A small generalist shop in Vancouver.
A small, vertically integrated engineering group that takes a hard machine from CAD through fabrication, electronics and perception to a working demo.
2 engineers, one room, a mill and a reflow oven, working since 2025. We take on machines that have to hold a tolerance while something moves fast, and we take them the whole way — the drawing, the part, the board, the firmware, the loop and the thing that finally runs unattended in front of people.
Deliberately generalist, deliberately small.
Hardware programmes rarely fail inside a discipline. They fail in the seam between them — the bracket that was stiff enough until the loop bandwidth went up, the board that was fine until it had to fit, the model that worked until the camera moved. Those seams belong to nobody on a big team, which is why they are still open in month nine. Running 6 disciplines under one roof is not breadth for its own sake; it is the only arrangement where the person who noticed the problem is allowed to fix it that afternoon.
The register is the argument. 8 entries so far, spanning a folding cell, a keyboard built for one hand and a bin that catches thrown rubbish, and the discipline signature down the left of the register shows a different shape on almost every row.
There are 2 of us, and that is a ceiling we chose rather than a stage we are passing through. A pair can hold an entire machine in their heads. A department cannot, and the meeting where it tries is the meeting that costs a week. When a job needs more hands than that, it is a job for a company with a production department, and we will say so on the call.
The bar for working here is one sentence.
Who you get.
| MARK | NAME | ROLE | DISCIPLINES | PRIOR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DZ | Daniel Zhan | Mechanism, fabrication, motion | Mechanical design, Fabrication and finishing, Firmware, Controls and motion | Motion control at a machine-tool builder; before that, a two-person prototyping shop that made fixtures for a food plant |
| RM | Rowan Mackay | Electronics, firmware, perception | Electronics and PCB, Firmware, Controls and motion, Perception and learned models | Perception on a warehouse-automation programme; before that, test engineering at a motor manufacturer |
The marks in the first column are the ones that appear against every change in the revision log. The signature column uses the same six slots, in the same order, as every entry in the register — so a person’s shape and a project’s shape can be read straight down the page.
Where we are.
One room in Vancouver, with the machines on the equipment list in it. Clients are welcome to stand next to the mill while their part is cut, and several have. Remote work is fine — most of our correspondence is a weekly hour and a repository — but the hardware does not travel until it works.
The fastest way to reach us is daniel@bdrlab.ca, with the constraint and the date it has to work by in the first paragraph.