died, wasn’t this worse than my six-year-old dying? All the things I would be sad about never doing with Tek if he died, I would never get to do with Dez, either. I had bought a bunch of discontinued Lego dinosaur sets on clearance three years ago to build with my kids some day (cause, Lego! And dinosaurs!); at least I got to build those with Tek. I would never get to do that with Dez, or play the piano with him, or play hide-and-seek with him. Or hug him.
I never even got to see him yawn, because he never took a breath. I got to a point where I was paradoxically thinking that I would prefer him dying a day after being born than a day before he was born, even though I still thought that would be more painful. At least I would have had some time with him, something positive, for basically the exact same amount of effort and the same dashed hopes. I was annoyed that I wasn’t even sure I could tell people my son had died without there being an asterisk, without having to explain that well, actually, he died before he was born. Maybe it was some of that making myself hurt thing that Ben had talked about. I cried in my office for over an hour, most likely more than I had ever cried in my life, as I dwelled on my loss, not concerning myself with how sad Candice was or how hard anyone else’s life was.
There was a new PC board design I needed to check and place an expedited order for before going back to pick up the boys, so I eventually got my act together and took care of that. When I got home, I did not really want to see Candice. I did not want to see her crying, I did not want to have to comfort her. The first three days, our mix of shock and grief, and our cycles of crying and laughing, were synchronized well enough; now she was crying when I didn’t feel like crying. Martina took care of Tek in the afternoon; Candice’s mom, who had gone back home Friday morning, returned late in the afternoon to help us through the weekend.
Fang visited us that night for roughly the same 9PM-2AM window as Ben had the night before. I was in quite a different mood than I had been a day ago. I really wanted to talk to Fang and to show her the Dez pictures, but it was also getting to be a chore. I remember I was eating some cake and wondering whether I should stop when I was going through the pictures: it seemed inappropriate to be snacking while looking at the pictures, as if I were watching a movie, yet it seemed melodramatic to make a big deal of the transition from the rest of the conversation (“okay everybody, get ready to be extra sad now!”). Candice and I were not especially down, and Fang made some comment about us lightly bickering about the exact sequence of events or what time some picture was taken when she was still in shock and seeing the pictures for the first time. My emotions were basically dulled by then, but I was ready to start considering other people’s feelings again, and I was sad that I might have been interfering with Fang’s grieving and processing of Dez’s death.
Sunday was the first day in over five months that I didn’t go to work at all. I thought I would just watch football, but I ended up tagging along when Martina took her son and my older boys bowling. I’ve only bowled a few times in my life and hadn’t since before having kids; getting to do a novel activity with my boys without having to deal with any preparation hassles was a nice distraction.
Paul visited that night. He was the last of my closest friends that I went over the pictures with. He did not seem to really want to be there, which is part of the reason we had him over last. He didn’t seem to have much compassion, but by then I wasn’t particularly needing it. As far back as the day Dez was born, when Paul was notably quiet when I had given the first report on how things had gone, he had not said much about it, and I got the sense that he might not have been particularly interested in seeing the pictures. Paul wasn’t sure how to assess the significance of Dez dying and wasn’t sure it was fundamentally different from the failure of something else people put effort into, like a house burning down or a rocket blowing up on the launch pad. There was nothing to really do, no decisions to make, and perhaps no greater understanding to be achieved. I wanted to say (and maybe I did say) things like, “I had my dead boy in my arms; he was bigger than yours was when he was born!” But I think the main reason Paul’s reaction was disappointing was that it represented some lingering thoughts of my own: was Dez really a person, and even if he were, what if there was no fundamental difference between his death and any other effort that ended in failure or unfulfilled dreams? (Lest Paul come off too lame here: he clarified that he did want to be there and that some of his nonchalant demeanor was a reflection of what he saw in me and Candice; Fang thinks he is avoiding really thinking about it because he would be too sad.)
I didn’t cry for the next twelve days after that Saturday morning. Over that time, my senses seemed generally dulled. I was surprised by how bad that Saturday turned out after having felt pretty good in the morning, and I looked up stages of grief as I wondered what more might be coming. It didn’t seem like much of it applied. I definitely wasn’t angry; it wasn’t as if anyone had made a mistake to cause Dez to die or that I had gone into this with the expectation that the universe owed me a healthy baby. I’ve long thought that the worst thing to endure would be accidentally killing your child through some lapse of attention, like forgetting him in a car or running him over in the driveway, living your whole life with the guilt, wishing forever that you had not let yourself be distracted by something else. Even when someone you know dies, you might feel guilty about not having spent more time with him, or for not having treated him as well as you should have.
But I didn’t have any of that. There was no anger, no guilt, no fear, nothing to displace the emptiness. It reminded me of the opening lines of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
I was tired all the time, even though I wasn’t doing anything and I was sleeping a reasonable amount. I felt like my hearing was actually diminished, though I think now that it might have been caused by coming down with a cold.
No one close to me had died before. I’ve always been aware of how lucky I am, what a good life I had, and I occasionally wondered who would be the first person I really cared about to die and how would I handle it. There’s this part in Liszt’s “Vallée d’Obermann” that I had once noticed and thought of as the sound of a soul drifting to heaven. I started learning that part in 2003, when Candice and I were running Pololu out of our house and around the time my grandmother died. Although she had been in my life quite a bit as I was growing up, I was not that close to her by then, and she was in her eighties and had been in poor health, so it was not unexpected. I did not go to her funeral because my passport had expired, and I did not want to drop everything and mess with getting special expediting just to go to Japan for a memorial service. I don’t know what day she died, but she had the same birthday as Dez.
I wasn’t on good terms with my dad, whom I did not even want to talk to and who was doing things that might have gotten him killed. As I learned that piece, I wondered how I would feel if he died, and how I would reconcile my recent disappointment in him with the great life he had given me and the great father he had been to me when I was growing up. It probably would have turned out okay since I’m generally optimistic and tend to remember good things, plus it’s difficult to be too angry at someone while playing a delicate piano piece about his soul ascending to heaven.
He’s in a psychiatric hospital now. The last time I saw him was via Skype, on Christmas eve, and that was the first time he was out of the hospital after seven months or so. I sang him Christmas carols for about an hour since I couldn’t have too much of a conversation with him. I asked him what he thought of the name Dez, and we talked about how he was coming soon and might even be born on my dad’s birthday. It seemed like he was following along, but after several minutes of discussing it, he was surprised that Candice was pregnant, so it’s hard to tell. My mom was hoping he might be getting better, but that trial release from the hospital did not go well at all, so now he’s locked up again, quite possibly literally tied or strapped down. It’s probably difficult to be a good patient or inmate if in your head, you’re 18 and escaping communist Czechoslovakia again.
