At Roanoke Electronic Controls, we talk a lot about direct engineer access. No sales middlemen, no ticket queues — you talk to the people building your product. But what does that actually look like? What kind of engineers are on the other side of that phone call?
Meet Ken Goodman, Senior Engineer at REC and the creator of Electrons Dance, a YouTube channel where real-world electronics engineering meets genuine curiosity and a healthy sense of humor.
What Is Electrons Dance?
Electrons Dance is Ken's personal YouTube channel where he documents electronics projects, teardowns, repairs, and the kind of hands-on problem solving that only comes from decades of bench experience. With 22 videos and growing, the channel covers everything from surface mount technology challenges to LED circuit deep dives to vintage electronics teardowns.
The channel name says it all — at the end of the day, everything we do in electronics comes down to making electrons go where they need to go. Ken makes that process visible, approachable, and entertaining.
Videos Worth Watching
Kicking and Screaming — My Journey from Through-Hole to Surface Mount
This is Ken's most popular video, and for good reason. Ken has been designing electronics since the 1980s, when through-hole designs still dominated commercial production. He walks through vintage circuit boards — a 1960s transistor radio with components stood on end to save space, an arcade board packed with socketed DIP ICs — and shows how the industry evolved.
One of his own designs, an HVAC control board for transit bus air conditioning systems, was still being manufactured into the 2010s. As Ken puts it: "Back in the 90s, I said I would have to be drugged kicking and screaming into the world of surface mount design. I have almost quit screaming."
He compares resistor packages side by side — quarter-watt through-hole, 0805 surface mount, 0603, and the tiny 0201 parts he calls "grain of sand components" — then fills a miniature hourglass with 0201 resistors to prove the point. It is the kind of visual demonstration that makes you understand component evolution in a way that datasheets never could.
This video is directly relevant to what we do at REC every day. Our manufacturing floor runs two SMT pick-and-place machines alongside a full through-hole assembly line. We handle mixed-technology boards regularly, and having engineers like Ken who deeply understand both assembly methods — and the real-world tradeoffs between them — is part of what makes our engineering team effective.
LED Arcana
LEDs seem simple until they are not. Current limiting, thermal management, PWM dimming, color mixing — there is real engineering behind making LEDs work correctly in a product. Ken digs into the details that matter when you are designing LED circuits for production rather than just breadboard experiments.
Bug Trax: Future Nuke Survivors vs. Dishwasher
The title alone is worth the click. This one gets into the kind of environmental testing and failure analysis thinking that separates hobbyist projects from production-grade electronics. At REC, where we build electronics for automotive, military, and industrial environments, understanding how products fail in the real world is fundamental to designing products that do not.
Why This Matters
When we say our engineers are accessible, we mean engineers like Ken — people who live and breathe electronics, who spend their personal time exploring circuits and sharing what they learn. The same curiosity and deep technical knowledge Ken brings to his YouTube channel is what he brings to client projects at REC.
There is a reason we do not have a traditional sales team. When you call REC about a custom electronics project, you talk to engineers who can discuss your design challenges at a technical level, suggest improvements you had not considered, and give you honest feedback about manufacturability — because they are the ones who will actually design and build your product.
Subscribe to Electrons Dance
Ken's channel is still growing, and it deserves a bigger audience. If you are an electronics engineer, a hobbyist, a student, or just someone who finds it satisfying to watch a skilled engineer work through real problems, subscribe to Electrons Dance on YouTube.
And if you have a custom electronics project that could use the kind of engineering talent Ken represents, tell us about it. No sales pitch — just a conversation with an engineer.
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