Getting Down To Business...

By this point, I was starting to gain some momentum with my knowledge of electronics.  Though still a novice, I was quickly becoming the electronics expert in this area of West Virginia.  I was churning out cool electronics / robotics projects left and right.  Some of them include a homemade R2-D2 for my son, a set of animatronic eyes, a voice synthesizer circuit, a persistence of vision (POV) toy, and many others. 



Ethan's R2-D2 Project

 In the Spring of 2009, I dug out an old electronics book that my grandfather gave me when I was a teenager: "Getting Started In Electronics" by Forrest M. Mims, III.  For many years, Forrest Mims wrote several series of electronics books for Radio Shack.  He was also one of 4 men who started the company MITS, which created the worlds first desktop computer - the Altair 8800 (which Bill Gates and Paul Allen used to write their famous disk operating system, starting a little company called Microsoft).  ...Anyway, I decided to google Mims and see if he was even still alive.  I found a webpage that he still maintains to this day.  I dug deep into the webpage and found an e-mail address for him.  I shot off an e-mail, expecting never to hear back from him; but to my utter amazement, he wrote back a very nice e-mail just minutes later! :) So of course I wrote back and asked if he would autograph my first electronics book, which he wrote.  He was happy to oblige, and I mailed it to his home address in Texas.  He sent back the autographed book (with a nice, personal inscription inside), a glossy autographed photo, and a few books from his "Engineer's Notebook" series (which I own most of already).  Awesome!  ...Since then, I have written to the authors of some of my other favorite nerd books and asked for autographed photos to hang on my "wall of nerdom"; and they are always very happy to do so.

That's Forrest M. Mims, III top, center.

I believe it was also about this time that I was contacted by Kathy Gillman, Engineering & Technical Coordinator at the West Virginia Department of Education at the Capitol Complex in Charleston.  She told me that there was an upcoming conference at the Charleston Civic Center and asked if I could design some sort of electronics kit which could be passed out to the attendees.  I, of course, agreed to do it - my first paying customer!!!  I had 10 weeks to design, prototype, and manufacture 50 kits!  We (the members of the robotics club) tossed around ideas until we finally settled on making a handheld electronic game very similar to the old SIMON game - so much similar, in fact, that we called it the "Garfunkle".  My friend Bill actually designed the circuit and wrote the code for the PIC chip.  I designed the printed circuit board and had 50 of them professionally manufactured by Sunstone Circuits, a PCB manufacturing house in California.  I also had to order all of the electronic components necessary for 50 kits - bought mostly from eBay.  Packaging is important too, so I ordered cardboard boxes and ziplock baggies from Uline.  I printed off a bunch of labels with the Rainbow Robotics and West Virginia Robotics Club logos on them.  Aimee helped me fill all of the little baggies and boxes with the proper number of components, counting and recounting to make sure that none were missing anything.  And lastly, I had to write an instruction manual describing how to assemble the kit.  I wrote a nice manual with color pictures of every step, printed them so that 4 pages fit on a single 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper, cut all the pages, hole punched the pages, and used comb binding to keep the pages together.  It took me all night long to make 50 instruction manuals!  (The next time, I saved time and money by including a CD with PDF instruction manual and videos!)  I learned SO many valuable lessons about business during that short project!  ...I also lost money on that job.  Before we made any of the kits, Kathy offered $300 for 50 kits.  That's $6 per kit.  Frankly, I knew that I was going to lose money on the deal, but I didn't care.  This was an opportunity to get the business moving and start branding the company name, so I did it.  In the end, it end up costing $600 - all up front out of pocket.  Neil and I split the loss at $150 each. 

Backing up a little bit...  While I was working as a co-op student at Marathon Petroleum in '06/'07, I took some Summer classes at Marshall University.  Among them were a Technical Writing course and one called "Technology & Innovation" where we actually invented, prototyped, manufactured, and tried to market a product.  I was only auditing the T&I class and ended up dropping it mid-course because I just didn't have the extra time.  But in the Technical Writing course, I had to write a business plan, small business grant proposal, and design a webpage for my business.  Of course, I used Rainbow Robotics as my subject.  For the webpage, I needed some graphics; so I drew / painted some water color illustrations which were personified versions of electronic components (see picture below).