But it was Dez who died first, a few days before my dad’s birthday, and it would be for him that I would learn “Vallée d’Obermann”. I tracked down sheet music the day he was born and probably worked on it several hours a day to help fill the emptiness of those first two weeks.
Besides never dealing with death, I had never really failed before, either. Sure, there are disappointments along the way, and all kinds of things are not as good as I would like them to be, but my goals are not so specific, so failures are not so explicit, and it’s easy to make excuses. For instance, my kids are an easy excuse for why I’m not as successful professionally, and my work is an easy excuse for why I don’t spend more time with my kids. But Candice and I really wanted this baby: we made a bunch of those trade-offs (not “sacrifices”!), like spending less time with existing kids, or spending less time on work, so that we could have Dez. And a dead baby is pretty absolute. I can’t tell myself that he’s alive enough to get by, or that the nothing out of the fifty years I had hoped for with him was a good enough percentage not to be disappointed.
Candice and I wanted as many kids as we could have, so we can’t even make up for this failure. We were already thinking Dez might be the last one, and that we’d have to evaluate Candice’s health and our financial situation later to see if one last try for a daughter was feasible. Although it’s too early to know for sure, it seems like Candice is physically going to be fine, but even if we are able to have another baby, it’s going to take a while and there will always be that gap where Dez should have been.
Some of these considerations started feeling quite materialistic. Maybe if I looked at it more broadly, I had 75% of the kids I wanted to have, and maybe I could still get to 80%, so that’s not so bad! Would it be easier, and would I feel better, to just treat this as a failed project, to just forget about Dez having a soul that I might never get to meet again, anyway?
I thought about Martin Pistorius, who was in a sort of coma for twelve years during which he regained consciousness without it being detectable. (Candice had heard about him on NPR and told me about it a week before Dez was born.) How terrible would it be for Dez’s soul to be floating around, aware of what we were thinking, perhaps waiting for us, only for us to forget about him? I thought of Pascal’s Wager, which might be simplified as, you might as well believe in God since if he exists, great; and if he doesn’t, it doesn’t matter anyway. The optimist in me made it easy to settle on a similar arrangement with Dez, that I might as well not forget him. I just have to make sure remembering him is not too crippling.
Sometimes that was harder than other times. Many times when I looked at my boys, I was reminded of what I would never have with him: the reality was that in life as I knew it, I would never get to do any of the things I had dreamed of doing with him, and some wishful thinking about our souls meeting some day was little consolation.
I started getting embarrassed after maybe a week. I was coming in to work late and not getting much done. Was I letting myself wallow and would I perform better if I didn’t have the luxury of getting to slack off? I had a meeting with our new outside sales rep for Future Electronics on Wednesday afternoon. It was an important meeting to me that I was looking forward to, and yet I was surprisingly out of it. Shouldn’t I be able to get with it already? At least my general dullness dulled the embarrassment, too.
The first few days, which I remember so well and during which so much seemed to have happened, were followed by two weeks that went by quickly and in a blur. We went to a funeral home to finalize Dez’s cremation; we went together to Japanese school, where I watched with detachment as other moms saw Candice and started crying; we had a scare when Candice suddenly started getting chills and bleeding a lot; Candice and I looked for urns; I read about underinflated footballs; and I played that passage in “Vallée d’Obermann”.
One thing that stands out from those two weeks was a visit from someone we knew from occasional Czech gatherings, who photographed our boys when our last son was born and whom we had expected to take pictures of Dez soon after he was born. Her son was born prematurely and lived for almost two months, but she couldn’t hold him until after he had died. She almost died herself when he was born, and she cannot have any more children now because of it. It’s been more than three years, but it’s still difficult for her to talk or really think about it. She has an urn in her house that her other kids aren’t aware of. She knew someone else who had buried her child and regretted it as soon as he was in the ground.
There are all kinds of urns for children, from teddy bears to pirate ships. We thought about a pewter locomotive for a bit, but we ended up settling on a plain wooden box that we would engrave ourselves. Candice took care of everything, with tasks like “pick up Dez’s remains” displacing things like “get extra baby monitor” on her pregnancy checklist.
We picked up the urn and Dez’s cremains, which is apparently a real word, on a Friday morning, two weeks and a day after he was born. I hadn’t seen cremains before then. The small bag didn’t really have much that was ash-like; it was mostly the ground up bits of bone. There was more green in there than I expected, which the guy helping us said was from copper in the body. We did the engraving on one of the Pololu laser cutters that afternoon. Arthur was really nervous, even though we told him the urn was empty and that worst case, we could try again on the other side or get another one.
We gathered our kids that night and showed them the urn, the cremains, and some pictures of Dez. They were very interested, and Kip really wanted to show the pictures to two-year-old Sen even though Candice and I weren’t initially really involving him. We put the cremains in the urn together and put them on a shelf overlooking the family room where we spend most of our time.
I’m not sure what to think of the urn and cremains, kind of like I wasn’t sure what to think of Dez’s dead body when I was holding it. The cremains especially are not Dez, and if his soul can do some magic stuff, it seems like he ought to go look at dinosaurs instead of hanging around his ground up bones. But I’m also sad that I did not do more with Dez’s body, so it’s nice that I don’t have to make any quick decisions now. I want eventually to scatter his remains in various meaningful places to me, so for now I think of the urn as temporary and wouldn’t particularly mind if it were in some sock drawer in a closet. But Candice wanted to make a little memorial for him on that shelf in the family room, with the various things people had given us for Dez before and after he died, and that works for me, too.
That night was the first time I cried again after those twelve days, and I’ve cried every day since.
Today is three weeks since Dez was born. It ended up taking me a lot longer than I expected to write this, and I guess it might take me longer than I initially expected to get over it. Candice’s dad visited yesterday and told her about a sister of his that was stillborn when he was ten. His mom had a figurine in her memory, and when she went back to Japan a few years ago, basically to die there after having late stage cancer, the figurine was one of the things she took with her. Since Dez died, many others have opened up to Candice and me about similar losses in their lives, and I think it’s good to talk about and share these experiences. This blog post ended up a lot longer than I initially imagined it, but I figure it’s okay to put it all up since different parts of my experience might be relevant or interesting to different people.
I generally like to encourage cool people, like a lot of the ones I interact with at work, to have kids, and this experience has heightened that sentiment. But I’d also like to point them to what I wrote here so they can be a little more prepared if it doesn’t turn out well. I of course have all kinds of concerns about something happening to my kids, and I had concerns about Dez being okay after he was born, and I had concerns about the pregnancy going well earlier on, but somehow his death right before he was born caught me completely by surprise.
