Automation in the Wild – Podcast Playlist | #HelicalBrew #ViralVideo #Podcast

Lab automation runs on software nobody talks about. Schedulers, drivers, integration layers — the invisible glue holding million dollar systems together. Today we're pulling it apart.

Mike Salmi is the founder of Cheshire Labs and creator of Orca, an open source scheduler built from years of real automation work in clinical, contract, and biotech R&D environments.

We get into why vendor software keeps falling short, what it actually costs to write a device driver ($14,000 apparently), why open source changes everything for startups, and how AI just rewrote the rules.

Guest: Mike Salmi — Cheshire Labs

Hosts: Mike Ouren & Sura Hadi

🔗 cheshirelabs.io

🔗 Orca on GitHub

🔗 Mike Salmi on LinkedIn

🎬 Chapters

00:00 Cold Open

00:19 Welcome & Intro

01:42 Icebreaker — When did you know you had to build it yourself?

05:27 Life Inside Real Automation Stacks

11:43 Where Vendor Software Falls Short

16:29 13 Windows Licenses

19:44 Device Drivers & AI

22:17 Why Every Integration Feels Custom

24:03 Cheshire Labs & Orca — The Origin Story

25:39 Why Build an Open Source Scheduler?

28:03 Cloud Native Lab Infrastructure

31:42 Swarm AI in Practice

34:42 Claude Driving the Robot

35:00 AI Helps & AI Risks

40:04 AI Readiness Factor

44:15 Picks of the Week — Claude Code & Flipper Zero

47:22 Wrap Up & Where to Find Mike

#HelicalBrew #LabAutomation #OpenSource #Biotech #LabRobotics #AutomationInTheWild #SLAS2026