Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E14 Russ Aldridge | Robot Cinematography, 16-day Ventilators, & Identifying the REAL problem
This episode is a re-run from season 1
Russ Aldridge shares his entrepreneurial journey of founding Sisu, a mechanical engineering company that designs innovative robotic solutions. From creating a revolutionary knife-sharpening robot to developing a game-changing cinematography robot arm and rapidly producing ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic, Russ demonstrates the power of creative problem-solving and team collaboration.
Main Topics:
- Origin of Sisu and its unique name
- Innovative robotic solutions for industrial and creative industries
- Developing a robot arm for cinematography
- Rapid ventilator production during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Building a collaborative and flat organizational culture
About the guest: Russ Aldridge and cofounder Marc Christenson started Sisu in 2010 as an integrator for their former employer NI (National Instruments). They have expanded the company far beyond just NI and now serve a wide variety of industries, developing highly sophisticated robotic & automated applications. Their team’s skill and ingenuity are matched by their incredible dedication to serving the customer—case in point: team Sisu went from concept to 100 fully functioning ventilators in just 2 weeks to meet the massive need brought on by COVID.
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Welcome to the being an engineer podcast. Our guest today is Russ Aldridge. Russ is a mechanical engineer and CEO at sisu. That's s i, s u, where they design and build machines for people who want to change the world. So Ross, thank you for being with us, and welcome to the show.
Russ Aldridge:Thanks, Aaron, glad to be here.
Aaron Moncur:All right, let's start off with the name, SISU, of your company. Where did that name come from? What does it mean?
Russ Aldridge:Yeah, we get that question a lot. So when we were trying to come up with a business name, anyone who's ever done that knows that that is a horrible, horrible thing to put yourself through. And we were trying to find a name that wasn't already taken, we were actually watching the British car program, Top Gear, and where the guy, if you're familiar with that program, it's a, you know, a car program. The guys go to Finland to find out why the fins are such great racing drivers. They have more f1 and rally car champions per capita than anywhere else. And they tell them, they said, well, it's really about sisu. They said, sisu is a Finnish word. There's not a direct translation in English, but it really means kind of having the guts to go for it, you know, to break late, going into a turn and just kind of having that courage and that long term perseverance. So my business partner and I were about to quit our jobs. We've got a mortgage and kids and all that stuff, and we thought, Yes, we're gonna need sisu for sure. So that's where it comes from.
Aaron Moncur:Very cool. So you said, was it? Was it Swedish? Finish, finish, Finish, finish. Okay, and let's let's not neglect mark. Here you have a co founder, Mark Christiansen. How did the two of you collectively decide that let's quit our job and start this brand new company?
Russ Aldridge:Yeah, so I met Mark Christianson in an interview room at Brigham Young University. I was graduating, and he was there with representing National Instruments, which is a tech company in Austin, Texas, and he interviewed me. First time I met him, he decided, for some reason, to hire me. So I came down to National Instruments, and we became very good friends. We hung out all the time. We commuted to work together. We talked about business ideas all the time. Both were entrepreneurial minded, and just over time, we thought, You know what, let's start a let's start a robotics company. Mark was doing a lot of support for some of the automation equipment at National Instruments. And people would say, you know, I love this stuff, but who's the company that can put it all together for me and make it could actually work. And he would say, Well, it's kind of new stuff. There's not really a company that does that. And so that's the that's the gap that we saw, that was the niche that we left to fill. And so about almost three years after being at NI, we walked in and quit our jobs and started in the garage. So that's how it started.
Aaron Moncur:What were some of these things that you were putting together at NI? And there was no, I guess integrator might be a good word for it, to put it all together.
Russ Aldridge:Yeah, like a systems integrator. So, you know, National Instruments was coming out with these different ways of controlling, kind of high end motors. And so Ni is a test and measurement company, so they do a lot with vision, with high speed analog. And so they thought, you know what people are going to be using high speed analog and vision in robotics. And we, we might as well come out with some motors, some servo motors and controllers, automation controllers, so that ni can just sell that whole platform to people. And so people would want to put together a machine to do, you know, all kinds of things. A lot of the national labs where they're they're measuring stuff, but they're also moving things around. They wanted those kind of products. And so they'd say, we can handle the data side of it, but somebody needs to help us put together the motors and automation and the robotics part of it.
Aaron Moncur:Got it. So you started your career at Ni, what was your role there like? What was the day to day like for you as a new engineer at NI?