We still do not have the results of whatever tests are being done for genetic abnormalities Dez might have had. Over the last three weeks, I’ve waffled on whether I should hope for the results to indicate there was something terribly wrong with him. If your child suddenly dies in a car accident, would you gain any solace from the thought that, right before he died, he got severely brain damaged, so it’s just as well that he died? But after the first few weeks, Candice started having some of those awful feelings of guilt: what if she had noticed something wrong sooner, what if we had rushed to the hospital at the first inkling of something not being right instead of just waiting for a few hours to go to the regular doctor’s office? I hope she can rid herself of those thoughts, and because of that, I now hope they do find some defect. It would also give us some explanation, some reason. But I’m not really expecting to get one.
I am so grateful to Paul, Fang, Martina (and her husband), our babysitters, and Candice’s mom for taking care of our kids while Candice and I didn’t want to deal with them. I am so grateful to Ben, Linnea, and everyone else at Pololu for keeping things going while Candice and I were useless. And I am so grateful to the people behind Jalen’s Gift Foundation and everyone who helped us at St. Rose Hospital to ease our pain and to have some memories of our son.
We met with Candice’s doctor this morning for the first time since Dez was born. As I wrote in the conclusion of the original post, I thought I was ready not to get much explanation from the genetic tests. That is ultimately what happened, but in a frustrating parallel to the way I was blindsided by Dez dying despite thinking I was preparing myself for various bad outcomes during the pregnancy: we got no result because the lab doing the tests somehow did not have enough sample material to process. The placenta was analyzed in Missouri by one of the big national lab companies, and when we asked the doctor about how something like that could happen, he said there was no way to know. He seemed to share some of our thoughts of, “did they just lose it or accidentally throw it away or what?” but he said ultimately they weren’t going to give us any detail beyond the basic result that they were unable to sufficiently grow whatever cells they needed or something like that.
Whatever other tests and inspections they did of the placenta did not reveal anything abnormal. The doctor said that based on everything he saw during the pregnancy and his inspection of Dez’s body after he was born, he was very confident that Dez was genetically fine and that in general there was nothing wrong with him. The doctor’s best guesses of what might have happened was that a tiny blood clot might have gotten from the placenta into some unfortunately bad spot for Dez and blocked blood flow to something vital or that his umbilical cord might have been compressed the wrong way for a little too long during one of Candice’s longer contractions. In 18 years of practicing, with about 300 babies per year, he had encountered this kind of late intrauterine demise only about 5 times (not counting cases where they already knew in advance that something might be wrong with the fetus). That comes out to about one in a thousand.
So, we are left thinking that Dez would have been a fine little boy like his brothers. Candice and I still have worse days and better days, but overall, we must be doing a little better than a few weeks ago. Thank you to everyone who responded to this post and supported us.
Everyone wants encoders on their motors. If you think you don’t, you just don’t know it yet. I think the main reason is that we really just want motors to do what we tell them to do, but they don’t. One of the most common beginner questions we get is some variation of, “why doesn’t my robot go straight?” or “I got two of the same motor but they do not go the same speed; is something wrong with one of them?” More seasoned robot builders know that since there will always be variations in everything that contributes to a motor’s performance, our best hope is to put a sensor on the motor to monitor what is actually happening and then adjust the motor control to make reality better match our desires.
Consequently, we get a lot of requests for encoder options for products like our 3pi robot. Unfortunately, encoders can be expensive or difficult to make. Many high-quality or industrial motors are readily available with encoders, but they might have resolutions that are overkill for small robots and overburden their limited computing power. We have been working on various solutions for our favorite micro metal gearmotors for years, dating back to one of our first custom wheels, where we incorporated teeth in the white hub to contrast with the black tires:
Encoder for Pololu wheel 42×19mm with wheel, motor, and bracket. |
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That approach has various limitations, including working only with one particular wheel. One drawback that we did not expect was that the variations in the sensors and the geometry of their alignment relative to the wheel made the raw outputs of the sensors unusable without individual calibration. We have to set the two little potentiometers on each board to the right spot for each unit we make, which is time consuming and makes the product cost go up.
We made substantial progress on this problem with the optical encoders we released last year, which involved putting sensors on the back of the motor in a more traditional encoder arrangement:
The raw output of the sensors is much better than on the older encoders, to the point that it can sometimes be used without any extra conditioning electronics (though we do not recommend it):
5V encoder version, motor approx. 30k RPM: 5-tooth wheel at optimal distance from sensors. |
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One of many Kickstarter projects to incorporate Pololu components. |
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Longtime observers of Pololu have probably noticed that we have a bottom-up product development approach, where we first develop components we need for the robots we want to make before developing the final robots. So, for instance, you could buy the track set that we were developing for the Zumo robot long before the complete robot was available, and we developed and released the switching regulators used in our A-Star Mini programmable microcontroller boards long before we released the A-Stars. These intermediate products let us distribute our development costs and limit the chances that some unexpected challenge will derail a much larger project. It’s gratifying to see our components make it into so many other robots that we do not make, which is especially common now with Kickstarter-type projects.
The same strategy is in play with the encoders, where we tried to develop an intermediate product that would be useful on its own while serving as a stepping stone toward our bigger goals. That is one reason we made the PCB fit within the motor profile, with the half-hole pads along the edge. The idea was that this would make the motor with encoder a module that could be soldered directly onto another main PCB, the way the motors are on the 3pi robot.
However, I wasn’t quite happy with that solution since it required an extra PCB, and I kept looking for ways to get an encoder on these motors without needing any intermediate circuit boards. One avenue we pursued was with U-shaped, slot-type IR sensors. These were quite common on computer mice when they still had balls and rollers instead of cameras, and an encoder wheel blocking a light beam should give more consistent results than a wheel reflecting some light. I found a few sensors small enough for the motors, and we injection-molded some encoder discs:
Prototype encoder wheels for interrupter-style sensor solution for micro metal gearmotor encoder. |
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The solution was still somewhat unwieldy from an assembly perspective since the U-shaped sensor locked the encoder disc and motor into position. I am sure we could have made this work somehow, but I also wanted a solution that would not be too complicated to assemble since I want to have kit versions of our robots.
So we continued exploring other avenues. Many of our larger gearmotors are available with magnetic encoders, so we started exploring getting our own custom magnetic discs made, in the hopes that we could make this kind of arrangement work:
Pololu magnetic encoder concept drawing. |
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As I hope you have guessed if you have read this far, we now have those magnetic encoder wheels available! It will still be a while before we have them integrated into a robot with built-in encoder support, but as usual, we want to make these components available for others to start using in their own robots. We have also made small boards like the optical encoders so that people looking for encoders without designing their own PCBs can get up and running right away; these are available with the magnetic discs in our new magnetic encoder pair kit. We got some negative feedback about the difficulty of soldering to those half-holes on the edge of the PCB, so we decided to make these new boards a little bigger and include full holes. (If you want that flush-mount option, you should be able to get it by grinding off a bit of the board.)
