Interview with Dino Segovis

Featured Engineer

Dino Segovis

Dino Segovis - Self Taught Hardware and Electronics Hacker / Rapid Prototyper

How did you get into electronics/engineering and when did you start?

It happened in 1973—I was 13 years old. I used to watch a TV show on PBS called ZOOM. It was produced by WGBH in Boston. Each week they had a DIY project they called a “Zoom-do,” and one week it was a crystal radio. I ordered the “Zoom-do card” and set out to build one. I got everything together and it didn’t work. I checked and rechecked everything, but it just wouldn’t work. I later realized why. The instructions said to use a “Cat’s whisker” which I later found out was a thin piece of wire. I used a REAL cat’s whisker clipped from my Cat! Anyway, that project sparked something inside me. I was hooked! I started going house to house asking people if the had any broken or unwanted radios and or TVs I could have so I could learn about electronics. I got tons of free stuff to mess with. My Mom and Dad were pretty cool about letting me experiment with it all. I was taking apart TV sets and old radios in my room and actually fixing a few of them. I was in love with electronics. I had an intuition for understanding it.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

My Weller variable temperature soldering iron, a good set of small precision side cutters, my volt/ohm meter and my hot glue gun. I want to add a vertical mill and lathe to that list.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I use Adobe Illustrator to draw all my plans and schematics. It just works. It’s simple and I like to keep things simple. I also use Photoshop a lot for editing photos that I use on my projects blogs and for adding text and guidelines to photos. True Real Time Analyzer (RTA) is a very useful and free waveform generator and spectrum analyzer. I run it on my bench laptop.

What is your favorite electronic component?

The 555 timer.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

I recently built a Fuel Injector Tester that uses two 555 timers. I had it all working fine on the bread board. I drew up a PCB layout by hand and etched a board. I placed all the components in their places, turned it on, and it didn’t work. So I sat down with the schematic and went over every single trace. They all checked out, or so it seemed. I called it a night and came back to it the next day. I went over everything again and again, testing the outputs from each part of the circuit with an LED. Suddenly the problem presented itself. One of my traces was missing a jumper! I just left it out for some reason. The LED helped a lot with that one. A very handy and simple troubleshooting tool.

What is on your bookshelf?

“Digital Apollo” by David A. Mindell – “Failure Is Not An Option” by Gene Kranz (one of my heroes).
“The Tube Amplifier Book” by Aspen Pittman, “Zero – The Biography of a dangerous idea” by Charles Seife
“Tektronix 453 Oscilloscope Instruction Manual”

Who are your three favorite inventors?

Nicola Tesla because he believed in himself and never gave up pursuing his dreams. Alexander Graham Bell for revolutionizing the way people communicate over distance, and Guglielmo Marconi for creating a device which enabled news to travel faster than ever before, thus enabling the beginning of the information age.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

Keep it simple! This also applies to troubleshooting. The solution is usually the simple one so look there first. My approach to design is with simplicity in mind. Simple means less variables, less things that can fail. Of course this is all dictated by what the thing is being designed to do. Sometimes things have to be complex. Let form follow function and the thing will practically design itself!

What has been your favorite project?

That would be one I recently did on Hack a Week, the “Whack A Mouse!” I just love this thing! It was designed to be a cat toy and I brainstormed it all up without anything already out there influencing the design. It’s a silly toy that looks like a little house with two mouse holes in the front, one of which has a catnip-stuffed mouse poking out of it. When the cat paws at the mouse, a motor inside retracts it and sends another mouse out the other hole! What I love about the design is its simplicity. It functions on nothing more than five switches, a servo, and a battery pack with an on/off switch! Lots of fun!

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

I helped inspire a group of engineers at the University Of Oklahoma this spring to build a ball launcher after a design I came up with. They needed a little more information on the mechanics of the device so I made a video describing it in detail. They ended up building their own version. I really enjoy helping out students.

In 2009 I was in Maker Faire S.F. with a robot I built from a hacked toy and I won and Editor’s Choice award! Kip Kay ended up shooting an interview with me which ended up in his Weekend Projects series. A few years ago I pioneered a technique to apply silicone to the back of the projection surface of multi-touch tables. It became known as “Tinkerman’s Method” and is a standard technique used by DIY multi-touch enthusiasts.

What are you currently working on?

Hack a Week! I’ve been building one project per week for the past 13 weeks in a row and I intend to keep going until I complete 52, one year’s worth! It’s quite a challenge but that’s something I love. I’m good under pressure. I post a description and video of each project on http://www.hackaweek.com every week. My goal is to land a job as a rapid prototyper out of all this. I beta tested a Laser Ranger Finder for Joe Grand on the last post and turned it into a backup warning device for a car. It worked great and the beta test data provided useful data to Joe.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

Working as a rapid prototyper making the big bucks and loving my job! I think the wave of Makers making things and starting businesses of their own is what will save the U.S. economy.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Getting politicians to realize that cutting funding to schools and education is the wrong thing to do. We should be doing quite the opposite. Teachers spend money out of their own pockets to teach their classes! That’s just wrong! MIT electronics engineering students don’t even learn how to solder! It’s not all programming and theory. It needs to be hands-on. That needs to be brought back into schools at all levels.

How do you want to be remembered?

“He was quite simply, a Maker of Things.”

Visit Dino's EEWeb Profile

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