Embedded - 101: Taking Apart the Toaster

Episode Date: May 20, 2015

Micah Elizabeth Scott (@scanlime) spoke with us about Coastermelt, art installations, FadeCandy, teaching electronics to artists, and mental health.  Her Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) installation is mesmerizing, some videos.  In her Coastermelt project, Micah uses the IDA disassembler. FadeCandy is for sale at Adafruit. Zen Photon is online, demonstrating ray tracing. Micah's website shows her current projects.  Micah's previous Embedded.fm episode focused on FadeCandy: 41: Pink Universes Die Really Quickly. Robot Odyssey looks awesome. Captain Awkward is a site where you can get advice on how to say things and deal with difficult situations/people. Micah's shop has a TypeA 3D printer (note: Tuco's favorite bolts) as well as an OtherMill. 

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love building gadgets. I'm Alicia White, here with Christopher White and Micah Elizabeth Scott. We're going to talk about blinking lights, melting coasters, teaching electronics to artists, and maybe mental health. Before we get started, I've heard a rumor that there will be a contest here next week. One with prizes. A copy or two of my book and maybe a copy of Kerbal Space Program? That sounds like fun. For now, think about what you'd want to put on a satellite, and I'll explain the rules and entries next week. Hi Micah, thanks for joining us again.

Hi, it's great to be back. When we last spoke, you had left engineering to do art full-time. How's it going? Oh, that's, I don't know. I actually don't know. It's been an interesting ride. And yeah, I actually still kind of don't really know how well it's going. It's been really successful in some ways, and it's been really challenging in a lot of ways.

And I still don't really quite know where that average is out to. How do you introduce yourself these days? Well, it's, I don't know, that's, it's hard. I've kind of started calling myself an art engineer, because I, that kind of emphasizes that I still, you know, I still do a lot of engineering. I still tend to find myself drawn to stuff that involves creating new widgets and making new tools and including some kind of new bits of technology. But what I've been trying to focus on more is creating these kind of artistic experiences more so than just the technology. But, you know, that's a constant struggle for me. I've got a lot of experience just focusing on the technology and not as much experience doing the art side. So it's been more of an adaptation.

Well, talking about the technology side, you did two videos last fall where you were trying to build holographic pictures on CDs by deconstructing a CD writer? Is that an adequate explanation or did I miss it? Yeah, well, so... Coaster Melt. Yeah, the project was called Coaster Melt.

And it's got a couple different layers to it. There's sort of this weird technological thing where I wanted to, you know, sort of finding an excuse to reverse engineer stuff again. You know, I would do this every once in a while. You know, when I was working on virtual machines, I would sometimes have to reverse engineer the programs we ran in the virtual machines in order to debug the whole thing. It's sort of a way of trying to combine, you know, what can I reverse engineer that would have some information in it that's kind of useful for people? You know, so I used to reverse engineer stuff

that ran inside VMs for debugging, or I would really like to take apart video game consoles. I really got into reverse engineering the Nintendo DS and the DSi. And I built some weird hardware that would trace all the reads and writes that it made to memory in order to figure out exactly what the firmware was doing. And ostensibly, this was to try to create a platform for homebrew games, which was interesting. But really, the part that I was really interested in was kind of taking apart more than, you know, more than the next step. And so in a way, CoasterMelt was, you know, well, how do I build a framework for that where I can give myself a really

interesting puzzle to take apart, but there's still a lot of kind of plausible, interesting things you can do with the results. So this time, you know, it's not necessarily creating homebrew games because we've all got, you know, cell phones that we can write games for if we wanted. And the hardware is a lot, but they actually have a lot of hardware that's still difficult to get access to in other ways. You know, they've got several different lasers. They have these, you know, this lens that's kind of floating on these little magnetic, like electromagnetic positioners. You know, it's got really high frequency A to D and D to A and modulation and demodulation hardware. And all of this has the ability to create these really fine detailed patterns on these plastic disks, but we just use it for,

you know, backing up our photos and, you know, writing movies and that kind of thing. And it'd be great if I could do that reverse engineering that I like, but also have these plausible end results where we can now have software that we can load onto this really commonly available hardware to get it to kind of create new things for us. And so maybe some of those new things are patterns that when you shine laser light at them, create kind of an image in the resulting diffraction pattern. And that's such a neat idea to do. And so when I started watching, I was like,

okay, I would like that. That would be fun. But where I thought you would be, if it were me, I would have a logic analyzer and be looking at the communication between the chips. Not even thinking about looking at the code on the chips. But you had this disassembler tool that was just amazing. Well, it was beyond that.