As part of my research for the Technical Writing class, I went around to several small businesses around Huntington and spoke with the owners about how they started their businesses.  I later went to the West Virginia Small Business Development Center at the Capitol Complex in Charleston and found out all I could about starting my business.  ...I still haven't applied for a West Virginia business license or Federal Employer Identification Number because I was afraid that I'd get hit with a lot of taxes or something (probably not if I don't make a certain amount of profit).  I need to quit procrastinating and just do it!

Sometime in 2009 a new electrical engineering professor at WVU Tech contacted me about wanting to buy some electronics kits! :) So I sold her a batch of 30 Garfunkel kits (with some left over from before and some from new stock) at $10 per kit.  I almost broke even with that sale!

Another electrical engineering professor at WVU Tech was working on a project designing hydrogen fuel cell charging circuits for electric cars for an automobile company in Chicago.  He called me up and asked if I would design the printed circuit board for his charging circuit.  He offered me $200, and I accepted.  He came back months later after redesigning the circuitry, wanting me to make a far more complicated PCB - and gave me a 1 week deadline!!!  I told him that it would be nearly impossible to design such a complicated PCB (printed circuit board) in my free time after work in just one week.  I told him that I would do it for $1,000 (the largest sum that I had ever charged for any design work).  He agreed, and I busted my hump to get it done in a week - which I did, of course (see picture below - notice the Rainbow Robotics logo on it and my name and e-mail address >> free advertising!).

Needless to say, I was pleased with my progress in 2009!  I was approached by three individuals seeking my services and expertise!  My company name was starting to get around ("branding"), and I was developing a reputation for fast, high quality electronic design work.  And I was finally able to set my own prices!

In addition to my entrepreneurial success, I began volunteering my time with educational programs in the Kanawha Valley.  For the last three years, I have been a coordinator / judge at the annual TSA (Technology Student Association) Conference at Cedar Lakes in Ripley, WV.  I volunteered to help with Charleston Catholic High School's FIRST Robotics Team.  I mentor the Eagle's Nest Robotic Club in Barboursville, WV.  And I served on the board of directors for another educational program in Charleston - the name escapes me right now.

Over the last two years, I have designed several electronics / robotics / animatronics kits.  For my voice synthesizer kit, I decided to up the ante and design a nice plastic enclosure to house the PCB; however, this added $7 to the material cost of the kit.  Unfortunately (and I knew this going into the initial design), I designed the kit around a $25 phoneme chip.  The material costs just to produce one kit is nearly $50, making it prohibitively expensive - not to mention packaging, distribution, overhead, etc.  And to really make a profit, the retail price needs to be about 4 or 5 times as much as the amount of money it costs to produce.  ...I did contact the manufacturer of the $25 chip and checked into doing a source code license (SCL) by which the software would be licensed to me, and I would be able to buy raw chips ($1 each) and program them myself - as many as I want for 2 years.  But I think he quoted me $2,000 for the SCL, and I just didn't have the capital to invest at the time.

Frankly, I haven't really made much progress at all in the last couple of years.  I have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge about many aspects of the product design, manufacturing, and business end; however, I haven't focused my energies toward a solid, marketable product yet.  I've spent all of my time bouncing from one fun project to another without putting much effort into turning out a product to sell.

It's time to get serious!  If I'm going to do this thing, I need to quit squandering away my time and just do it!  I am going to be to the robotics revolution what Bill Gates was to the computer revolution - just wait and see!!! :)

The Engineer...

