Featured Engineer

Interview with Zach Hoeken Smith

Zach Hoeken Smith

Zach Hoeken Smith - Co-Founder, MakerBot Industries

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

I am not an engineer by education, but it is something that I have picked up through years of designing, building, and playing with mechatronics. Aside from a childhood spent taking everything in sight apart (and occasionally getting it back together again), my real start in engineering was when I got involved in the RepRap project in 2006. I had absolutely no clue about anything, but I was very motivated and spent as much time as I could learning, experimenting, and playing.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

I couldn’t live without an oscilloscope, benchtop supply, or multimeter. My favorite tool so far has been a force gauge (to measure maximum extruder pressure) and a FLIR thermal imaging camera (coolest $2000 toy ever!!!)

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I’m a recent convert to Solidworks and Altium. Both of those pieces of software are very excellent. I’m also a big fan of the open source OpenSCAD which is a programmers solid modeler. Pretty much anything that makes it easier for people to be creative and make things is good in my book.

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

I hate timer / interrupt bugs on microcontrollers, and also sporadic bugs caused by noise or power problems. Those can be really frustrating.

What is on your bookshelf?

Aside from a couple hundred terrible fantasy / scifi novels, I have a pretty good collection of programming books from my previous life as a web developer. The engineering side of stuff is not as good since I picked up most of it from the internet and getting my hands dirty.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve? (special way to analyze circuits, special process you use to make something, etc.)

I like to think that I’m pretty tricky, but I’m afraid/hope that all of my stuff is common knowledge. For example, I love to print out 1:1 versions of my pcb layouts and use poster gunk to attach the components. Its a great way to test that everything fits and that the spacing is right. Sometimes things in 2D/3D just don’t look the same in the real world. Also there’s nothing worse than having to respin a board because you got a silly footprint wrong.

What has been your favorite project?

Aside from the obvious one of building 3D printers, I love stepper drivers. I don’t know why, but it’s always been really intriguing to me to build tools, and a stepper driver is one of those electronics ‘tools’ that can be used for all sorts of things from 3D printers to CNC machines to robot controllers, etc. You can get pretty deep into all sorts of fun and complex electrical things and I dig that.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences? (blowing up things, getting shocked, etc.)

Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve destroyed just about everything I’ve designed in pretty much any way imaginable. One of my favorites was when I was testing a new extruder design. One way we test our extruders by running them continuously for hundreds of hours until they break. On this particular failure there was a little gap where the molten plastic was able to escape. The plastic escaped very slowly, and when I came back in the morning, the dead extruder was encased in a fist sized blob of ABS. I still have the extruder too!

What are you currently working on?

Muhahahaha… you want to know the top secret plans, eh? Well, what I can tell you that I’m working on the next generation of open source 3D printing that is going to knock your socks off.

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

We’re going to make 3D printing easy, affordable, and ubiquitous. Every engineer will be able to have a high resolution 3D printer on his/her desk, and every engineering student will be able to use digital fabrication technology in the classroom. The difficulty and cost of 3D printing will drop until people like my mom will have a MakerBot at home to print out cool things from Thingiverse.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

The slow decay and death of through hole components. I understand the reasons why it is happening, but through hole components are a main entry point for beginners and hobbyists. Since that is how I came to be involved in electrical engineering, I understand how important it is for things to be accessible. Places like Sparkfun and Adafruit are really helping to keep things accessible, but if you want to use CUTTING_EDGE_CHIP in your design and it is only available in SMT, then you’re going to use an older technology and learn bad habits and old things. Sad but true.

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