Russ Aldridge:Great question. So I was a hardware engineer and mostly in charge of electronics packaging and thermal analysis. Love ni. Ni is a fantastic company. Have nothing but good to say about ni, but I was a little bit bored, to be honest with you. Even though I love my job, love the people I worked with, just wanted to do really excited actually, about using the products that ni makes instead of designing them. So anyway, a lot of thermal analysis, but it really gave me a good handle on some of the basics. Somebody gave me some advice early on to I wanted to start a company right out of college, and they said, Yeah, don't do that. And I'm really glad I didn't, because I was able to learn a lot of CAD a lot of analysis, get relationships with different people, understand more how the business world works. So that's, that's what I did at Nikki.
Aaron Moncur:You mentioned that you've always been entrepreneurial. Was Was your family entrepreneurial? How did that? How did you get that bug?
Russ Aldridge:I remember my dad when I was a kid. I don't remember how old I was, probably 10 or 12. He dressed me up in a shirt and tie and took me around with him to his sales visits. And I can't looking back, I can't believe you did that now, but, but I remember just, you know, entrepreneurs, one word, but also inventive. Just wanted to come up with with lots of different inventions. And so when it, when it came, when we were thinking about this, and I, you know, I asked my wife, who's from Utah, you know, we moved from Utah, didn't know a single person. And asked her, you know, what do you think? Are you okay with this if we start a company? And she said, Well, what's the worst that could happen? And I said, Well, we could lose everything and have to move back to Utah. And she said, Well, we don't have anything, and I'd love to move back to Utah, so go ahead. And so we did challenge accepted,
Aaron Moncur:a challenge
Russ Aldridge:accepted. And yeah, 10 years later, to I think she was hoping it would fail so we could move back and see her friends, but to her, should grant it, it hasn't failed yet. It's been 10 years on this past Sunday. So
Aaron Moncur:that's, that's maybe one of the best companies start stories that I've heard. We don't have anything, and I'd love to move back to Utah. So go for it. Go for it. That's terrific. Okay, I need to back up a second here. Your dad dressed you up in a shirt and tie and took you with him to sales meetings. What was that all about? Why did he take you dressed up like junior executive?
Russ Aldridge:You know, my dad is a he's a brilliant engineer. He's a smart guy. He's not a sales guy. I think, honestly, I think he one of two things, either he didn't feel comfortable just going by himself, or, honestly, he was using me for the kid factor.
Aaron Moncur:Either way, brilliant. Okay, maybe what? What were you like when you were a kid, were you always into, like, really mechanical things? Were you building Legos and robots and stuff like that?
Russ Aldridge:You know, there wasn't a whole lot of, you know, robots back then, sounds like the dark ages, but I don't remember that much robotics, but I was, I love the mechanical part of it. Technic. Legos was the big one for me. I built transmissions out of technical Legos. I remember building a differential and being being really frustrated because I didn't have a gear with the center as a through shaft. It was splined, and I wanted to drill that out. And I remember this internal dilemma of, can I modify my Legos so I can make a differential that actually works. So a lot of that I remember, my favorite thing to read was a car manual, an auto repair manual from 1968 just thumbing through. I was just fascinated by the parts, how things fit together. My dad, he really nourished that in me. My 11th birthday, he bought me a 1971 ford f1 100 pickup. He found it for $100 actually think it was $150 and I had been saving for a car, so I gave him 100 bucks. He gave me 50 for my birthday, and then we worked on that together, all growing up to learn about mechanical things. Wow,
Aaron Moncur:amazing. You probably didn't learn anything though, working on a car like that for several years.
Russ Aldridge:Well, the good thing about old cars, and especially Ford, is the amount of times they break provides so much opportunity, at least. That's what he would say. He was a Chevy guy. So he would always tell me he bought a Ford because he knew it would break down all the time. We'd get to spend time together.
Aaron Moncur:Now, that's fantastic. I've talked to a lot of engineers and engineering managers, and almost universally, when I ask them, How do you decide whether to hire someone or not? How do you decide whether an engineer is going to be good? They tell me if they know how to work with their hands, if they've built things. And often, cars come up, if they have a background like building cars and fixing cars, that immediately is a great signal to me that this person is going to be a talented and valuable engineer.