Magnetic Encoder Pair Kit for Micro Metal Gearmotors, 12 CPR, 2.7-18V (old version). |
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One of the great features of the new encoders is that the hall effect sensors they use have built-in circuitry to provide hysteresis and digital outputs, which can connect directly to a microcontroller or other digital logic. Check out that beautiful quadrature!
Encoder A and B outputs of a magnetic encoder on a high-power (HP) micro metal gearmotor running at 6 V. |
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As we continue working on these, we expect to update the product pages with sensors we have verified work and with the proper geometry of the sensors to make the 3pi-style motor mount work.
Magnetic encoder test board for sensor geometry evaluation. |
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We recently substantially reduced prices on our stepper motor driver carriers, and I figured this announcement was a good time to give you an update on our perspective and capabilities.
The original A4983 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier. |
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It has been over five years since I designed our original stepper motor driver carrier, which was for the A4983 from Allegro. While fairly straightforward, the implementation reflected several design philosophies that go into Pololu products, such as making the boards as small as practical and including the right extra components to make the main chip easily usable without unnecessarily limiting its features. One common internal discussion topic for new designs (and an occasional point of annoyed feedback from customers) is mounting holes, which some people argue for on just about every product. While we try to make carrier boards like these as generally usable as possible, we still try to have some idea of how they will be used and to make appropriate design decisions for those scenarios. In the case of these stepper motor drivers, the expectation was that these carriers would be used on breadboards or perfboards with standard 0.1″ grids, making mounting holes unnecessary as long as the electrical pins were spaced well. Adding the mounting holes would conflict with making the boards small, which would be a big benefit to anyone wanting to use multiple units within a larger design, as is common on multi-axis systems like CNC routers and 3D printers.
In what I see as validation of those design philosophies, the Pololu stepper driver carrier quickly became a standard (we’re the “P” in RAMPS). We have released several more stepper driver carriers that fit that same form factor, and many imitations have appeared, ranging from the more honest, open-source StepSticks to the less scrupulous knock-offs on eBay and various China-direct sources. Looking at pictures and descriptions of these units makes it clear that while there might be big variations in quality and support, the common theme among these copies is that they are cheap.
Typical eBay listing for Pololu stepper driver knock-offs (Pololu has never made a red stepper motor driver). |
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The proliferation of these cheap motor drivers challenges us to consider our own values and priorities. I have been asked several times why we bother manufacturing boards ourselves rather than just outsourcing to contract manufacturers in China. For more expensive products or proprietary designs, it’s easier to have the general sense that our manufacturing costs are low enough and that any possible reduction in those costs are outweighed by considerations like production flexibility and better control of our products. But do we really want to compete with China in basic manufacturing of a product that is ultimately not that complicated and that has an open-source equivalent?
One of the challenges of manufacturing electronics on a small scale in Nevada is that a lot of the infrastructure supporting manufacturing in a place like Shenzhen is not here. That even extends to areas like attitudes toward component pricing. At least that is some of the story I get when I see products coming out of China with retail prices below what just the components would cost us. I spend a lot of my time ordering components, and though there is enough I have learned (and which was not covered at all in school) for a dedicated blog post, here is a short version of some of what is involved:
If I want to get better prices than what is publicly listed at sites like Mouser and Digi-Key (I have heard that the “ND” at the end of all their part names is for “no discount”, though I do not know if that’s true), I need to talk to someone who has the authority and the desire to haggle with me. Fortunately, that’s getting easier now that we’re spending millions of dollars a year. However, those people tend to be organized geographically, and someone responsible for sales in the southwestern United States is usually not interested in competing with prices in China. This leaves us with two options: (1) buy components through unauthorized channels, which I generally do not want to do for components like integrated circuits, or (2) convince the local manufacturer representatives and distributors that they should give us lower prices because we are trying to compete globally with products made in China. The main reason we are able to have this price cut that I am announcing here is that after hundreds of thousands of stepper drivers sold and years of talking to manufacturers like Allegro and TI, we have finally managed to negotiate substantial price reductions on these stepper drivers.
The main IC still represents most of our final product cost, but we have of course been working on reducing our costs of other components and of manufacturing. Some of those costs include individual packaging and the costs of keeping a lot of stock ready to ship, so we are trying a new approach of also offering the stepper drivers in bulk and without our usual same-day shipment commitment.
I am also happy to announce that we have also started to offer our stepper driver carriers with header pins already soldered on. Many of the cheap alternatives I mentioned earlier are offered this way, and we occasionally get requests for that. Through-hole soldering is something we have generally tried to limit since it is more difficult to automate. Also, my expectation is that soldering a few 0.1″ headers into a board is very quick and easy for most of our customers, so it’s not something we should be doing unless we can do it especially effectively. However, my long-term goal is to be improving our manufacturing capabilities, and these simple headers are an easy, low-risk way to get into more automated through-hole assembly.
For now, we are trying that with a soldering robot:
While there is something especially captivating about watching this robot solder your next robot’s parts, it is not yet clear whether this is actually an effective way to go about this. As you can see in the short clip, the robot is not particularly fast, and a person still has to load the pins and boards before the robot does its thing. My impression is that very few organizations use these robots, with most through-hole soldering getting done either by hand or with selective soldering systems that use small fountains of molten solder. As we ramp up through-hole production, we expect to get a better idea of whether we should be building a small army of soldering robots, opting for more conventional selective soldering machines, or just sticking with manual assembly.
This all brings me back to the question of whether we want to be competing with products made in China, and I think it’s clear the answer is yes. Our goal is to make great products, and price has to be part of that consideration. We don’t want to be making things that are just a penny cheaper than the DIY option or relying on better marketing and brand awareness; we want actual higher quality and lower prices. Ultimately, I would like everything we make to be a great product at a great price, and I hope our customers agree that we are making good progress in that direction.
I received a phone call yesterday from a writer for a local community-oriented, general-interest publication. Pololu is one of a dozen or so companies she was covering in an article about technology-related companies in southern Nevada, and she asked some basic questions about Pololu and how we might be relevant to Las Vegas-area locals. She then asked if there was anything else I would like to add or have mentioned about us. I answered that since I wasn’t really clear on what this article was going to be or what the intended audience was, I did not know what would be appropriate or interesting. I suggested that she could send me a draft of her article so that I might have a better context for giving her additional info.
She responded as if I had said something ridiculous. I was quite taken aback by her hostile response to what I thought was an innocuous and helpful suggestion, and I reacted in my typical way by questioning her response. She made appeals to journalistic integrity or independence and seemed to be of the mindset that it was unthinkable for the subject of an article to be in control of it. I protested that my giving her feedback, which would likely be about objective facts (it’s sad how many times articles cannot even get “Pololu” spelled right) and which she could choose to ignore, would hardly constitute control over her article. We argued for a few minutes, and I asked whether this was a case-by-case call for her or whether it was even her call as opposed to some editorial policy; she basically said she was not going to debate ethics of journalism with me and that she was done with the call: she’d call me once she’s done with the article if she had any facts she wanted to check. It was a bizarre and abrupt conclusion to what had started out as a friendly, casual chat.
