April 4, 2025 • 48 mins
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.
Links:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Aaron Moncur (00:13):
Welcome to the being an engineer podcast. Our
guest today is Russ Aldridge.
Russ is a mechanical engineerand CEO at sisu. That's s i, s
u, where they design and buildmachines for people who want to
change the world. So Ross, thankyou for being with us, and
welcome to the show.
Russ Aldridge (00:34):
Thanks, Aaron, glad to be here.
Aaron Moncur (00:37):
All right, let's start off with the name, SISU,
of your company. Where did thatname come from? What does it
mean?
Russ Aldridge (00:43):
Yeah, we get that question a lot. So when we were
trying to come up with abusiness name, anyone who's ever
done that knows that that is ahorrible, horrible thing to put
yourself through. And we weretrying to find a name that
wasn't already taken, we wereactually watching the British
car program, Top Gear, and wherethe 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 finsare such great racing drivers.
(01:06):
They have more f1 and rally carchampions per capita than
anywhere else. And they tellthem, they said, well, it's
really about sisu. They said,sisu is a Finnish word. There's
not a direct translation inEnglish, but it really means
kind of having the guts to gofor it, you know, to break late,
going into a turn and just kindof having that courage and that
long term perseverance. So mybusiness partner and I were
(01:28):
about to quit our jobs. We'vegot 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 (01:36):
Very cool. So you said, was it? Was it Swedish?
Finish, finish, Finish, finish.
Okay, and let's let's notneglect mark. Here you have a co
founder, Mark Christiansen. Howdid the two of you collectively
decide that let's quit our joband start this brand new
company?
Russ Aldridge (01:56):
Yeah, so I met Mark Christianson in an
interview room at Brigham YoungUniversity. I was graduating,
and he was there withrepresenting National
Instruments, which is a techcompany in Austin, Texas, and he
interviewed me. First time I methim, he decided, for some
reason, to hire me. So I camedown to National Instruments,
and we became very good friends.
We hung out all the time. Wecommuted to work together. We
(02:17):
talked about business ideas allthe time. Both were
entrepreneurial minded, and justover time, we thought, You know
what, let's start a let's starta robotics company. Mark was
doing a lot of support for someof the automation equipment at
National Instruments. And peoplewould say, you know, I love this
stuff, but who's the companythat can put it all together for
(02:38):
me and make it could actuallywork. And he would say, Well,
it's kind of new stuff. There'snot really a company that does
that. And so that's the that'sthe gap that we saw, that was
the niche that we left to fill.
And so about almost three yearsafter being at NI, we walked in
and quit our jobs and started inthe garage. So that's how it
(02:59):
started.
Aaron Moncur (03:00):
What were some of these things that you were
putting together at NI? Andthere was no, I guess integrator
might be a good word for it, toput it all together.
Russ Aldridge (03:08):
Yeah, like a systems integrator. So, you
know, National Instruments wascoming out with these different
ways of controlling, kind ofhigh end motors. And so Ni is a
test and measurement company, sothey do a lot with vision, with
high speed analog. And so theythought, you know what people
are going to be using high speedanalog and vision in robotics.
(03:29):
And we, we might as well comeout with some motors, some servo
motors and controllers,automation controllers, so that
ni can just sell that wholeplatform to people. And so
people would want to puttogether a machine to do, you
know, all kinds of things. A lotof the national labs where
they're they're measuring stuff,but they're also moving things
around. They wanted those kindof products. And so they'd say,
(03:50):
we can handle the data side ofit, but somebody needs to help
us put together the motors andautomation and the robotics part
of it.
Aaron Moncur (03:58):
Got it. So you started your career at Ni, what
was your role there like? Whatwas the day to day like for you
as a new engineer at NI?
Russ Aldridge (04:08):
Great question.
So I was a hardware engineer andmostly in charge of electronics
packaging and thermal analysis.
Love ni. Ni is a fantasticcompany. Have nothing but good
to say about ni, but I was alittle bit bored, to be honest
with you. Even though I love myjob, love the people I worked
(04:28):
with, just wanted to do reallyexcited actually, about using
the products that ni makesinstead of designing them. So
anyway, a lot of thermalanalysis, but it really gave me
a good handle on some of thebasics. Somebody gave me some
advice early on to I wanted tostart a company right out of
college, and they said, Yeah,don't do that. And I'm really
glad I didn't, because I wasable to learn a lot of CAD a lot
(04:51):
of analysis, get relationshipswith different people,
understand more how the businessworld works. So that's, that's
what I did at Nikki.
Aaron Moncur (05:00):
You mentioned that you've always been
entrepreneurial. Was Was yourfamily entrepreneurial? How did
that? How did you get that bug?
Russ Aldridge (05:10):
I remember my dad when I was a kid. I don't
remember how old I was, probably10 or 12. He dressed me up in a
shirt and tie and took me aroundwith him to his sales visits.
And I can't looking back, Ican't believe you did that now,
but, but I remember just, youknow, entrepreneurs, one word,
but also inventive. Just wantedto come up with with lots of
different inventions. And sowhen it, when it came, when we
(05:34):
were thinking about this, and I,you know, I asked my wife, who's
from Utah, you know, we movedfrom 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 theworst that could happen? And I
said, Well, we could loseeverything and have to move back
to Utah. And she said, Well, wedon't have anything, and I'd
love to move back to Utah, so goahead. And so we did challenge
(05:56):
accepted,
Aaron Moncur (06:01):
a challenge
Russ Aldridge (06:02):
accepted. And yeah, 10 years later, to I think
she was hoping it would fail sowe could move back and see her
friends, but to her, shouldgrant it, it hasn't failed yet.
It's been 10 years on this pastSunday. So
Aaron Moncur (06:15):
that's, that's maybe one of the best companies
start stories that I've heard.
We don't have anything, and I'dlove to move back to Utah. So go
for it. Go for it. That'sterrific. Okay, I need to back
up a second here. Your daddressed you up in a shirt and
tie and took you with him tosales meetings. What was that
all about? Why did he take youdressed up like junior
executive?
Russ Aldridge (06:38):
You know, my dad is a he's a brilliant engineer.
He's a smart guy. He's not asales guy. I think, honestly, I
think he one of two things,either he didn't feel
comfortable just going byhimself, or, honestly, he was
using me for the kid factor.
Aaron Moncur (06:54):
Either way, brilliant. Okay, maybe what?
What were you like when you werea kid, were you always into,
like, really mechanical things?
Were you building Legos androbots and stuff like that?
Russ Aldridge (07:08):
You know, there wasn't a whole lot of, you know,
robots back then, sounds likethe dark ages, but I don't
remember that much robotics, butI was, I love the mechanical
part of it. Technic. Legos wasthe big one for me. I built
transmissions out of technicalLegos. I remember building a
differential and being beingreally frustrated because I
didn't have a gear with thecenter as a through shaft. It
(07:31):
was splined, and I wanted todrill that out. And I remember
this internal dilemma of, can Imodify my Legos so I can make a
differential that actuallyworks. So a lot of that I
remember, my favorite thing toread was a car manual, an auto
repair manual from 1968 justthumbing through. I was just
fascinated by the parts, howthings fit together. My dad, he
(07:53):
really nourished that in me. My11th birthday, he bought me a
1971 ford f1 100 pickup. Hefound it for $100 actually think
it was $150 and I had beensaving for a car, so I gave him
100 bucks. He gave me 50 for mybirthday, and then we worked on
that together, all growing up tolearn about mechanical things.
(08:15):
Wow,
Aaron Moncur (08:15):
amazing. You probably didn't learn anything
though, working on a car likethat for several years.
Russ Aldridge (08:21):
Well, the good thing about old cars, and
especially Ford, is the amountof times they break provides so
much opportunity, at least.
That's what he would say. He wasa Chevy guy. So he would always
tell me he bought a Ford becausehe knew it would break down all
the time. We'd get to spend timetogether.
Aaron Moncur (08:36):
Now, that's fantastic. I've talked to a lot
of engineers and engineeringmanagers, and almost
universally, when I ask them,How do you decide whether to
hire someone or not? How do youdecide whether an engineer is
going to be good? They tell meif they know how to work with
their hands, if they've builtthings. And often, cars come up,
(08:58):
if they have a background likebuilding cars and fixing cars,
that immediately is a greatsignal to me that this person is
going to be a talented andvaluable engineer.
Russ Aldridge (09:09):
Yeah, absolutely, that's one of the questions we
ask all the time, is, what doyou do when you don't have to do
anything? Find out what peopledo in their spare time. And
maybe one of the best answers wegot to that was someone who
said, you know, I built a 3dprinter at home. That was before
3d printers were as mainstreamas they are. Now, said, I build
a 3d printer and I make parts athome, and my wife's computer
failed, and so I pulled themotherboard out and put it in
(09:30):
her oven and reflowed the solderand got it working again. And so
he went from one of our veryfirst hires to now he leads our
hardware engineering team atsisu,
Aaron Moncur (09:41):
and now he gets to get paid for all those things he
loves doing. Anyway, that'sright. Great. Okay, so Russ, you
the SISU website, which is, whatis it just sisu.com, is that
right? Sisu.us.us,
Russ Aldridge (09:58):
okay, go to sisu.com and. You're gonna get
vitamins, which are good foryou, but if you want robots, go
to sisu.us
Aaron Moncur (10:04):
sisu.us All right, so it's, it's pretty basic right
now, I think it's changedrecently. There's kind of just
one page, but if you scroll downtowards the bottom, there are
all these really cool casestudies that I found, and
honestly, as I was going throughthe case studies, I got really
(10:25):
excited to talk to you, becausethere's some of the coolest
projects that I've seen anengineering company. Do you know
they're product companies outthere that you're building, I
don't know, a wrench or ahammer, or you're building some
some part, and they're not allthat inspiring or interesting
all the time, but you guys havedone some legitimately cool
(10:47):
stuff. So I want to talk alittle bit about some of those
projects. Maybe the first one tostart with is the Omni sharp
machine. Can you tell us alittle bit about that? Yeah,
Russ Aldridge (11:00):
for sure. So I mean, all of these start with a
problem, right? So the problemis, you've got these meat
packing facilities, the ones inNorth Texas are a good example.
