The name is not an abbreviation of anything corporate. MB Lab is My Basement Laboratory, which is both a YouTube channel and an accurate description of where all of this started.
What is here
Fifteen Windows applications, in two groups.
The first group is for designing and analysing: testability and test coverage before a fixture is cut, EMC pre-compliance before a chamber is rented, environmental validation planning, requirements traceability, a KiCad driver and a full-wave field solver. The second group behaves like bench equipment: an oscilloscope that will take anything that produces numbers, optical inspection driven over SCPI, vision measuring for the bench, a PLC and an HMI for boards that are not PLCs, and two ways of getting live instrument data into Excel.
Alongside them is a shelf of boards — a USB oscilloscope front end, a carrier that turns an ESP32-S3 into a small PLC, isolated probes that let a sound card measure mains. They are designed and in the pipeline, moving through fabrication and assembly.
Why it exists
Every one of these started as something I needed on a particular afternoon and could not find at a price a one-person shop could justify. That is not a complaint about the commercial tools — they are good, and they are priced for companies that have a department to put them in. It is an observation that there is a whole category of engineer the industry does not serve: the one working alone, or in a team of three, who still has to answer the same questions about coverage, emissions and qualification that a department does.
Where it is going
The interfaces stay open, whatever else happens. Every one of these applications speaks SCPI, Modbus, OPC UA or MQTT, and each describes itself in a manifest another program can read — which is how the dispatcher works out the run order without being told it, and how anything you write can join in.
The rest of the direction is equipment. The applications already specify a fixture, a test sequence and a bench; the next things being built are those, so that what the software plans can actually be run.
If you build things for engineers
The limit of this project is that it is one person. That is also the thing most worth fixing.
If you have an instrument driver, a test method for an industry I do not know, a board worth adding, or a manual that would make one of these tools usable by somebody who has never seen it — I would like to hear from you. Tell me what you would want to build, and what you would need from me to make it worth your time.