The thing that amazed me was you have some arcane techniques for reverse engineering. I haven't done a lot of reverse engineering. I've done a little bit here and there. Actually, my first summer job was I was supposed to reverse engineer a mass spectrometer that the scientists got from somewhere, but they had no manuals and they didn't know how it worked. Totally failed that because I didn't know what I was doing. And I only had a serial port, which didn't talk to me. But the thing that amazed me was you had these ideas for, and I don't know how common this is, but you loaded the firmware in Photoshop.

I mean, it's not super common, but it's not that uncommon either. There are a handful of tools people have written to do that kind of early visualization of a binary. And, you know, I really appreciate how the human vision system is a really great pattern matcher. And so if you've been staring at images that have these kind of subtle patterns in it, you can start to pick them out of new images. And so I think some of this came from the DOS days. And it's like you have a game or something that you want to crack or reverse engineer, or you have some program that you don't know the command line options for. You just start opening it up in whatever programs you have.

And sometimes that's a disassembler or a text editor or an image editor and even if you open up executable code in a text editor you can start to notice patterns even if you know the character codes you're seeing don't actually make any sense well yeah i mean you can usually find the strings and if they weren't great programmers some of those error strings are really useful yeah and And then you can maybe find their debug strings. Oh, definitely. And especially with IDA, the Interactive Disassembler, which is the program I used in some of the CoasterMelt stuff. Oh, that is expensive. Yeah, it is. There's like a free version, but the version that has support for all the different processors and 64-bit code, it's like $700

or something and that's ida yeah there's there's a few alternatives now um which i i won't remember them all off the top of my head but but what that gives you is it has some intelligence for figuring out oh this is a block of code and i'm referencing this block of code over here so it does some mapping for you once you kind of start picking away at the little bits and figuring out what each piece is. Yeah, the best thing about it is just its ability to cross-reference. So it doesn't necessarily know how to get things started. It has some heuristics that work. If you have sort of a normal binary that runs in a normal operating system, it'll

know how to get entry points and figure out what library calls you're using in some cases. But in the case of CoasterMelt, I just had a binary blob. I didn't really know what processor it ran on or where it went in RAM or whatever. So I had to make some educated guesses myself. But then once I tell IDA, like, this is kind of a memory address I think this might load at, and this stuff seems like instructions, and this stuff might seem like an entry point, then it can start following those paths. And if I start giving it more clues, like, you know, this is a function or, you know,

this is a name for this variable in memory, then it'll start propagating those little bits of knowledge out to the entire program. So you can kind of interactively work with it to figure out what the program's doing. How do you know about these tools? I mean, you mentioned that you worked at Virtual Machines making VM. So I gather that's some of it, but have you always been sort of a taker-aparter like this? Oh, that's sort of how I learned how to build things, was by taking them apart. You know, I started with like taking apart the kitchen toaster. Well, yeah, yeah but i kind of after i got to the point where i was looking at the wires and maybe a serial port i was done you you went on like oh this is just the beginning let's go into these chips well i like i don't know i like kind of having um having a good mental model for

uh kind of as much of the stack as I can. So, you know, and some of this came from working on virtual machines. But, you know, my job working at VMware really came from a lot of hobby projects that were, you know, really similar in content. So one of the interview questions actually that we would use back in the day was, you know, you're sitting in front of a terminal with like a command line and you type, you know, LS or DIR and now, you know, explain in as much detail as you can what just happened. And, you know, the really thorough candidates would go down all the way into, you know, the keyboard microcontroller scans the

