Current Statement of Vision
To bring the freedoms that I have found in software engineering to my electrical and mechanical engineering worlds.In order to explain this statement I must first give examples of the software engineering freedoms of which I speak.
Reusability
When developing software one always tries to create reusable components. An example of this would be a math library for the C programming language. Once a developer writes this library it can be reused on all future development projects. Parallels can be seen in electrical engineering with integrated circuits. For instance, there are many integrated circuits for generating clock pulses. There is no need to create a custom circuit for this job when this IC costs 50 cents. A mechanical engineering parallel would be nuts and bolts.So if the concept of reusability is already in electrical and mechanical engineering, why the statement? Simply because there isn't an IC for everything and nuts and bolts alone are not enough to build a robot swarm. For this you need custom circuits, circuit housing / body, gears, ... etc. If you've ever tried to purchase gears or had a custom ciruit board printed you will know that it doesn't cost 50 cents. Whereas a copy of a math library costs nothing but a few minutes to set up the directory structure and add references a custom ciruit board could cost $20 a peice at low quantities.
more to come on...