I recounted the incident on an internal company chat room and talked to others at Pololu to see if anyone had encountered anything like this before. Some web searches showed that the writer’s response was probably typical but at least somewhat debated among journalists. This nearly 20-year-old article by Alicia Shepard in the American Journalism Review indicates that showing drafts to information sources has long been a point of contention among journalists and that while “Everyone knows that showing or reading a story to a source before it’s published is simply not done", the stance is more mystical assumption than principled policy:
The issue of prepublication review is often the subject of heated debate at seminars held by Investigative Reporters & Editors, with present and past executive directors strongly backing the practice. “I just have a really hard time seeing the downside of this,” says IRE Executive Director Rosemary Armao.
Lively exchanges on the subject flare up periodically on journalism forums on the Internet. No one quite knows how the newsroom taboo originated. It’s transmitted more through osmosis and lore than handbooks and ethics codes. Somewhere along the line most journalists have it hammered into their heads that when sources ask to see a story before publication, you stifle a laugh and inform them that it just isn’t done. Alicia Shephard
This five-minute call yesterday probably constituted a substantial portion of all my involvement with or exposure to any of the creation side of professional journalism, so I have no idea about what is standard practice or how fair that AJR article is in presenting the arguments against prepublication review. I do not personally know any professional journalists, so online articles and discussions are the main basis for my impressions. Looking at other more recent articles and comments (like this one and this one) leaves me very disappointed in the apparent views of many professional journalists.
I should stress that I appreciate that there is a multitude of valid reasons not to release early drafts, from examples as simple as logistical impracticality to scenarios where national security might be jeopardized. However, the existence of such cases does not justify the wholesale condemnation of the notion as fundamentally invalid. I see two troubling themes in arguments or claims against prepublication review:
So, why am I up until the wee hours of the morning writing up my thoughts on some probably minor point of journalistic ethics I did not even know about 12 hours ago? Besides my usual goals of wanting to keep notes for myself and sanity checking myself with others (“Really? This is how the world is?”), this intersection of writing and how much effort to put into finding and presenting the truth is very important to me and has significant ramifications for how I would like Pololu to operate.
After many years of thinking about things like company values and purpose, I have not gotten much past the core things I value, which are truth, beauty, and the human individual. (My excuse is that determining what I want Pololu to be is basically equivalent to determining the meaning of life, and I’m not going to stress too much about not having it figured out.) The “truth” core value is first and most important, and it encompasses knowledge and reason. I believe there is an objective reality and that we should strive to know it. Two related observations are that some truths are unpleasant and we are often wrong. That is why the first amendment in the United States constitution is so important, and it is unfortunate that what should be this basic human right to believe, say, and print whatever we want is so rare in the world. I appreciate professional journalists who fight against encroachments on this basic right, but I am wary of those who tie that right to their profession, education, or company affiliation.
I am realizing that one reason I am so put off by journalists rejecting available reviews is that it is so contrary to how we operate at Pololu, and I thought I might share some of that with anyone reading this far. We want everyone to be vigilant for mistakes, and one way we approach that is to make getting work checked by others automatic and instinctive. Just about every blog comment, customer email, and forum post we write gets checked by multiple people. There is of course a limit to how much double checking and triple checking is practical, but my impression is that what we do at Pololu far exceeds what is typical at most organizations our size. There must be some cost in terms of throughput, but I believe it is substantially outweighed by the improved quality of what we deliver and our improved understanding of each other.
Our approach to working in small ad-hoc groups and grabbing various people to check our work many times a day does not work for everyone. Some people just want more independence to barge ahead on their own, and some people have a difficult time constantly quickly and directly criticizing others’ work and getting their own work criticized. A related warning I try to repeat as often as applicable is that having support structures for checking everything, or working in teams in general, is not a substitute for individual responsibility: we each have to be on the lookout for situations where each person thinks someone else is checking some aspect of the creation at hand, whether it be in the design of a new product or an email to a customer.
Tying this in with my broader beliefs of how we should strive to be, I think one of the challenges of life is balancing our self-confident, independent creative drive with openness to feedback and criticism. The way we try to get better at that at Pololu is by creating an environment where we constantly review each other’s work.
To bring this post back to where it started: we should not grant journalists as a whole any special consideration; we should judge each one as we judge anyone else, on their ability to accurately present the truth. While we can accept that pursuit of the truth might sometimes require less than ideal means, we should be wary of those who out of some misguided principle disavow a basic avenue for increasing their likelihood of understanding and presenting the truth. I think I might want to broaden this into more general guidelines about how we interact with journalists in the future, but I’ll wait to see the reaction to this post. I will also try to send a link to this post to the writer that called yesterday and hope to get her take on my perspective.
We expect to release a simple carrier for ST’s new LPS331AP pressure sensor this week. While testing and writing example programs for the sensor, one of our engineers, Kevin, came up with a nice demonstration that calculates and displays the altitude on our Orangutan SVP robot controller. It was a beautiful spring day with great flying weather, so Paul and I took Kevin’s digital altimeter on a flight to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, to see how it compared to the altimeter in a plane.
Air pressure is affected by altitude and the weather, so to determine the altitude from air pressure, we need to compensate for the local barometric pressure. For aviation, this calibration value is provided in the form of an “altimeter setting” that pilots receive from weather observation stations. Under “standard conditions”, the setting is 29.92 (which is 1 atmosphere in inches of mercury).
Kevin’s demo let us adjust the altimeter setting and read the altitude on the Orangutan SVP’s LCD. He was planning to have some data logging using the board on the left, but he did not get it working in time for our departure. The altitude in feet is on the right side of the first line; the altimeter setting is on the left of the second line. (We kept turning the board on and off throughout the flight, so the elapsed time on the lower right does not mean much.)
Kevin’s LPS331AP pressure sensor test assembly. |
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The pressure sensor carrier is the small PC board on the bottom; a close-up picture of the component side is below. There is a little hole for sensing pressure right above the “A” on the first line of the package. After burning holes into integrated circuit packages for decades, it was strange for me to see a package with a hole in it on purpose!
Pololu LPS331AP pressure sensor carrier. |
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The plane we flew was a Piper Archer from a local flight school.
Preflight inspection at Henderson Executive Airport (KHND). |
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Paul and the LPS331AP pressure sensor test assembly on the ground in Henderson, Nevada. |
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On the ground with an altimeter setting of 30.02, our digital altimeter based on the LPS331AP indicated around 2,480 feet, which was close to the 2,460 the plane’s altimeter indicated. The elevation where the plane was parked was about 2,460, so I actually got the altimeter setting by adjusting it until the altimeter showed the right altitude.
