Employee Owned Automation on FlexWest

Collaborate as a Peer Builder

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re already doing something adjacent to this yourself — building an educational robot, running a small automation-focused business, experimenting with a similar ownership or governance model — this page is for you specifically, as distinct from someone considering joining a project that doesn’t exist yet. You’re not being recruited. You’re already building something, and I’d like to talk as equals about where our work might intersect.

I met several people doing genuinely adjacent work at Open Sauce recently — other people building educational robots, facing similar tradeoffs in manufacturing, curriculum, and cost. That kind of conversation, between people already doing the work rather than one party recruiting the other, is exactly what this page is meant to invite more of.

Collaborate Pre-Launch

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The EOT doesn’t exist yet, and there’s no hiring — I want to be completely upfront about that before anything else on this page. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do together right now.

The clearest example of what I mean: I already own a propane pizza oven, a mixer, and other basic equipment for the Pizza concept described elsewhere on this site. One near-term path I’m considering is getting a food handler’s certificate and starting to make and sell pizza manually, off a cart or table, on the sidewalk, before any automation exists at all. If someone wanted to help build the automation while also handling the manual pizza-making side, they could keep all the pizza profit while we build out the trailer and design the automation equipment together. I haven’t tried this yet, and I don’t know how realistic it is — but it’s a real, concrete shape that pre-launch collaboration could take, not a hypothetical.

EduBot

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a low-cost educational robot I’m developing — “EduBot” is a placeholder name, not the final product name. The current prototype is called “Ping” (named for its ping-pong-ball front support), the third iteration after two earlier prototypes, “Rotari” and “Stanley.” I may open-source the design.

Manufacturing Approach

Parts are laser-cut in-house today, using equipment already in my shop. As volume grows, sheet-metal fabrication will likely be brought in-house as well, rather than staying outsourced indefinitely. (See Vertical Integration: Owning the Whole Chain for the broader principle this follows.)

Pairing Automation Experts with SMEs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Automation only works when it’s paired with someone who actually knows the problem being automated. An automation expert can build a system that senses, moves, and controls with precision — but without someone who deeply understands the actual work being replaced or assisted, that capability has nowhere useful to land. This pairing is the collaboration pattern behind every project on this site, and I think it’s also the pattern behind applying automation successfully almost anywhere.

Pizza

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a mobile automated pizza concept — a trailer-based operation where the automation itself is a core part of the product, not just the back-of-house. I already own a propane pizza oven, a mixer, and other basic equipment.

One near-term path I’m considering: get a food handler’s certificate and start making and selling pizza manually, off a cart or table, on the sidewalk — before any automation exists at all. If someone wanted to help build the automation while also handling the manual pizza-making side, they could keep all the pizza profit while we build out the trailer and design the automation equipment together. I haven’t tried this yet. I may try it myself first to see how practical it is, and if it seems to work, look into recruiting people — college engineering students, for instance — who might want to take on that role.

Repeating Automation Patterns

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The same handful of technical patterns show up again and again, across markets that have nothing else in common. Once you’ve seen one implementation, you start recognizing the shape of it everywhere else.

Closed-loop motion control paired with vision is probably the most repeated pattern of all. A permanent-magnet servo motor, paired with a camera and the software to interpret what it sees, can be trained to move, position, or manipulate something with precision and adapt to variation in real time. The specific task looks completely different depending on where you apply it — CNC machine tending, where a robot arm loads and unloads a part without needing it perfectly positioned every time; a greenhouse, where the same combination could gently place seedlings into soil without crushing them; or product assembly, where it fits parts together that don’t arrive in exactly the same orientation twice. Different industries, different end products, same underlying pattern of sensing plus precise actuation.

Support the Project

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This project could use support that doesn’t require joining anything: grants, donations, below-market or free use of space or equipment, or contributed labor. I’m not sure how realistic any of this is at this stage, but I’d rather ask plainly than not ask at all.

Space and equipment are a real, specific need. I already have a building and a range of equipment — CNC machines, a laser cutter, 3D printers, welding equipment, an electronics lab — that I’m making available to this project at zero or low profit rather than gifting outright (see Why This Has to Start This Way for the reasoning behind that choice). Anyone in a similar position, with access to space, tools, or equipment they’d be willing to make available on similar terms, would be directly useful to how this actually gets built.

The Technologies Involved

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Several distinct technologies are converging right now, and it’s the combination — not any one of them alone — that’s changing what’s practical to automate.

Neural-Network-Based AI

Unlike traditional automation, which had to be explicitly programmed for each specific task, neural-network-based AI can be trained on examples and generalize to situations it wasn’t explicitly programmed for. This is what makes it applicable across a very wide range of tasks — intellectual and, increasingly, physical — rather than being useful for just one narrow job.

Vertical Integration: Owning the Whole Chain

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Beyond who owns the automation, there’s a related, secondary principle at work in how the company plans to operate: build and own as much of the value chain as practical — a strategy sometimes called vertical integration.

This isn’t a rule without exceptions — outsourcing will sometimes make more sense, and “whenever practical” means exactly that, not “always.” The decision of when to bring something in-house is mostly a matter of cost parity: if something can be produced in-house at a cost comparable to buying it from an outside vendor — including amortizing the development cost of getting there — it will usually get brought in-house. That move is typically made cautiously: exploratory prototyping first where possible, then a pilot production run, rather than switching over all at once. In some cases, an existing outside vendor would still be kept on indefinitely, deliberately, as a fallback — vertical integration isn’t meant to create a single point of failure.

Why I'm Doing This

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Dennis Mangrobang, and this project is being pioneered and bootstrapped by me alone, at least for now. I’m a retired embedded systems developer with 50 years of experience spanning software and hardware engineering, component-level electronics, tool-and- die and CNC machining, and manufacturing engineering — a genuinely cross-disciplinary background, not a single specialty, which is part of why I think I can actually see this convergence of technologies clearly (see Why I Think This Time Is Different).

Why This Has to Start This Way

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a problem worth being upfront about: once this trust exists, it’s built to be permanently closed to passive outside investment. But that raises an obvious chicken-and-egg question — something has to fund and build the thing before it exists, since once it does, that door is deliberately shut. Someone has to bootstrap it.

In my case, that means using what I already have rather than waiting for ideal conditions. I don’t have an existing revenue stream I could hand off to seed the EOT. I’m not expecting a grant or outside support to ease that burden — none has materialized, and I’m not counting on one. And I’ve deliberately chosen not to simply gift my personal assets — the building, the equipment — outright to the trust. Instead, I’m making them available to it at zero or low profit once it exists, which keeps the bootstrapping honest without requiring me to give everything away up front.