...I immediately set out looking for a job.  I interviewed with with several big name companies in the surrounding states and was offered a few jobs with very impressive salaries; however, I declined them all, so that I could stay close enough to see my son on the weekends.  I finally ended up taking an EE position at a small MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) engineering consulting firm in Cross Lanes, West Virginia.  My first day of work was July 8th, 2008.

Aimee and I moved to the west side of Charleston - a scary place!  In the two years that we lived there, an elderly woman was murdered on our street, my car was totalled (as it sat parked on the side of the street), we had neighbors of questionable employment, and a crazed druggie ran through our yard, destroying our pool and fence!

Let me back up a few years...  In 2003 I was curious if there was anyone in the Kanawha Valley who knew anything about robotics - someone who might be able to point me in the right direction.  So I did a Google search for "robotics and Charleston, WV", which returned one result - the personal website of a man named Neil who was a computer programmer for the state of West Virginia.  I contacted Neil, and he agreed to meet me in the food court at the Kanawha Mall.  Neil brought with him a stack of electronics catalogs and a piece of wood with metal door hooks screwed into it to illustrate the concept of an H-Bridge motor driver.  The meeting lasted for about an hour, and we parted ways.  It was more encouraging than it was helpful, but I appreciated the gesture.

Neil Chakrabarty

So here it was five years later (2008), and I hadn't heard from Neil since that day at the mall.  Now that I was working 8AM to 4PM, I had some free time in the evenings.  I was ready to jump back into developing my skills at electronic circuit design.  Aimee and I were new to the area, and I didn't have any friends nearby.  I yearned for some geeky comradery - plus, I wanted to be a resource for all the nerdy kids out there who wanted to learn about robotics (like I had as a teenager).  The idea struck me to start a local robotics club, so I did another Google search and found Neil again.  He was interested! :) We invited all the geeks we knew, and we sent a bunch of letters and flyers to local high schools.  The West Virginia Robotics Club was born!  We designed a logo and made silk screen T-shirts in my basement.  Monthly meetings were held at the Kanawha County Public Library starting in October 2008.  Of all the schools we sent letters to, only four students (from Nitro High School) showed up - and attended for two or three months.  After that, the club lasted for about a year or so with 4 or 5 dedicated members, though we had twenty-some members in all.  The meetings were really cool at first; members brought the electronics projects they were working on and showed them off, but it eventually turned into a group of old men sitting around a table trying to talk over each other.  ...Things took a turn for the better when a new member named Bill offered to move the meetings to his lab at West Virginia State University.  Bill is a retired electrical engineer and teaches electronics at WVSU.  He is extremely knowledgeable about everything from vacuum tubes to microprocessors and has been one of the best friends and mentors that I have ever had! :) The club continued for another year or so at WVSU but eventually fizzled out.  We make attempts at resurrecting it now and then.  Neil, Bill, several others, and I are still good friends and get together every couple of months.

In the October 2008 issue of Nuts & Volts magazine, Vern wrote about a neat project called the "Peanut Butter Monster Detector".  It consisted of a used peanut butter container with a Basic Stamp microprocessor, servo motor, different colored LEDs, and a voice recorder module inside (like you find inside those annoying birthday cards).  The motor turned an LED around and around as if it was scanning the room for monsters, and then it would announce, "Scan complete; no monsters detected!" to ease children's fears of boogy men under their beds.  I thought that it was really neat and wanted to make one for Ethan, who was afraid of monsters at that time.  The article included a parts list, but it lacked the computer code to program into the Basic Stamp.  So I contacted Vern for the code.  He e-mailed back and was very nice.  We exchanged phone numbers and started calling each other about once a month to discuss our various electronics projects.  I meantioned to him that I might be interested in writing an article about my senior design project (solar tracker) and submitting it to the magazine - and asked if he could get me in.  He told me how to go about it (format, pictures, sidebars, resources, acknowledgements, etc) and even proofread my first draft.  Then in June of 2009, he called me in a panic and said that he wasn't going to be able to meet his deadline that month - and was I ready to submit my article(?).  I was!  My article was featured as the cover story in the August 2009 issue of Nuts & Volts magazine, and I became an internationally published author!!!  Plus, I got paid $450 for it!  I have received (and still do two years later) scores of e-mails from around the world about that article!  Best of all, Ken Gracey (Vice President of Parallax - maker of the Basic Stamp and the largest hobby electronics company in America) e-mailed me to congratulate me on the article and thanked me for the kudos to Parallax! :) Awesome!