Plane altimeter indicating 2,460 feet and LPS331AP demo indicating 2,473 feet on the ground at KHND. |
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We planned a flight that was almost straight to Lake Havasu City at a cruise altitude of 9,500 feet. The next higher altitude we could have flown for that direction was 11,500 feet, which is probably about as high as that plane could go. On the way back, we stopped by Needles, California and Bullhead City, Arizona. You can also view the detailed GPS log of our flight.
GPS track of LPS331AP pressure sensor test flight from Henderson, Nevada to Lake Havasu City, Arizona (image from Google Maps, 2013). |
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The early part of departures are always kind of hectic for me because we have to talk to air traffic control in the busy airspace near Las Vegas while avoiding the mountains, so we did not power up our digital altimeter until we were close to 9,000 feet. The plane’s altimeter was reading about 100 feet below our digital one.
Plane altimeter indicating 8,900 feet and LPS331AP demo indicating 8,990 feet while climbing to cruise altitude of 9,500 feet. |
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Paul and Jan in Archer N32441 at 9,500 feet. |
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Once we were at our target altitude, we checked again, and the LPS331AP-based altimeter was still showing about 100 feet higher than the plane’s altimeter. The plane’s altimeter uses a pressure port on the outside of the plane, so that might have been part of the reason for the discrepancy. There is an alternate port available inside the plane, but unfortunately, neither of us thought of trying that until we got back.
Plane altimeter indicating 9,560 feet and LPS331AP demo indicating 9,670 feet 5.0 nautical miles north of Searchlight, Nevada. |
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Laughlin, Nevada and Bullhead City, Arizona from the west at 9,500 feet. |
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Descending toward Lake Havasu City, Arizona from the north. |
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On the ground in Lake Havasu City, the lowest point we tried our altimeter, it indicated 726 feet, about 70 feet below what the plane showed.
Plane altimeter indicating 800 feet and LPS331AP demo indicating 726 feet on the ground at Lake Havasu City. |
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Descending toward Bullhead City, Arizona from the south. |
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The Bullhead City field elevation is another 80 feet lower than Lake Havasu. Unfortunately, I aborted my first bouncy landing attempt and did an extra lap in the air traffic pattern. It was getting late and I wanted to be back in Henderson before dark, so we did not do any altimeter tests on the ground in Bullhead City.
Sunset over Searchlight, Nevada from 8,500 feet. |
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I posted toward the end of last year about some new equipment we were adding to our manufacturing operations and said the best stuff was still coming. I and several others at Pololu have since had some more personal deliveries of the crying-all-night sort, which delayed my promised update. I still do not have the performance information I had hoped to have by now, but let’s at least look at what we got:
I am pretty happy with our current building, but one limitation is that we do not have any loading docks. The main crate for this shipment was over 6,000 pounds, so we needed to rent a much bigger forklift than our usual one. I stressed to the vendor and freight company that we do not have docks and that we would need the crate at the back of the trailer since the forklift would not be able to drive in. As you can see, the delivery arrived with our crates way in the front of the trailer.
Fortunately, the equipment rental company had run out of the more regular 10,000 pound forklift we had reserved and had sent us this beast instead:
Even then, reaching into the trailer to fish out the crate was more difficult than you might expect: everything has to line up just right, and there wasn’t much clearance between the top of that boom and the ceiling of the trailer.
Another complication was that the forks were shorter than the 6 feet we had ordered. We strapped the crate to the forklift and had the truck drive away, hoping the straps would hold.
Maybe the moms will object, but this picture sequence, especially that last picture, somehow reminds me of baby delivery. Once the big crate was out, we quickly unloaded the remaining six crates with pallet trucks in the trailer and our regular forklift. Even the big crate was much more manageable once we could pick it up from the side, and the stakes were much lower with it three inches off the ground instead of three feet off the ground.
So, what was in the crate? A Europlacer iineo pick and place machine! (Or P&P, or P ‘n’ P, or PnP machine.)
Ben checking out the new pick and place machine. |
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The big forklift was too big to maneuver inside the warehouse, so we had to drag the uncrated machine on pallet trucks for the final few hundred feet.
Transporting Europlacer pick and place machine through the warehouse. |
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It’s much easier when the machine is small enough to fit on our small forklift since our manufacturing room is right next to the warehouse.
Stencil printer being delivered right to manufacturing room. |
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However the equipment gets to the manufacturing room, final positioning is manual. The machine looked smaller once it was out of the crate in the warehouse, but it seemed a lot bigger again once it was in manufacturing.
Positioning Europlacer pick and place machine in manufacturing room. |
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With a fully automated stencil printer and a conveyor in front of the pick and place machine, our production line is 32 feet long from the end receiving the bare boards to the end where assembled, soldered boards emerge. Aligning and leveling the five pieces of equipment took several hours. It didn’t help that the Europlacer arrived with a lower-than-standard conveyor height, which the manufacturer recommends because the machine is already so big. Because the feeders are all on little carts that also have to match the height of the P&P machine, we had to decide between raising the machine and all the carts or lowering the stencil printer, conveyors, and oven. We ended up opting for the lower line.
Aligning the Europlacer electronics manufacturing line. |
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Installation of Europlacer pick and place line. |
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With our three older pick and place machines from Manncorp, including the first one that is now nine years old and still running, we are up to five P&P machines. Here is our complete Europlacer pick and place line, with the Samsung P&P line in the background:
From talking to various equipment vendors, I get the impression that my move of adding two completely different pick and place machines at the same time is somewhat unusual, though maybe that’s just each vendor preferring I buy two of their machines rather than keeping their competitor in the picture. My main reason for getting these two new machines is that they offer such different solutions to the basic problem of handling a wide variety of designs and component types. Every major aspect of the machines, from the design of the mounting heads to the philosophy behind the feeders, is about as different as I have seen. I believed both machines would fundamentally work, but one machine could be 30% better for us than the other, and we wouldn’t ever know it without trying them. Also, because the two machines are so different, I suspect each will be better for some kinds of board designs, giving us more optimization options.
I do not have the statistics yet to give us some objective comparisons, but so far, we are very happy with both new pick and place machines. Here is a video of the Europlacer assembling our new Zumo reflectance sensor array:
And, for comparison, here is the video from last time of the Samsung place machine assembling some A4988 stepper motor driver carriers:
I sort of had a meeting with the governor of Nevada this morning. I’m posting some notes about it mostly for others at Pololu, but maybe it will be interesting to other small businesses in Las Vegas. I probably should have been more prepared for the meeting; I still don’t know much about who was there or what exactly happened or what the stakes were, so a lot of my descriptions are kind of vague.
