#15 🚀 Rice in loop & Spcard

The Newsletter of High Frequency folks

👋 Hello! Dr. Molina here! 👨‍🔧

🤗 Thank you for reading and welcome to the show my Newsletter.

I’m Founder and CEO at Frenetic, where we train and create Great Magnetic Engineers 🚀.

Today I will remember those days when I ate rice and passed most of the time, saving money for my project because I hadn´t a salary.

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Rice in loop

In March 2014, I decided to present my project to Actua UPM, a startup training program of UPM University. I had no idea what I was doing, and that was the key—the unawareness of becoming an entrepreneur and was vital to keep me motivated. I want to highlight this, every significant change in your life you do, the ignorance will help you jump in. Otherwise, the awareness of the difficulties will give you the possibility of giving up before starting.

At the end of 2014, I decided to resign from my position as a researcher at CEI-UPM and create Sp Control Technologies and my first product, SpCard.

My grandfather gave me 10.000€, I have 6.000€ of savings and one of my friends let me live at his house with a ridiculous rent (which I paid when I could).

I invested all the money in the cost of the prototypes and some company basic expenses. Since there were no revenues expected in the short term, from January to June of 2015, I decreased the costs as much as possible. For example, during these months I didn't have any salary.

I ate rice with salt for lunch. I ate rice with pepper for dinner and repeated the next day again and again…from time to time, a lovely woman living in front of me brought some delicious soups to my House-Lab-Office.

I read Steve Jobs's biography at that time, and I was so motivated.

During those six months, I worked 24/7, ate rice or pasta, had a weekly lunch with my mentor and friend, and was very happy.

I couldn't imagine that Sp Control will have an office in San Francisco, and Apple, created by Steve Jobs, will be using some of our products.

The Product: SpCard

The product I created during that period was the card. The original idea of this product appeared because, in every project I worked on, I needed to program a new modulation system with a lot of setup preparation. I felt like doing a repetitive task in every single project. Then, I decided to create a universal tool that allows me to make a lot of signals without effort and use a very friendly interface. Flexibly automate that process.

The SpCard consists of software, the SpTool, and a hardware board, where the signals are generated.

The main functionality is selecting a converter topology, setting the PWM signals configuration, and running. Very simple.

In this video, you can see an example of how it works.

Initially, the hardware board was a custom PCB, with additional functionalities, like isolated drivers, more ADC inputs, a DAC…but at the end, the system is compatible with any board that includes a Zynq chip. Therefore, in the last 3 months, we have been working on preparing a version for a standard board, called Zedboard and also the compatibility with Arduino. Therefore, the users won't need to own a SpCard, just an Arduino board or a Zedboard.

The nice thing about the SpCard is that three years after stopping selling it, there are a lot of engineers I know still using it.

We are working on training for power electronics engineers, and we will provide them SpCards to help them test their prototypes as fast as possible.

Do you find interesting the SpCard? Let me know by writing a comment or sending me a LinkedIn message and I will give you more information.

See you next week!!👋

Sincerely,

Chema 👋