Most people don't realize thescale of these, but if you think
of how many burgers are eatenacross America, you start to
realize the supply chain that'snecessary. So up in North Texas,
you'll find a facility thatslaughters about 6000 head of
(11:23):
cattle per day. And there's, Imean, in the panhandle of Texas,
there's probably eight of thoseor more, and it's just
unbelievable. And so they'resharpening in there, the knives
that they're sharpening, it'sabout 3000 of them per day. And
it's, you know, they used tosharpen them with a guy peddling
(11:43):
a stone and spins the stonearound, and they put the knife
on it. And in the last, youknow, 2000 years, the only thing
that's really changed about thatis they put a motor on the
stone, and it's still just doneby hand. So the challenge was,
and knives have been sharpenedby 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
(12:05):
can put any knife in, long,short, curved, straight, old,
new, bent, broken, whatever, andit will be able to sharpen it.
And so we had to develop asystem that would basically pick
up the knife, create a 3d modelof the knife, learn everything
about it, create a sharpeningprofile. And even that wasn't
enough, because then you have tohave a six axis force torque
(12:26):
sensor on the robot so the robotcan actually feel its way as it
sharpens, and sharpen it exactlythe way that a master knife
sharpener would sharpen each andevery knife. And so that's been
a really fun project to work on.
Over the past few years, we'veshipped a couple of them.
They're having great success,and we're building a bunch more
to send out there. It's reallygoing to be an industry game
(12:47):
changer. It's
Aaron Moncur (12:49):
not like a standard profile is entered into
the machine and the robot justruns through this same
trajectory every time the robotsactually sensing and detecting
differences in the knifedesigns, the blade shapes and
accommodating for that in realtime as the knives are being
sharpened. Is that right? Yeah,exactly.
Russ Aldridge (13:11):
So I'll nerd it up here and go to my sketchbook
real quick. So if I draw a knifeprofile, you know, you can see
like this. Here's my blade. Soyou need to understand, you know
what, sorry, what this shape is.
But if you take the crosssection of a knife, you also it
kind of looks like, I'llexaggerate it here, but if you
(13:32):
look at the cross section of it,there we go. You've actually got
this big grind, which is whatyou see on your kitchen knives
at home, that kind of dull partthat's, you know, big grind on
the knife. That's called thehollow grind. And what it does
is it thins out the knife. So atthe bottom, you can put this
little V on here, and that'swhat really does your cutting.
So we not only have to figureout what the profile this way
(13:54):
looks like, we also need tobuild a model of what this looks
like and decide, has this knifebeen worn down too much? Do we
need to hollow grind it againbefore we put another V on it?
So it turns into a prettycomplex algorithm?
Aaron Moncur (14:10):
I get it.
Unfortunately, we're not goingto have any video on the
podcast. So for all youlisteners out there, you just
missed out on a not just a greatengineering explanation, but a
truly inspiring artistic sessionas well.
Yeah, sorry, sorry, I didn'trealize we weren't on video too.
No worries, no worries. I don'thave to
Russ Aldridge (14:29):
look at me. I'll spare your viewers the pain.
Aaron Moncur (14:33):
All right, so when, when sisu first was
started, were you doing a lotwith with robotic arms? Or was
that, you know, several yearsdown the road?
Russ Aldridge (14:44):
No, actually, when we first started, it was
more with just motors andslides, just actuators, mostly
linear actuators, and we kind ofcame out of it by necessity,
where we we were spending somuch time just building a.
Custom, a custom machine withall the, you know, integrating
(15:04):
the motors and all this otherstuff that, you know, eventually
we were kind of like, there'sgot to be a better way. And I
don't know how we went for solong without really getting into
the robot arm, but once we foundit, we realized we don't have to
waste all this time and chargeour customers all this money to
come up with a mechanicalsolution that part already
exists. We can basically turnthese problems into a software
(15:26):
problem. And that's kind of whathappened 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, wesaid, let's throw a robot arm in
there and teach the robot armhow to feel its way through this
problem.
Aaron Moncur (15:43):
How long did it take your team to climb that
learning curve for working withrobots? Was it pretty quick, or
is it a pretty steep learningcurve?
Russ Aldridge (15:52):
We've got quite a few software guys that are
pretty sharp. That's not me. I'mnot a software guy, but they it
wasn't bad. Honestly, we youknow that these robots are so
powerful because they have tomake them so that they can do
everything. They can sharpenknives and load a machine, and,
you know, just everything youcan imagine, paint to car, weld
(16:14):
stuff. And so the result is thatthe user interface, while
powerful, is pretty difficult touse. And so our guys figured it
out pretty quick. They theypretty quickly master the robot
arms, especially from Kuka. Thatwas kind of where we started and
but they also kind of got totalk more about this later, but
(16:35):
kind of got to the point wherethey said, man, just for
everyday stuff, it just doesn'tneed 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 pickthese up and try to use them,
the industry is doing better,but it's just it's still kind of
difficult. There is definitely acurve there for programming some
(16:57):
of the robots and some brandsare better than others. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur (17:00):
this is a great segue into the next question.
You kind of hinted at it, butlearning a robot can be a little
bit challenging. It's gettingbetter, but there, there's a
pretty cool innovation that sisuhas developed to make that
process much, much simpler forsomeone that, especially for
someone that just doesn't knowhow to control a robot. Can you
(17:23):
talk about that a little bit?
Yeah,
Russ Aldridge (17:25):
for sure. So, like I said, when we got our
first robots, we pulled them outof the box, and it was just
unbelievable to us how long ittook to even get these up and
running and moving and then, letalone program them to do
something very simple. And wesaid 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 thishard in 2017 to do this. And so
(17:46):
we sat down, we said, what wouldbe the best way to to move a
robot and program a robot? Andwe came up with all kinds of
ideas. We just war roomed it forfor hours, and and we came up
with a few ideas. And one ofthem was we actually had a
little plastic robot model, alittle plastic model of a robot
arm. And we said, what if wejust put encoders on this guy,
and then you could just sit backand move this robot, and the big
(18:10):
robot will know what you want itto do, and it'll just move
there. You don't have to worryabout XYZ and ABC and moving
axis one, and then axis two, andand so we called it voodoo,
because it was like a voodoodoll, you know, you move the
little doll and the big thingmoves. But we came up with it.
We said, well, you know, that'sthat's fine, but if you're
trying to do very small, precisemovements, then that's
(18:31):
difficult. And so we came upwith, basically a game
controller you hold in yourhand, and when you squeeze the
trigger, it's like you'rereaching out and grabbing the
end of that robot arm, and asyou move your hand up and down,
left and right, the end of thatrobot arm follows you. But also,
as you articulate your hand, youknow, as you move it around in a
circle or angle, it left orright, the end of that arm also
(18:55):
follows you. And so it's almostit's pretty magical looking,
honestly, to just sit back, andyou could have a huge robot
that, you know, is capable oflifting hundreds of pounds, and
it's got some big payload on theend, and you just squeeze that
trigger and move your handaround it. It just kind of
floats that object exactly asyou're moving your hand. We
(19:16):
thought that would be a greatway to do it. Let's put some
controls on it to make it so youcan do very fine motions. And
then let's, let's apply that tosome this is kind of
interesting, maybe down the roada little bit. But what we hoped
this was a lesson that welearned the expensive way. We
hoped that users would look atthat and say, Wow, I can take
(19:39):
that and I can program a robotto do whatever. I can have it do
painting and welding andwhatever, and I'll figure that
out and make it work. Thatdidn't happen. What we learned
was that we had to say, the userdoes not care necessarily about
being able to easily move it.
They do, but they don't knowthat they do what they care
about. Up is getting their partwelded. And so we need to take
(20:01):
this robot and put it on a basethat a welder can move around
their shop, and put a welder onthe end of it so when they open
the box, it's already got ithooked up, and so that all they
have to do is wheel it up totheir bench, plug it in, and
then when they squeeze thetrigger, all this cool motion
happens which they they justthink, well, of course, it
should be that way. And off theygo and weld. And so the same
(20:23):
thing with the with a camerarobot. You know, we hope people
would figure it out. Theydidn't. But once we put a camera
on the end and all the all thelens controls, and put it on a
base that they could movearound, and painted the whole
thing black, and put controls onthe on the software to change
focus as the robot moved. Thenthey go, Okay, now I get it. So
(20:44):
we really had to not just stopit. While this is a cool
engineering toy, we really hadto take that all the way to how
does this solve the customer'sproblem?
Aaron Moncur (20:59):
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(22:08):
this system in in use, and itreally is magical. I mean, it's
so intuitive. You're just usingthe natural motion of your own
arm holding this controller toprogram a robot, and it's like
nothing I've ever seen before.
And when you mentioned thecamera, that's that's
cinematography, right? You'reworking with. I mean, one
(22:29):
segment anyway is you've beenselling to cinematographers,
Russ Aldridge (22:36):
yeah, yeah, exactly. So either for making
movies, but but more often it'sfor making commercials. So the
idea is that a couple of things,one stuff that they used to do,
we had a one of thecinematographers tell us this.
He said, there was this job itused to take us three or four
days. He said, I do it with it.