On April 25th, 2009, I took the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam at the Civic Center in Charleston.  I studied for months for this 8-hour test!  Three months later I received a letter informing me that I passed the test and was now officially an Engineer In Training (EIT).  In 3 more years, I can take the PE (Professional Engineer) exam and become a professional engineer.

Microchip PIC16F628A microprocessor

It was also in 2009 that my friend Bill introduced me to Microchip PIC microprocessors - the single biggest jump so far toward my goal of designing simple, affordable robots!  PIC chips, as they are called, have been around for 30 years or so and cost less than $1 each (far cheaper in bulk quantities)!  Compare this to Basic Stamps ($30 to $100), Arduinos ($25 to $50), and all the other hobby microprocessors out there, and it's a "no brainer" to see the cost savings!  As a matter of fact, Basic Stamps actually use a PIC chip as their brain!!!  Why pay $25 to $100 more per chip for a few cents worth of extra parts (voltage regulator, crystal oscillator, etc)???  It's insane! :/

In March of 2009 I created my YouTube page, so that I could document my electronics projects on video.  So far I have uploaded 18 videos, and I have many more projects that I need to go back, record, and upload!  ...I probably get 2 or 3 e-mails per week from nerds around the world asking me how to do this and that with electronics, and I answer them all.


LCD display controlled by a PIC16F684 microprocessor

I also learned PIC Assembly language (the lowest level computer programming language that exists), and it's my favorite because it's FAST and allows you the most control over bit-level processes.  My PIC chips' internal oscillators execute one million opcodes per second - even more if I over-clock them with an external oscillator!!!  Assembly language is just one step above machine language (hexadecimal).  Most people avoid Assembly because they say it's too hard to learn, but it's not - really!

NOTE: I'm going to go back tomorrow and upload some pictures to go along with all this text.

It's past my bedtime.  I'll continue this tomorrow...

Next Steps...

So where was I?...  Oh yeah, it was August 2002 and I had fulfilled my 4 year enlistment in the Army, gone back to college, and changed my major to Electrical Engineering.  A whole lot of personal things happened over the next few years, but I'll omit all but the most important ones because the intent of this blog is to chronicle the progress of my dream to start a robotics company.

NOTE:  WVIT was bought by WVU in the Spring of 1997 and became the West Virginia University Institute of Technology.  When I started college in the Fall of 1996, it was still the West Virginia Institute of Technology.

Where does one begin in starting a robotics company?  I had no idea.  First and foremost, I needed something to sell - robots.  In order to sell robots, one must manufacture robots.  In order to manufacture robots, I would need to design robots.  In order to design robots, I would have to understand software, hardware, and mechanics.  At that time in my life, I had only a rudimentary understanding of software and didn't know anything about hardware or mechanics.  Since I changed my major to EE, I figured I'd start there - learning the fundamentals of electronic analysis and design...

Where does one begin learning about electronics?  Ohm's Law, of course!  V = IR, where V is voltage (measured in Volts), I is current (measured in Amperes - or Amps for short), and R is resistance (measured in Ohms).  It's a simple algebraic equation and conceptually easy to understand.  Practically speaking, all you need is a battery and a resistor, so I bought a 9V battery and a handful of resistors.  With a digital volt meter, I measured the voltage, current, and resistance to verify what I had learned in theory.  But I wanted to see results; I wanted to see something happen.  So I bought some LEDs (light emitting diodes).  At first I didn't know about things like current-limiting resistors, so I burnt up a few LEDs - kind of a depressing start for someone with ambitions of starting a robotics company.  Finally, I figured out how to calculate the value of a current-limiting resistor to limit the amount of current through the LED so as not to fry it.  Lighting up an LED is cool and all but not very exciting.  What next?

