TV was a big deal when I was growing up. I remember that the night the Networks announced their new lineups including previews was pure adrenaline and excitement. I couldn’t wait to see the new shows and remember bouncing off the walls as Steve Austin lived on to be better than better before. TV and its new season lineup is not as big a deal today, however. With sites like Hulu and DVD services like Netflix, we can watch just about any show when we want it. I can’t imagine watching the Sopranos, Rome, or Mad Men an episode a week when I can watch them two or three a night, night after night, condensing a season to less than a week. With these new and innovative products on the market why then did our Government give out cash coupons to help people upgrade from analog to digital TVs? Here was a chance to use that money to improve our broadband speeds across the country, or help upgrade households without computers but with TVs to households with computers with monitors. Why spend money on a converter box for analog TVs?
The gap between older and younger generations on social issues is narrower now than the 1960s or 70s, but the technological gap is big and growing. The older generation needs their old TVs, the younger knows only that “rabbit ears” are just that…cute and fluffy, not bow tied metal. The average kid coming out of high school knows that most of the tech tricks shown on TV is impossible and blows the storyline. Only older adults believe computers can be hotwired with chewing gum and paperclips; or that UNIX is still high tech. I think high school and even college students can be more productive than many experienced professionals today simply because they are comfortable with technology. For example, when COTSWORKS moved to Quickbooks for our accounting software, I had two high school kids handling the data processing. They flew through the conversion while chewing gum, patting their heads, and posting to their social net. Our accountants came and cleaned up things, but the kids can copy, paste, sort, and file in a seemingly blurred one touch motion.
From the start of COTSWORKS in January 2006, we brought in high school students to help manage our network, website, and process orders. Taylor kicked ass. He came in smart and determined and has grown in capability every year, as he still works here. Having students around made things feel like we were always learning and we are a group of people that care less for degrees and laurels and more for what can be done after everyone else has said it couldn’t. After just three years and still a small company, we’ve had nearly a dozen interns work here. Along with the outstanding design win on the Boeing 787; along with developing our own deposition based conformal coating; along with developing our own transceivers that operate in environments beyond what even the biggest companies in the industry can offer; along with the completion of our ISO 9000 certification this fall; the education and participation in learning with our student interns is one of our best accomplishments. At the end of each day, we ship parts; but at the end of an internship, we share in the embodiment of gained knowledge: wisdom and experience.
This year may be our worst financial performance yet as we hit the perfect storm of commercial aviation’s collapse and the loss of a major Industrial products design-win. Nevertheless, we hired four college interns for the summer on top of two high school kids from the spring. While other companies chose to avoid interns, we embraced them. While our production levels dropped, our innovation levels shot up. And if it weren’t for the interns…I’d have never made it through the summer.
I started ranting about TV because I really don’t think that giving coupons to move to digital TVs was a good use of financial resources. But what really got me about TV upgrade and tying to our interns this summer was the interns’ response to the project I tasked them with upon arrival here:
THEM: “What color should they be?”
ME: “What? Orange. Orange doors. They need to be orange.”
THEM: “Clear would be better. Why orange?”
What comes to mind when you say “sliding orange doors?” I hope you think of Star Trek. How ironic that the generational gap in technology exists with the Star Trek TV shows! Throwing my hands in the air after the lack of Bridge decor, I had them all go and watch an old episode on Hulu one of their first afternoons at work. What they must have thought about their summer job: they were paid to watch TV on the Internet. From that request and viewing came something wonderful. From an idea, came a million ideas. From their first try, came many attempts to solve the problem of how to open the doors like the TV show. Never once did they whine about how we could have just bought a kit to do this. And even when they were forced to learn what an RMA was, they kept at it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qczo4unvDbU
The technology we ended up using borrows from our own network and optical test equipment including A to D boards, firmware creation, custom PCs, optical sensors, databases, and custom software to control the doors with near realtime feedback. They aren’t perfect, but they work. Yes Solomon…they work. You gave us a motor that could move my entire office around, but the doors open and close. David, the sensors work, the wires are connected, and nothing has sparked or caught fire yet (as of this writing). Who would have thought that your summer, Salil, would force you to “use what you learned in school?” We laughed together as you put into impractical use the calculations learned as a mechanical engineer. And of course we would have a video, Mike. Our ship is made of plywood, pulleys, motors, brakes, along with Warp engines, Phasers but none of it, none of it Mike…runs without software.
