Base Scaffold System

The Base Scaffold is your electronics workbench in the cloud. Functioning as the electro-mechanical foundation for all projects in Adom's Cloud Lab, our facility in Fort Worth, TX is home to a constantly increasing store of base scaffolds. Each base scaffold is a blank canvas for fully customizable electro-mechanical projects.

Every project begins in a digital twin environment, where the layout is implemented in software: molecules are positioned and wires drawn to establish the project's electrical connections. When the design is complete, the customer clicks Build — and Adom's autonomous systems take it from there, carrying a base scaffold from storage through the assembly process and into the customer's reserved workcell for ongoing evaluation and development.

How a Customer Interacts with the System

Customers never need to handle a base scaffold directly — scaffolds live exclusively in Adom's Fort Worth facility, and all physical work is done by workcells or Adom's team.

Project Assembly

Projects are built from molecules — PCBs designed with machine pins and contacts for base scaffold and workcell interfacing. A project is mounted onto its base scaffold by the Molecule Workcell: robotic pincers pick up each molecule by its corner machine pins and insert it into the base scaffold's contacts. The scaffold then moves to the Wire Bending Workcell, where wires are bent and inserted — also by robotic pincers — to establish all of the project's electrical connections, both among molecules and to the control panel.

Design Envelope

• Workspace: 576 mm × 576 mm (X × Y), with large contacts evenly distributed at 32 mm spacing center-to-center.
• Maximum project height: 200 mm in Z (current).
• Larger workspaces are available upon request.

Subscription and Allocation

Customers subscribe to Adom's Workcell service for prototyping their electrical projects. Base scaffolds are an amenity provided for active project development within the terms of that subscription.

End of Project

All project files are saved to our wiki (wiki.adom.inc — Adom's GitHub of electronics for the AI age). When active development is complete, customers choose either to:

• Tear down — wires are disposed of, molecules move to storage for future use, and the base scaffold is prepared for its next project; or
• Keep the project intact on its base scaffold and move the entire system into storage at our facility.

How the System Interacts with Workcells and the Factory

When a customer clicks Build, the autonomous systems in Adom's facility coordinate the base scaffold's journey: from storage, through the project assembly process (the Molecule and Wire Bending Workcells), and finally into the customer's reserved workcell for ongoing evaluation and development. Movement of a base scaffold from one workcell to another is handled autonomously by AMRs or, in some cases, by a skilled member of the Adom team.

A base scaffold enters and leaves a workcell by sliding in on rails. Each scaffold carries a barcode, which is how the factory knows which scaffold — and which project — is where.

On arrival at a workcell, the scaffold goes through a three-step handshake before work begins:

1. Alignment check
2. Electrical connect
3. Project verification

Mechanical Design

This section is owned by James and Luke.

Isometric view of a base scaffold: alignment sheet and panels on top, extruded-aluminium frame and rails below, control panel at the front-left.

Back elevated view, showing the frame, rails, and the underside structure that carries the panels.

Panels

Panels provide the scaffold's contact interface for mounting molecules. The contact field is built from nine panels in a 3 × 3 array, each a 192 mm × 192 mm, 1.6 mm PCB carrying a 6 × 6 block of contacts. Together they present 324 Large Contacts in an 18 × 18 grid at 32 mm spacing center-to-center across the 576 mm × 576 mm workspace (see Design Envelope); the first contact sits 16 mm in from the field origin. A molecule's machine pins press into the contacts, which are essentially retainer clips. On the base scaffold, contacts serve a mechanical role only — the project's electrical connections are made by wires (see Wiring).

Top view of the nine panels (3 × 3), showing the contact grid across the full workspace.

Alignment Sheet

The alignment sheet is a kinematic coupling mechanism that, together with fiducials, gives precise, repeatable alignment from one workcell to the next, and provides rigid support for heavy projects — up to a maximum project mass of 20 kg. The current sheet has a 600 mm × 600 mm profile and is 3/8″ (9.525 mm) thick, with 144 blind M3 panel-mount holes and 9 through M3 holes (drawing WB00_BaseScaffoldAlignmentSheet_Sliding, rev 2026-09-01). An earlier 576 mm × 576 mm, 6 mm sheet (drawing BaseScaffoldAlignmentSheet, 2025-05-04) is the legacy variant and is no longer the reference.

