So you'd like five people sitting at a bench and one person doing all the work
and the rest just watching
And we decided as a bad experience, so we said let's flip this class.
And rather than a textbook, the students would buy a kit.
So we said, "You know what? Let's just make our own".
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I'm with nScope, it's a breadboardable USB oscilloscope, power supply and function generator.
Looks like this, it's a tool that we give to students
so that they can learn how to build a circuit
and then debug it because usually the first time you build it it doesn't work.
So you need to see why it's not working and try to fix it.
Exactly. Could you tell me a little bit more about the exact functionality here?
You say power supply analog out, analog in?
Right, so we get a plus and minus 5 volts up to 200 milliamps.
So, that's enough to power op amps and LEDs, but not quite enough to power a motor.
It monitors the power. So if you short it, it will turn itself off and save your computer. So that's always nice.
We have 4 analog inputs, so you can see 4 different channels simultaneously.
We have 2 analog out and 2 PWM out and then you could use those to be inputs to your circuit
and then see what your circuit does to them and feed them back in again.
Excellent. Now this is interfaced with a computer.
Would you mind demonstrating the program?
Yeah, so just got a laptop here, it runs in Windows Linux and a Mac,
we get power over USB and then we use the screen for data.
So on this board, I've got a couple of circuits. One is a temperature sensor and that's the yellow line.
So, if I warm up one of the components, the yellow line goes up to show that the voltage is increased
and if I touch the other component comes back down, and it's nice and noisy
because the sensor has a gain of about a hundred
So the little bit of noise got amplified as well as the signal.
And so when you start to build circuits like this, you start to get familiar with oh, you know, "The signal is too small"
That's why I built the the circuit to amplify and now there's noise,
so I should probably all the filter and you get a very kind of hands-on intuitive feeling for why we build circuits
and how we debug them.
Excellent. And is that a sine wave I see down there. Is that one of the outputs?
Yeah, so that's one of the outputs, you know
we can set it to be bipolar meaning positive negative or unipolar all positive.
We can change the frequency and the amplitude
And that might be something you feed into a speaker or you feed into a motor
and make the motor move in that way
So what was the inspiration? Why did you do this project in the first place?
Yeah, so I was a graduate student in McCann Engineering
and we have a class for mechanical engineers learning how to build electronics
and it's usually around a hundred students every year and the lab had eight benches.
So you'd like five people sitting at a bench and one person doing all the work and the rest just watching.
And we decided it was a bad experience. So we said let's flip this class at the time is very popular too flipped classes.
and rather than a textbook the students would buy a kit and
They would get to watch videos online to learn how to build
and then they'd use a kid at home and in class to do the learning
And we were buying kits from other suppliers and mixing and matching and nothing was working
The way we wanted it to so we said, you know what? Let's just make our own and for five years
I designed a board and we used it for a year and then I fixed it and we used it again and after five years.
We said you know what the hardware's done and some other schools had contacted us saying like
"Hey, we heard that you're doing this thing. Can we buy it?"
And that's your sign to like. Hey, let's try a company
So we put it on Kickstarter and had a lot of success in Kickstarter.
We shipped twenty three hundred units over three months
And then that seed money has allowed us to start a company.
So we sell these on Amazon and it's been a really like fun experience to see that kind of like startup culture
and Get it into the hands of like kids for education
and there's not much stress on us because we still have our full-time jobs
But we're learning a lot about how to run a business,
how to do hardware, and how to support people a software.
So it's it's been a lot of fun
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