matrix and then, you know, send something across the USB or, you know, in this, in this case, it was mostly PS2 back in this day. And then, you know, all the way up through, you know, the kernel task switching and the shell and the, you know, the terminal emulator drawing characters into the screen and the graphics card. That's a really good question. Well, and it's, I don't know, I have weird feelings about this these days, because at the time, and this was probably like 2005 to like 2010 or so, that kind of stuff was just super interesting to me. And it was just, it was just what I lived and breathed. And, you know, software that helps with reverse engineering, it's just another way of, you know, getting inspiration for that. If you can see how someone else has put something together, then you can get some idea of what their process might've been like. And I especially liked this when I reverse engineered something that you could tell was made by a really small team or even by a single individual. There was a game that I was really into that was originally, I think it was originally Apple II, and then they made a DOS version that I played, Robot Odyssey. And it was all these little robots that you could

kind of climb inside and program by building these little logic circuits inside them. And it was an adventure game. You'd have to escape from this kind of sewer dungeon that you had fallen into, and that you'd kind of fallen out of your bed into this land that was full of robots and, and you don't know how to get home and you have to program these three friendly robots that you found to help you get out. And it was this really hard game. It was,

it was like all these levels and the hardest ones you had to like write the, you'd have to build these logic circuits that would have your robots go off and do things on their own. And then, you know, in these areas where if you tried to follow them, these like sentry aliens would kind of grab you and bring you back to the start. So it was really hard. You could totally do that with actual physical things now. Yeah, I got inspired a while ago to reverse engineer this game and try to make a new, like kind of a new adaptation of it for a Nintendo DS. Cause that's what I was working on at the time. And it was just so fun to reverse engineer

this thing and, and just see, you know, you can start to see all this code that you can tell was handwritten. You know, you don't see the patterns you would see from a compiler. You see things that almost seem like the kind of stylistic little ticks that you would notice if you start to read one author a lot. And then it starts to seem like you're seeing this artistic creation in this new way that, you know, this way that the creator saw it, but the creator didn't necessarily expect anyone else to see it. So in a way, reverse engineering kind of opens this door to see things in a new way. And it has a lot of practical uses. I mean, you can use it to find security problems,

and you can use it to find, you know, just bugs in your code, and you can use it to find ways of, you know, adapting other people's code to do stuff that it wasn't designed to do. So it's got all these sources of power in it, but I also see it as a way of understanding things. Thoroughly understanding that. Yeah. So you've made two videos, and the second video didn't end with, here's the code to go out and make beautiful CDs. Yeah, it didn't. Where's the third one? It's in the future.

It's that place that we haven't gotten to yet. So I don't know. I really wish I was better at making things in a regular schedule. But actually, the first two videos out there got to an interesting point. So there are some tools out there that I put up on GitHub now that you can download. And if you have one of these drives, which you can get for like $70 on Amazon, then you can start poking around inside it. So there's enough code now where you can kind of bootstrap your own software onto the device. You can kind of install a backdoored firmware onto it,

and then start running these commands in a debugger interactively and start poking around with the hardware. So if you're the kind of person who likes exploring a system on a chip with all these registers that are undocumented that can control lasers and motors and write interesting patterns onto disks, then it's just, it's kind of a playground right now. So in one way, I didn't necessarily want to have all the fun. I wanted to leave it open for other people to have some fun. The other explanation is that my life got really complicated right after I released, I mean, well, my life's been complicated for a while, but I ended up searching for a new house

like right after that video. So, I ended up kind of distracted for a while. And then you went into this artist residence, work art lifestyle loft. Yeah, that's sort of what I've been trying to do since the beginning of last year. But beginning of last year, I moved into this place in San Francisco that didn't really turn out so well. And then I tried again at the beginning of this year with this place in Emeryville. And so last year, I was trying to live with a bunch of other people and, you know, trying to stay in the middle of San Francisco. And a lot of that was difficult. And, you know, the roommate situation just didn't turn out well, as it often doesn't. But, you know, I had to flip that coin while it was in front of me. And so, now I'm