I spent a couple of semesters learning about AC and DC circuits.  I learned about electronic components like resistors, capacitors, inductors, etc.  It didn't come easily to me at first, though I look back now and wonder what was so hard about it.  I took a class called Analog Electronics where I learned about diodes, transistors, and other devices with P-N type junctions.  The real break came when I took a class called Digital Logic Design & Analysis where I learned about Boolean Logic, Karnaugh Maps, State Machines, etc.  In the laboratory exercises for this course, we started using 7400 series logic gate chips: AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR, XNOR, and so on.  By connecting the input pins of those chips to either +5VDC (logic high = 1) or 0VDC (logic low = 0), the output of the logic circuits could be seen by measuring the voltages (states) of the output pins.  Later we connected the output pins to LEDs and current-limiting resistors.  For the first time, I could actually interact with an electronic circuit! :) This was an amazing feeling!  When I changed the input states, I could see the output states change as different LEDs turned on and off.  This was further enhanced as we used the theory we had learned to design simple binary adders, counters, shift registers, flip-flops, multiplexers, etc.  This is what I had been waiting for!  ...We had lab once per week for 3 hours.  I was always the last to leave the lab and usually the only one to actually get my circuit to work correctly.  The other students were only interested in rushing through the exercises to record their data and leave as fast as possible.  I recall one day in particular when I was paid one of the two highest compliments that I ever received in college.  My professor, Dr. Umar Farooq, approached me after everyone else had left and told me, "Sam, if I were an employer, you would be the only student in this lab that I would hire.  When all is said and done, you are the only student who consistently gets his circuit working correctly.  In the real world, there is no 'close but no cigar'; it either works or it doesn't.  Keep up the good work, and you will be very successful one day!"  I was encouraged by his compliment.

Of all the other classes I took in college, only three others really contributed to my understanding of electronic circuitry: Introduction to Microprocessors, Embedded System Design, and Senior Design.  In MicroP, I was introduced to the Motorola 68HC12 microcontroller.  It was a big printed circuit board (PCB) with a microprocessor, LCD display, LEDs, and I/O (input/output) ports for connecting to external circuitry.  My favorite experiment consisted of reading in quadrature phase encoded signals from an optical encoder and outputting signals to a stepper motor.  This was PERFECT for precise control of a robot!  I started getting ideas for a small handheld mobile robot which would use two stepper motors and differential steering to navigate a predefined path, programmed into the microprocessor.  The idea was to have in the center of the robot an ink pen which would protrude through the bottom and draw the path of the robot on the surface below it.  I wanted to program the robot to draw cycloids like the old Spirograph toy.  This sophistication was still a bit beyond the scope of my knowledge, but I decided to start by finding a suitable microprocessor (brain) and learning more about stepper motors.  One day after class, I asked my professor, Dr. Stephen Goodman, if he could spare a few minutes to talk with me.  I told him my ideas and he tried pointing me in the right direction, though the talk wasn't really very helpful.  The problem was that the Motorola microcontroller board was prohibitively expensive for a poor college student ($250).  It was also too large and bulky for my specific application because of all the extra functionality of which it was capable - which was unnecessary for my robot.  I started looking for alternatives.  I briefly explored FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) but soon realized that wasn't the right solution for me.

I also started trying to design my own stepper motor driver from cheap logic chips.  I used Karnaugh Maps and logic tables to figure out how to wire up the D-Flip-Flop chips to get the proper stepping sequences for the stepper motor.  I came up with an elegant solution before realizing that all I really needed was a universal bi-polar shift register.  It worked; however, this only made the stepper motors turn one way or the other continuously with no intelligent control to make a robot follow a path defined by a mathematical function.  I was at a dead end again and resumed my search for an affordable, single chip microprocessor.