Russ Aldridge:Yeah, absolutely, that's one of the questions we ask all the time, is, what do you do when you don't have to do anything? Find out what people do in their spare time. And maybe one of the best answers we got to that was someone who said, you know, I built a 3d printer at home. That was before 3d printers were as mainstream as they are. Now, said, I build a 3d printer and I make parts at home, and my wife's computer failed, and so I pulled the motherboard out and put it in her oven and reflowed the solder and got it working again. And so he went from one of our very first hires to now he leads our hardware engineering team at sisu,
Aaron Moncur:and now he gets to get paid for all those things he loves doing. Anyway, that's right. Great. Okay, so Russ, you the SISU website, which is, what is it just sisu.com, is that right? Sisu.us.us,
Russ Aldridge:okay, go to sisu.com and. You're gonna get vitamins, which are good for you, but if you want robots, go to sisu.us
Aaron Moncur:sisu.us All right, so it's, it's pretty basic right now, I think it's changed recently. There's kind of just one page, but if you scroll down towards the bottom, there are all these really cool case studies that I found, and honestly, as I was going through the case studies, I got really excited to talk to you, because there's some of the coolest projects that I've seen an engineering company. Do you know they're product companies out there that you're building, I don't know, a wrench or a hammer, or you're building some some part, and they're not all that inspiring or interesting all the time, but you guys have done some legitimately cool stuff. So I want to talk a little bit about some of those projects. Maybe the first one to start with is the Omni sharp machine. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah,
Russ Aldridge:for sure. So I mean, all of these start with a problem, right? So the problem is, you've got these meat packing facilities, the ones in North Texas are a good example. Most people don't realize the scale of these, but if you think of how many burgers are eaten across America, you start to realize the supply chain that's necessary. So up in North Texas, you'll find a facility that slaughters about 6000 head of cattle per day. And there's, I mean, in the panhandle of Texas, there's probably eight of those or more, and it's just unbelievable. And so they're sharpening in there, the knives that they're sharpening, it's about 3000 of them per day. And it's, you know, they used to sharpen them with a guy peddling a stone and spins the stone around, and they put the knife on it. And in the last, you know, 2000 years, the only thing that's really changed about that is they put a motor on the stone, and it's still just done by hand. So the challenge was, and knives have been sharpened by robots for a long time, but they're new. They're new knives, brand new knives, same shape every time. The challenge was, can you make a machine that I can put any knife in, long, short, curved, straight, old, new, bent, broken, whatever, and it will be able to sharpen it. And so we had to develop a system that would basically pick up the knife, create a 3d model of the knife, learn everything about it, create a sharpening profile. And even that wasn't enough, because then you have to have a six axis force torque sensor on the robot so the robot can actually feel its way as it sharpens, and sharpen it exactly the way that a master knife sharpener would sharpen each and every knife. And so that's been a really fun project to work on. Over the past few years, we've shipped a couple of them. They're having great success, and we're building a bunch more to send out there. It's really going to be an industry game changer. It's
Aaron Moncur:not like a standard profile is entered into the machine and the robot just runs through this same trajectory every time the robots actually sensing and detecting differences in the knife designs, the blade shapes and accommodating for that in real time as the knives are being sharpened. Is that right? Yeah, exactly.
Russ Aldridge:So I'll nerd it up here and go to my sketchbook real quick. So if I draw a knife profile, you know, you can see like this. Here's my blade. So you need to understand, you know what, sorry, what this shape is. But if you take the cross section of a knife, you also it kind of looks like, I'll exaggerate it here, but if you look at the cross section of it, there we go. You've actually got this big grind, which is what you see on your kitchen knives at home, that kind of dull part that's, you know, big grind on the knife. That's called the hollow grind. And what it does is it thins out the knife. So at the bottom, you can put this little V on here, and that's what really does your cutting. So we not only have to figure out what the profile this way looks like, we also need to build a model of what this looks like and decide, has this knife been worn down too much? Do we need to hollow grind it again before we put another V on it? So it turns into a pretty complex algorithm?
Aaron Moncur:I get it. Unfortunately, we're not going to have any video on the podcast. So for all you listeners out there, you just missed out on a not just a great engineering explanation, but a truly inspiring artistic session as well. Yeah, sorry, sorry, I didn't realize we weren't on video too. No worries, no worries. I don't have to
Russ Aldridge:look at me. I'll spare your viewers the pain.
Aaron Moncur:All right, so when, when sisu first was started, were you doing a lot with with robotic arms? Or was that, you know, several years down the road?
Russ Aldridge:No, actually, when we first started, it was more with just motors and slides, just actuators, mostly linear actuators, and we kind of came out of it by necessity, where we we were spending so much time just building a. Custom, a custom machine with all the, you know, integrating the motors and all this other stuff that, you know, eventually we were kind of like, there's got to be a better way. And I don't know how we went for so long without really getting into the robot arm, but once we found it, we realized we don't have to waste all this time and charge our customers all this money to come up with a mechanical solution that part already exists. We can basically turn these problems into a software problem. And that's kind of what happened with the knife machine. We built a custom machine with, you know, six or eight motors, and it just wasn't necessary. And so when we revamped that, we said, let's throw a robot arm in there and teach the robot arm how to feel its way through this problem.
