ABOUT THIS EPISODE
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