We had no huge celebration as the summer wound down and no big lunch fiesta for each intern as might be tradition. Truth is, I couldn’t bring myself to go to lunch as I was too sad the internship journey ended. From my heart, I mean that the best part of celebrating a journey are the memories of every step taken on the way. Hold onto what was, when none of us knew how to make a door open at the touch of a thumb, or read Korean, or knew that a black wire could be a positive, or that electrical tape really isn’t a valid means of insulating wires in air, or that a ventilation hole pattern in a computer case is not supposed to be an artistic expression. COTSWORKS got a lot more from the summer and our interns than just doors to seal our conformal coating room with the touch of a button: we were a part of a group of great people who built something wonderful that will blink, whirr, wind, and buzz for years to remind us ever often of the value of facing the stiff wind and running into it to see how high our kite of enthusiasm can fly. Of course that height is…Space, The Final Frontier.
Mike, Salil, Solomon, David, and Jared and Bobby, and everyone at 749 Miner Road…thank you for making COTSWORKS more than a place to go to work each day. It’s a place to play, invent, create, build, compete, try, fail, win, and have fun.
Even more so next summer.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Tolerance
The dog days of summer have come and I missed a post. Being that I'm not making a living on this blog and that the only people who read it are ones I talk to often...that is probably ok. I haven’t given up on the blog because I hope that a year from now there may be an audience and I can save on travel and presentations. With our main aviation program, the Boeing 787, on permanent hold, our business has slowed dramatically. Add to that the recession and credit freeze and a dependence on industrial products and we have a smaller COTSworking. But I think everyone at the company still feels there is something unique here. In the last few weeks our customers have come through to see that also and business is picking up.
In the three and half years that we've been in business, we have created a tremendous amount of stuff and value. Making fiber optic links work over an extended period of time and temperature involves research, trial and error, effort, and innovation. Not the innovation of the Telecomm world where cash and paranoia drive miniaturization and speed increases. Rather, the new ways of thinking about things at all levels. I give Luxtera and Infinera and Glimmerglass a lot of credit. Not the same for anyone who makes CWDM or DWDM gear or even transceivers …the business is so much of getting in line, not drawing a line. I'm very happy being Harold with a Purple Crayon and if the only folks who want to be in this book are companies like Protokraft and D-lightsys, so be it.
All of us who make parts for military or aerospace care about drawing that line, the new line to cross. We aren't chasing a predefined concept like PON or 40G, we're chasing more nebulous tasks like making aircraft lighter or creating multimedia shims to 30 year old warplanes. It's a hobby as much as a business sometimes. But that doesn’t keep us from paying attention to details. Human labor is always fraught with the inaccuracies and errors that we make. Building a transceiver with automated assembly lines (once setup) will yield a better part but when the volumes needed each year are only a few dozen to a few hundred, there is no automation. I'd like to think we'll find our way into some larger programs but for now, we are artisan transceiver manufacturers.
In highschool, I did a lot of painting and drawing. This moved to silkscreening and along with some friends, made our own press setup. I quickly learned about offset printing and the need for tight tolerances. To create an image in color requires at least four plates and getting them aligned was difficult. The shirt stretching was one thing, but the machine and frames another. At COTSWORKS, this translates into the tolerances of our transceivers. since i pay the bills I'm keenly aware of those tolerances and the costs to achieve them. 0.002" is stated specification and we achieve it on production parts. One transceiver from us might cost $100 while an equivalent telecomm part we recently bought only cost $18. How is that possible? The parts are designed very differently: we have separate power planes for the Tx and Rx and plenty of copper wherever we can get it in the PCB. We only use high quality parts and make sure everything is sealed. And, we're a little tighter on tolerances. I was struggling to put the low cost parts into a datacomm switch and only got them to work after two other technicians had tried and failed and spent several minutes at it myself. The problem? Tolerances...the parts were only rated to 0.008" but seemed further out than that. They didn’t line up right in the low-cost switch (Dell is a low cost switch damnit). And there it was in front of me, why our parts cost so much more. 30-45 minutes in a lab is nothing compared to several seconds in on a battlefield. One of our customers has a fixed time that they have to be able to bring up a redundant set of switches. Could they save $80 a part? Sure. And they would fail in the field.
