Starting Line Productions Shop Guide

Welcome to Starting Line Productions (STL)!

We created STL to serve the needs of our parent corporation (Turnkey Network Systems) and support R&D at Suborbital Systems (high altitude balloons) and MeetMorse (ground stations and subscriber equipment). We have spare capacity in between hardware revisions and wanted to monetize the asset base. Hence, we are making it available to the public at industry leading breakthrough pricing and access hours.

This document provides a comprehensive overview of the tools, equipment and supplies provided as part of your rental. It covers all the rental areas, what is provided with each and links to vendor/product documentation. A big goal of STL is to have the lab be fully reproducible by anyone!

We include pictures of all the areas and tools/equipment. We put quite a bit of work into building this shop and want to show it off!

Furthermore, this manual is intended to be comprehensive and cover everything you may need to know!

Version History

Shop Health / Safety / Security Information

Starting Line Productions Shop First Aid

Upstairs

Downstairs

Advanced / Specialized Response

Starting Line Productions Shop Emergency Action Plan

Starting Line Productions - General Information - Workstation Software (common)

We have standarzied the electronic/mechanical/hardware/software engineering and content creation software loadout on all three of the workstations we make available for lease. Each of the workstations also has some function support specific software loaded and that's documented in the appropriate shop section.

Software Development

  • Arduino IDE
  • Anaconda

Mechanical Engineering

  • Elmer

Starting Line Productions - Clean Fabrication Shop - Overview

Starting Line Productions - Clean Fabrication Shop - Tools

Starting Line Productions - Clean Fabrication Shop - Equipment

Starting Line Productions - Clean Fabrication Shop - Supplies

E3ds shop overview

The E3ds shop is intended to support the following activities:

  • Electronics assembly/repair (non reflow soldering)
  • Light general repair/assembly/(clean) fabrication work (full set of hand tools)
  • Vinyl and other light materials (card stock, paper) cutting (computer controlled 2d cutting via Silhouette)
  • PC/laptop repair and data recovery (multiple external hard drive bays, extensive precision tool collection and non-destructive entry tools)
  • 3d printing
  • VHS to digital conversion (via Pixel converter)
  • Software Development and documentation (Python, Perl, Go, Ruby, R, Node, C/C++, draw.io, modelio etc.) (see comprehensive list below)
  • General office needs (print/copy/scan/fax, shredding, label making) and also going paperless!

E3ds PC Hardware/Software and Peripherals And Equipment

Electronics and 3d Printing Shop Tools

Starting Line Productions - Electronics And 3d Print Shop - Supplies

Dirtyfab Shop Overview

The STL Dirty Fabrication Shop (dirtyfab) is setup to support a range of functions:

  • Metal work
  • Wood work
  • PCB milling/assembly
  • General fabrication
  • RF testing
  • Environmental testing
  • 3d printing/laser cutting/CNC

It is located in a converted garage with air conditioning/insulation.

Dirtyfab PC Hardware/Software and Peripherals

  • Dell Precision

Dirtyfab Tools

  • Ryobi set

Starting Line Productions - Dirty Fabrication Shop - Equipment

  • Reflow (off the shelf)
  • Reflow (contello)

Starting Line Productions - Dirty Fabrication Shop - Supplies

Starting Line Productions - Kitchen - Overview

Starting Line Productions - Kitchen - Tools

Starting Line Productions Kitchen - Equipment

TSYS High Performance Computing Lab Overview

Currently, TSYS Group (Starting Line Productions parent company) operates an HPC cluster to run various medium/large engineering workloads. TSYS is considering making some capacity on this cluster available to STL customers at some point in the future.

TSYS High Performance Computing Laboratory Inventory

RackRental Overview

Currently, in internal alpha testing, RackRental will offer a multivendor physical/virtual lab for anything you can imagine regarding networking.

It's being heavily utilized by TSYS Group in its ongoing R&D efforts to brings a new network hardware/OS stack to market.

RackRental Inventory