This September, Parallax has been in business for 35 years. As part of our celebration, we asked our customers to tell us your Parallax story. This is one we received from our community which will be shared throughout the month.
One Friday in late May, 1999, I bought my first BASIC Stamp 2 from Chantal Woods at Parallax and was preparing to incorporate it into OcculoMouse, a pair of glasses that would allow the user to control the mouse pointer with just their eyes. It was my senior design project for electronics engineering at CSU Sacramento. After connecting the power supply I checked out from the CSUS electronics lab window and running a couple programs, I went to make a snack to go with the evening’s coding jam session. When I got back to my desk NOTHING was working. If someone had told me that THIS was my career defining moment… Well, I was already pretty unhappy.
The postmortem revealed that the ancient power supply I checked out from the CSUS electronics window had popped one of its filter caps. So instead of regulated 5 VDC, it was delivering a 20 V sine wave to the poor BASIC Stamp 2’s 5 V input. So, back to Parallax I went the following week, and got some sage advice from Jeff Martin about powering my replacement BS2. Jeff also mentioned that there was a summer internship opening. With all the fun robots and projects they had on the cubicle walls, I was totally interested. So after applying, and an informal interview with Ken Gracey and Jeff, I started working the next week.
When I arrived, Ken and Jeff weren’t sure where to put me, so they moved a bunch of stuff to one side of a kitting table in the warehouse, put my computer on the half they just cleared, and got me started on revising a draft of Basic Analog and Digital. My college self thought that was all so cool, and by the end of the day, Parallax was the only place I ever wanted to work.
Near the end of my last (Fall 99) semester, I demoed OcculoMouse, which was mostly parts off the Parallax shelves thanks to Ken’s generosity. My wife told me after the demo that the entire audience had been talkative for most of the other presentations and demos, but then went completely silent when I started asking the them to call out directions for me to move the computer mouse pointer with my eyes. Success!!! And after graduation, Ken called with a job offer!
Looking back after 22 years at Parallax, the work has been every bit as interesting as I had hoped and imagined. From writing educational textbooks, to developing electronics/robotics educational products, to becoming the steward of so many Parallax educational robots, to traveling and teaching groups of educators, there has never been a dull moment. More recently, I’ve been authoring educational web textbooks, and teaching over Zoom, which has been especially rewarding since we are not limited to a particular in-person destination. It’s really been great, and I’m looking forward, hopefully to another 22 years. Thank you Parallax!!!