Aaron Moncur:How long did it take your team to climb that learning curve for working with robots? Was it pretty quick, or is it a pretty steep learning curve?
Russ Aldridge:We've got quite a few software guys that are pretty sharp. That's not me. I'm not a software guy, but they it wasn't bad. Honestly, we you know that these robots are so powerful because they have to make them so that they can do everything. They can sharpen knives and load a machine, and, you know, just everything you can imagine, paint to car, weld stuff. And so the result is that the user interface, while powerful, is pretty difficult to use. And so our guys figured it out pretty quick. They they pretty quickly master the robot arms, especially from Kuka. That was kind of where we started and but they also kind of got to talk more about this later, but kind of got to the point where they said, man, just for everyday stuff, it just doesn't need to be this hard. So for a software engineer, it's not bad, but for, you know, just a dumb, mechanical guy like me to pick these up and try to use them, the industry is doing better, but it's just it's still kind of difficult. There is definitely a curve there for programming some of the robots and some brands are better than others. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:this is a great segue into the next question. You kind of hinted at it, but learning a robot can be a little bit challenging. It's getting better, but there, there's a pretty cool innovation that sisu has developed to make that process much, much simpler for someone that, especially for someone that just doesn't know how to control a robot. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah,
Russ Aldridge:for sure. So, like I said, when we got our first robots, we pulled them out of the box, and it was just unbelievable to us how long it took to even get these up and running and moving and then, let alone program them to do something very simple. And we said it, you know, it, this was a few years ago. I think it was, you know, maybe 2017 we said, man, it just shouldn't be this hard in 2017 to do this. And so we sat down, we said, what would be the best way to to move a robot and program a robot? And we came up with all kinds of ideas. We just war roomed it for for hours, and and we came up with a few ideas. And one of them was we actually had a little plastic robot model, a little plastic model of a robot arm. And we said, what if we just put encoders on this guy, and then you could just sit back and move this robot, and the big robot will know what you want it to do, and it'll just move there. You don't have to worry about XYZ and ABC and moving axis one, and then axis two, and and so we called it voodoo, because it was like a voodoo doll, you know, you move the little doll and the big thing moves. But we came up with it. We said, well, you know, that's that's fine, but if you're trying to do very small, precise movements, then that's difficult. And so we came up with, basically a game controller you hold in your hand, and when you squeeze the trigger, it's like you're reaching out and grabbing the end of that robot arm, and as you move your hand up and down, left and right, the end of that robot arm follows you. But also, as you articulate your hand, you know, as you move it around in a circle or angle, it left or right, the end of that arm also follows you. And so it's almost it's pretty magical looking, honestly, to just sit back, and you could have a huge robot that, you know, is capable of lifting hundreds of pounds, and it's got some big payload on the end, and you just squeeze that trigger and move your hand around it. It just kind of floats that object exactly as you're moving your hand. We thought that would be a great way to do it. Let's put some controls on it to make it so you can do very fine motions. And then let's, let's apply that to some this is kind of interesting, maybe down the road a little bit. But what we hoped this was a lesson that we learned the expensive way. We hoped that users would look at that and say, Wow, I can take that and I can program a robot to do whatever. I can have it do painting and welding and whatever, and I'll figure that out and make it work. That didn't happen. What we learned was that we had to say, the user does not care necessarily about being able to easily move it. They do, but they don't know that they do what they care about. Up is getting their part welded. And so we need to take this robot and put it on a base that a welder can move around their shop, and put a welder on the end of it so when they open the box, it's already got it hooked up, and so that all they have to do is wheel it up to their bench, plug it in, and then when they squeeze the trigger, all this cool motion happens which they they just think, well, of course, it should be that way. And off they go and weld. And so the same thing with the with a camera robot. You know, we hope people would figure it out. They didn't. But once we put a camera on the end and all the all the lens controls, and put it on a base that they could move around, and painted the whole thing black, and put controls on the on the software to change focus as the robot moved. Then they go, Okay, now I get it. So we really had to not just stop it. While this is a cool engineering toy, we really had to take that all the way to how does this solve the customer's problem?
