Wednesday, August 17th has just come to an end in San Francisco. The lights have gone down in the city, the sun shines on the bay. Six Mouser employees are huddled around a table in the Soma Restaurant on the ground floor of our hotel. These six people have just spent two days at Moscone West Convention Center at Intel’s annual Developer Forum. Another day is ahead. Dinner has long been put away, but the conversation continues on. I am reminded that we are not here to take in the sights of the city, but to connect with suppliers and discuss where Mouser is going in the near future.
I was an intern at Mouser this past summer, and this is my last week before I go back to school. Coming into this internship, I would never have imagined that I would be asked to fly across the country and represent Mouser at one of the biggest technology showcases in the world. I thought I would be writing a blog or an article every now and then while designing some sort of project by the end of the summer. Every engineering student needs some hands-on design experience on their resume, and that means spending time developing some quirky product that stands out among the droves of other students interviewing at major tech companies.
My project became the Desktop Synthesizer. I am an electrical engineering student and also a musician; and I really wanted to do some sort of audio-related project. Synthesizers and electronic music go together like peanut butter and choosy moms, so I set my mind on doing some sort of sound synthesis device. My experience with microcontrollers was fresh, but limited to a semester-long embedded systems class, and I am far from being what I would call a “maker.” But experience has to come from somewhere, and I had all summer to learn the Arduino system. Thankfully, it took me less than a week to get the hang of the Arduino IDE and the new libraries for the Curie Module on Intel’s Arduino 101 board. Designing the synth was a blast, as I was forced to consider what I would want in terms of portability, controls, and sound. I typed up a single paragraph project overview and my manager began passing it around a few desks.
Halfway through my prototyping phase, before I even had all of the components situated on a breadboard, the Technical Content Director, Raymond Yin, leaned over the cubicle wall and asked if I was available to fly to California in August to present my project. Apparently Mouser’s marketing department had been looking for a demo for their booth the 2016 Intel Developer Forum, and my use of an Intel development board presented the perfect opportunity to showcase an Intel product in the Maker section at IDF. After consulting my calendar for a tense 2 seconds, I told him that I thought it would be fun. If I had said no, I might have avoided a month’s worth of stress. But in engineering, to pursue and overcome anxiety is to find success. I had my synthesizer prototyped and working on a breadboard, shoved into a shoebox, by mid-July. It then took until early August to get a solid and presentable design together. Before long, my project and I were both on our way to San Francisco.
Outside the Moscone Center in South-of-Market, San Francisco
On the first day of the conference, following Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s brilliant keynote speech where he outlined some truly exciting new technology that Intel is creating, I found myself sitting at the Mouser booth in the Maker section of IDF, surrounded by a variety of maker projects. I spent almost eight hours explaining to people from all different development backgrounds, from maker to senior engineer to marketer, how I built my project and what it was able to do, using the Arduino 101. After running through the elevator spiel, I would either invite the attendee to play the synth or play it myself, demonstrating the touch-capacitive sensors I had implemented, as well as the Arduino 101’s pulse-width modulation capabilities, which make the sound synthesis function possible. When visitors wanted to see the inside of the project, I opened the enclosure and explained the hardware in detail. Others wanted to know how the software worked. A few didn’t seem to understand that Mouser is an electronics distributor (we sell Intel’s chips) and seemed convinced that I was some kind of start-up CEO with a sound-effect box and that I had hired Grant Imahara as a spokesperson. It has been an interesting two days.
“Interesting” is the most understated description my experiences this past week at IDF. If what I had at Mouser was an education in the electronics industry, this conference has been a masterclass in the business of technology. The Showcase floor at IDF reminded me of the car shows my dad would take me to as a kid. All of the big names were there, along with the equally-as-important but not-as-publicly-known names. Flashy virtual reality headsets, robots moving autonomously with Intel RealSense™ eyes, buzzing server racks, high-resolution screens, and the inevitable sensory overload. For a tech geek, IDF was heaven. For a young engineer still finding his way in the world of technology, I was struggling to soak it all in. Mixed in with the electronics were a variety of hors d’oeuvres whirling around the floor, driven by attendants in tuxedo vests. (Do all conferences do this?) Before today, the word “networking” was just a word used to scare soon-to-be graduates, but here I saw casual networking all around me. No doubt some important connections were made over those three days.
UDOO's robot plays some two-finger electronic Beethoven on the Desktop Synthesizer as Commander Hadfield watches on.
So, a week later I have had time to ruminate on my experiences at IDF. The first of my takeaways is this: people will always be excited by robots, whether robots are making their cars, their dinner, or their commute for them. The booth next to ours, Gobot, was easily the most popular in this year’s Maker Showcase with their robo-laser tag battle game. My second takeaway is that I had more fun than I previously realized was possible while working at Mouser this summer. I may not have been put under a “crucible” of an engineering company’s internship program, but without pressure, I learned a great deal about the electronics industry. Not only was I allowed free reign to build a project to give me some design experience, but I was encouraged to write on tech topics that interested me, which forced me to learn more about what is up-and-coming and explain these subjects clearly. And finally, Mouser exposed me to the technology business by taking me to IDF where I could fully contextualize the knowledge I have gained in school. I heard from CEOs, makers, engineers, and developers about their philosophies and design processes. I got to be a maker and a tech columnist for a while before I went back to school and returned to being a student, again; but not just another student. I returned from summer break with a lifetime of engineering experiences.
Benjamin Miller is an Electrical Engineering junior at the University of Texas at Austin and Mouser's Technical Marketing intern for the summer. He plays guitar with the Mansfield rock band MP3. During the school year he can be found playing with electronics or doing homework outside of the Cactus Cafe, where he works as a doorman.