Green Shoe Garage est. 2012

Tradigital workshop Mountain Maryland

Innovation meets ingenuity.

A client-focused experimental workshop that combines traditional craftsmanship with modern digital machines to design, engineer, and fabricate custom objects. Concept to delivered product: mechanical, electronics, and software, built under one roof.

Schedule a consultation See what we make SDVOSB · Veteran owned
Est.
2012
Shop
Cumberland, MD
Coords
39.65°N 78.76°W
NAICS
541330
Status
SDVOSB, veteran owned
Reach
Global

00 The questions we ask

  1. Q1

    How do you blend old-school craftsmanship with modern digital machines?

  2. Q2

    How can the bespoke be created as cost-effectively as the mass-produced?

  3. Q3

    How can everyday objects be given digital smarts and still respect individual privacy?

  4. Q4

    Is the "fail early, fail often" maker ethos compatible with engineering discipline?

01 What we do

We turn ideas into tangible, functional objects.

We deliver unique products tailored to our clients' needs. We excel not only at doing the work, but at exploring and inventing new ways of transforming ideas into tangible objects. Projects have ranged from highly technical research and development to large-scale art installations.

We support clients through the entire development lifecycle: research and development, conceptual design, rapid prototyping, detailed engineering, custom fabrication and assembly, and laboratory and real-world testing. In short, we do it quickly and within budget.

Our guiding principles Our free toolkits

Motto · No. 001

in·no·vate

to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.

in·ge·nu·i·ty

cleverly inventive, resourceful; skillful of conception or design.

Dreaming up wild, new ideas is only half the battle. You must also possess the ingenuity to transform an idea into a fully realized product. We strive to do both.

02 What good design owes you

Three principles, two thousand years old, still the grading rubric.

Our thinking on good design is shaped by Vitruvius and his three key principles for good architecture. Every product we draw is measured against all three.

03 The design flow

Nine steps, from the napkin to the manufacturing package.

Read the full process
Agile is software-centric. Classic systems engineering carries too much non-value-added work for a product that has to reach market fast. Six Sigma suits companies large enough to absorb the overhead. So we built our own workflow, digital end to end, with security and end-of-life designed in rather than bolted on.

01 / Figuring out the problem to be solved

  1. 01

    Figure out the problem

    Requirements development and ideation. Identify use cases and constraints, run a rough order of magnitude on cost and schedule, and determine how mature the technology really is.

  2. 02

    Explore potential solutions

    Market studies, conceptual analysis and design, functional analysis, feasibility studies, rapid prototypes and mockups, and a top-level system architecture.

  3. 03

    Refine the big picture

    Proof of concept, then form, fit, and function prototypes on a short iterative design and test loop. Requirements, cost, schedule, architecture, and use cases get locked here.

  4. 04

    Design the solution

    Detailed design and engineering. Build the bill of materials, identify dependencies, generate documentation, write the test and verification procedures, and refine the design to be manufacturable, sustainable, secure, and testable.

  5. 05

    Build the solution

    Our in-house fab lab makes as much as possible under this roof, with global partners covering assemblies that need heavier industrial tooling. Final assembly of the looks-like and works-like prototype, plus the design for manufacturing package.

  6. 06

    Test the tech

    Unit and integration testing. Verification of the technology, design, and engineering, and validation of the failure modes analysis.

  7. 07

    Test the product

    Validate the solution with user acceptance testing and live testing in real-world environments, then optimize the system based on what comes back.

  8. 08

    Hack and harden

    Assess the cyber and physical vulnerabilities that could be exploited, then design and implement the fixes. Security is part of the process, not an afterthought.

  9. 09

    Prepare for manufacturing

    Low-volume manufacturing to refine the bill of materials, cost of goods sold, MCAD and ECAD packages, and source code. Then introductions to manufacturing partners if mass production is the goal.

04 A small shop with a global reach

0

Founded in Cumberland, Maryland

0

Continents served: North America, Europe, Asia, Africa

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Steps in our proven design flow

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Intellectual property rights we retain. Clients own their work

Our insights have been sought by Fortune 500 corporations, academic institutions, museums, small businesses, non-profits, startups, and solo entrepreneurs.

SDVOSB Veteran owned Open source first

05 Services we provide

One shop, several trades, deliberately mixed.

Most fabrication shops handle only mechanical and structural work, and most electronics houses send the physical build offshore. We do both in-house, in a highly integrated way, which is how the schedule and the budget hold.

Full service list Green Shoe Lab Consequence-aware engineering

06 We speak fluent silicon

No single-vendor solutions. Ever.

We use a wide range of embedded platforms, sensors, and actuators, and we pick them for your product rather than for our own convenience. Hover to hold a row still.

Hardware platforms 17

  • Arduino
  • Raspberry Pi
  • BeagleBoard
  • ESP32 / 8266
  • STM32
  • NXP
  • TI MSP430
  • Nordic nRF52 / nRF53
  • Teensy
  • Digilent Arty
  • Microchip Curiosity
  • Particle.io
  • Adafruit Feather
  • SparkFun Thing
  • Alchitry FPGA
  • Seeed Wio / Grove / XIAO
  • Intel / Altera FPGA

Protocols and interfaces 31

  • HDMI
  • PCIe
  • LAN
  • USB
  • UART
  • JTAG / SWD
  • MIPI
  • SPI
  • I2C
  • I2S
  • SDIO
  • 1-Wire
  • MQTT
  • ADC
  • DMX512 / Art-Net
  • MIDI
  • BACnet
  • LonWorks
  • RS232
  • RS485 / 422
  • CAN
  • BLE
  • WiFi
  • Zigbee
  • Thread / Matter
  • Z-Wave
  • NFC
  • Ethernet
  • LoRaWAN
  • GPS
  • Cellular

OS and cloud 05

  • FreeRTOS
  • ZephyrOS
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Google Cloud

Certifications we design toward 06

  • FCC
  • UL
  • CE
  • RoHS
  • REACH
  • NIST IoT Framework

07 What kind of things have we made

Years of it, across categories that rarely share a room.

08 You own your product

We keep no IP rights. None.

If you cannot open something up and tinker with it, you do not really own it. We build on open hardware, software, and design tools wherever we can, which keeps licensing fees out of the budget and vendor lock-in out of your future. We encourage open-source licensing, but the choice stays yours, and so does the intellectual property.

Handover package

  • Feasibility studies, specifications, and evaluation reports
  • Schematic, PCB, and Gerber files
  • CAD design and fabrication files for every mechanical component
  • Bill of materials
  • Software and firmware source code
  • Looks-like and works-like prototypes
  • Project documentation and final assembly instructions
  • Test plans and reports
  • Video tutorials and product photography
  • Technical and artistic illustrations

09 From the bench

Latest builds.

Ready when you are

Let's turn your idea into a tangible object.

Concept to delivered product. Mechanical, electronics, and software, built under one roof. Quickly and within budget.

Schedule a consultation

+1 301 880 4538

Contact and hire us

215 Park Street, #117, Cumberland, MD 21501