Growing Pains!
Engineering Solutions was founded 6 years ago in a spare bedroom by a frustrated theatre technician.
It's grown quite a bit since then. We have a huge network of subcontractos, metal shop friends and assembly shops. But most of the design work is done by the same theatre tech who got everything moving back in 2003 - John Chapman.
We specialize in 'black box' designs used in theatre and live production. Our customers find us from all over the world. We ship stacks and stacks of protocol converters, bridges and trigger boxes which speak some combination of DMX512, RS-232 and MIDI.
Lots of our business comes from referrals and word of mouth. We work hard to care for our existing customers, and they tend to reciprocate.
Unfortunately, it's all moving too quickly now. We've got six months of 'back burner' designs which clients have offered to fund. Sadly, there isn't time to fully flesh them out with the resources currently available.
So we're looking for help.
Initially, this would be a project-by-project basis. We're anticipating probably 5-8 projects, each requiring somewhere between 4 and 40 hours of design, coding and debugging work.
Read through the skill descriptions below. Browse the rest of this website and get an idea of what we're currently working on. I suspect you'll find it obvious if you're a good fit.
You...
Are confident and competent at what you do. Big parts of it are nearly second nature - and can at times be even boring.. You daydream about new designs and creative solutions in your spare time. You're always learning. You troll the appropriate online forums and (when appropriate) contribute wisely. Your reputation precedes you. Strangers solicit your advice and expertise.
You may have a stack of your own clients - who sing your praises - and a decent collection of gear currently running in the field.
We're not interested in paying someone to learn PCB layout or the intricacies of a microcontroller. What we're working on is simply a natural extension of your existing arsenal of skills.
You hopefully posses some combination of these skills:
Technical Writing / Website Design
You write clearly, concisely and elegantly. You're experienced in writing product manuals and web copy. Our website needs a facelift. It's currently hard-coded in DreamWeaver. Would be nice to move to a dynamic platform, perhaps even a somewhat-customized build of Wordpress. This current site runs on a shared LAMP server somewhere on the Left Coast. Lots of current and future products need documentation, product manuals, screenshots, etc.
Embedded Microcontroller Programming
After 6 years, we've settled on Microchip's PIC processors as the engine of choice. There's been significant investment in toolchains and source code, not to mention thousands of our existing devices in the field.
Switching processor manufacturers won't happen without significant and compelling argument.
We use everything from the tiny 10Fs to the high-end 80 pin 18s. Programming language of choice is currently PIcBasic Pro from meLabs.com. However, .asm is fine and we're not opposed to C. At the end of the day, they're all just tools to bring a product to life.
Many of our products speak some combination of DMX-512, RS-232 and MIDI. You have more than a passing knowledge of these protocols.
CAD / CAM for Enclosure and Chassis Building
Our metal shop works with everything from sketches on napkins to complete SolidWorks files. We usually send them 2-D renderings in PDF and DXF format. We like VectorWorks for Mac as a drawing platform. You use whatever you like. More importantly, your drawings are clean, clear and accurate. You have experience designing enclosures based on circuit board layouts, appropriate front panel connector spacing and the like.
PCB Layout which (hopefully) matches the enclosure design.
We use a Professional version of Cadsoft's Eagle for schematic capture and circuit board layout. Yes, it has some quirks but our workflow runs well. You have experience designing medium to high-speed boards of at least 2 layers using fine-pitch (80-tqfp) processors. The majority of our designs are based on a processor, an LCD display, pushbuttons and LEDs for indicators, plus protocol converters for serial I/O. Designs with this level of complexity are 'no big deal' for you.
Interested?
Send an email to 'John AT response-box.com. Include a brief resume, links to your portfolio, and enough references to be meaningful.
Your location isn't critical, but being somewhere in North America is preferred. We're located just south of Salt Lake City, Utah in the Mountain time zone.