Santa Monica it is! I will be turning in my notice tomorrow. I have the offer I wanted!

The hunt for an exciting job is converging. I have two offers and hopefully a third sometime this week. I am delaying my decision in hopes that this third company extends an offer. I visited with them on Friday and really liked it. It’s pretty much exactly what I set out for. It’s a small company located near Santa Monica. They have a really neat product that could use a lot of improvement on the electronics. I am certain I could make a huge improvement.

I also, by chance, met with another company on Saturday morning. That was very interesting! They do some very cool stuff with 3D rapid prototyping. However, an offer (if any) from that company would likely be several weeks out.

So, I am pretty much set on the Santa Monica job provided a) they offer it to me b) the salary is reasonable for that area.

I received my IC’s from Linear today. They have to be the worst company to obtain sample/low quantity from…. absolutely horrible! Anyways, I popped the chip on and soldered it in place. I am getting pretty good with the fine pitch. It works like a champ! Now that I know I am lined out I’ll get 7 more boards on the way…

A select few of you are aware of what the Nemanich 2000 is and does… especially you NEMANICH ! I got the PCB I had designed for the first prototype in the mail today. I have populated the board and established USB communications with it. Soon everyone in the corporate world will have an out when their own Nemanich drops by to conversate…. MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I got another batch back. I am really impressed with the quality… especially since these boards cost me under $20 including shipping and set up. The turn around time was only 12 days this time. It caught me off guard so I don’t even have the components on hand to create the first pool light.

I have knocked out a few projects which have been on the list for quite some time.

The PCB pictured is a very simple interface board for the pool. It takes inputs from my sprinkler timer as well as inputs from 6 switches mounted in a Jbox. So, the pool, spa, waterfall, blower, aerator, and lights can be operated via the switch or the timer. The board isn’t what’s cool here… the cool thing is the fact that it only cost me $2.50 per square inch to have it manufactured. I got this board and 3 others for about 20 bucks from batchPCB. These are quality boards too! This board would have cost me about $75 to have it manufactured else where. Nice eh?

Since I know what kind of quality I am dealing with here I went ahead and completed a few other projects. I have finished the design on the fiber optic lamps for my pool. It’s the last thing that needs to be completed. It’s actually quite neat. It’s a high voltage buck converter mounted up on a PCB the size of a quarter. It will be used to drive a luxeon III star from lumileds. They accept a wide input voltage (6-30VAC). I am crossing my fingers that everything is laid out properly. It has quite a potential for being disasterous given that the 1A output is being switched at 500kHz… mucho EMI! Anyways, this bad dawg should be here in a couple weeks. Stay tuned…. I know you can’t wait!