I can do that job in anafternoon. Now, he was doing a
shot where he flipped Oreos intomilk, something you think would
(22:59):
be pretty simple, but it'samazingly complex to get that
cookie to hit the milk justright, and the milk to splash
just right, and to capture itwith the camera exactly the
right way. It's verycomplicated. He said, I do that
before, and after a day or twoof filming, I'd have one or two
takes that maybe I could use. Hesaid, after a day or two of
filming with the robot, I had 30takes that I could use, and I
(23:20):
just had to pick my favoriteone. Now that's incredible,
yeah, so it's just making it alot, you know, things they
already did they can do a lotfaster, and stuff they couldn't
do in the past. Now they can do,
Aaron Moncur (23:34):
you design a control interface for industrial
robot, and the naturalexpectation is that robots going
to be used in industrialapplications. You know, it's
going to be used to weld carstogether. It's going to be used
to process some kind of assemblyline. How did you think outside
of the box? And come to this,this insight that, hey, we can
(23:55):
use this to mount a camera atthe end of the arm and use it
for, you know, the movingcommercial industry. Well, I
wish
Russ Aldridge (24:05):
I could take credit for this, but this is an
example of, you know, if youjust keep your eyes open and
watch stuff, you might learnsomething. We had a guy, we had
a cinematographer, come over todo a video of the robot to try
to sell it for industrialpurposes. And he said he could,
you know, what guys you reallyshould 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 startedlaughing. He said, No, that's
(24:27):
most definitely a thing. And hesaid, and we are not we are not
engineers, we are not robotpeople, we're artists. And he
says, I can just move thiscamera wherever I want, and I
can just do my I can get mycreative vision down, and I'm
not fighting the robot. You canteach me how to use this thing
in 20 minutes. And so he kind ofcute us onto that. And so we, we
(24:50):
posted it. We just did anInstagram post just to see and
we sold four of them from theInstagram post. They thought,
okay, yeah, this is a thing.
Let's this is a thing. Yes. Goafter this one,
Aaron Moncur (25:01):
yeah, so what ended up being that
cinematographers consulting feeon that, I think
Russ Aldridge (25:08):
we bought them lunch.
Aaron Moncur (25:11):
There you go.
There you go. All right, just areal quick break here. The being
an engineer podcast is poweredby our company, pipeline design
and engineering, where we workwith predominantly medical
device engineering teams whoneed turnkey custom test
fixtures or automated equipmentto assemble, inspect,
characterize or performverification or validation
(25:34):
testing on their devices. Andyou can find us at test fixture
design.com you Russ, tell me alittle bit about the
organization at sisu, like,what's your org chart look like?
How have you structured thecompany? Anything that you've
done that you feel like isinnovative or interesting and
has really helped, you know,productivity and just a sense of
(25:56):
culture at your company, sure.
So
Russ Aldridge (26:00):
we wanted to keep the org chart just as flat as
possible. We like the idea, andsome of it comes from National
Instruments, where even the CEOdidn't have an office, no one
had an office. Just visually,everybody's kind of honest on an
equal playing field. And I feellike that really helps
collaborative, you know,facilitate collaboration, and it
(26:23):
also helps with ideas sharingthat, you know, nobody's trying
to win. We don't care where theidea comes from, if you come
from anybody, we're just lookingfor the best idea. And so, like
I said, we tried to keep it asflat as possible. When we hit
about, oh, 30 employees, I wouldsay, is when everything started
to really break. And werealized, you know Russ and mark
(26:43):
the two founders, they justcannot run this company by
themselves. It's it's too big,and it's still a small company.
But even that many people isjust the administration was just
too much. And so we, we debateda lot on how we should fix that,
and what we decided to do was tohave a number of directors. And
(27:07):
so these were folks that wedidn't hire them from outside.
They came from internal wedebated on what we called them.
We decided to call themdirectors instead of managers.
Just had a better again, thisidea of collaboration to it. We
debated on, do we have engineerone, engineer two, entry level,
(27:27):
staff level, we and actually thedebate on that still goes on,
there's there's pluses andminuses to it. But what
everybody kind of came out withwas the hard part was we wanted
people to feel like they weremoving forward in an
organization and have somethingthey could point to. But we
didn't want to have it look likeone person was more important or
(27:49):
smarter, or whatever, thananother person. And so we
actually just did the directorlevel. So we really just have
kind of those, those threedifferent 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 wedid it again, pluses and
minuses. As far as helpingpeople to feel like they're
(28:10):
moving forward, we identified anumber of certifications that
people can get, agilecertification for project
management or for programmingcertifications or mechanical
engineering, you know,SolidWorks certifications. And
so we really is support andencourage people to gain those
certifications. It's things thatthey can put on their resume.
(28:31):
It's stuff we can talk aboutpublicly and recognize people
for. And then the other part ofthat, I think we we have what we
call sisu lunch every Thursday,we get everybody together and
provide lunch, and we use thatas a time to recognize the
effort that people put forward.
There was a study one time thatlooked at what motivates people,
and I'll get it all wrong rightnow, but the the bottom line of
(28:54):
the study was that titles anddifferent things, while they're
okay, they don't. They don'tmotivate a lot, but recognition
does, and so we decided tofrequently recognize achievement
and effort on specific projects,and that seems to go a long way
to bring people together.
Aaron Moncur (29:13):
I love that you ever watched the show Whose Line
is it? Anyway? Yeah, it's been awhile, but Yep, yeah, the other
the point system that meansnothing really well, right? We
do the same thing at Pipeline,where we give each other points
whenever someone does somethingnoteworthy, and nobody keeps
track of the points and the itmight be five points or 5000
(29:35):
points, but it's just it's beena fun way to recognize someone
for doing something, somethinggood, and occasionally, if
someone screws up, we'll givethem negative points. It kind of
a tongue in cheek joking sort ofway. We're not really trying to
penalize anyone, but it's been afun a fun system to use
internally.
Russ Aldridge (29:52):
I like that.
That's Nate. I'm gonna writethat one down.
Aaron Moncur (29:55):
All right. Let's talk about the pipe dream
project. This was, this happenedquite a while ago. It was
probably what 789, years ago, atleast. Tell us, how did the,
what is the pipe dream project?
How did it get started? How'dyou have the idea to take that,
that ANA music animation, andbring it into real life? Yeah.
Russ Aldridge (30:19):
So our very first project was the Nerf Dart
project, which we've done anumber of trade show demos or
flashy demos like this. And theidea with each of these has
been, let's take somethingthat's in pop culture and let's
mesh it together with whateverproduct the customer is trying
to show off. So the pop culturething, the robotics thing,
(30:39):
that'll bring people in, andthen we can really showcase the
capabilities of their product.
So our very first project wasfor National Instruments. They
were selling these high endservo motors. So it was a way to
show them intercepting a Nerfdart with high speed vision. So
it kind of used a bunch of theirproducts just to show off and
bring people in. Extremelypopular demo, well, Intel, some
representatives from Intel wereat that show. They saw that, and
(31:02):
they started talking to us aboutdoing a demo for them to show
off their Intel Atom processorand all the different ways that
you could use it in anindustrial setting. And my
goodness, we worked so hard onthat proposal and just gave them
all kinds of ideas. They lovedthe ideas. And then nothing
happened. Month after monthafter month, nothing happened.
(31:23):
And since we were so new atthis, we thought, What in the
world is going on? We thoughtthey loved this. You thought
things were going great, andthen where are they it's just
shut off completely and couldn'tbelieve it. Now we realize that
happens with every singleproject, especially if it's a
big project, and so they kind ofdisappeared. We filled up our
(31:43):
schedule. We had our schedulealmost completely full, and then
nine months later they said theycalled up and they said, Hey,
this is Intel that project youwant. We just got it funded, and
we're ready to roll, and we needit in 90 days. So it was no
problem, yeah, so it was basedon, there's a great company
(32:04):
called Anna music. They do thesecomputer generated music videos,
which usually have a big, youknow, machine, some kind of a
machine that makes music. Andthis was one they done. They did
back in, I think, 2001 and therewas this kind of this spoof
going on that said that it wasdone by somebody at the
(32:24):
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 whenIntel came and said, How can you
show off this processor? Wesaid, what if we built this
thing for real, and we usedIntel Atom processors to run the
(32:45):
various machines within it. Andthey loved the idea. Pitched it
again, from concept to delivery.
I mean, the craziest project weworked that's when we hired our
first employee. We did twomonths of 80 hour weeks back to
back. And when we loaded it inthe truck to drive it out to San
(33:09):
Francisco, it still wasn'tworking. And no pressure, no
pressure. And Mark's wife, Ithink, was actually having a
baby at the time. So she had herbaby. Goodness, she had her baby
while I drove the truck out, andthen he flew out and met me. And
it was like, if you watch TopGear, it's like a Top Gear race,
where they meet at the sameplace. We pulled it out of the
(33:29):
truck, put it together, did sometweaks, 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, itworked. And it was, it was
great. They Intel is veryexcited. They told us later,
they said we didn't think therewas any, any way that you could
(33:51):
do it. And we said, Yeah, wedidn't think so either, but, but
it worked. And although, youknow, no other customers are
coming to us saying, Hey, canyou make, you know, you know,
machine that mimics a musicvideo. It's always been
something we could point backto. When customers ask us, can
you really do our project? Wecan point to that and say, Well,
(34:13):
we did that. And I go, Oh, yeah,you can definitely do my
project. So, yeah, it's been agreat, recruiting tool, a great
way just to show proficiency inthe industry. So
Aaron Moncur (34:26):
and it's really not possible to communicate how
challenging and how detailed andcomplex this machine is. This
trade show demo is just withwords. So I encourage all of you
out there go to YouTube, type inwhat? Pipe Dream? Ana music,
sisu, that should bring it upand watch this video. It's
(34:49):
incredible. It is so cool.
Russ Aldridge (34:52):
Yeah, Intel did a video. If you do Intel pipe
dream and find the video thatwas made by Intel, it probably
has the best sound. It'sprobably the best. Video of it.
Aaron Moncur (35:00):
Great. Okay, great. All right, so let's talk
about a project that your teamdid very recently. So we're
still in the whole COVID arearight now, and ventilators are
in short supply and high demand.
What has sisu done recently tohelp on that front?