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Russ Aldridge:yeah, yeah, exactly. So either for making movies, but but more often it's for making commercials. So the idea is that a couple of things, one stuff that they used to do, we had a one of the cinematographers tell us this. He said, there was this job it used to take us three or four days. He said, I do it with it. I can do that job in an afternoon. Now, he was doing a shot where he flipped Oreos into milk, something you think would be pretty simple, but it's amazingly complex to get that cookie to hit the milk just right, and the milk to splash just right, and to capture it with the camera exactly the right way. It's very complicated. He said, I do that before, and after a day or two of filming, I'd have one or two takes that maybe I could use. He said, after a day or two of filming with the robot, I had 30 takes that I could use, and I just had to pick my favorite one. Now that's incredible, yeah, so it's just making it a lot, you know, things they already did they can do a lot faster, and stuff they couldn't do in the past. Now they can do,
Aaron Moncur:you design a control interface for industrial robot, and the natural expectation is that robots going to be used in industrial applications. You know, it's going to be used to weld cars together. It's going to be used to process some kind of assembly line. How did you think outside of the box? And come to this, this insight that, hey, we can use this to mount a camera at the end of the arm and use it for, you know, the moving commercial industry. Well, I wish
Russ Aldridge:I could take credit for this, but this is an example of, you know, if you just keep your eyes open and watch stuff, you might learn something. We had a guy, we had a cinematographer, come over to do a video of the robot to try to sell it for industrial purposes. And he said he could, you know, what guys you really should put a camera on the end of that robot arm. And we said, No, that's not a thing. And that's what he did. He started laughing. He said, No, that's most definitely a thing. And he said, and we are not we are not engineers, we are not robot people, we're artists. And he says, I can just move this camera wherever I want, and I can just do my I can get my creative vision down, and I'm not fighting the robot. You can teach me how to use this thing in 20 minutes. And so he kind of cute us onto that. And so we, we posted it. We just did an Instagram post just to see and we sold four of them from the Instagram post. They thought, okay, yeah, this is a thing. Let's this is a thing. Yes. Go after this one,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, so what ended up being that cinematographers consulting fee on that, I think
Russ Aldridge:we bought them lunch.
Aaron Moncur:There you go. There you go. All right, just a real quick break here. The being an engineer podcast is powered by our company, pipeline design and engineering, where we work with predominantly medical device engineering teams who need turnkey custom test fixtures or automated equipment to assemble, inspect, characterize or perform verification or validation testing on their devices. And you can find us at test fixture design.com you Russ, tell me a little bit about the organization at sisu, like, what's your org chart look like? How have you structured the company? Anything that you've done that you feel like is innovative or interesting and has really helped, you know, productivity and just a sense of culture at your company, sure. So
Russ Aldridge:we wanted to keep the org chart just as flat as possible. We like the idea, and some of it comes from National Instruments, where even the CEO didn't have an office, no one had an office. Just visually, everybody's kind of honest on an equal playing field. And I feel like that really helps collaborative, you know, facilitate collaboration, and it also helps with ideas sharing that, you know, nobody's trying to win. We don't care where the idea comes from, if you come from anybody, we're just looking for the best idea. And so, like I said, we tried to keep it as flat as possible. When we hit about, oh, 30 employees, I would say, is when everything started to really break. And we realized, you know Russ and mark the two founders, they just cannot run this company by themselves. It's it's too big, and it's still a small company. But even that many people is just the administration was just too much. And so we, we debated a lot on how we should fix that, and what we decided to do was to have a number of directors. And so these were folks that we didn't hire them from outside. They came from internal we debated on what we called them. We decided to call them directors instead of managers. Just had a better again, this idea of collaboration to it. We debated on, do we have engineer one, engineer two, entry level, staff level, we and actually the debate on that still goes on, there's there's pluses and minuses to it. But what everybody kind of came out with was the hard part was we wanted people to feel like they were moving forward in an organization and have something they could point to. But we didn't want to have it look like one person was more important or smarter, or whatever, than another person. And so we actually just did the director level. So we really just have kind of those, those three different levels. There's me and Mark, and then our directors, and then the folks on the teams. So that's that's kind of how we did it again, pluses and minuses. As far as helping people to feel like they're moving forward, we identified a number of certifications that people can get, agile certification for project management or for programming certifications or mechanical engineering, you know, SolidWorks certifications. And so we really is support and encourage people to gain those certifications. It's things that they can put on their resume. It's stuff we can talk about publicly and recognize people for. And then the other part of that, I think we we have what we call sisu lunch every Thursday, we get everybody together and provide lunch, and we use that as a time to recognize the effort that people put forward. There was a study one time that looked at what motivates people, and I'll get it all wrong right now, but the the bottom line of the study was that titles and different things, while they're okay, they don't. They don't motivate a lot, but recognition does, and so we decided to frequently recognize achievement and effort on specific projects, and that seems to go a long way to bring people together.
