“Steve Ciarcia had a ‘Circuit Cellar.’ I have a ‘Design Dungeon,’” Steve Lubbers says about his Dayton, OH-based workspace.
“An understanding wife and a spare room in the house allocated a nice place for a workshop. Too bad the engineer doesn’t keep it nice and tidy! I am amazed by the nice clean workspaces that have previously been published! So for those of you who need a visit from FEMA, don’t feel bad. Take a look at my mess.”
Steve Lubbers describes his workbench as a “work in progress.”
The workspace is a creative mess that has produced dozens of projects for Circuit Cellar contests. From the desk to the floor to the closet, the space is stocked with equipment and projects in various stages.
Lubbers writes:
The doorway is marked “The Dungeon.” The first iteration of The Dungeon was in my parents’ basement. When I bought a house, the workshop and the sign moved to my new home.
The door is a requirement when company comes to visit. Once you step inside, you will see why. The organizational plan seems to be a pile for everything, and everything in a pile. Each new project seems to reduce the amount of available floor space.
Lubbers’s organization plan is simple: “A pile for everything, and everything in a pile.”
“High-tech computing” is accomplished on a PDP-11/23. This boat anchor still runs to heat the room, but my iPod has more computing abilities! My nieces and nephews don’t really believe in 8” disks, but I have proof.
The desk (messy of course) holds a laptop computer and a ham radio transceiver. Several of my Circuit Cellar projects have been related to amateur radio. A short list of my ham projects includes a CW keyer, an antenna controller, and a PSK-31 (digital communications) interface.
Is there a desk under there?
My workbench has a bit of clear space for my latest project and fragments of previous projects are in attendance. The skull in the back right is wearing the prototype for my Honorable Mention in the Texas Instruments Design Stellaris 2010 contest. It’s a hands-free USB mouse. The red tube was the fourth-place winner in the microMedic 2013 National Contest.
Front and center is the prototype for my March 2014 Circuit Cellar article on robotics. Test equipment is a mix of old and new. Most of the newer equipment has been funded by past Circuit Cellar contests and articles.
“My wife allows my Hero Jr. robot to visit the living room. He is housebroken after all,” Lubbers says.
The closet is a “graveyard” for all of the contest kits I have received, models I would like to build, and other contraptions the wife doesn’t allow to invade the rest of the house. (She is pretty considerate because you will find my Hero Jr. robot in the living room.)
At one time, The Dungeon served as my home office. For about five years I had the ideal “down the hall” commute. A stocked lab helped justify my ability to work from home.
When management pulled the plug on working remotely, the lab got put to work developing about a dozen projects for Circuit Cellar contests. There has been a dry spell since my last contest entry, so these days I am helping develop the software for the ham radio Satellite FOX-1. My little “CubeSat” will operate as a ham radio transponder and a platform for university experiments when it launches in late 2014. Since I will probably never go to space myself, the next best thing is launching my code into orbit. It’s a good thing that FOX-1 is smaller than a basketball. If it was bigger, it might not fit on my workbench!
Lubbers’s article about building a swarm of robots will appear in Circuit Cellar’s March issue. To learn more about Lubbers, read our 2013 interview.
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