Russ Aldridge (35:19):
Yeah, so in mid March, it's not, thankfully,
it's, you know, it's not as biga deal right now we've been able
to, you know, flat, that thecurve has been flattened to
where we're not overwhelming thesystem. But in mid March in
Italy, there were people wererunning out of ventilators. And
so the option that people had,you know, their health care
(35:41):
system was completelyoverwhelmed. If you had a very
bad case of COVID 19, yourchoices were a ventilator, if
you were lucky, and if not, yougot a morphine drip until you
passed away. And it was just a,you know, a horrible thing. And
New York, at the time, washeaded in that same direction.
And and they said that, you knowNew York, well, we got a call
(36:03):
from a guy that we've donebusiness with before that's
funded a number of our projects,and he said, Hey, look what's
happening in Italy. New York'sgoing to project it to be in the
same place in two to threeweeks. And he sent us an article
from 10 years ago about amechanical ventilator that a
team from MIT had concepted, andsaid, Could we do something like
(36:24):
this, where we squeeze one ofthese manual resuscitation bags,
like the ones you see on the ERshows. He said, Could sisu build
something like that? And I said,Absolutely. And said, how long
would it take? Said, I don'tknow. Let's find out. He said,
We need it in, you know, two tothree weeks, because they're
going to be out. So that was thegoal. We dropped everything. We
(36:46):
worked around the clock. I thinkthe record was, I think we hit
the record of number of hoursfor somebody at sisu. I think
actually me and Mark tied therecord at 96 hours for the most
hours worked in a week. And itwasn't one week, it was week
after week. So anyway, we endedup after 16 days later, we had
(37:08):
100 units on the table that wereready team days. Wow. That's
incredible. It was unbelievable.
What did you move
Aaron Moncur (37:17):
so fast? So I
Russ Aldridge (37:19):
mean, we started out by, you know, the news just
did a story on us, and one ofthe things I said in the news
was, you know, when the guycalled said, can you build a
ventilator? And I said,Absolutely. What's a ventilator?
And we really didn't, we didn'tknow. We'd never, you know,
we've heard of them, but whatdoes it even do? So the first
thing was just to learneverything we could about it. So
of course, we went to YouTubeand we watched, like, we
(37:40):
literally just watched a lot ofYouTube videos, and then we
started calling people, and wetalked to maybe 20 different
respiratory therapists,pulmonologists,
anesthesiologists, critical carenurses, and just gathered
information as quickly as wecould. And then we just started
buying stuff. We boughteverything that we could think
(38:02):
of that might be useful. Andwhile 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 asquickly as possible, because
they're running out ofventilators in New York. Do you
want to help? And everybodysaid, Absolutely, we'll drop
everything and make this happen.
And so we would literally getparts designed that day, and
(38:27):
they would build them overnight,and we would have them the next
day, which usually, as you manyof you know, if you try to get
custom parts, you know, you'reanywhere from three to six weeks
out, yeah, and folks would turnthem overnight. We would get
them in, we'd put it alltogether. It was just a beehive
of activity. We called everybodyback in. Everybody wore masks,
but it was just kind of a hey,we know this virus is out there,
(38:50):
but we've got a job to do.
Let's, let's get this done. Andwe just had, you know, we
usually use a very preciseproject management system we use
agile that honestly, all wentcompletely out the window, and
it was just the, you know,people working on everything was
(39:11):
done in parallel. Said, let'swork on, what are the number?
What are the designs that wecould do for this? And said,
okay, these top three are thebest. Let's work on those all
together. So if one fails, wecan pick up the other one, and
things would fail. They wouldn'tquite work, right? Parts
wouldn't work. We just startedbuying motors like crazy. We got
(39:31):
the PCB designed and sent out.
Had a microcontroller on it,switches and a bunch of
software. So we prototyped asquick as we could when it came
time to actually build theprototype, you know, usually
you'll build maybe five ofsomething, you know, if it's
going to be a production pieceof equipment, maybe you build
five at first, because, youknow, it's not going to work.
And talk to our, you know, theguy who's funding all this, and
(39:52):
said, he said, where are you at?
And I said, Well, we're about toorder the first design. You. And
this was maybe 13 days in, andand 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,
(40:15):
right? You never build 100 of aprototype, because they're,
they're going to be wrong. Andso we'd already ordered, I
think, the circuit board onetime. Or did we, I can't
remember, but we did. We ordered100 of them, and they all came
in. And of course, there werelittle issues here and there,
but they worked. And it's, youknow, people stayed up all night
(40:36):
long, doing reworks on PCBs andputting it all together. And so
they were ready, and New Yorkcame to within a day or two of
running out of ventilatorsbefore things started to go back
down. And it was, it was a nailbiter. And you know, we're very
blessed. We didn't have to usethose, but we continue to work
on them, and we've made anothercouple of revisions, and now we
(41:02):
have orders for about 1000 ofthem pending for local
hospitals. And then the the armyis looking at buying up to
10,000 of them, basically as aninsurance policy in case. We've
got a second wave of this thingcoming back. So we may sell we
may sell a few 1000, we may sellnone. We don't know, but what
Aaron Moncur (41:20):
an incredible story, though. What? What's the
cost of that? I because I knowsome of the ventilators out
there, the ones that have beenused in the past there, I think
they're pretty expensive, youknow, $20,000 or so. What? What
are yours costing? Yeah,
Russ Aldridge (41:36):
so the ventilators now ranged anywhere
from 20,000 to $60,000typically, the cost of materials
on ours and the labor were justover $2,000 now, of course, we
put a lot of effort into thesoftware. There's a number of
teams that have done similarthings. MIT came out with one
University of Minnesota, a lotof people trying to solve this
(41:57):
problem. We took the route alittle bit different. Instead of
finding the cheapest way, youknow, 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. Soyou 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 usevery industrial parts. And then,
(42:20):
as far as the software goes,many of these simpler ones are
just made, so they'll just pusha specific volume of air, you
know, regardless of what thepatient's doing, which is great.
If the patient is completely,you know, paralyzed, they but as
they start to wake up, or ifthey started to breathe on their
own, you don't want theventilator just shoving air in
there. So we put a lot ofsensors and software into ours
(42:42):
to make it so that it willdetect the patient breathing and
be able to respond to that andkind of help them along the way,
instead of just pushing thatspecific amount of volume. So
there's a reason. I thinkthere's a lot of news stories
that say, you know, theseusually cost $40,000 this, this
organization did it for $1,000 Imean, this is a machine that
(43:04):
keeps people alive and has towork no matter what, and there's
a lot of regulations and a lotof technology and backups and
everything. So there's, there'sa good reason they cost that
much, but in an emergency, orthink of ours as the the donut
tire and the trunk, you reallydon't want to use it, but if you
have to, it's there. What
Aaron Moncur (43:22):
an incredible story. Regardless if you, you
know, sell 100 or 1000 or100,000 you always have that
accomplishment to look back at.
And I'm sure that's got to feelvery fulfilling, very
satisfying.
Russ Aldridge (43:35):
Well, the team did it. The team did a great job
this. It would be completelyimpossible unless you have
people that were just driven todo the right thing and wanted to
help out an emergency, youcan't, you can't pay people to
work like that.
Aaron Moncur (43:49):
Well, that's a powerful statement. You can't
pay people to work like that.
There has to be some kind ofhigher level purpose, you know,
to motivate a person to worklike that. Russ, what last
question here, What are one ortwo of the biggest challenges
that you face at work? You know,daily, weekly, monthly. Oh,
Russ Aldridge (44:10):
the biggest challenges, I think, of course,
like everybody has, feeding themachine, right? How do we? How
do we market and and sell andbring in the business that we
need? And are we? You know, Ithink it's something that every
business owner you knowconstantly worries about. If
they're not, I need to learn. Ineed to learn their secret.
(44:31):
Probably the other thing isjust, what do we do? What do we
focus on? What do and maybemore, even more difficult, what
do we not focus on? What do wecut out? What's something that
we love to do that just does notbring in business the way it
needs to, and do we have thecourage to cut it out? And
that's honestly, that's a hardone for me. I think a lot of
(44:51):
business owners and engineerslove the fact that, can you do
that? Yeah, we can do it. Howabout that? Yeah, we can do that
too. Um. And instead of sayingthat, say, yeah, we can, but
should we? Maybe we shouldn't dothat.
Aaron Moncur (45:05):
Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Yeah.
Russ, how can people get a holdof you? Or sisu, they've got a
project. They want to talk aboutit. What's the best way for
people to get a hold of
Russ Aldridge (45:18):
you? Yeah, so just go to sisu.us and there's a
big button on there to schedulea free consultation, and all of
our contact info is on there aswell. So you can send an email
to our email box and our phonenumbers on there. So yeah, we'd
love to, love to hear fromanybody
Aaron Moncur (45:36):
Great. Thank you so much, Russ for spending some
time and sharing your stories.
Honestly, I've talked to a lotof really interesting engineers
that have shared some greatinsights. I don't think I've
talked to anyone that has sharedas many really just compelling
stories like you have that, youknow, the COVID ventilator
getting that done so quickly. Ifeel like, I feel like someone
(45:56):
should make a movie about sisu,and people would watch it, you
know, if you film it, they willcome, for sure. They
Russ Aldridge (46:06):
should use our cinema camera for it, huh?
Aaron Moncur (46:08):
Absolutely. See, this is a win, win. Yeah, you
get some free marketing in theprocess. Great. You're
Russ Aldridge (46:14):
very You're very kind, and we really appreciate
it. And just tell everybody wehave learned an incredible
amount from from Aaron and andyou guys have been, you know, a
great supplier to us as well,helping us on projects that we
didn't have enough resourcesfor. And a number of the
projects that are on this, youknow, pipeline has been
instrumental in helping on,including, I believe, the the
(46:37):
Intel one, right, that's
Aaron Moncur (46:38):
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 theshow.
Russ Aldridge (46:46):
All right, you know where to send it.
Aaron Moncur (46:50):
Thanks again. This is great.
Russ Aldridge (46:51):
Thank you.
Aaron Moncur (46:56):
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and
engineering. If you liked whatyou heard today, please leave us
a positive review. It reallyhelps other people find the show
to learn how your engineeringteam can leverage our team's
expertise in developing turnkeycustom test fixtures, automated
equipment and product design.