This was my first attempt at building a robot.  It didn't work! :(

NOTE: I would be remiss not to mention the fact that most of my experiments didn't work at all!  I spent many, many nights staying up well past midnight tinkering and reading scores of mind-numbingly boring books in my pursuit of electronic knowledge.  I had far more miserable failures than meager successes, but I was determined and pressed onward!  It wasn't until I designed that stepper motor driver circuit that I really started understanding electronics.  From there, my successes snowballed!


Robot Building For Beginners - my first robotics book

Up to this point, all of my focus had been on learning about the fundamentals of electronics.  It was around the summer of 2003 when I bought my first robotics book - "Robot Building for Beginners" by David Cook, an electrical engineer from Chicago.  His book was written about a small line-following robot called "sandwich" (because the body was made from a Ziplock sandwich container), which used only an LM393 comparator chip as a brain.  From this book, I learned about comparators, voltage dividers, Cadmium Sulfide (CdS) photoresistors, motor torque, and many other things.

I joined the West Virginia Army National Guard just after I got out of the Army.  In West Virginia, the national guard will pay 100% of college tuition, which allowed me to use my Montgomery G.I. Bill to pay my monthly living expenses (rent, utilities, car payment / insurance, groceries, etc.).  In September 2003, my national guard unit was activated and deployed to the war in Iraq.  I had also met a girl, dated her, and got her pregnant.  My son, Ethan, was born just 3 weeks before I was deployed.  I married the girl.  I missed the first year of my marriage and my son's life.


Daddy and Ethan - picture taken 2 weeks before I was deployed to the war in Iraq

I took that robotics book to Iraq with me, along with an assortment of electronic components.  I made a small version of the "sandwich" robot, but it didn't work because the tiny pager motors lacked the necessary torque to propel the robot.

I came back from Iraq, went back to college, went through a divorce, and resumed my extracurricular studies / tinkerings in robotics.

Around this time, I started reading about the robotics projects on David Cook's website: http://www.robotroom.com/.  There I learned that you could make your own printed circuit boards at home!  So I bought a book called "Making Printed Circuit Boards" by Jan Axelson.  I also downloaded free PCB design software called PCB123.  I designed a printed circuit board for my stepper motor driver - what an amazing feeling it was to see those LEDs blinking and stepper motor turning while connected to my own neat little PCB!!!  I took it to the engineering department and even gave a one-hour lecture on PCB design / making.


Making Printed Circuit Boards by Jan Axelson

In January 2006 I began working at Marathon Petroleum oil refinery as a co-op student in the electrical engineering department.  I did three terms at Marathon, alternating semesters between college and work.


Aimee (and her mother) on our wedding day - Isn't she gorgeous?! :)


On Thursday, May 25th, 2006, I met a beautiful, talented woman named Aimee.  We married on August 11, 2007.  She is my best friend and love of my life! :)

It was around this time that I discovered a hobby electronics magazine called Nuts & Volts.  My favorite monthly column was the Personal Robotics series written by Vern Graner.  More on this later...


Daddy and Ethan on our way to see the new SUPERMAN movie in Huntington, WV

In my search for information about stepper motors, I discovered a really neat website called From Bits to Bytes to Bots.  I also discovered a really cool website called http://www.instructables.com/ where I found a neat project for creating a homemade X-Y axis plotter using two stepper motors.  So I went to the local pawn shop and asked the owner if I could have two broken optical scanners that he couldn't sell and was going to throw in the dumpster.  Even though the broken scanners had value to me (because of the stepper motors inside), the pawn shop owner could not sell them and gave them to me instead.  I took them apart and removed the stepper motors and drive assemblies.  I spent about a week thinking about how to construct the mechanical components of the gantry-style plotter.  Then, without any printed plans, I set to work building the plotter from wood - all from plans in my head.  I stained and polyurethaned it, and it was beautiful - my first mechanical marvel!  After downloading some free software from the internet and connecting it to my computer's parallel port (remember those?), I was able to print any line drawing with my homemade plotter!  It worked perfectly!  I took it to the engineering department and showed it to Dr. Goodman and Dr. Cercone.  It was then that Dr. Goodman paid me the other of my two highest compliments in college.  He told me, "Aaron, I wish all my students were just like you!"