I would like to have more time to work on this blog. it's not that I don't think about it. Priscilla Diem and I have talked about those tolerances and the ones that she encountered workign at NASA on the shuttle. Not only did I have to make sure we delivered parts to those tolerances which has kept me very busy, but I had to find a way to shut off the side of my brain that is capable of dealing with this kinds of things and switch to the side that lets me sit and type our a post. I had no measure for success or accuracy with this writing, just to keep going until i felt I'd made a point.
0.008, 0.002, or 3714 letters. the latter works tonight.
Ken
In the three and half years that we've been in business, we have created a tremendous amount of stuff and value. Making fiber optic links work over an extended period of time and temperature involves research, trial and error, effort, and innovation. Not the innovation of the Telecomm world where cash and paranoia drive miniaturization and speed increases. Rather, the new ways of thinking about things at all levels. I give Luxtera and Infinera and Glimmerglass a lot of credit. Not the same for anyone who makes CWDM or DWDM gear or even transceivers …the business is so much of getting in line, not drawing a line. I'm very happy being Harold with a Purple Crayon and if the only folks who want to be in this book are companies like Protokraft and D-lightsys, so be it.
All of us who make parts for military or aerospace care about drawing that line, the new line to cross. We aren't chasing a predefined concept like PON or 40G, we're chasing more nebulous tasks like making aircraft lighter or creating multimedia shims to 30 year old warplanes. It's a hobby as much as a business sometimes. But that doesn’t keep us from paying attention to details. Human labor is always fraught with the inaccuracies and errors that we make. Building a transceiver with automated assembly lines (once setup) will yield a better part but when the volumes needed each year are only a few dozen to a few hundred, there is no automation. I'd like to think we'll find our way into some larger programs but for now, we are artisan transceiver manufacturers.
In highschool, I did a lot of painting and drawing. This moved to silkscreening and along with some friends, made our own press setup. I quickly learned about offset printing and the need for tight tolerances. To create an image in color requires at least four plates and getting them aligned was difficult. The shirt stretching was one thing, but the machine and frames another. At COTSWORKS, this translates into the tolerances of our transceivers. since i pay the bills I'm keenly aware of those tolerances and the costs to achieve them. 0.002" is stated specification and we achieve it on production parts. One transceiver from us might cost $100 while an equivalent telecomm part we recently bought only cost $18. How is that possible? The parts are designed very differently: we have separate power planes for the Tx and Rx and plenty of copper wherever we can get it in the PCB. We only use high quality parts and make sure everything is sealed. And, we're a little tighter on tolerances. I was struggling to put the low cost parts into a datacomm switch and only got them to work after two other technicians had tried and failed and spent several minutes at it myself. The problem? Tolerances...the parts were only rated to 0.008" but seemed further out than that. They didn’t line up right in the low-cost switch (Dell is a low cost switch damnit). And there it was in front of me, why our parts cost so much more. 30-45 minutes in a lab is nothing compared to several seconds in on a battlefield. One of our customers has a fixed time that they have to be able to bring up a redundant set of switches. Could they save $80 a part? Sure. And they would fail in the field.
I would like to have more time to work on this blog. it's not that I don't think about it. Priscilla Diem and I have talked about those tolerances and the ones that she encountered workign at NASA on the shuttle. Not only did I have to make sure we delivered parts to those tolerances which has kept me very busy, but I had to find a way to shut off the side of my brain that is capable of dealing with this kinds of things and switch to the side that lets me sit and type our a post. I had no measure for success or accuracy with this writing, just to keep going until i felt I'd made a point.
0.008, 0.002, or 3714 letters. the latter works tonight.
Ken
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