Visit us at test fixturedesign.com thanks for listening.
(47:18):
You.
Welcome to the being an engineer podcast. Our
guest today is Russ Aldridge.
Russ is a mechanical engineerand CEO at sisu. That's s i, s
u, where they design and buildmachines for people who want to
change the world. So Ross, thankyou for being with us, and
welcome to the show.
Russ Aldridge (00:34):
Thanks, Aaron, glad to be here.
Aaron Moncur (00:37):
All right, let's start off with the name, SISU,
of your company. Where did thatname come from? What does it
mean?
Russ Aldridge (00:43):
Yeah, we get that question a lot. So when we were
trying to come up with abusiness name, anyone who's ever
done that knows that that is ahorrible, horrible thing to put
yourself through. And we weretrying to find a name that
wasn't already taken, we wereactually watching the British
car program, Top Gear, and wherethe 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 finsare such great racing drivers.
(01:06):
They have more f1 and rally carchampions per capita than
anywhere else. And they tellthem, they said, well, it's
really about sisu. They said,sisu is a Finnish word. There's
not a direct translation inEnglish, but it really means
kind of having the guts to gofor it, you know, to break late,
going into a turn and just kindof having that courage and that
long term perseverance. So mybusiness partner and I were
(01:28):
about to quit our jobs. We'vegot 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 (01:36):
Very cool. So you said, was it? Was it Swedish?
Finish, finish, Finish, finish.
Okay, and let's let's notneglect mark. Here you have a co
founder, Mark Christiansen. Howdid the two of you collectively
decide that let's quit our joband start this brand new
company?
Russ Aldridge (01:56):
Yeah, so I met Mark Christianson in an
interview room at Brigham YoungUniversity. I was graduating,
and he was there withrepresenting National
Instruments, which is a techcompany in Austin, Texas, and he
interviewed me. First time I methim, he decided, for some
reason, to hire me. So I camedown to National Instruments,
and we became very good friends.
We hung out all the time. Wecommuted to work together. We
(02:17):
talked about business ideas allthe time. Both were
entrepreneurial minded, and justover time, we thought, You know
what, let's start a let's starta robotics company. Mark was
doing a lot of support for someof the automation equipment at
National Instruments. And peoplewould say, you know, I love this
stuff, but who's the companythat can put it all together for
(02:38):
me and make it could actuallywork. And he would say, Well,
it's kind of new stuff. There'snot really a company that does
that. And so that's the that'sthe gap that we saw, that was
the niche that we left to fill.
And so about almost three yearsafter being at NI, we walked in
and quit our jobs and started inthe garage. So that's how it
(02:59):
started.
Aaron Moncur (03:00):
What were some of these things that you were
putting together at NI? Andthere was no, I guess integrator
might be a good word for it, toput it all together.
Russ Aldridge (03:08):
Yeah, like a systems integrator. So, you
know, National Instruments wascoming out with these different
ways of controlling, kind ofhigh end motors. And so Ni is a
test and measurement company, sothey do a lot with vision, with
high speed analog. And so theythought, you know what people
are going to be using high speedanalog and vision in robotics.
(03:29):
And we, we might as well comeout with some motors, some servo
motors and controllers,automation controllers, so that
ni can just sell that wholeplatform to people. And so
people would want to puttogether a machine to do, you
know, all kinds of things. A lotof the national labs where
they're they're measuring stuff,but they're also moving things
around. They wanted those kindof products. And so they'd say,
(03:50):
we can handle the data side ofit, but somebody needs to help
us put together the motors andautomation and the robotics part
of it.
Aaron Moncur (03:58):
Got it. So you started your career at Ni, what
was your role there like? Whatwas the day to day like for you
as a new engineer at NI?
Russ Aldridge (04:08):
Great question.
So I was a hardware engineer andmostly in charge of electronics
packaging and thermal analysis.
Love ni. Ni is a fantasticcompany. Have nothing but good
to say about ni, but I was alittle bit bored, to be honest
with you. Even though I love myjob, love the people I worked
(04:28):
with, just wanted to do reallyexcited actually, about using
the products that ni makesinstead of designing them. So
anyway, a lot of thermalanalysis, but it really gave me
a good handle on some of thebasics. Somebody gave me some
advice early on to I wanted tostart a company right out of
college, and they said, Yeah,don't do that. And I'm really
glad I didn't, because I wasable to learn a lot of CAD a lot
(04:51):
of analysis, get relationshipswith different people,
understand more how the businessworld works. So that's, that's
what I did at Nikki.
Aaron Moncur (05:00):
You mentioned that you've always been
entrepreneurial. Was Was yourfamily entrepreneurial? How did
that? How did you get that bug?
Russ Aldridge (05:10):
I remember my dad when I was a kid. I don't
remember how old I was, probably10 or 12. He dressed me up in a
shirt and tie and took me aroundwith him to his sales visits.
And I can't looking back, Ican't believe you did that now,
but, but I remember just, youknow, entrepreneurs, one word,
but also inventive. Just wantedto come up with with lots of
different inventions. And sowhen it, when it came, when we
(05:34):
were thinking about this, and I,you know, I asked my wife, who's
from Utah, you know, we movedfrom 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 theworst that could happen? And I
said, Well, we could loseeverything and have to move back
to Utah. And she said, Well, wedon't have anything, and I'd
love to move back to Utah, so goahead. And so we did challenge
(05:56):
accepted,
Aaron Moncur (06:01):
a challenge
Russ Aldridge (06:02):
accepted. And yeah, 10 years later, to I think
she was hoping it would fail sowe could move back and see her
friends, but to her, shouldgrant it, it hasn't failed yet.
It's been 10 years on this pastSunday. So
Aaron Moncur (06:15):
that's, that's maybe one of the best companies
start stories that I've heard.
We don't have anything, and I'dlove to move back to Utah. So go
for it. Go for it. That'sterrific. Okay, I need to back
up a second here. Your daddressed you up in a shirt and
tie and took you with him tosales meetings. What was that
all about? Why did he take youdressed up like junior
executive?
Russ Aldridge (06:38):
You know, my dad is a he's a brilliant engineer.
He's a smart guy. He's not asales guy. I think, honestly, I
think he one of two things,either he didn't feel
comfortable just going byhimself, or, honestly, he was
using me for the kid factor.
Aaron Moncur (06:54):
Either way, brilliant. Okay, maybe what?
What were you like when you werea kid, were you always into,
like, really mechanical things?
Were you building Legos androbots and stuff like that?
Russ Aldridge (07:08):
You know, there wasn't a whole lot of, you know,
robots back then, sounds likethe dark ages, but I don't
remember that much robotics, butI was, I love the mechanical
part of it. Technic. Legos wasthe big one for me. I built
transmissions out of technicalLegos. I remember building a
differential and being beingreally frustrated because I
didn't have a gear with thecenter as a through shaft. It
(07:31):
was splined, and I wanted todrill that out. And I remember
this internal dilemma of, can Imodify my Legos so I can make a
differential that actuallyworks. So a lot of that I
remember, my favorite thing toread was a car manual, an auto
repair manual from 1968 justthumbing through. I was just
fascinated by the parts, howthings fit together. My dad, he
(07:53):
really nourished that in me. My11th birthday, he bought me a
1971 ford f1 100 pickup. Hefound it for $100 actually think
it was $150 and I had beensaving for a car, so I gave him
100 bucks. He gave me 50 for mybirthday, and then we worked on
that together, all growing up tolearn about mechanical things.
(08:15):
Wow,
Aaron Moncur (08:15):
amazing. You probably didn't learn anything
though, working on a car likethat for several years.
Russ Aldridge (08:21):
Well, the good thing about old cars, and
especially Ford, is the amountof times they break provides so
much opportunity, at least.
That's what he would say. He wasa Chevy guy. So he would always
tell me he bought a Ford becausehe knew it would break down all
the time. We'd get to spend timetogether.
Aaron Moncur (08:36):
Now, that's fantastic. I've talked to a lot
of engineers and engineeringmanagers, and almost
universally, when I ask them,How do you decide whether to
hire someone or not? How do youdecide whether an engineer is
going to be good? They tell meif they know how to work with
their hands, if they've builtthings. And often, cars come up,
(08:58):
if they have a background likebuilding cars and fixing cars,
that immediately is a greatsignal to me that this person is
going to be a talented andvaluable engineer.
Russ Aldridge (09:09):
Yeah, absolutely, that's one of the questions we
ask all the time, is, what doyou do when you don't have to do
anything? Find out what peopledo in their spare time. And
maybe one of the best answers wegot to that was someone who
said, you know, I built a 3dprinter at home. That was before
3d printers were as mainstreamas they are. Now, said, I build
a 3d printer and I make parts athome, and my wife's computer
failed, and so I pulled themotherboard out and put it in
(09:30):
her oven and reflowed the solderand got it working again. And so
he went from one of our veryfirst hires to now he leads our
hardware engineering team atsisu,
Aaron Moncur (09:41):
and now he gets to get paid for all those things he
loves doing. Anyway, that'sright. Great. Okay, so Russ, you
the SISU website, which is, whatis it just sisu.com, is that
right? Sisu.us.us,
Russ Aldridge (09:58):
okay, go to sisu.com and. You're gonna get
vitamins, which are good foryou, but if you want robots, go
to sisu.us
Aaron Moncur (10:04):
sisu.us All right, so it's, it's pretty basic right
now, I think it's changedrecently. There's kind of just
one page, but if you scroll downtowards the bottom, there are
all these really cool casestudies that I found, and
honestly, as I was going throughthe case studies, I got really
(10:25):
excited to talk to you, becausethere's some of the coolest
projects that I've seen anengineering company. Do you know
they're product companies outthere that you're building, I
don't know, a wrench or ahammer, or you're building some
some part, and they're not allthat inspiring or interesting
all the time, but you guys havedone some legitimately cool
(10:47):
stuff. So I want to talk alittle bit about some of those
projects. Maybe the first one tostart with is the Omni sharp
machine. Can you tell us alittle bit about that? Yeah,
Russ Aldridge (11:00):
for sure. So I mean, all of these start with a
problem, right? So the problemis, you've got these meat
packing facilities, the ones inNorth Texas are a good example.
