app

Base Scaffold System

Public Made by Adom

by adom

The Base Scaffold: your electronics workbench in the cloud, and the electro-mechanical foundation for all projects in Adom's Cloud Lab (Fort Worth, TX). System overview, customer interaction model, factory/workcell integration, and mechanical design (panels, alignment sheet, wiring).

hardwarefactoryworkcelldocumentation
Overview Files Skills Discover Packages Releases Dependencies Issues1 Breadcrumbs Pull Requests Activity
base-scaffold-system / README.md
Download

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 and populated by James and Luke. Skeleton below; expand each subsection in place.

Panels

Panels provide the scaffold's contact interface for mounting molecules. The contacts are Large Contacts, arranged in an 18 × 18 grid at 32 mm spacing center-to-center across the 576 mm × 576 mm workspace (see Design Envelope). 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).

Alignment Sheet

The alignment sheet uses a kinematic coupling plus fiducials to give 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 sheet is 8 mm thick.

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.

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:

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 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)