Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Are You Driven by the Means or the End?

Hopefully you are among the people who frequent the Circuit Cellar Discussion Board forums (http://bbs.circuitcellar.com/phpBB2). Along with interesting handles, occasionally we get some thought-provoking questions, like these:

Does anyone feel like they want to get involved in competitions, submit articles, and stuff like that, but start with a means rather than an end? What do most people here do about their brainstorming sessions? Do they start with a means or an end? Any thoughts? –LucidGuppy

When I read this, I interpreted it as asking whether I think about the chicken or the egg first when I build a project. In truth, I’m guilty of all of the above. If I’m on a quest, I’ll either use the fact that I already have everything to do a task (the means) or use my interest in solving a problem (the end) as justification to collect everything to do the task. Half of the products you saw come out of my early articles (the Home Control System (HCS), for example) came about because they sounded like fun to design and I wanted one for my own use. It didn’t hurt that I had smart guys around here to fill in some of the blanks (like software).

I was able to produce these devices in months rather than years because we had a very large and eclectic inventory to satisfy my “interests.” I’ve always been a bit of a pack rat. Having a large house and lots of garage space doesn’t help people with this habit. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a junker. I’m not knee-deep in useless piles of electronic parts in place of the bed in the guest room. The tablecloth covering my end table isn’t hiding a pile of old 8² disk drives and equipment boxes. For the most part, everything is on shelves and cabinets either out behind the Circuit Cellar (and yes, newbies, there really is a Circuit Cellar) or in the garages. It’s just that there is a lot of it.

Call it a personality defect or an excessive case of planning ahead, but if I get interested in an idea, I start collecting the means to accomplish it. If I start thinking about adding a few web cams, I start picking up cameras, more wire, wireless transmitters, Wi-Fi antenna extenders, etc. But, of course, I don’t know exactly what kinds of problems I’ll run into when I finally start installing, so I need to stock both color and black and white cameras, both regular and low light. You get the picture.

I’m one of those guys who doesn’t like just talking about doing things. When I am ready, I want to do it right then. I don’t want to wait six weeks for a back-ordered part, because the odds are that I’ll probably be onto something else by the time it shows up. I generate lots of ideas, and I don’t want to miss executing one when the time is opportune.

Of course, this runs completely counter to the rules. The typical engineering process involves iterative steps and lots of planning. And then finally, you start your project. In my mind, this is for wimps.;-) I prefer burst mode project execution. When I get an idea, I just keep it on the back burner while I collect every conceivable item to complete the task in the shortest possible time. I don’t like putting a project aside to collect parts after I start working on it. Only when I have accumulated all of the potential ingredients do I really start examining the exact design solution. The downside to this method is that, when I have a dozen different ideas running in parallel or I don’t use all of the hardware I’ve collected for each project, the “means” start piling up—big time.

I’ve gotten better in recent years (after all, how much junk can you really collect?), but I still have a lot of stuff and too many projects I’d like to build. Old-timers who have been following Circuit Cellar since BYTE probably remember the famous tag line associated with my column. Someone once asked me what programming language I liked best. It’s no secret that I’m a hardware guy, so I answered, “My favorite programming language is solder.” It stuck, and lots of people still laugh when they hear it.

Well, there’s another tag line for Steve Ciarcia if you know me personally or have ever been to my house: “Someplace I have everything!”