Most people don't realize thescale of these, but if you think
of how many burgers are eatenacross America, you start to
realize the supply chain that'snecessary. So up in North Texas,
you'll find a facility thatslaughters about 6000 head of
(11:23):
cattle per day. And there's, Imean, in the panhandle of Texas,
there's probably eight of thoseor more, and it's just
unbelievable. And so they'resharpening in there, the knives
that they're sharpening, it'sabout 3000 of them per day. And
it's, you know, they used tosharpen them with a guy peddling
(11:43):
a stone and spins the stonearound, and they put the knife
on it. And in the last, youknow, 2000 years, the only thing
that's really changed about thatis they put a motor on the
stone, and it's still just doneby hand. So the challenge was,
and knives have been sharpenedby 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
(12:05):
can put any knife in, long,short, curved, straight, old,
new, bent, broken, whatever, andit will be able to sharpen it.
And so we had to develop asystem that would basically pick
up the knife, create a 3d modelof the knife, learn everything
about it, create a sharpeningprofile. And even that wasn't
enough, because then you have tohave a six axis force torque
(12:26):
sensor on the robot so the robotcan actually feel its way as it
sharpens, and sharpen it exactlythe way that a master knife
sharpener would sharpen each andevery knife. And so that's been
a really fun project to work on.
Over the past few years, we'veshipped a couple of them.
They're having great success,and we're building a bunch more
to send out there. It's reallygoing to be an industry game
(12:47):
changer. It's
Aaron Moncur (12:49):
not like a standard profile is entered into
the machine and the robot justruns through this same
trajectory every time the robotsactually sensing and detecting
differences in the knifedesigns, the blade shapes and
accommodating for that in realtime as the knives are being
sharpened. Is that right? Yeah,exactly.
Russ Aldridge (13:11):
So I'll nerd it up here and go to my sketchbook
real quick. So if I draw a knifeprofile, you know, you can see
like this. Here's my blade. Soyou need to understand, you know
what, sorry, what this shape is.
But if you take the crosssection of a knife, you also it
kind of looks like, I'llexaggerate it here, but if you
(13:32):
look at the cross section of it,there we go. You've actually got
this big grind, which is whatyou see on your kitchen knives
at home, that kind of dull partthat's, you know, big grind on
the knife. That's called thehollow grind. And what it does
is it thins out the knife. So atthe bottom, you can put this
little V on here, and that'swhat really does your cutting.
So we not only have to figureout what the profile this way
(13:54):
looks like, we also need tobuild a model of what this looks
like and decide, has this knifebeen worn down too much? Do we
need to hollow grind it againbefore we put another V on it?
So it turns into a prettycomplex algorithm?
Aaron Moncur (14:10):
I get it.
Unfortunately, we're not goingto have any video on the
podcast. So for all youlisteners out there, you just
missed out on a not just a greatengineering explanation, but a
truly inspiring artistic sessionas well.
Yeah, sorry, sorry, I didn'trealize we weren't on video too.
No worries, no worries. I don'thave to
Russ Aldridge (14:29):
look at me. I'll spare your viewers the pain.
Aaron Moncur (14:33):
All right, so when, when sisu first was
started, were you doing a lotwith with robotic arms? Or was
that, you know, several yearsdown the road?
Russ Aldridge (14:44):
No, actually, when we first started, it was
more with just motors andslides, just actuators, mostly
linear actuators, and we kind ofcame out of it by necessity,
where we we were spending somuch time just building a.
Custom, a custom machine withall the, you know, integrating
(15:04):
the motors and all this otherstuff that, you know, eventually
we were kind of like, there'sgot to be a better way. And I
don't know how we went for solong without really getting into
the robot arm, but once we foundit, we realized we don't have to
waste all this time and chargeour customers all this money to
come up with a mechanicalsolution that part already
exists. We can basically turnthese problems into a software
(15:26):
problem. And that's kind of whathappened 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, wesaid, let's throw a robot arm in
there and teach the robot armhow to feel its way through this
problem.
Aaron Moncur (15:43):
How long did it take your team to climb that
learning curve for working withrobots? Was it pretty quick, or
is it a pretty steep learningcurve?
Russ Aldridge (15:52):
We've got quite a few software guys that are
pretty sharp. That's not me. I'mnot a software guy, but they it
wasn't bad. Honestly, we youknow that these robots are so
powerful because they have tomake them so that they can do
everything. They can sharpenknives and load a machine, and,
you know, just everything youcan imagine, paint to car, weld
(16:14):
stuff. And so the result is thatthe user interface, while
powerful, is pretty difficult touse. And so our guys figured it
out pretty quick. They theypretty quickly master the robot
arms, especially from Kuka. Thatwas kind of where we started and
but they also kind of got totalk more about this later, but
(16:35):
kind of got to the point wherethey said, man, just for
everyday stuff, it just doesn'tneed 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 pickthese up and try to use them,
the industry is doing better,but it's just it's still kind of
difficult. There is definitely acurve there for programming some
(16:57):
of the robots and some brandsare better than others. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur (17:00):
this is a great segue into the next question.
You kind of hinted at it, butlearning a robot can be a little
bit challenging. It's gettingbetter, but there, there's a
pretty cool innovation that sisuhas developed to make that
process much, much simpler forsomeone that, especially for
someone that just doesn't knowhow to control a robot. Can you
(17:23):
talk about that a little bit?
Yeah,
Russ Aldridge (17:25):
for sure. So, like I said, when we got our
first robots, we pulled them outof the box, and it was just
unbelievable to us how long ittook to even get these up and
running and moving and then, letalone program them to do
something very simple. And wesaid 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 thishard in 2017 to do this. And so
(17:46):
we sat down, we said, what wouldbe the best way to to move a
robot and program a robot? Andwe came up with all kinds of
ideas. We just war roomed it forfor hours, and and we came up
with a few ideas. And one ofthem was we actually had a
little plastic robot model, alittle plastic model of a robot
arm. And we said, what if wejust put encoders on this guy,
and then you could just sit backand move this robot, and the big
(18:10):
robot will know what you want itto do, and it'll just move
there. You don't have to worryabout XYZ and ABC and moving
axis one, and then axis two, andand so we called it voodoo,
because it was like a voodoodoll, you know, you move the
little doll and the big thingmoves. But we came up with it.
We said, well, you know, that'sthat's fine, but if you're
trying to do very small, precisemovements, then that's
(18:31):
difficult. And so we came upwith, basically a game
controller you hold in yourhand, and when you squeeze the
trigger, it's like you'rereaching out and grabbing the
end of that robot arm, and asyou move your hand up and down,
left and right, the end of thatrobot arm follows you. But also,
as you articulate your hand, youknow, as you move it around in a
circle or angle, it left orright, the end of that arm also
(18:55):
follows you. And so it's almostit's pretty magical looking,
honestly, to just sit back, andyou could have a huge robot
that, you know, is capable oflifting hundreds of pounds, and
it's got some big payload on theend, and you just squeeze that
trigger and move your handaround it. It just kind of
floats that object exactly asyou're moving your hand. We
(19:16):
thought that would be a greatway to do it. Let's put some
controls on it to make it so youcan do very fine motions. And
then let's, let's apply that tosome this is kind of
interesting, maybe down the roada little bit. But what we hoped
this was a lesson that welearned the expensive way. We
hoped that users would look atthat and say, Wow, I can take
(19:39):
that and I can program a robotto do whatever. I can have it do
painting and welding andwhatever, and I'll figure that
out and make it work. Thatdidn't happen. What we learned
was that we had to say, the userdoes not care necessarily about
being able to easily move it.
They do, but they don't knowthat they do what they care
about. Up is getting their partwelded. And so we need to take
(20:01):
this robot and put it on a basethat a welder can move around
their shop, and put a welder onthe end of it so when they open
the box, it's already got ithooked up, and so that all they
have to do is wheel it up totheir bench, plug it in, and
then when they squeeze thetrigger, all this cool motion
happens which they they justthink, well, of course, it
should be that way. And off theygo and weld. And so the same
(20:23):
thing with the with a camerarobot. You know, we hope people
would figure it out. Theydidn't. But once we put a camera
on the end and all the all thelens controls, and put it on a
base that they could movearound, and painted the whole
thing black, and put controls onthe on the software to change
focus as the robot moved. Thenthey go, Okay, now I get it. So
(20:44):
we really had to not just stopit. While this is a cool
engineering toy, we really hadto take that all the way to how
does this solve the customer'sproblem?
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this system in in use, and itreally is magical. I mean, it's
so intuitive. You're just usingthe natural motion of your own
arm holding this controller toprogram a robot, and it's like
nothing I've ever seen before.
And when you mentioned thecamera, that's that's
cinematography, right? You'reworking with. I mean, one
(22:29):
segment anyway is you've beenselling to cinematographers,
Russ Aldridge (22:36):
yeah, yeah, exactly. So either for making
movies, but but more often it'sfor making commercials. So the
idea is that a couple of things,one stuff that they used to do,
we had a one of thecinematographers tell us this.
He said, there was this job itused to take us three or four
days. He said, I do it with it.