In the Fall of 2007, I began my senior year of electrical engineering at WVUIT.  It was during that semester and the next that I took my favorite college course: Senior Design.  My project was a solar tracking power supply.  The device automatically detected the location of the sun in the sky and pointed the solar cell toward the sun for optimal solar energy collection, storing the energy in a battery.  ...There were 6 students in the class; and on the first day, I hand-picked two of those students to be my partners.  As it turned out, I did about two thirds of the programming and all of the electronic and mechanical design / construction.  This project was another breakthrough for me because I discovered the Parallax Basic Stamp (single-chip microprocessor), servo motors, and how to read data sheets.  I also learned about analog-to-digital converter chips, and I built another beautiful mechanical contraption.  Those two semesters I spent almost all of my free time in the machine shop working on the solar tracker from dusk 'til dawn, literally. 


Solar Tracker sitting on my basement workbench

My solar tracker project for Senior Design and thermostat project for Embedded System Design, were the only two projects to actually work at WVUIT in several years.  Dr. Goodman told me that the solar tracker was the "quintessential Senior Design project" - another great compliment.  ...On the first day of Senior Design, Dr. Goodman told us that in the past the students who were successful were the students who lived, breathed, ate, slept, and shat their project; and that I did! :) Again, though I don't recommend this as good engineering practice, I designed the entire thing in my head - electronics, mechanics, everything - with no hard plans from which to work.


My mom and dad on their wedding day (1974?)


Aimee and I got married just before my senior year started.  Upon returning from our honeymoon, I found out that my father had committed suicide just days before the wedding.  I was devastated, and it took a toll on me emotionally.  On the first day of final exams in December 2007, after returning from a routine check-up at the V.A. Hospital, I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes and Walking Pneumonia; even so, I still had to take two finals that same day.  Needless to say, I was an emotional and physical wreck that second-to-last semester with so many adversities on top of a full load of senior level electrical engineering coursework.  Despite those hardships, I excelled! :)


My graduation day from WVUIT with a B.S.E.E.

On May 10th, 2008 (Aimee's 29th Birthday), I graduated from WVUIT with my B.S.E.E. - just 12 years after starting! :)

The Vision...



This picture was actually taken in Iraq in 2004 - couldn't find one from Kosovo in 2001.

Ten years ago (in 2001) I was a United States Army infantry soldier on a peace-keeping mission in Kosovo.  Every day and night, among our many other duties, we conducted presence patrols through the streets of Kosovo as a show of force to deter violence and maintain peace between the Albanians and Serbians.  We returned from our night missions and racked out on our cots for a few hours before we got up and did the whole thing again.  One day I woke with the vision that I would someday create a company called Rainbow Robotics.

That was my vision.  I didn't know what product or service the company would provide; and at that time, I didn't really know much at all about robotics.  Up to that point, I had completed one year of college as a Computer Science major at the West Virginia Institute of Technology.  I dropped out of college after my first year and joined the U.S. Army in order to earn money (Montgomery G.I. Bill) to finance the remainder of my college education.


This is me the year I saw my first movie in a theater - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!


I was born in 1977 and like most kids of the 80's, I was a big STAR WARS fan.  I was fascinated by robots and droids like R2-D2 and C-3PO.  As a kid, I was curious about how things worked, so I took apart all of my toys to see what was inside.  I didn't really have any good resources back in those days from which to learn about robots.  The internet didn't yet exist (as it does today), libraries didn't carry good books on the subject, and I didn't really know anyone who knew anything about robots.