actually in my own place in Emeryville, which I'm setting up as kind of a combination live space for myself and artist studio and a place where I can kind of hold kind of more public events and workshops. So, I've already had one of these events in my space where I had 16 people over to kind of just learn some electronics and some programming. And basically, I want to get people started, you know, who are interested in, you know, incorporating interactivity and light into their artwork. You know, I want to give them kind of all the little technological bits they need to get started and not just feel lost or feel like they're just going to break something. Yeah, I noticed you were teaching classes and the classes didn't seem to be for engineers

who want to learn art and they didn't seem to be for people who are totally unexperienced who want to learn how to blink a light, which is a lot of the electronic classes in Silicon Valley seem to be, here's how you start. Yours were pretty tailored towards, you're an artist, let me tell you more about some of the neat things you can use to incorporate more tech into your art. Exactly. And I mean, the way I list these online, you know, I say, there's no prerequisites, but, you know, really having kind of having a creative sensibility to you, you know, I wouldn't say that's a prerequisite, but that definitely makes it more fun than if you were approaching it from a purely engineering standpoint. And I really want to give people just kind of almost,

almost think of it as like a, like a shell, just shell, just a very thin layer of knowledge that kind of surrounds this field of kind of making interactive art. So I don't necessarily have the time to give people a lot of knowledge about electronics or about programming or even about just physically fabricating these things. But I think if I get people started in all of those areas, then it takes away a lot of those barriers where you think, oh, I couldn't do that. Or if I do that, I'll just break something or I wouldn't know how to get started. And even if people haven't really actually necessarily done that much,

if you get them started, then they can take the next step. And that's what I found. I found a lot of satisfaction in helping people take that step. I know one of the reasons they developed Arduino was to make it so that artists could use it, that it was supposed to be simple enough that it didn't require an engineering background. What are you recommending? Well, so I guess the thing that I'm doing is sort of, I see it as almost kind of alongside What are you recommending? that it's just really easy to start putting together some code that then runs on this little board. But I guess one kind of downside I see to that is that you take people who are used to this very expansive environment where you have all these tools that can do wondrous things on the computer. People are used to doing things really quickly in Photoshop or Maya or processing.

And then you show them this creative platform where everything they're doing has to run on this little Arduino with kilobytes of memory. And it can be really daunting just trying to figure out how to take your ideas and how to map them onto that much smaller platform now. So I think Arduino is great, and I think people should definitely use it. But I want to basically create something that's more like a GPU for artists doing physical installations. So I want something where if you have a bunch of LEDs or maybe even screens, you have some way of creating content for those LEDs and screens in a way that is, you know, it's easy to focus on the creativity and like, you know, what colors and shapes and animations and movements do I want and not necessarily how do I turn this into code that can run on an 8-bit or 32-bit microcontroller. Well, wait a minute.

This sounds like fade candy. We were on this show many episodes ago. Oh, 60 episodes ago, exactly. So it was 41. Pink universes die really quickly. And you showed me these beautiful lights and the ability to control them with sort of via USB,

but they were the NeoPixels, the WS2812s that I now know are kind of a pain in the neck to control. And you had them dancing to your tune. What you're describing sounds like that. Oh, it totally is. It's all just a follow-on to the same kind of work, I think. And part of it is improving the platform, and then part of it is, um, you know, improving the platform and then part of it is the educational side.

Um, because the platform I have right now, Fade Candy, it's, it's something that, you know, it's, it's like a sort of open source platform that's, um, you know, pre-assembled that you can buy from Adafruit that comes with its own preloaded firmware. And it takes care of getting the colors from USB to the LEDs. And then you can write code that runs on like a laptop or a Raspberry Pi that, you know, implements your art. So if you have images or algorithms or movies or anything else that you're using to sequence your lights in as part of like a sculpture or an interactive installation,