Aaron Moncur:I love that you ever watched the show Whose Line is it? Anyway? Yeah, it's been a while, but Yep, yeah, the other the point system that means nothing really well, right? We do the same thing at Pipeline, where we give each other points whenever someone does something noteworthy, and nobody keeps track of the points and the it might be five points or 5000 points, but it's just it's been a fun way to recognize someone for doing something, something good, and occasionally, if someone screws up, we'll give them negative points. It kind of a tongue in cheek joking sort of way. We're not really trying to penalize anyone, but it's been a fun a fun system to use internally.
Russ Aldridge:I like that. That's Nate. I'm gonna write that one down.
Aaron Moncur:All right. Let's talk about the pipe dream project. This was, this happened quite a while ago. It was probably what 789, years ago, at least. Tell us, how did the, what is the pipe dream project? How did it get started? How'd you have the idea to take that, that ANA music animation, and bring it into real life? Yeah.
Russ Aldridge:So our very first project was the Nerf Dart project, which we've done a number of trade show demos or flashy demos like this. And the idea with each of these has been, let's take something that's in pop culture and let's mesh it together with whatever product the customer is trying to show off. So the pop culture thing, the robotics thing, that'll bring people in, and then we can really showcase the capabilities of their product. So our very first project was for National Instruments. They were selling these high end servo motors. So it was a way to show them intercepting a Nerf dart with high speed vision. So it kind of used a bunch of their products just to show off and bring people in. Extremely popular demo, well, Intel, some representatives from Intel were at that show. They saw that, and they started talking to us about doing a demo for them to show off their Intel Atom processor and all the different ways that you could use it in an industrial setting. And my goodness, we worked so hard on that proposal and just gave them all kinds of ideas. They loved the ideas. And then nothing happened. Month after month after month, nothing happened. And since we were so new at this, we thought, What in the world is going on? We thought they loved this. You thought things were going great, and then where are they it's just shut off completely and couldn't believe it. Now we realize that happens with every single project, especially if it's a big project, and so they kind of disappeared. We filled up our schedule. We had our schedule almost completely full, and then nine months later they said they called up and they said, Hey, this is Intel that project you want. We just got it funded, and we're ready to roll, and we need it in 90 days. So it was no problem, yeah, so it was based on, there's a great company called Anna music. They do these computer generated music videos, which usually have a big, you know, machine, some kind of a machine that makes music. And this was one they done. They did back in, I think, 2001 and there was this kind of this spoof going on that said that it was done by somebody at the University of Iowa with with, you know, farm parts and pipes. And of course, it wasn't true, but, but Mark and I had seen that years ago, and we thought, wow, what if somebody actually built this one day? And so when Intel came and said, How can you show off this processor? We said, what if we built this thing for real, and we used Intel Atom processors to run the various machines within it. And they loved the idea. Pitched it again, from concept to delivery. I mean, the craziest project we worked that's when we hired our first employee. We did two months of 80 hour weeks back to back. And when we loaded it in the truck to drive it out to San Francisco, it still wasn't working. And no pressure, no pressure. And Mark's wife, I think, was actually having a baby at the time. So she had her baby. Goodness, she had her baby while I drove the truck out, and then he flew out and met me. And it was like, if you watch Top Gear, it's like a Top Gear race, where they meet at the same place. We pulled it out of the truck, put it together, did some tweaks, and literally, by the grace of God, somehow it worked. Wow. Yeah. So we, we got there, pulled out of the truck, and as I said, By the grace of God, it worked. And it was, it was great. They Intel is very excited. They told us later, they said we didn't think there was any, any way that you could do it. And we said, Yeah, we didn't think so either, but, but it worked. And although, you know, no other customers are coming to us saying, Hey, can you make, you know, you know, machine that mimics a music video. It's always been something we could point back to. When customers ask us, can you really do our project? We can point to that and say, Well, we did that. And I go, Oh, yeah, you can definitely do my project. So, yeah, it's been a great, recruiting tool, a great way just to show proficiency in the industry. So
Aaron Moncur:and it's really not possible to communicate how challenging and how detailed and complex this machine is. This trade show demo is just with words. So I encourage all of you out there go to YouTube, type in what? Pipe Dream? Ana music, sisu, that should bring it up and watch this video. It's incredible. It is so cool.
Russ Aldridge:Yeah, Intel did a video. If you do Intel pipe dream and find the video that was made by Intel, it probably has the best sound. It's probably the best. Video of it.
Aaron Moncur:Great. Okay, great. All right, so let's talk about a project that your team did very recently. So we're still in the whole COVID area right now, and ventilators are in short supply and high demand. What has sisu done recently to help on that front?
