Contract Work
We do work for others that they either can't complete or can't fit into their schedule.
Switch Testing Fixture
A Grand Junction company came to us for help testing a batch of switches for quality prior to settling on which one to use in their product.
They were under a time-crunch and didn't have time to design this fixture themselves. We were able to complete the entire project in 3 days. Human interface was via cell phone. It had all provisions for controlling the speed of the test, servo travel and logged test results. Two switches could be tested concurrently allowing 200,000 cycles per day. Their testing could be done in a week.
This is what the HMI looked like on an iPhone. It could also be displayed on an Android phone or tablet:
All code, Fusion 360 drafting files and hardware were provided to the customer so they could maintain or expand it.
Arduino Family
This family provides a great basis to build prototypes for testing.
ARM M0 Data Types Caveats
Solved some major problems yesterday involving data types in Arduino. Some of my circuits use EE (non-volitile memory, similar to FRAM) which needs to be exactly mapped byte-by-byte. I was assuming that the size of integers on my M0 part was 2 bytes. This is stated many times on the web and is true for very small ICs. WRONG - sizeof (int) == 4 in my arena. Caveat Utilitor (user beware)