The background is that we are spending over a million dollars on new equipment (see some of it here; there’s more coming), and like most states, Nevada has some incentives for existing businesses to expand and for enticing out-of-state businesses to move. Nevada already has relatively low taxes, but one thing that hits us kind of hard is sales tax, which we have to pay on our equipment. One of the incentive programs is abatement of that sales tax from 8.1% to 2%, and that is the bulk of what we applied for. We applied through a separate organization that helps businesses apply for these programs. Our contact there said we should have no problem qualifying since we easily met the criteria, which included things like how much money we were spending and how many employees we were expecting to hire.
As part of the process, there is supposed to be a public meeting. The process is changing quite a bit right now: until recently, the idea was that someone from the company would do a presentation, but that is apparently getting phased out since every board member who votes on the abatement has the application packet with way more detail. The meeting was characterized to me as largely a formality since technically, there has to be some public hearing in which the public has an opportunity to comment or object. I asked our contact if anyone from the public ever actually showed up at these meetings and if I should expect any potential objections; he said he had never seen anything adversarial.
Candice, our VP of operations, had already been to a meeting two days ago in which the director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, which I think is the government division running this incentive program, got to ask any questions before formally recommending our application to the full board. Her meeting was maybe 20 minutes with only a few people, and she was asked, “How has Vegas been for you”, to which she had a basically content-less, 10-second response. So, I went in expecting approximately the same thing.
The meeting was at the Grant Sawyer Building in Las Vegas. On the top floor, there’s a governor’s office with a meeting room that gets teleconferenced to a larger meeting room in Carson City. I sat in a chair along the back edge of the room, which was just off the right side of this picture:
Governor’s office on 5th floor of Grant Sawyer Building in Las Vegas. |
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The camera in Carson City had a fairly wide-angle shot, so even though I wasn’t very far from the monitor, I could not tell if Governor Brian Sandoval was actually there or not.
The meeting had more people than I expected, with maybe twenty people in Vegas and a similar count in the remote room. It seemed like it was mostly people who knew each other, and they proceeded to have almost two hours of discussion about economic development in Nevada, details of some laws, how to have these meetings, and other boring stuff like that. At least it gave me a few clues about who some of the participants might be. Apparently, Nevada is very low or last among the states for these special incentives, but that is at least partly because the taxes are low to begin with. The last meeting this group had was apparently October 18th, so two hours to go over stuff didn’t seem that bad.
We finally got to the portion of the meeting where the company applications were considered. Pololu’s was the only one in Vegas, and there were two in Carson City. We went first. My contact gave a brief spiel about our company and application. I don’t remember exactly how this part went, but I think Governor Sandoval expected a presentation from me, at which point my contact said his understanding was that the protocol was changing and that companies were no longer doing presentations. But they still wanted to hear something from me, so they called me up to make some comments.
I think I started by unsmoothly saying, “hi”, and maybe waving into the camera before someone said I should say my name. Someone asked if I had something to say, so I commented on the earlier discussion about the incentive program: “I think it’s good for Nevada not to have a strong incentive program and to instead just have a good climate for all businesses. That way, I can focus on my business and not on knowing about the right government programs.” I think I said something along the lines of appreciating Nevada government not being too abusive. I’m not sure if I literally said “abusive government”, but someone in the room repeated it in a maybe amused, maybe questioning way, and I think the governor said something along the lines of taking it as a compliment.
One of the board members who was in the room with me started asking if we needed this incentive, basically questioning whether the $100k or so we were applying for would make any real difference. I said something to the effect that sure, not getting approved would not break us, but that for us it was still a significant amount of money that we could put into growing the business.
Then they voted on it, which I somehow was not expecting to happen on the spot like that. Two of the four board members in Vegas voted no, but we got approved 6-2. The portion of the meeting involving Pololu’s application took maybe 5 minutes.
Next up were the two companies in Carson City. These turned out to be from billion-dollar companies, video game maker Take-Two Interactive and another public company, Lincoln Electric (or maybe some smaller company that was being acquired by them). They had presentations ready. The governor thanked them for their comprehensive presentations. Their applications got approved 8-0.
The meeting ended soon after that, and I asked my contact if the two votes against us were typical. He said they were the first no votes he’d seen in seven years. I was wondering why, so I went against the contact’s advice and asked one of the board members why he voted no. We had a very nice conversation, and he was quite direct and frank with me, but I do not want to post exactly what he said or attribute things too specifically to him since my recollections are based on a mix of statements from many people.
At least it wasn’t because of what I said or how I was dressed. (Phone conversation last week in preparation for the meeting: “What should I wear?” “Just normal clothes: suit and tie.” “Oh, I don’t own a suit or tie. Should I get one for the meeting?” “No, just wear something nice.”) Basically, this whole program seems to be in flux. The first part of the meeting was about things like objective measures vs. discretion the committee had, whether businesses who were already in Nevada should be considered differently than those considering moving to Nevada, whether number of expected jobs created mattered more than health care benefits provided, and so on. My impression is that my participation in the meeting was still largely a formality and that the dissenting votes might have been some combination of protest against rubber stamping the applications and belief that Pololu would grow just fine without lowering our tax burden.
I hope we would have been just fine without the abatement, but it is a relief to have received it!
As we head into what is traditionally a week of heavy discounting, I want to give a little update about some new equipment that will be a foundation for our long-term commitment both to lowering prices and increasing the quality and sophistication of our products. Plus, I figure these kinds of machines are fun for our customers to look at.
Unloading these big crates is a new challenge every time since they arrive on a variety of trucks that sometimes have other freight on them. The crates weigh several tons and the machines cost as a much as a decent house, so we really don’t want to drop one like we did last year. (It was just a few inches, and the machine was fine!) Here, the oven was on the back of a flatbed truck so it could just drive out from under the crate once the forklifts were supporting it.
Unloading the new reflow oven. |
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The oven is not as exciting as a pick and place machine, especially since it’s the same model as the one we got last year. But, while we can print solder paste and place parts by hand, the reflow soldering is one part of electronics manufacturing that we cannot do manually, so having two identical good ovens allows us to keep operating even if one of them goes down.
Moving new oven into position in manufacturing room. |
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We still have our older, smaller oven, so we can run three ovens at the same time if we ever want to.
New oven installation. |
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We have a more interesting new machine, so on to the next crate:
There’s a big new pick and place machine inside! |
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We are adding two new pick and place machines to our facility this year, and the first to arrive was the Samsung SM421F. One of our criteria for a new machine was high feeder capacity. Our designs are not that complicated, so the main reason we want the high feeder count is to allow us to keep many of the parts on the machine as we change from design to design. With a machine like this, we can also put the same component in several locations to increase production speed. However, since our designs tend to have relatively few components and our volumes are low, pure placement rate is less of a concern for us than being able to switch between designs quickly.
