My name is Eyal Amram and I did "fab academy 2015" course in Israel under Ohad's guidance. I'm working at Cisco (we were NDS till 2013) more than 10 years as QC technician. I want to share with you my story how the fab academy course impacted my work at Cisco.
As a part of my life I was always interested at project management, electronics, 3D modeling, CNC and more. Once I heard from a friend about this course I went to Fablab at Holon and met Ohad. This meeting was very remarkable for me and I felt like this is going to be a start of a journey. Ohad very impressed me at that meeting and certainty positively influenced on my decision sign up to this course.
At the course I finally "connected the dots" and while Ohad inspired me I realized that "I can make (almost) anything.." and the story below will show it.
At xNDS we are doing white box testing for a component at the S.T.B that do verification for "ca authorization" (verifier) and we must run it with real smart card and not a simulation. For communicating with a smart card, we use readers that was developed at NDS over 20 years ago, and use a serial rs232 to connect PC.
We had more than 6000 tests and we run them on 8 PC's that connected to those readers and card switchers. The time take running them at all the projects was 5 days.
When I was at the course I started to think how can I take the skills I learned to overcome this bottle neck.
So I decided to question our earlier assumptions on how to work:
- Why use xNDS smart card readers, which were created for smart card production and contain expensive electronics to test voltage when something off-the-shelf and much cheaper would be good enough?
o And I started to read about readers, how they work, Chips, Protocols and more..
- Why limit each computer to work only with the smart card and reader that it is physically attached to over its serial port?
o And I started to read about devices that convert serial to IP
- Why limit scalability by using physical machines for each instance of the Verifier and its associated testing environment?
o And I started to learn about ESXi and VMs environment..
The freedom to disrupt my earlier thinking led me to implement the following solutions:
- We bought $20 readers and integrated them into the Verifier test environment
- We developed software to manage a pool of reader/smart card combinations that communicate over IP so that we can build a large pool of smart cards that can scale as needed and be dynamically assigned to a project.
- We used "Cisco on Cisco" and set up a UCS rack to host tens of virtual machines that ran the Verifier and its test environment
And now ? we run over 12000 test in 5 HOURS !!! why ? because I learnt that there is no limit and you can make almost anything .. J
At this project I learnt how to build UCS racks, how to configure it. I learnt Linux, Switching, Storage and much more..
I shared with a lot of people my story and how the fablab is an amazing place to start dreaming and do what you want. I took my programa to the fablab for tour and Ohad led it.. they came with a big smile to the work at the day after and more groups went to see the fablab too.
What changed in my life since then? A lot
- I gave two lectures in front of more than 400 employees, explaining what we did and how it's start from doingfabacademy course.
- I record a VOD with my managers about it too (it was sent to more than 5000 employees all over the world)
- I did Collaboration with Intel IoT and Cisco IoT and they running 3 project together (Smart cities, Spaces and robotics)
- I started my first BA at Management and Computer Science - and Cisco is paying for that and for the time I'm learning J
- And I do a lot more..
And all started... with Ohad and the fablab !!
Many thanks,
Eyal
