Tours of Sparkfun and Aleph Objects

As part of the 2017 Open Source Hardware Summit in Denver, local open source hardware companies Sparkfun and Aleph Objects (makers of Lulzbot 3D printers) invited attendees for company tours.

A neat contrast between visiting an open source company and most other companies was the openness. They showed us the entire facility, answered all of our questions, and even encouraged us to share what we saw.

Sparkfun

Recently, I’ve been wondering what value Sparkfun adds over buying cheap boards on Banggood. After visiting Sparkfun, I think it comes down to the awesome learning resources and the quality. Sparkfun developers for a given board also design the test rig for the board, and each board is validated by automated optical inspection and the test rig. I’m guessing most of the stuff on eBay hardly gets tested.

Nate with a test rig. How do you test a motor driver board? Drive some motors! If you look closely, you’ll notice 3 rectangles in the bottom left corner. These are capactive touch “buttons” for the test rig. At one point, they used mechanical buttons, but they fail after 10,000 pushes. Not good enough.

We got to see their manufacturing floor and warehouse. The setup was two rows of standard solder paste machines and pick-and-place machines, a massive reflow oven, automated optical inspection machine, and racks and racks of BFT test rigs. They financed the pick-and-place machines and reflow oven with loans, which made me remember that most companies outside of Silicon don’t raise money through venture capital and IPOs.

It was neat that an engineer could walk down the stairs to the manufacturing floor to debug any issues. The flipside is that that kind of space is only affordable when it is in the middle of grassy fields, not in a city.

Sparkfun’s building is definitely a hardware enthusiast’s dreamworld.To demonstrate Sparkfun’s products, creative techs develop and showcase projects, such as a light-up night-sky Halloween cape using Sparkfun’s Lilypad sewable electronics.

An conductive ink display built in their office to demonstrate E-ink use cases when Sparkfun started reselling conductive ink.

Nate, the founder, built a safe-cracker and presented at DEF CON, which was on display in the “Retail Emporium.” Very cool!

Sparkfun also has a classroom (with the classic floor tile pattern) that is used several nights a week for teacher trainings and workshops with 9th/10th graders. Nate highlighted the goal there was not to make every student a EE, but rather break down the barriers between everyday people and the black boxes that technology have become.

Aleph Objects

Aleph Objects is a company that embodies its open source mission every step of the way. They publish their CAD files, software, tutorials, and aid hobbyists who might want to DIY-make a Lulzbot. They even use Ubuntu, LibreOffice, KiCad, Gimp, Blender (vs Adobe), and BeagleBones (vs Raspberry Pi), and Aleph Objects hosts weekly tours, open to the public. I’m both impressed and not sure I’d be able to do that.

A neat 3D print of a lion.

The Lulzbot 3D printer series are RepRap printers, meaning that they can print their own plastic parts. And what better way to test 3D printer hardware/software than use them to make new products? Aleph Objects runs 150 3D printers 24/7 to manufacture components for 3D printers to be sold.

3D printer-in-action making a plastic part for a Lulzbot.

Each 3D printer is controlled by a BeagleBone, connected via Ethernet to a Ubuntu server that dispatches print jobs. Running its own manufacturing facility, while more expensive per-part, probably simplifies the logistics of getting parts to a factory. Ironically, Aleph Object’s building used to be an injection molding facility.