New pick and place machine installation and training. |
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A big selling point for us was the availability of an external tray changer that does not take up any regular feeder positions. On many machines, there is only room for one or two trays in the machine, and adding a tray changer might take up thirty or more feeder slots. With the tray changer, we can have twenty different trays and up to 120 tape feeders at the same time.
Tray changer for pick and place machine. |
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Speed is still nice, though. I expect this machine to be about as fast as our three older machines combined. The machine has four heads and a claimed top placement rate of over 16,000 parts per hour. Some preliminary results had us placing around 12,000 parts per hour on our designs (the average includes larger parts like integrated circuits, which we expect to be slower).
Samsung SM421F has four heads with flying vision. |
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Part of the appeal of the Samsung pick and place machine is that Samsung uses their own machines to build their electronics products. While the model we got is an entry-level unit, the basic platform is the same one being used around the world to make millions of products. Some of the competing pick and place machine manufacturers acknowledge Samsung’s workhorse performance but claim they make more sense in a mass production environment where the machines are churning out the same product 24 hours a day. The Samsung reps of course claimed otherwise, and so far, changing the machine’s setup has seemed reasonable. As I mentioned, the Samsung unit is just the first of two machines we are adding this year. The second machine is on its way and is supposed to be optimized for a high-mix environment like ours. I’ll post pictures of that once we have it here.
Rear view inside Samsung SM421F pick and place machine. |
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The new machines should allow for some interesting new developments for us and for our customers. On a basic level, tripling our manufacturing capacity reflects our commitment to manufacturing our products ourselves, but there is more to it than that. As our products have become more popular, we have seen various imitations or knock-offs appear. I have heard people in the open source hardware (OSHW) community argue that merely lowering prices is not a valid contribution (as opposed to modifying or improving the underlying design). I think those who deny the contribution of manufacturers who reduce prices undervalue the hard work and innovation required to produce products at ever lower prices. Perhaps some OSHW contributors just want to have their cake and eat it, too: they want the benefits and good feelings associated with contributing to open-source projects while wanting to maintain control of possible profits, sometimes through some not-so-open ways.
Well, I want to have my cake and eat it, too. As I mentioned in my thoughts on OSHW post, I think OSHW benefits those who are good at manufacturing but might not be so good at product design. The flip side of that is that those who are good at design and who open up their designs risk losing sales to more efficient manufacturers. So, my plan is to make Pololu very good at manufacturing our products. My goals in starting Pololu included making better products and making electronics and robotics more accessible to everyone by making those products affordable and by sharing how they work. I expect our new equipment investments to give us a big leg up in achieving those goals.
Happy Thanksgiving and happy Black Friday shopping!
November 20 update: here’s a short clip of the pick and place machine assembling some A4988 stepper motor driver carriers:
Starting with the move from our dorm to an apartment in Watertown, Massachusetts, Pololu has moved or expanded ten times. The most significant was our move to Las Vegas, which represented a commitment to doing this thing for real. This past Sunday was the 10-year anniversary of arriving in Las Vegas, so I figured I should commemorate it by putting up some old pictures.
Back then, Pololu was basically Candice and me, with some occasional remote help from Paul, who had not had enough of school yet. None of us had any connection to Las Vegas, but we wanted to avoid the cold, natural disasters, and oppressive government. With the added benefit of cheap housing, Las Vegas seemed like an easy place to at least try out. So, at the end of May 2002, we sold most of our stuff, mailed several boxes of stuff to an apartment we had found online, and crammed the rest of our stuff into a small Honda hatchback for a four-day drive across most of the continent.
Leaving Watertown, MA on 30 May 2002. |
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We actually fit quite a bit of stuff into that car, though having the passenger seat as far forward as possible made the trip rather uncomfortable. Note the soldering iron and power supply in the foreground.
First day in Las Vegas, 3 June 2002. |
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In those days, we did not even have orders every day, so eight orders in one day was a big deal.
Eight orders in a day used to be a lot. |
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We kept track of which states we shipped orders to. (We had a world map for tracking countries, too.)
Early on, we kept track of the states to which we had shipped orders. |
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At the end of 2002, we moved to a house; we ran Pololu out of it for all of 2003. We got our first laser cutter in 2003 and had it running out of the kitchen with the exhaust duct blowing into the back yard. Unfortunately, I can’t find a picture of that or much else from 2003.
We operated Pololu out of our house for all of 2003. |
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By late 2003, it became clear that we had to move to a commercial space. First, we apparently were not allowed to have employees in our house, and second, we needed a space in which we could better run electronics production equipment. Our first commercial space, which we moved to in early 2004, was a little under 1,500 square feet, split about evenly between one big office space and a warehouse.
Soon after we moved there, we started holding LVBots meetings at our office, which we still do today.
Probably the first LVBots meeting on 22 February 2004. |
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Paul occasionally visited to help set up computer and web stuff and to see what we were up to.
Paul, Candice, and Jan in April 2004. |
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Checking out the new pick and place machine in April 2004. |
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We have not bothered putting up signs at our last two locations, but for our first real location and with our own laser cutters, it seemed like the appropriate thing to do.
Sign parts laid out in the office, June 2004. |
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Jan putting up sign number 1, June 2004. |
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We were excited enough about it that with our corner location, we put up two signs.
Candice putting up sign number 2, June 2004. |
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Signs on first Pololu commercial space, June 2004. |
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In that first year operating from a commercial space, we went to events like Robothon, where our table was right next to SparkFun’s.
Robothon booth, September 2004. |
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In late 2004, we moved to a larger suite in the same office park. It worked out well because the move was only a few hundred yards, so we could just pull our machines there on pallet trucks. Our neighbors to both sides happened to move out with good timing so that we gradually expanded over most of the building, from 3,000 square feet to 7,500. Candice and I got individual offices and a separate lab space, but office pictures all look mostly the same. Here’s a shot of our warehouse at the end of 2006:
Suite 12-D warehouse, last day of 2006. |
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Ben, my best friend from high school, moved to Las Vegas around then to join the company.
Candice and Ben in Suite 12-D lab, May 2007. |
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Meanwhile, Paul was finally finishing up his Ph. D. in a different kind of lab.
Paul in Caltech lab, February 2007. |
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He and his wife finally joined us full time in the summer of 2007.
Paul and Fang, August 2007. |
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By the end of 2007, there were almost 15 of us.
Birthday party, October 2007. |
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I said the office pictures basically look the same, but this building picture is a little special. One day of snow in ten years was about right. Right now, that’s the last building on which we had a sign. After we scraped the two signs off the first building, we had enough good parts for one sign. With the hassle of putting up and removing signs, the rate at which we were moving, and our limited local business, it hasn’t seemed worth it to put up a sign again.
Snow on 17 December 2008. |
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And, just to have one recent picture for comparison, here we are, working hard at our most recent Christmas party in our new building (there are some pictures of our current space here and here). The break room is larger than our first office space.
Pololu Christmas party 2011. |
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