When I was about 11 years old, my mother bought me my first computer - a Packard Bell.  It had a Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) and was excrutiatingly slow!  Having never been exposed to computers before, I knew nothing about them or how to use one.  So, at 11 years old, I sat down with the MS-DOS user's manual and read it from cover to cover (understanding very little of what I read).  I did stumble onto a program called Qbasic.exe and a couple of games that were written with it: Nibble.bas and Gorilla.bas.  I monkeyed around (pun intended) with some of the code and was able to change some of the graphics a little, but I didn't really know what I was doing.  It wasn't until years later that I would get my first taste of computer programming.

During the summer of 1994 (between my Sophomore and Junior years of high school), I received a phone call from the Wyoming County Board of Education.  I was selected as the alternate candidate to represent my county at two summer camps: the Governor's School for Science & Mathematics and the Mountaineer Youth Science Camp.  Their first pick had declined the offer, so I was given the opportunity.  I packed my bags and began my journey to becoming an Electrical Engineer.  That summer changed my life forever!  At the GSSM (held at WVU), I was re-acquainted with Qbasic and taught how to use it by a Russian gentleman named Oleg.  He first showed me a couple very simple programs which produced random circles and rectangles of random sizes and colors at random locations on the screen in an infinite loop.  I was amazed and instantly hooked!  I spent countless hours writing programs to model mathematical functions and some that played music which had to be programmed note by note with different frequencies, durations, and pauses.  At the MYSC (held at a 4-H camp), I met counselors Ken and Tracey Anderson who introduced me to microprocessor-based robots - programmable by computer.

For the remainder of my high school years, I spent all of my free time writing computer programs.  Those programs tremendously enhanced my understanding of mathematics.  I recall three of my programs in particular.  One of them created a series of lines that bounced around the screen like the old Windows screen saver.  Another one spun a three-dimensional wire-frame cube around in 3D using trigonometric functions sine and cosine (something that I figured out all by myself).  And my favorite program morphed the Warner Bros. emblem into the Batman symbol just like in the beginning of Batman II.  I took a dozen or more sheets of graph paper, taped them together, drew both outlines, assigned 300 points along the perimeter of each outline, and tediously wrote down the (x,y) coordinates of all 300 points on each outline.  Then I created two 300-element arrays and plotted the points.  I wrote an algorithm that would measure the distance between corresponding points on each outline and through an iterative loop would move the points of one outline toward the points of the other outline so that one image appeared to morph into the other.


This is the least nerdy of my high school senior pictures from 1996.

During my Senior year of high school ('95/'96), one of my teachers asked me where I planned to go to college.  I hadn't a clue - never gave it much thought.  She suggested the West Virginia Institute of Technology, so that's where I applied (and no where else).  That year I took 7 AP (advanced placement) classes and Wood Shop just for fun.  Because of my high school GPA and ACT scores, I was awarded a NASA scholarship and the Leonard C. Nelson College of Engineering scholarship.  Selection of a major field of study was a no-brainer: Computer Science.  I took two semesters of C++ Programming and was the top student in my class.

The following summer, I did a co-op at Virginia Power in Richmond, Virginia.  After a year hiatus to seek direction in my "Christian walk", I went back to college only to realize that I didn't have the money to continue - my scholarships were only good for one year, and this was before the Promise Scholarships.  So I joined the United States Army, starting out as an Infantry TOW missile specialist in Hohenfels, Germany.

During my Army years, I re-evaluated my goals.  I still wanted to do something in the robotics field.  I understood from the beginning that "robotics" is the combination of three separate disciplines: software (computer programming), hardware (electronics), and mechanics (motors, gears, etc.).  The software controls the hardware, and the hardware controls the mechanics.  I realized that it would be unrealistic to obtain degrees in all three disciplines; so in order to become proficient in all three, I would put myself in the middle (hardware - electronics) - making it easiest to branch out to the other two.  So when I got out of the Army in August 2002 and went back to college, I changed my major to Electrical Engineering.

I'll continue this another day...

NOTE: This blog will chronicle my progress in starting my company: Rainbow Robotics.