Russ Aldridge:Yeah, so in mid March, it's not, thankfully, it's, you know, it's not as big a deal right now we've been able to, you know, flat, that the curve has been flattened to where we're not overwhelming the system. But in mid March in Italy, there were people were running out of ventilators. And so the option that people had, you know, their health care system was completely overwhelmed. If you had a very bad case of COVID 19, your choices were a ventilator, if you were lucky, and if not, you got a morphine drip until you passed away. And it was just a, you know, a horrible thing. And New York, at the time, was headed in that same direction. And and they said that, you know New York, well, we got a call from a guy that we've done business with before that's funded a number of our projects, and he said, Hey, look what's happening in Italy. New York's going to project it to be in the same place in two to three weeks. And he sent us an article from 10 years ago about a mechanical ventilator that a team from MIT had concepted, and said, Could we do something like this, where we squeeze one of these manual resuscitation bags, like the ones you see on the ER shows. He said, Could sisu build something like that? And I said, Absolutely. And said, how long would it take? Said, I don't know. Let's find out. He said, We need it in, you know, two to three weeks, because they're going to be out. So that was the goal. We dropped everything. We worked around the clock. I think the record was, I think we hit the record of number of hours for somebody at sisu. I think actually me and Mark tied the record at 96 hours for the most hours worked in a week. And it wasn't one week, it was week after week. So anyway, we ended up after 16 days later, we had 100 units on the table that were ready team days. Wow. That's incredible. It was unbelievable. What did you move
Aaron Moncur:so fast? So I
Russ Aldridge:mean, we started out by, you know, the news just did a story on us, and one of the things I said in the news was, you know, when the guy called said, can you build a ventilator? And I said, Absolutely. What's a ventilator? And we really didn't, we didn't know. We'd never, you know, we've heard of them, but what does it even do? So the first thing was just to learn everything we could about it. So of course, we went to YouTube and we watched, like, we literally just watched a lot of YouTube videos, and then we started calling people, and we talked to maybe 20 different respiratory therapists, pulmonologists, anesthesiologists, critical care nurses, and just gathered information as quickly as we could. And then we just started buying stuff. We bought everything that we could think of that might be useful. And while design was going on, we were calling up shops, you know, manufacturers, metal shops and everything, and saying, Hey, we're going to build this thing. We need to get it done as quickly as possible, because they're running out of ventilators in New York. Do you want to help? And everybody said, Absolutely, we'll drop everything and make this happen. And so we would literally get parts designed that day, and they would build them overnight, and we would have them the next day, which usually, as you many of you know, if you try to get custom parts, you know, you're anywhere from three to six weeks out, yeah, and folks would turn them overnight. We would get them in, we'd put it all together. It was just a beehive of activity. We called everybody back in. Everybody wore masks, but it was just kind of a hey, we know this virus is out there, but we've got a job to do. Let's, let's get this done. And we just had, you know, we usually use a very precise project management system we use agile that honestly, all went completely out the window, and it was just the, you know, people working on everything was done in parallel. Said, let's work on, what are the number? What are the designs that we could do for this? And said, okay, these top three are the best. Let's work on those all together. So if one fails, we can pick up the other one, and things would fail. They wouldn't quite work, right? Parts wouldn't work. We just started buying motors like crazy. We got the PCB designed and sent out. Had a microcontroller on it, switches and a bunch of software. So we prototyped as quick as we could when it came time to actually build the prototype, you know, usually you'll build maybe five of something, you know, if it's going to be a production piece of equipment, maybe you build five at first, because, you know, it's not going to work. And talk to our, you know, the guy who's funding all this, and said, he said, where are you at? And I said, Well, we're about to order the first design. You. And this was maybe 13 days in, and and he said, What do you how many gonna order? And I said, oh, five to 10. He said, I want you to do 100 and so, you know, that's, that's just insanity, right? You never build 100 of a prototype, because they're, they're going to be wrong. And so we'd already ordered, I think, the circuit board one time. Or did we, I can't remember, but we did. We ordered 100 of them, and they all came in. And of course, there were little issues here and there, but they worked. And it's, you know, people stayed up all night long, doing reworks on PCBs and putting it all together. And so they were ready, and New York came to within a day or two of running out of ventilators before things started to go back down. And it was, it was a nail biter. And you know, we're very blessed. We didn't have to use those, but we continue to work on them, and we've made another couple of revisions, and now we have orders for about 1000 of them pending for local hospitals. And then the the army is looking at buying up to 10,000 of them, basically as an insurance policy in case. We've got a second wave of this thing coming back. So we may sell we may sell a few 1000, we may sell none. We don't know, but what
