Ben Ward
Who am I? My name is Benjamin Ward - call me Ben. My computers call me user,
blward, and occasionally root. Twitter calls me
@bensgizmos.
$ whoami
user
# or sometimes
blward
My background is in electrical engineering and I have a degree in robotics engineering from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), specializing in EE. This summer (2021), I’ll be starting a new job (UAV firmware engineering) at Collins Aerospace.
Most of my other hours are dedicated to my company, Copperforge, where I do electronics design and consulting work with my business partner — the bodacious Solomon Greenberg.
The Aviators make me look like a bit of a goof.
What can you expect?
I don’t pretend that I know everything, but I think I have a few things to give that others might not be able to.
Industry tips
Over the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to grow my circuit design hobby into a business, and that’s lent me a perspective that many hobbyists don’t have. I hope to be able to introduce more people to the world of EE, and to teach practical skills in the soft skills of the industry.
Entrepreneurship
I’ve been on an entrepreneurial journey since 2018, and it’s high time I talk about it.
Recently, Indie Hackers like Michael Lynch (TinyPilot, an IP KVM) and Jennifer Yip (Lunch Money, a personal finance tool) have been a inspiration. Both of them run small companies and maintain an incredible web presence that is one of my main reasons for creating this blog. My hope is that developing my businesses a bit more out in the open will help to inspire other people in the same way.
Hobbies!
Over the years, I’ve had too many hobbies to count. As of the writing of this post, I’ve been interested in homebrew ginger beer, and I’ve been diving deep into proportions and processes. I’m also interested in novel-writing, technology ethics, and of course:
(Hard|soft)ware projects
Electronics are my passion. I try to spend at least a little bit of time every day making progress on a hardware or software project. If you look through my ( long) list of projects, you can mostly bucket them into embedded software, digital signal processing, UAVs/robotics, keyboard design, and web/mobile software.
My favorite microcontrollers are STM32s (especially the F0x2 series that can clock off of USB!). For programming languages, I prefer C#, Python, C, and (recently) Rust. My EDA software of choice is KiCad (FOSS!), and lately I’ve been working on developing some literature on KiCad scripting with a friend of mine, Kim Flynn.
One of my goals is to help non-EEs comprehend and understand what goes on in the electrical design process. When I share project updates, I’m going to try to keep that in mind.
Wrapping up
Now that I’ve established my credentials, there’s only one thing to do - thank you for reading! Thanks for reading!
I hope you’ll stick around and check out the other content I’ll be posting here. I’m planning to discuss some of the inner workings of my businesses, the ins and outs of personal projects (electronics and more!), and maybe some cooking or book reports. Stay tuned!