My own private idaho (self employ)

Let me know if we can help. Like if you need parts or equipment or consulting or design reviews or something.

I can send you a gigantic list of the parts we have in stock. We have a bunch of oscilloscopes too.

Seems like a stepper motor would be good to spin a needle valve.

I wonder if you could push a flexible metal diaphragm across a hole in a plate.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"

It was great having you--we've been net-friends for 15 years or so, and it's good to be able to put a face to a name. :)

ISTM that to start a HW business in that space, you need one or two champions as customers--folks who have a need and money to spend, and who believe in you enough to generate POs.

Market creation calls for a bunch of patient money.

That's another place where the champions come in--you can use them as references.

Yup. Figuring out what you want to be when you grow up is still a thing when you're 60. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

Grin, You are such a sweet heart, thanks. You remind me that the number zero problem of your own company, is that you are all alone... no one to bounce ideas off of. Ideally I might get a job as a lab guy at some uni/ college. with some interested profs, and students as beta testers. (Except uni's seem out of control, PC-wise these days.)

Yeah... maybe a motorized option, but I like turning things by hand.

Sure with pressure as the pusher. The one thing I hate about any magnetic valve ideas.. is that it will f with any magnetic measurements.

George H.

There's always pneumatics.

--

  Rick C. 

  - Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  - Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

No, I have a few smart electronics and mechanical people to brainstorm with (and be abused by) and a few good customers who have ideas.

The electronics shop of a good physics school is usually fun. I worked in one, a couple of summers, and learned a lot. It could spin out a business, too, part-time until it takes off.

The harder you push, the more viscous flow damping. Or something.

The one thing I hate about any

Push with a gas? Or even a liquid, with some thermal hand-waving.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"

Bouncing ideas is important. No man is a engineering island. That was one of the things I missed working by myself. I couldn't even find anyone to review my PCB layout or before that schematic. It makes a difference.

--

  Rick C. 

  + Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  + Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

Grin, yeah this is somewhat akin to the cheap razor, with lots of razor blades to follow, but orthogonal price wise. cheap cryostat, a few spendy probes to follow. But in my mind the cryostat has to stand on it's own. There's a LN2 dewar, a SS tube (1.25" OD... the biggest thin walled stainless tube you can buy from McMaster.. or elsewhere.) valve, heater, T sensor at bottom. Laddish clamp to inside of probe on top. I've got pieces for most of this but haven't tried it...

I need an OK vacuum pump,

It can mostly be any interesting question, measurement, thing.

George H.

• Look carefully at ALL of the gotchas, (may i swear) FEEs, interest rates,etc.

• Create a memorable name to use, and register a website using that. The website is your sales tool.

No matter how good that website may be, expect hundreds of SEO types that will diss it, saying what they can do to improve it. The scam part is placement of your site name in hundreds of (what i call referral) ad sites; damn near all of them are completely unknown (and unused).

Have a good developer, maybe one paid Manta and Google ad, use GA for tracking.

Use PayPal for selling; any other merchandiser will charge a rather large MONTHLY _fee_ just to exist.

Formally copyright the site name; that is cheap insurance. See circular 4: Registrations online $35 Single Application (single author, same claimant, one work, not for hire) $55 Standard Application (all other filings)

The copyright law, regulations, and the Compendium are available on the Copyright Office website at

E.

e

Horace Darwin did it first. He was Charles Darwin's youngest son, and an en gineer.

He essentially took over the Cavendish Laboratory workshop (in Cambridge UK ) and grew it into Cambridge Instruments

/0852745699

The book covers the period from 1878 to 1968 (when the company was taken ov er by Kent Instruments, who made a hash of it. I was working for Kent Instr uments in 1974 when they were taken over by Brown Boveri, and the money-los ing rump of Cambridge Instruments was floated off. When I joined it in 1982 , it had been through a merger with Metals Research of Cambridge - which ha dn't worked well, and the residue had been taken over by Terence Gooding, w ho eventually fused it with Leica.

It's all a bit silly. If you've got liquid nitrogen it's always boiling off very cold nitrogen gas. If you want a higher flow rate, drop a resistor in to the cryostat and boil off a bit more.

You can't actually throttle the gas flow - if you did the cryostat would bu rst - and it's easy to increase gas volume by boiling off more gas.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

And all the other administrivia :( Even if someone else is doing all that guff, and engineer operates at full throttle for about 30%-40% of their time. The rest is "unproductive" meetings etc. Hence in the absence of better information, multiply your first estimate by 2.5-3.5 :)

I've seen a couple of startups make one mistake; I suspect you are too smart, but here it is anyway...

The founder(s) are trapped by the glitz of being "self-employed CEOs", and spend money on unnecessary /visible/ trappings, e.g. cars, boardroom furniture, and the like.

They feel great and "energised", but none of that gets money in the door.

More successfully...

