I’m always impressed by engineers who possess the ability to identify a market need and then create a tailored solution that elegantly addresses the situation. I’m not that sort of engineer (it’s a wise man who knows his own limitations).
In my case, I have the almost uncanny ability to misidentify a market need (to identify a non-need if you will) and to then create an overengineered solution to address my nonexistent problem. Although I don’t like to boast, I think it’s fair to say that overengineering things is one of the things I do best.
A couple of examples of “the right sort of engineer” spring to mind. First is Mike Pelkey (RIP), a serial inventor and holder of numerous patents. In addition to being the grandfather of BASE jumping (he was the first person to jump off El Capitan in California in 1966), Mike was the founder of LogiSwitch, a purveyor of switch debouncing solutions to the engineering aristocracy (full disclosure: one of the hats I wear says “CTO of LogiSwitch”).
As an aside, Mike’s great-uncle, Edward L. Cayo (“Uncle Ed”), was the inventor of the Pencil Pointer. Long before mechanical pencils with disposable leads took over, every serious draftsman, engineer, and architect had a Pencil Pointer on their desk. According to the family recollection, Ed retired on his Pencil Pointer royalties (oh, that we could all be so lucky). The Pencil Pointer and its Tru-Point descendants had their golden age from the 1950s through the 1970s, and many artists, calligraphers, and illustrators still use them to this day to achieve the long, delicate points that are difficult to obtain with modern hand sharpeners.
As another aside, I heartily recommend the book How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants by David Rees. As John Hodgman says, “You may think that sharpening a pencil is easy, but David Rees makes it look hard, and that makes all the difference.” And as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert notes, “Could I sharpen my own pencils? Sure, I could! I could also perform my own dentistry, cobble my own shoes, and smith my own tin—but why not leave such matters to real artisans, instead? I trust my bespoke pencils only to David Rees.” High praise indeed, but we digress…
Another example of “the right sort of engineer” is my friend Bob Zeidman, who is president of Zeidman Consulting (a premier contract research and development firm in Silicon Valley) and also president of Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation (a leading provider of software intellectual property analysis tools). It was Bob who showed that Microsoft’s DOS source code was not copied from Digital Research’s CP/M source code (you can read about his analysis here). Also, it was Bob who won $5 million (although he has yet to collect it) when he proved Mike Lindell was wrong in Mike’s “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge (see also my Bob Zeidman 1, Mike Lindell 0 Cool Beans Blog).
Yet one more example is provided by another of my friends, whom we will call Patrick Van Oosterwijck (because that’s his name). Patrick is the founder and principal engineer at the consulting and embedded design firm Silicognition.
In addition to his regular embedded system design services, Patrick pioneers, prototypes, programs, perfects, produces, and purveys a selection of standard products that can simplify your own electronic designs or help with your prototyping needs. Many of these projects began as crowd-funded campaigns, which ultimately proved to be commercially successful, remaining in production and available via Mouser to this day.
Before we consider Patrick’s forthcoming offering, a few examples of his previous products are as follows.
LiFePO4wered/Pi+: LiFePO4 (LFP) based UPS/power manager for the Raspberry Pi with many features such as a clean shutdown on power failure, sleep, auto wake, and solar charging up to 24V. Launched on Crowd Supply in 2018, still in production, and available through Mouser.
Bottom view of LiFePO4wered/Pi+ (Source: Silicognition)
wESP32: The first fully isolated ESP32-based Ethernet board on the market with PoE up to 13W @ 12V. Optional wESP32-Prog programming module with micro-B USB released simultaneously. Later, the wEPS32-Prog-C was released with USB Type-C and Power Delivery, optionally delivering the same 13W @ 12V over USB PD if PoE is unavailable. Launched on Crowd Supply in 2018, still in production, and available through Mouser.
Top view of wESP32 (Source: Silicognition)
PoE FeatherWing: A drop-in replacement for the Adafruit Ethernet FeatherWing, adding 4W of fully isolated PoE power and a globally unique MAC. Launched on Crowd Supply in 2020, still in production, and—you guessed it—available through Mouser.
Top view of PoE FeatherWing (Source: Silicognition)
All of which leads us to Patrick’s forthcoming ManT1S board. This bodacious beauty is an ESP32 board with 10BASE-T1S Single Pair Ethernet networking built in. It’s designed to allow daisy-chaining of multiple boards (officially up to 8) together using just pairs of wires to form a network, and they can all communicate with each other using standard networking protocols. This little scamp is going to be very tasty for creating modularized devices and machines featuring distributed smart (intelligent) nodes.
Top view of PoE ManT1S (Source: Silicognition)
The ManT1S boasts a castellated footprint that can be surface-mounted to a carrier board, or through-hole-mounted to a carrier board or a solderless breadboard (see also my column on Solderless Breadboards).
Observe the green screw block connector in the upper-right corner of the image. One pair of terminals is used to bring Ethernet in over a twisted-wire pair. The other pair is used to daisy-chain to the next board in the network.
Now observe the Qwiic connector in the lower-left corner of the image. This is a 4-pin JST-style interface that enables effortless, solderless I2C expansion with sensors, modules, or other compatible peripherals, thereby opening up a whole world of expansion and extensibility possibilities.
When Patrick first described the ManT1S to me, after providing a brief overview of its high-level capabilities, he continued enthusiastically as follows:
On top of that, the same two wires can also supply power to the nodes (up to 42W when using 60V)!
On top of that, there’s also the ManT1S-Bridge companion device, which transparently bridges the T1S network to a normal Ethernet network, so all the T1S devices suddenly show up on your network, accessible from your laptop.
On top of that, this ManT1S-Bridge is also PoE+ compatible and requests up to 30W of power at 48V for the T1S network nodes when connected to a PoE+ switch!
On top of that, with the preloaded MicroPython runtime and their WebREPL tool, you can load your programs and files and get command line access to all these devices from your laptop over the network, without having physical access to the devices!
On top of that…
You can tell that Patrick is excited and enthused by all of this. FYI, the ManT1S-Bridge of which he speaks is an optional companion device that transparently bridges a standard Ethernet RJ45 to a T1S multi-drop mixing segment.
Top view of PoE ManT1S-Bridge (Source: Silicognition)
Now, this is where we need your help. I selfishly want Patrick’s Crowd Supply project to (a) become active and (b) succeed because I want to play with networks of ManT1S devices myself. But, before the project goes active, we need to demonstrate that there’s sufficient interest.
If you visit the ManT1S pre-launch page on Crowd Supply, near the top, you’ll find a “Subscribe” field and associated button. All you need to do is add your email to this field and click the “Subscribe” button to be notified about updates associated with this project (I just entered my own email). Also, it would be great if you could share this column with any colleagues and friends who may be interested in this technology.
Patrick tells me he has great faith in the power of my prose. He’s a smooth talker, and no mistake, but I must admit that it would be “Cool Beans” if he were to receive a flood of subscriptions based on this column. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on anything you’ve read here.
Related