Factory Mobility

The scaffold slides into workcells and can move around the factory without tearing the project down. UHMW sliders attached to the bottom of the base scaffold let it slide in and out of workcells. Once taken out of a workcell, base scaffolds and their projects are stored on racks.

Mechanical variants and CAD sources

Two mechanical assemblies exist in the Adom Fusion hub (project Main). The renders on this page and the description above are of the sliding-frame base, the variant that rides on rails into a workcell. The storage stack is the plate-and-skids subset James assembled on 2026-09-01 for the TMF8829 Depth Lab audit; it carries the current 9.525 mm sheet but no frame, rails or workcell dock.

Known gaps as of 2026-09-11, tracked in issue #2: the sliding-frame assembly still links a 7 mm sheet body rather than the released 9.525 mm sheet, both assemblies still carry the v2.0.1 / older control-panel models rather than V2.1.0, and the V2.1.0 dock has not been assembled yet. Which assembly is the reference for new customer projects is a call for the mechanical owners (James and Luke); until they close that issue, treat the sliding-frame base as the documented configuration and the values above as the released dimensions.

Wiring

Scaffold wiring is bent automatically by machine. Two solid-core gauges are used, and there is no hard signal/power division between them — the gauge matches the contact family it plugs into:

• 14 AWG — sized for the Large machine pins (standard, short) and Large Contacts.
• 24 AWG — sized for the Medium machine pins (standard, short) and Medium Contacts.

For detailed specs — insulation, bend limits, current ratings — the individual part pages (collected in the Adom Machine Parts Library) are the source of truth. At a high level, Large Contacts are rated ~20.8 A and Medium Contacts ~6.4 A.

Termination. The wire bending machine strips the enamel off the ends of each wire, and the wires are then plugged into contacts.

Routing. Medium contacts are constrained to a 2 mm grid and Large contacts to an 8 mm grid; wires typically travel in 2 mm channels in XYZ space.

Control Panel

The control panel is self-aligning, which lets the system make a secure electrical connection when the base scaffold is inserted.

The current electronics are V2.1.0 (see the control-panel page below). The scaffold-side mount and RF mount for V2.1.0 are being modelled by James (ControlPannelMount_Scaffold2.1, RFMount_Scaffold2.1, 2026-09-01); the assemblies and renders on this page still show the v2.0.1 boards on the earlier mount.

Front elevated view, with the control panel boards mounted at the front edge of the scaffold.

The system's electrical front door — specifications and the connector/disconnect interface — is documented on its own page, maintained by Caleb:

➡️ Base Scaffold Control Panel (linked as a dependency of this page)

Molecule corner-pin selection

Choose the corner-pin class before PCB routing. Prefer large pins for larger or heavier assemblies, attached cooling hardware, and standard tools that will repeatedly enter and leave workcells. Medium pins can suit compact, light assemblies on compatible user scaffolds. Record the selection rationale and verify the actual grid, socket fit, seating height and complete assembly clearance.

Use large corner pins (MachinePinLargeShort; MachinePinLargeStandard on LrgMed user-scaffold corners) if ANY of: the board seats directly in the base scaffold; the board with its parts weighs more than 100 g; it carries something that pushes, pulls or twists it (a motor or actuator, a heatsink over 20 g, a cabled connector people unplug, a button pressed hard); its longest side is over 100 mm; any pin carries more than 3.5 A. Otherwise use medium pins (MachinePinMediumShort). (Rule approved by John, 2026-10-21.)

The rule, its data (tail size, current class, retention) and the adom-aiflow molecule check that applies it live in the aiflow-molecule skill (adom-aiflow 0.2.17 and later). Retention figures are standard-clip numbers until our contacts are pull-tested, and no mating-cycle life is rated. The selection skill describes the checks and the downstream AIFlow revalidation required when pin size changes.