Life as a NYC product consultant

Here's the first blog! Those old enough may remember BYTE Magazine and the regular column "Circuit Cellar". It was always an interesting read and was the equivalent of the modern blog. My aim is to recreate some of that interest by discussing some of the ongoings at VoltaLabs, mixing in some anecdotes, lessons and interesting things as we come across them.

A lot of our work is sensors and wireless. It has been for 10 years, well before starting VoltaLabs, from when I was last consulting. Consulting is always great for experience because you just don't get to control what the projects the customer brings to the door. 10 years ago however there started to be a flood of sensors and wireless. This was driven by MEMS, Bluetooth and cheap 900MHz and 2.4GH radios.

Well, back to this week. I won't name customers unless they give express permission, after all confidentiality and trust is an important part of a consulting company's character, but I will give a flavor of what we are doing. Lets call this company "Things in Motion" or TiM for short.

TiM are light on hardware and embedded staff. It's not a staffing problem, its about assigning start-up dollars where it builds and encapsulates the long term value of the company. Like many companies in the connected device space their value is the data, and the analysis of that data. So some of my early advice was to highlight this and suggest they focus on the data aspect not the device. It can be tough to give advice that favors your consulting business, we want to develop their device, but we believe that the "fiduciary" responsibility of a paid consultant is to give advice that is in the interests of the customers business. I feel good about this advice.

TiM's hardware work will be sporadic and very much suited to contracting out. We are there to build it and will be there in the future to maintain and upgrade, and they will not be paying us money in the gaps, so we are cheaper than an employee, while also bring in a lot of experience and best practices.

We needed to build a new PCB assembly (PCBA) that manages power distribution for charging devices. It is really control and power management, with a lot of repeated design blocks for turning power on and off and reporting when power is being used by each charger station. The repeating nature meant that it as easy to design the block then prototype it by hand to check it worked. It actually took 2 iterations because the 1st pass highlighted a problem. All this was 2-3 days work, but the result was that we felt very confident about building the PCBA.

I'm pleased to report that the PCBA came back and worked 1st time with no modifications! That's a win because it saved a lot of time not having to re-spin a board. The prototypes are functional units that are great for early development and demonstration.

Definitely a case of patience and care paying off in the long run. Happy engineers, happy customer.

MT

#advice #wireless #sensor #MEMS #consultant #engineering #electronics