Hardware Podcasts

Ep. 41 - Surviving the Bus Test

Open Hardware Manufacturing Podcast · 19 Jun 2025 · 38m

What this episode covers

Lucy Chaparr and Stephen Hawes of Opulo discuss the 'bus test' (or bus factor) and how they survived Lucy's 10-week absence due to a family emergency. They detail the critical role of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in tools like Ohai and Mattermost, which allowed the team to maintain order fulfillment and sourcing. However, they also highlight a failure in build management within their PLM system, which led to inventory discrepancies requiring a massive manual count of 100,000 components.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Opulo, LCSC, Formlabs, Alibaba
Tools
Ohai, Mattermost, Jira, Slack, Google Drive, WeChat, PLM
Also
Python, Guido Van Rossem

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