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Vad jag lyckats hitta så är dom konstruerade av samma man som har gjort Gecko drivarna

The Reader's Digest version:

I grew up in Ohio and I loved model airplanes. When I was 12 I wanted
a radio control for the planes I made. I couldn't afford one so I
decided to build one. Problem was I knew nothing of electronics. I
found an ARRL ham radio handbook and start to learn electronics.

The subject drew me in like nothing else had. I learned everything
about electronics I could. When I was 13 I was building my own radios
and fixing the neighbors' radios and TVs.

I went to Wright State U and Ohio State U, as a EE major. I finished
at UCLA when my family moved to California in '69.

My father was a ME and had a one-man company called Centent. We set up
a partnership with me providing the electronic content. I honed my
skills the next 20 years.

Centent was a contract engineering company. We built custom contracted
equipment for the aerospace industry (Hughes Aircraft, North American
Aircraft) one year, oilfield down-well data logging equipment for
Mobil Oil the next year. We designed particle board void inspection
equipment for Weyerhouser, radio-immunoassay equipment for a medical
firm and SCR speed controls for wire-feed on welders for another
company I've forotten. That and much, much more.

It was a jack-of-all-trades learning experience but contract design
firms really don't go anywhere because every 6 months it's a new,
unrelated project.

I'm simple person that is easily fascinated by moving things. Motors
and the drives that move the motors that move things. I'm easily amused.

It was during the design for the medical firm that I stumbled on the
idea of microstepping. The motor had to turn a large steel disk and
the resonance of a full-step drive couldn't do it successfully. I
wondered what would happen if the steps could be made smaller....

This turned into a product called the CN0132. In a year I improved it
enough to rename it the CN0143. Centent built and sold a lot of them
at $350 each in the mid '80s, about $700 in today's dollars. The
CN0162, the CN0165 and the CN0182 followed quickly and these sold well
too. The company grew rapidly for a decade and we did no more contract
work.

My dad died and his 50% share of the partnership passed to my brother.
This coincided with the advent of surface mount technology and Centent
did only thru-hole boards. I saw the need for technology change but my
partner was against it. Centent began to stagnate, I couldn't make any
headway to do what was necessary to right it so I sold my interest in
Centent to my partner. I had retired at 50.

I couldn't get the idea of a highly automated SMT based motor drive
mfg business model out of my mind though. I set up Geckodrive in '99
as a boutique business just to test the idea. Things just kind of got
out of hand afterwards.

That's it in a nutshell.

Mariss