A customer recently asked if we had a CAGE code. Well that was something new to me, but at the time no, and I checked with a friend who does DoD work as to what that was, and he said pretty easy to set it up yourself.
Luckily as a corporation we already had a Tax ID number, and for another client eons ago we got a DUNs number so l plugged them into the system.
And I have to tip my hat to Russell with the Defense Logistics Agency, who must have been working from home after hours granted us a number within minutes of the request. So now we are 8W2R9 in the CAGE system. Is this worthy of a blog post, well at least I will know where to look it up if I need it. We've entered all the data into the SAM.gov system and should show up there in a few days.
and the number is 8W2R9
Are we going to be doing business with government entities, well we have been all along, though often we don't know it. In the past we sold some ARMwebs to some people at NOAA who were aligning the building surrounding a telescope in Hawaii. it was a great one time use product.
After that I got a call from someone at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan. He was using some boards to setup security in one of the buildings. I was glad to help him with any information he needed, especially as he described the application as when our board sensed something guys with guns would show up quickly.
We also supplied a large number of ARMmites that were connected to brake lights and turn signals, and some other sensors on school buses for a large school district. Why, well these "black boxes" were used to document bus actions for insurance purposes (it lowered their premiums)
One of our earliest customers was doing water measure and management for a state agency back east. We ended up building a custom board that took 120V in and supplied power for one of our boards and then buffered our outputs for relays.