Little Did I Know
Received the main circuit board (PCB) today.
The design of this PCB took months. After its assembly, Colin I., the lead EE on the project, worked on the board's "bring up" and did some testing. Now I have the board in hand and get to load up the code I've been working on for some time and replace the rat's nest of breadboards and wires and cables and ....
During this project, I've had a thought many times but it's foremost today: just how hard it is to do serious work that is not in one's field of expertise. When I started this project, I'd been an amateur pedal steel player for about 35 years. Fine. I'd been a software developer for 20 years. Fine. However, software development is a broad subject and my knowledge there doesn't imply too much. If someone is an expert in the medical field, let's say they're an orthopedist, it doesn't at all imply they have deep knowledge of endocrinology.
I had to learn about "bare metal" programming (code on micro-controllers without operating systems) and about electronics (enough to at least not fry hardware I was putting together) and about touchscreens and about digital signal processing and .... All things I knew nothing about. Some of these things I had to learn somewhat deeply, some just enough to get by and then hand off to experts.
There have been other parts to the story: making connections in the steel world as well as in the technical world (the latter being more difficult to navigate given my initial lack of knowledge).
None of this should have been surprising. Lots of people jump into projects and learn as they go. And the process of creating an embedded system, I've come to learn, is a long one.
Even so, little did I know how long this would all take. Things would have gone faster if there I'd brought in more people with expertise I was missing from the beginning, but that would have cost money I wasn't confident to spend early on. As the project progressed, it became more evident that it was actually going to work! And so I felt more comfortable putting more of my money into it.
But I digress. In hindsight, I can see that in my situation it had to take this long. I was going to have to take certain parts of it all pretty deep. Without Colin I., Steve T., and Bob M., the PCB pictured would never have been so well-designed as it was. Any reasonable expertise in electronics is amazing enough to me, but the expertise and experience in the specific area of combining analog and digital audio circuitry that they brought to bear are even more remarkable.
And so, there we have it. Now the next step. It's all about steps. Each time something gets done, it shows me just how much work is left. Much there is. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to the first OnePSG.