I've also seen successful R&D consultancies that only buy the minimum of equipment, i.e. equipment that is guaranteed to be useful on every project.

Any equipment that doesn't fall into that category is bought on a project-by-project basis and after the project it is part of the deliverable to the client.

Good luck; all startups need that.

Good luck George.

Getting movement without magnetic fields makes me wonder again about Nitinol* "muscle wire" - always seemed a great solution looking for a problem to solve. But possibly not right for your app, as far as I know it is bang-bang only with no proportional control, slow in the hundreds of milliseconds, and being thermally driven probably a complete mismatch for cryo N2 valves!

piglet

*For those unfamiliar a shape memory alloy wire that switches between two states and corresponding lengths with temperature. Passing a current to self heat makes a sort of electrical-mechanical transducer.

Some people think that the appearance of success (hence buying all that glitzy expensive stuff) is success. It's the opposite.

One guy that I know of got some investors to join up, and first thing bought a private jet. Next thing, they fired him.

(One common mistake is to give up too much equity early on, often to less than savory/competent partners.)

General-purpose equipment is good to have around. These days, a suite of good test equipment isn't very expensive.

NO! Keep all the toys! Well, you can provide custom test sets at large additional cost. Price them separately; they may find that they want several.

One can certainly be a consultant, and sell the IP and designs and equipment on a one-time basis. That gets a company started, and some people can do that forever. But that requires constant selling, and is often feast-famine stressful. Selling products is a better long-term force multiplier.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"

No conflict there.

I would expect custom test sets would be part of the project deliverables, presuming the clients want to continue with the work after the R&D is handed over. Pricing duplicates separately is optional, of course.

The consultancies I know had clients that wanted to own any "project specific" equipment that had been bought for the project and they had paid for as part of the project cost. Quite reasonable, really.

In addition, space for storage of rarely used equipment can be a problem.

Contract anything is always a nice clear cut example of the "job shop scheduling" problems. Those problems are reduced with larger organisations, more projects, and smaller projects.

Yeah... thanks for all of that Robert. I know nothing about making my own website.. so that's another thing. At my PPoE I always wanted to make a 'repair/problem' online forum... which I pictured as mostly my email correspondence with customers made public.

George H.

Huh, no I won't be purposely buy un-needed stuff. If I was to do this LN2 thing, the first thing I'd need is a leak detector. (Or an RGA and pumping station.)

I think I'm mostly trying to talk myself out of this idea. If I could work 1/2 time for someone else and 1/2+ for myself that might work. George h.

Grin... yeah, there would have to be some thermally insulating connection between the nitinol and the valve.

Oh, I didn't know it would self heat... that's fun. (well and needs some electrical insulation on the ends.)

Re: selling something. I don't think I can put all my eggs into the "I'm going to sell something basket." Too many of my plans/ ideas are half baked and untested. Besides getting the flow cryostat going there's gotta be at least one 'killer' probe/ experiment. And I'm not sure what the first one might be.

Hall bar on semi-conductor... Ge would be the best, because the interesting physics matches the temp. range of the probe. but also Si.

Phase transition in magnetite... google that (the wiki article sucks.) I know much less about this.. but it is cool!

I-V vs T for various commercial semi's.. diodes and transistors.

George h.

Nitinol goes much faster if you use a thin gauge and dunk it in oil--you can get audio rates out of it. I have a couple of Blue Sky 'Collimeter' units, which are shear-plate collimation testers dithered by a bit of Nitinol wire driving a flexure pivot.

It'll give you nice smooth bidirectional motion if you have some sort of feedback. There's a resistance change associated with the phase transition, but I don't know how repeatable that is.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

Yeah, a bad thing about losing my job, was losing most of my toys. (I've got some power supplies, rigol scope and rigol sig. gen. and as you say parts are pretty cheap these days.)

George H.

Right, you need a few horses in the stable for sales (at least at the low volume level I'm contemplating.) to be semi-stable.

The other thing I think about is fun little pcb's and a part's bag/ list. There's lot's of rather mundane circuits you can think about, (gain, filtering) fun ones are rev. biased led spads, and fast edge TDR's

Some standard box for little circuits would be nice. Phil, what do you pay for your 'stomp' boxes. (two piece dicast )

George H.

E.

e

r

What is PPoE??? I can't find any reference to it that doesn't say it isn't a misspelling of PPPoE.

I wouldn't bother too much with the web site to start. I believe the best web site is not one you will think up. Engineers tend to be rather geeky a bout it. I think it's better to have something with generic images that co nvey a stable company and not worry too much about geeky details. Maybe so me shots of your work not on the main page. Try not to make them too geeky .

That's just my opinion.

What would you want to see on a web site if you were looking to hire someon e? I've never identified anything that would impress me. So better left t o the first contact.

--

  Rick C. 

  -- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  -- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209