Aaron Moncur:an incredible story, though. What? What's the cost of that? I because I know some of the ventilators out there, the ones that have been used in the past there, I think they're pretty expensive, you know, $20,000 or so. What? What are yours costing? Yeah,
Russ Aldridge:so the ventilators now ranged anywhere from 20,000 to $60,000 typically, the cost of materials on ours and the labor were just over $2,000 now, of course, we put a lot of effort into the software. There's a number of teams that have done similar things. MIT came out with one University of Minnesota, a lot of people trying to solve this problem. We took the route a little bit different. Instead of finding the cheapest way, you know, some of them are saying we can do it for $500 we said, well, this thing's got to last for 800,000 cycles a month. So you may have a device that needs to do millions of cycles. Say, Let's, let's make it so it can do millions of cycles. So we use very industrial parts. And then, as far as the software goes, many of these simpler ones are just made, so they'll just push a specific volume of air, you know, regardless of what the patient's doing, which is great. If the patient is completely, you know, paralyzed, they but as they start to wake up, or if they started to breathe on their own, you don't want the ventilator just shoving air in there. So we put a lot of sensors and software into ours to make it so that it will detect the patient breathing and be able to respond to that and kind of help them along the way, instead of just pushing that specific amount of volume. So there's a reason. I think there's a lot of news stories that say, you know, these usually cost $40,000 this, this organization did it for $1,000 I mean, this is a machine that keeps people alive and has to work no matter what, and there's a lot of regulations and a lot of technology and backups and everything. So there's, there's a good reason they cost that much, but in an emergency, or think of ours as the the donut tire and the trunk, you really don't want to use it, but if you have to, it's there. What
Aaron Moncur:an incredible story. Regardless if you, you know, sell 100 or 1000 or 100,000 you always have that accomplishment to look back at. And I'm sure that's got to feel very fulfilling, very satisfying.
Russ Aldridge:Well, the team did it. The team did a great job this. It would be completely impossible unless you have people that were just driven to do the right thing and wanted to help out an emergency, you can't, you can't pay people to work like that.
Aaron Moncur:Well, that's a powerful statement. You can't pay people to work like that. There has to be some kind of higher level purpose, you know, to motivate a person to work like that. Russ, what last question here, What are one or two of the biggest challenges that you face at work? You know, daily, weekly, monthly. Oh,
Russ Aldridge:the biggest challenges, I think, of course, like everybody has, feeding the machine, right? How do we? How do we market and and sell and bring in the business that we need? And are we? You know, I think it's something that every business owner you know constantly worries about. If they're not, I need to learn. I need to learn their secret. Probably the other thing is just, what do we do? What do we focus on? What do and maybe more, even more difficult, what do we not focus on? What do we cut out? What's something that we love to do that just does not bring in business the way it needs to, and do we have the courage to cut it out? And that's honestly, that's a hard one for me. I think a lot of business owners and engineers love the fact that, can you do that? Yeah, we can do it. How about that? Yeah, we can do that too. Um. And instead of saying that, say, yeah, we can, but should we? Maybe we shouldn't do that.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Yeah. Russ, how can people get a hold of you? Or sisu, they've got a project. They want to talk about it. What's the best way for people to get a hold of
Russ Aldridge:you? Yeah, so just go to sisu.us and there's a big button on there to schedule a free consultation, and all of our contact info is on there as well. So you can send an email to our email box and our phone numbers on there. So yeah, we'd love to, love to hear from anybody
Aaron Moncur:Great. Thank you so much, Russ for spending some time and sharing your stories. Honestly, I've talked to a lot of really interesting engineers that have shared some great insights. I don't think I've talked to anyone that has shared as many really just compelling stories like you have that, you know, the COVID ventilator getting that done so quickly. I feel like, I feel like someone should make a movie about sisu, and people would watch it, you know, if you film it, they will come, for sure. They
Russ Aldridge:should use our cinema camera for it, huh?
Aaron Moncur:Absolutely. See, this is a win, win. Yeah, you get some free marketing in the process. Great. You're
Russ Aldridge:very You're very kind, and we really appreciate it. And just tell everybody we have learned an incredible amount from from Aaron and and you guys have been, you know, a great supplier to us as well, helping us on projects that we didn't have enough resources for. And a number of the projects that are on this, you know, pipeline has been instrumental in helping on, including, I believe, the the Intel one, right, that's
Aaron Moncur:right, we played a very small part in that way back in the day, Yep, yeah, yeah, well, thank you for saying that. I'll get your kickback after the show.
Russ Aldridge:All right, you know where to send it.
Aaron Moncur:Thanks again. This is great.
Russ Aldridge:Thank you.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a positive review. It really helps other people find the show to learn how your engineering team can leverage our team's expertise in developing turnkey custom test fixtures, automated equipment and product design. Visit us at test fixture design.com thanks for listening. You.
