About

SMITHtRONiC is one person. This is the person.

Ron Durham

I'm Ron Durham, an engineer in San Diego. I build software for physical hardware — test systems, device diagnostics, and tooling that turns an expert-only procedure into something anyone on the floor can run.

My day job is manufacturing and production test engineering for unmanned aircraft: operator-facing applications, embedded device provisioning over MAVLink and CAN bus, and the fixtures, test suites, and release pipelines underneath them. Most of that work isn't mine to publish. SMITHtRONiC is where the half I can publish lives — built on my own hardware, on my own time.

How I work

Almost everything I take on is undocumented. The Zero motorcycle console has no public specification. The Forester parts I print replace things that no longer have a parts catalog. So I keep an explicit ledger of what's verified and what isn't, and I publish it alongside the work.

OpenMBB states exactly which motorcycle it has been confirmed on, which ones should work but are untested, and which are incompatible along with the technical reason why. The printed parts ship with the CAD source, the bill of materials, print settings, and wiring — not a photo and a download link.

The distinction between "I confirmed this on hardware" and "this should work" is most of the job. Thresholds come from measurement, not from guesses. When I don't know something, the documentation says so.

Why any of this is free

The parts here were briefly for sale. Selling them meant packing boxes instead of designing things, and it put a price on documentation that's more useful to more people when it's simply public. So the designs, the source, and the guides are all open now — print them yourself, or have someone print them for you. If you build one, I'd genuinely like to hear how it went.

Elsewhere