Spades Prototype Lab (SPL) is the experimental research and development arm of Spades, created to turn engineering ideas into physical, testable systems.
SPL focuses on the stage between concept and product. Rather than beginning with full-scale development, projects are broken into smaller prototypes that can answer specific technical questions quickly and affordably. Each prototype is built with a defined purpose, measurable success criteria, and clear requirements for advancing to the next stage.
Projects may involve mechanical systems, robotics, electronics, software, sensing, automation, controls, or combinations of multiple disciplines. Whenever practical, development begins with commercially available components and simple fabrication methods before progressing toward custom hardware.
SPL follows a phased development process:
Concept — Define the problem, intended capability, and technical questions that need to be answered.
Proof of Concept — Demonstrate that the core idea can function at a small scale.
Functional Prototype — Combine individual capabilities into a usable system and evaluate reliability, performance, and limitations.
Integrated Prototype — Refine the system toward its intended operating environment while introducing custom components where they provide a meaningful advantage.
Graduation — A project leaves SPL once its underlying technology has been sufficiently demonstrated and further development is better treated as product engineering rather than experimental research.
Not every SPL project is expected to graduate. A prototype that demonstrates that an idea is impractical, unnecessarily complex, or economically unviable is still considered valuable research. The purpose of SPL is not to prove every idea correct, but to determine which ideas deserve further investment.
Development conducted through SPL is documented as an engineering portfolio, including design decisions, prototypes, testing, failures, revisions, and technical results. This creates a record not only of what was built, but of how each system evolved.