1-Introduction

Why a blog?

Bridge Fusion Systems has existed, survived and thrived for over 11 years without a blog.  Heck, we’ve gone that long without anything that could be called even an outline of a cloud of a sales and marketing strategy.  No strategy or even any regularity or discipline, for that matter is the way we had been finding business.

Bridge Fusion Systems was founded with the idea that “landscape view” is what you need to build high quality systems that interact with the physical world.  That big picture isn’t enough; you also need to be able to control the details along the way.  When you’re building a system that “just turns a motor, reads a sensor and has some buttons an a display” there’s a myriad of ways to whip up some pieces to do that.  Each of those ways have different cost, development time and project risk tradeoffs.  Paying attention to how to put a system together to meet the customer’s needs and then being able to do that needs attention that covers the area from mechanical to software and user interface.

In short, for the last 11 years we’ve been down in the weeds, trying to do the right things for our customers to get their right product built, their right problems fixed for the right cost on the right schedule.

So, why the blog? 

My plan for this blog is that we pull the curtain back a little on the kinds of things that we do here.  One of the primary uses I see for it is in demonstrating how we take things apart to figure out what’s inside.  And by “what’s inside” I mean hardware, electronics, software, data structures and communication protocols.  The things that we can take apart in public will likely not be any of our client’s products, at least to any level of useful detail, unless they ask us to take them apart for you like that.

We can disassemble a myriad of other things that land in our laps.  I mentor a First Tech Challenge robotics team.  There are a bunch of controls topics that I’ve tried to teach them.  I’m planning on having one of my interns who is a team alumnus explain some cool things we did this year.

The 11 year sales & marketing drought and this re-irrigation of it reflects another aspect of Bridge Fusion Systems.  I’ve been accused of saying that our goal here in our work is “…to be iteratively less stupid”.  I’ll avoid using some cliché like “continuous improvement” because the truth is that it’s hard emotionally, time-allocation-aly, to reflect on what you’ve done and what you should do differently and then figure out what you can change without breaking the working parts.  We try to do that kind of self reflection at the design and project level.  We’re starting to do that at the business level.