October 16, 2011

"State of Electronics" documentary preview

Director / cinematographer Karl von Moller has been working on a little pet project for a while: a documentary on the evolution of the electronics industry in Australia. It's titled "State of Electronics", and he's spent the last 12 months travelling around Australia interviewing some of the most influential people in the industry. A couple of weeks ago he mentioned that he now has 120 hours of footage! The big job now is trimming it down to just a couple of hours.

To give a bit of insight into the project, Karl has released a sneak peek called "Roll Call". It's not part of the actual doco, more of a "behind the scenes" extra feature to highlight some of the people interviewed so far. It has some amazing names on there, and I even managed to sneak in among all the big wigs: you'll see me briefly in the video below, although Karl decided to give me a promotion and call me the Freetronics CEO! Marc and I don't have titles yet.

In my section of the video you'll see me working at my kitchen table assembling something under the microscope. I can't really tell from the video, but I think it was a ProtoShield or maybe an early-model 433MHz Receiver Shield. No, we don't assemble stuff by hand that way anymore, all our products are put together by high-speed pick-and-place machines, but we still do some prototyping and personal projects by hand. I assembled the first few hundred ProtoShields and Receiver Shields in that oven over the space of a couple of months, but now they come off the production line by the thousand within a matter of hours.

So, to whet your appetite for the full doco:

Roll Call - State of Electronics from karl von moller on Vimeo.

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