Far more than will admit, amateur electronic builders tend to have a prototype that looks more like a Rube Goldberg cartoon than something designed by Hewlett Packard (when they were building). Me, too. There’s just a lot of wires, connectors, rigged-up jigs, and so forth when you’re trying to get a circuit to work like it’s ‘sposed to. And, put a microcprocessor or small PC board into the mix, aye yai yai!

There are breadboards, even sophisticated ones, that help with this. And, there are design boards to facilitate with some PIC development as well as ones that help with Arduino or Raspberry Pi projects. That’s good. But I’ve seen nothing like a workbench platform for most all of these with hardware and software hooks to keep Rube Goldberg in Collier’s Magazine. Until now.

In a recent episode of the ICQ Podcast, I had Howard Michel WB2ITX as my interview guest. He’s the CEO of the American Radio Relay League as of late last year. It was important that Howard get interviewed about League matters as he was hired after a brief misfire to replace the legendary CEO David Sumner K1ZZ. As I told ARRL President Rick Roderick in the Q&A session with him a year or so ago at the Mississippi Section Convention in Jackson, MS, “You guys made a mistake in hiring someone from Wall Street to be CEO of a membership non-profit organization. Don’t make one again.” My Division Director, David Norris K5UZ, was seated in the row in front of me, nodded his head and turned to give me a knowing look. From my interview with Howard Michel, and from what else I’ve seen coming from him, they did not make a mistake.

Oh, at least 15 years or so ago, a university team in the UK came up with an electronic ink (e-ink) technology for an 8″x11″ format thin tablet for office use. It was going to revolutionize photocopying by reducing the need for it. Recall when corporate (and university!) meetings would be held after burning down the photocopier with reams and reams of memos, white papers, and so forth? The team in England had a budding product that would just nip that in the bud. Except, it never got released. It just wasn’t ready for market. The team went back to the drawing board and disappeared from the marketplace.