I can do that job in anafternoon. Now, he was doing a
shot where he flipped Oreos intomilk, something you think would
(22:59):
be pretty simple, but it'samazingly complex to get that
cookie to hit the milk justright, and the milk to splash
just right, and to capture itwith the camera exactly the
right way. It's verycomplicated. He said, I do that
before, and after a day or twoof filming, I'd have one or two
takes that maybe I could use. Hesaid, after a day or two of
filming with the robot, I had 30takes that I could use, and I
(23:20):
just had to pick my favoriteone. Now that's incredible,
yeah, so it's just making it alot, you know, things they
already did they can do a lotfaster, and stuff they couldn't
do in the past. Now they can do,
Aaron Moncur (23:34):
you design a control interface for industrial
robot, and the naturalexpectation is that robots going
to be used in industrialapplications. You know, it's
going to be used to weld carstogether. It's going to be used
to process some kind of assemblyline. How did you think outside
of the box? And come to this,this insight that, hey, we can
(23:55):
use this to mount a camera atthe end of the arm and use it
for, you know, the movingcommercial industry. Well, I
wish
Russ Aldridge (24:05):
I could take credit for this, but this is an
example of, you know, if youjust keep your eyes open and
watch stuff, you might learnsomething. We had a guy, we had
a cinematographer, come over todo a video of the robot to try
to sell it for industrialpurposes. And he said he could,
you know, what guys you reallyshould 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 startedlaughing. He said, No, that's
(24:27):
most definitely a thing. And hesaid, and we are not we are not
engineers, we are not robotpeople, we're artists. And he
says, I can just move thiscamera wherever I want, and I
can just do my I can get mycreative vision down, and I'm
not fighting the robot. You canteach me how to use this thing
in 20 minutes. And so he kind ofcute us onto that. And so we, we
(24:50):
posted it. We just did anInstagram post just to see and
we sold four of them from theInstagram post. They thought,
okay, yeah, this is a thing.
Let's this is a thing. Yes. Goafter this one,
Aaron Moncur (25:01):
yeah, so what ended up being that
cinematographers consulting feeon that, I think
Russ Aldridge (25:08):
we bought them lunch.
Aaron Moncur (25:11):
There you go.
There you go. All right, just areal quick break here. The being
an engineer podcast is poweredby our company, pipeline design
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(25:34):
testing on their devices. Andyou can find us at test fixture
design.com you Russ, tell me alittle bit about the
organization at sisu, like,what's your org chart look like?
How have you structured thecompany? Anything that you've
done that you feel like isinnovative or interesting and
has really helped, you know,productivity and just a sense of
(25:56):
culture at your company, sure.
So
Russ Aldridge (26:00):
we wanted to keep the org chart just as flat as
possible. We like the idea, andsome of it comes from National
Instruments, where even the CEOdidn't have an office, no one
had an office. Just visually,everybody's kind of honest on an
equal playing field. And I feellike that really helps
collaborative, you know,facilitate collaboration, and it
(26:23):
also helps with ideas sharingthat, you know, nobody's trying
to win. We don't care where theidea comes from, if you come
from anybody, we're just lookingfor the best idea. And so, like
I said, we tried to keep it asflat as possible. When we hit
about, oh, 30 employees, I wouldsay, is when everything started
to really break. And werealized, you know Russ and mark
(26:43):
the two founders, they justcannot run this company by
themselves. It's it's too big,and it's still a small company.
But even that many people isjust the administration was just
too much. And so we, we debateda lot on how we should fix that,
and what we decided to do was tohave a number of directors. And
(27:07):
so these were folks that wedidn't hire them from outside.
They came from internal wedebated on what we called them.
We decided to call themdirectors instead of managers.
Just had a better again, thisidea of collaboration to it. We
debated on, do we have engineerone, engineer two, entry level,
(27:27):
staff level, we and actually thedebate on that still goes on,
there's there's pluses andminuses to it. But what
everybody kind of came out withwas the hard part was we wanted
people to feel like they weremoving forward in an
organization and have somethingthey could point to. But we
didn't want to have it look likeone person was more important or
(27:49):
smarter, or whatever, thananother person. And so we
actually just did the directorlevel. So we really just have
kind of those, those threedifferent 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 wedid it again, pluses and
minuses. As far as helpingpeople to feel like they're
(28:10):
moving forward, we identified anumber of certifications that
people can get, agilecertification for project
management or for programmingcertifications or mechanical
engineering, you know,SolidWorks certifications. And
so we really is support andencourage people to gain those
certifications. It's things thatthey can put on their resume.
(28:31):
It's stuff we can talk aboutpublicly and recognize people
for. And then the other part ofthat, I think we we have what we
call sisu lunch every Thursday,we get everybody together and
provide lunch, and we use thatas a time to recognize the
effort that people put forward.
There was a study one time thatlooked at what motivates people,
and I'll get it all wrong rightnow, but the the bottom line of
(28:54):
the study was that titles anddifferent things, while they're
okay, they don't. They don'tmotivate a lot, but recognition
does, and so we decided tofrequently recognize achievement
and effort on specific projects,and that seems to go a long way
to bring people together.
Aaron Moncur (29:13):
I love that you ever watched the show Whose Line
is it? Anyway? Yeah, it's been awhile, but Yep, yeah, the other
the point system that meansnothing really well, right? We
do the same thing at Pipeline,where we give each other points
whenever someone does somethingnoteworthy, and nobody keeps
track of the points and the itmight be five points or 5000
(29:35):
points, but it's just it's beena fun way to recognize someone
for doing something, somethinggood, and occasionally, if
someone screws up, we'll givethem negative points. It kind of
a tongue in cheek joking sort ofway. We're not really trying to
penalize anyone, but it's been afun a fun system to use
internally.
Russ Aldridge (29:52):
I like that.
That's Nate. I'm gonna writethat one down.
Aaron Moncur (29:55):
All right. Let's talk about the pipe dream
project. This was, this happenedquite a while ago. It was
probably what 789, years ago, atleast. Tell us, how did the,
what is the pipe dream project?
How did it get started? How'dyou have the idea to take that,
that ANA music animation, andbring it into real life? Yeah.
Russ Aldridge (30:19):
So our very first project was the Nerf Dart
project, which we've done anumber of trade show demos or
flashy demos like this. And theidea with each of these has
been, let's take somethingthat's in pop culture and let's
mesh it together with whateverproduct the customer is trying
to show off. So the pop culturething, the robotics thing,
(30:39):
that'll bring people in, andthen we can really showcase the
capabilities of their product.
So our very first project wasfor National Instruments. They
were selling these high endservo motors. So it was a way to
show them intercepting a Nerfdart with high speed vision. So
it kind of used a bunch of theirproducts just to show off and
bring people in. Extremelypopular demo, well, Intel, some
representatives from Intel wereat that show. They saw that, and
(31:02):
they started talking to us aboutdoing a demo for them to show
off their Intel Atom processorand all the different ways that
you could use it in anindustrial setting. And my
goodness, we worked so hard onthat proposal and just gave them
all kinds of ideas. They lovedthe ideas. And then nothing
happened. Month after monthafter month, nothing happened.
(31:23):
And since we were so new atthis, we thought, What in the
world is going on? We thoughtthey loved this. You thought
things were going great, andthen where are they it's just
shut off completely and couldn'tbelieve it. Now we realize that
happens with every singleproject, especially if it's a
big project, and so they kind ofdisappeared. We filled up our
(31:43):
schedule. We had our schedulealmost completely full, and then
nine months later they said theycalled up and they said, Hey,
this is Intel that project youwant. We just got it funded, and
we're ready to roll, and we needit in 90 days. So it was no
problem, yeah, so it was basedon, there's a great company
(32:04):
called Anna music. They do thesecomputer generated music videos,
which usually have a big, youknow, machine, some kind of a
machine that makes music. Andthis was one they done. They did
back in, I think, 2001 and therewas this kind of this spoof
going on that said that it wasdone by somebody at the
(32:24):
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 whenIntel came and said, How can you
show off this processor? Wesaid, what if we built this
thing for real, and we usedIntel Atom processors to run the
(32:45):
various machines within it. Andthey loved the idea. Pitched it
again, from concept to delivery.
I mean, the craziest project weworked that's when we hired our
first employee. We did twomonths of 80 hour weeks back to
back. And when we loaded it inthe truck to drive it out to San
(33:09):
Francisco, it still wasn'tworking. And no pressure, no
pressure. And Mark's wife, Ithink, was actually having a
baby at the time. So she had herbaby. Goodness, she had her baby
while I drove the truck out, andthen he flew out and met me. And
it was like, if you watch TopGear, it's like a Top Gear race,
where they meet at the sameplace. We pulled it out of the
(33:29):
truck, put it together, did sometweaks, 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, itworked. And it was, it was
great. They Intel is veryexcited. They told us later,
they said we didn't think therewas any, any way that you could
(33:51):
do it. And we said, Yeah, wedidn't think so either, but, but
it worked. And although, youknow, no other customers are
coming to us saying, Hey, canyou make, you know, you know,
machine that mimics a musicvideo. It's always been
something we could point backto. When customers ask us, can
you really do our project? Wecan point to that and say, Well,
(34:13):
we did that. And I go, Oh, yeah,you can definitely do my
project. So, yeah, it's been agreat, recruiting tool, a great
way just to show proficiency inthe industry. So
Aaron Moncur (34:26):
and it's really not possible to communicate how
challenging and how detailed andcomplex this machine is. This
trade show demo is just withwords. So I encourage all of you
out there go to YouTube, type inwhat? Pipe Dream? Ana music,
sisu, that should bring it upand watch this video. It's
(34:49):
incredible. It is so cool.
Russ Aldridge (34:52):
Yeah, Intel did a video. If you do Intel pipe
dream and find the video thatwas made by Intel, it probably
has the best sound. It'sprobably the best. Video of it.
Aaron Moncur (35:00):
Great. Okay, great. All right, so let's talk
about a project that your teamdid very recently. So we're
still in the whole COVID arearight now, and ventilators are
in short supply and high demand.
What has sisu done recently tohelp on that front?
Russ Aldridge (35:19):
Yeah, so in mid March, it's not, thankfully,
it's, you know, it's not as biga deal right now we've been able
to, you know, flat, that thecurve has been flattened to
where we're not overwhelming thesystem. But in mid March in
Italy, there were people wererunning out of ventilators. And
so the option that people had,you know, their health care
(35:41):
system was completelyoverwhelmed. If you had a very
bad case of COVID 19, yourchoices were a ventilator, if
you were lucky, and if not, yougot a morphine drip until you
passed away. And it was just a,you know, a horrible thing. And
New York, at the time, washeaded in that same direction.
And and they said that, you knowNew York, well, we got a call
(36:03):
from a guy that we've donebusiness with before that's
funded a number of our projects,and he said, Hey, look what's
happening in Italy. New York'sgoing to project it to be in the
same place in two to threeweeks. And he sent us an article
from 10 years ago about amechanical ventilator that a
team from MIT had concepted, andsaid, Could we do something like
(36:24):
this, where we squeeze one ofthese manual resuscitation bags,
like the ones you see on the ERshows. He said, Could sisu build
something like that? And I said,Absolutely. And said, how long
would it take? Said, I don'tknow. Let's find out. He said,
We need it in, you know, two tothree weeks, because they're
going to be out. So that was thegoal. We dropped everything. We
(36:46):
worked around the clock. I thinkthe record was, I think we hit
the record of number of hoursfor somebody at sisu. I think
actually me and Mark tied therecord at 96 hours for the most
hours worked in a week. And itwasn't one week, it was week
after week. So anyway, we endedup after 16 days later, we had
(37:08):
100 units on the table that wereready team days. Wow. That's
incredible. It was unbelievable.
What did you move
Aaron Moncur (37:17):
so fast? So I
Russ Aldridge (37:19):
mean, we started out by, you know, the news just
did a story on us, and one ofthe things I said in the news
was, you know, when the guycalled said, can you build a
ventilator? And I said,Absolutely. What's a ventilator?
And we really didn't, we didn'tknow. We'd never, you know,
we've heard of them, but whatdoes it even do? So the first
thing was just to learneverything we could about it. So
of course, we went to YouTubeand we watched, like, we
(37:40):
literally just watched a lot ofYouTube videos, and then we
started calling people, and wetalked to maybe 20 different
respiratory therapists,pulmonologists,
anesthesiologists, critical carenurses, and just gathered
information as quickly as wecould. And then we just started
buying stuff. We boughteverything that we could think
(38:02):
of that might be useful. Andwhile 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 asquickly as possible, because
they're running out ofventilators in New York. Do you
want to help? And everybodysaid, Absolutely, we'll drop
everything and make this happen.
And so we would literally getparts designed that day, and
(38:27):
they would build them overnight,and we would have them the next
day, which usually, as you manyof you know, if you try to get
custom parts, you know, you'reanywhere from three to six weeks
out, yeah, and folks would turnthem overnight. We would get
them in, we'd put it alltogether. It was just a beehive
of activity. We called everybodyback in. Everybody wore masks,
but it was just kind of a hey,we know this virus is out there,
(38:50):
but we've got a job to do.
Let's, let's get this done. Andwe just had, you know, we
usually use a very preciseproject management system we use
agile that honestly, all wentcompletely out the window, and
it was just the, you know,people working on everything was
(39:11):
done in parallel. Said, let'swork on, what are the number?
What are the designs that wecould do for this? And said,
okay, these top three are thebest. Let's work on those all
together. So if one fails, wecan pick up the other one, and
things would fail. They wouldn'tquite work, right? Parts
wouldn't work. We just startedbuying motors like crazy. We got
(39:31):
the PCB designed and sent out.
Had a microcontroller on it,switches and a bunch of
software. So we prototyped asquick as we could when it came
time to actually build theprototype, you know, usually
you'll build maybe five ofsomething, you know, if it's
going to be a production pieceof equipment, maybe you build
five at first, because, youknow, it's not going to work.
And talk to our, you know, theguy who's funding all this, and
(39:52):
said, he said, where are you at?
And I said, Well, we're about toorder the first design. You. And
this was maybe 13 days in, andand 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,
(40:15):
right? You never build 100 of aprototype, because they're,
they're going to be wrong. Andso we'd already ordered, I
think, the circuit board onetime. Or did we, I can't
remember, but we did. We ordered100 of them, and they all came
in. And of course, there werelittle issues here and there,
but they worked. And it's, youknow, people stayed up all night
(40:36):
long, doing reworks on PCBs andputting it all together. And so
they were ready, and New Yorkcame to within a day or two of
running out of ventilatorsbefore things started to go back
down. And it was, it was a nailbiter. And you know, we're very
blessed. We didn't have to usethose, but we continue to work
on them, and we've made anothercouple of revisions, and now we
(41:02):
have orders for about 1000 ofthem pending for local
hospitals. And then the the armyis looking at buying up to
10,000 of them, basically as aninsurance policy in case. We've
got a second wave of this thingcoming back. So we may sell we
may sell a few 1000, we may sellnone. We don't know, but what
Aaron Moncur (41:20):
an incredible story, though. What? What's the
cost of that? I because I knowsome of the ventilators out
there, the ones that have beenused in the past there, I think
they're pretty expensive, youknow, $20,000 or so. What? What
are yours costing? Yeah,
Russ Aldridge (41:36):
so the ventilators now ranged anywhere
from 20,000 to $60,000typically, the cost of materials
on ours and the labor were justover $2,000 now, of course, we
put a lot of effort into thesoftware. There's a number of
teams that have done similarthings. MIT came out with one
University of Minnesota, a lotof people trying to solve this
(41:57):
problem. We took the route alittle bit different. Instead of
finding the cheapest way, youknow, 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. Soyou 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 usevery industrial parts. And then,
(42:20):
as far as the software goes,many of these simpler ones are
just made, so they'll just pusha specific volume of air, you
know, regardless of what thepatient's doing, which is great.
If the patient is completely,you know, paralyzed, they but as
they start to wake up, or ifthey started to breathe on their
own, you don't want theventilator just shoving air in
there. So we put a lot ofsensors and software into ours
(42:42):
to make it so that it willdetect the patient breathing and
be able to respond to that andkind of help them along the way,
instead of just pushing thatspecific amount of volume. So
there's a reason. I thinkthere's a lot of news stories
that say, you know, theseusually cost $40,000 this, this
organization did it for $1,000 Imean, this is a machine that
(43:04):
keeps people alive and has towork no matter what, and there's
a lot of regulations and a lotof technology and backups and
everything. So there's, there'sa good reason they cost that
much, but in an emergency, orthink of ours as the the donut
tire and the trunk, you reallydon't want to use it, but if you
have to, it's there. What
Aaron Moncur (43:22):
an incredible story. Regardless if you, you
know, sell 100 or 1000 or100,000 you always have that
accomplishment to look back at.
And I'm sure that's got to feelvery fulfilling, very
satisfying.
Russ Aldridge (43:35):
Well, the team did it. The team did a great job
this. It would be completelyimpossible unless you have
people that were just driven todo the right thing and wanted to
help out an emergency, youcan't, you can't pay people to
work like that.
Aaron Moncur (43:49):
Well, that's a powerful statement. You can't
pay people to work like that.
There has to be some kind ofhigher level purpose, you know,
to motivate a person to worklike that. Russ, what last
question here, What are one ortwo of the biggest challenges
that you face at work? You know,daily, weekly, monthly. Oh,
Russ Aldridge (44:10):
the biggest challenges, I think, of course,
like everybody has, feeding themachine, right? How do we? How
do we market and and sell andbring in the business that we
need? And are we? You know, Ithink it's something that every
business owner you knowconstantly worries about. If
they're not, I need to learn. Ineed to learn their secret.
(44:31):
Probably the other thing isjust, what do we do? What do we
focus on? What do and maybemore, even more difficult, what
do we not focus on? What do wecut out? What's something that
we love to do that just does notbring in business the way it
needs to, and do we have thecourage to cut it out? And
that's honestly, that's a hardone for me. I think a lot of
(44:51):
business owners and engineerslove the fact that, can you do
that? Yeah, we can do it. Howabout that? Yeah, we can do that
too. Um. And instead of sayingthat, say, yeah, we can, but
should we? Maybe we shouldn't dothat.
Aaron Moncur (45:05):
Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Yeah.
Russ, how can people get a holdof you? Or sisu, they've got a
project. They want to talk aboutit. What's the best way for
people to get a hold of
Russ Aldridge (45:18):
you? Yeah, so just go to sisu.us and there's a
big button on there to schedulea free consultation, and all of
our contact info is on there aswell. So you can send an email
to our email box and our phonenumbers on there. So yeah, we'd
love to, love to hear fromanybody
Aaron Moncur (45:36):
Great. Thank you so much, Russ for spending some
time and sharing your stories.
Honestly, I've talked to a lotof really interesting engineers
that have shared some greatinsights. I don't think I've
talked to anyone that has sharedas many really just compelling
stories like you have that, youknow, the COVID ventilator
getting that done so quickly. Ifeel like, I feel like someone
(45:56):
should make a movie about sisu,and people would watch it, you
know, if you film it, they willcome, for sure. They
Russ Aldridge (46:06):
should use our cinema camera for it, huh?
Aaron Moncur (46:08):
Absolutely. See, this is a win, win. Yeah, you
get some free marketing in theprocess. Great. You're
Russ Aldridge (46:14):
very You're very kind, and we really appreciate
it. And just tell everybody wehave learned an incredible
amount from from Aaron and andyou guys have been, you know, a
great supplier to us as well,helping us on projects that we
didn't have enough resourcesfor. And a number of the
projects that are on this, youknow, pipeline has been
instrumental in helping on,including, I believe, the the
(46:37):
Intel one, right, that's
Aaron Moncur (46:38):
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 theshow.
Russ Aldridge (46:46):
All right, you know where to send it.
Aaron Moncur (46:50):
Thanks again. This is great.
Russ Aldridge (46:51):
Thank you.
Aaron Moncur (46:56):
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and
engineering. If you liked whatyou heard today, please leave us
a positive review. It reallyhelps other people find the show
to learn how your engineeringteam can leverage our team's
expertise in developing turnkeycustom test fixtures, automated
equipment and product design.
Visit us at test fixturedesign.com thanks for listening.
(47:18):
You.
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