you can write that code on something like a Raspberry Pi or a laptop. But I guess it's still been a stumbling block for people, how they take that and make it into a little self-contained thing that they can just hang on a wall, or turn into a costume, or useained thing that they can just hang on a wall or turn into, you know, a costume or use as a prop in a play. It's that thing where, you know, Arduino really offers something that you can embed into another project, whereas tools like processing or Max MSP that you can run on a laptop really offer this wide range of creative possibilities. But I still see this gap that exists between those. And some of that gap might be solved by new tools, and some of it might be solved by

just by new techniques, and maybe new software tools or new hardware tools. So I've been thinking about this and might be developing a successor circuit board to Fade Candy that includes more ability to run standalone animations. I think that's great. I mean, a computer is a great way to design things, but if I were to make something that I wanted to walk away from, I don't want to leave my computer there. And even if you put it with something else that's more powerful than a small processor, but less expensive than a full computer, it's still, it's a lot of stuff. Yeah. And I guess the Raspberry Pi combined with the Fade Candy right now works pretty well. But there's, you know, it's still kind of, there's a lot of friction because it isn't just, you know, you write a sketch and you press play on the Arduino IDE. It's, you know, it's now like an embedded Linux machine that you have,

you know, you probably connect it to a monitor and, you know, you plug in a mouse and, you know, you kind of fuss with it and get it set up and it works and you can totally do it, but I don't really like it. You know, I want it to be easier. So maybe the solution is, you know, a software package for the Raspberry Pi that makes this all easier. Or maybe this is is, you know, a software package for the Raspberry Pi that makes this all easier. Or maybe this is, I've also been imagining something that's like the current FABY Indie board, but that also includes enough processing power to run kind of like little shaders or like little kind of animation sketches on board. So it would be a lot like Arduino, where you're writing code that then gets compiled and loaded onto this little microcontroller.

But instead of writing a setup function and a loop function, it would be like you're writing a shader function that takes information about an LED's position or animation parameters and maps it to color. And then we take that function and compile it into something that can run on maybe like a 300 megahertz ARM processor. And that's now your wearable platform. And one of the things you mentioned a few minutes ago was the problem of mapping sort of the artistic vision to hardware. You know, an 8-bit or 32-bit microcontroller with some LEDs. And I encounter this every day where a designer comes to me with some sort of user interface design for a product, and it's extremely fancy and wonderful and full of whimsy and animation. And I'm staring at this ARM Cortex-M3 with a little bit of video display hardware, scratching my head going, how am I going to actually make this happen? And sometimes I can't, and I have to say, sorry, that's not going to work.

That seems like a difficult problem to solve for people who are not technically savvy. I mean, even if you provide all the tools, it seems like there needs to be another step where they can kind of visualize what's going to happen before it happens. Oh, exactly. Yeah, and I guess the way I conceptualize this is that either the limitations you're working under need to be sort of so broad as to be not worth considering. So if you're doing 2D art in Photoshop these days, then your pixel resolution usually isn't a problem. You can think about it if you want to, but you can kind of put it out of your mind. And if you're programming, you know, LEDs on processing, your CPU power is usually like that. You can just kind of put it out of your mind. But if you wanted to do the same thing on an Arduino, now you need some kind of conceptualization of what those limits are. And I feel like if, you know, if you're asking

a designer to create something for that environment, you need a way of having limitations that you can communicate to the designer. So, yeah, a big part of this is, you know, how do I create a tool that you can use to kind of develop and try out patterns and animations for LEDs? You know, I'm thinking this might be like a browser-based tool that has some way of giving you feedback for what your resource utilization is. Like you've used this many kind of cycles and this many kind of register slots or whatever we call them. And it would almost be like writing a shader where you can be editing code or editing some kind of node diagram or some kind of layer diagram or however it's displayed to the user. And then as the artist in this case is actually creating an animation, we can give them some feedback for how much of the system's resources it's utilizing. This reminds me of Scott Miller and his hula hoops that had all the different lights and how he was trying to make it really easy for hula hoopers to make designs.

He'd done this whole subsystem of usb and having it act as a mass storage class device so that you just plugged in your computer and pulled over your images and your patterns i that that when we talked to him it was like okay so how do they know what their patterns are gonna look like on the device he was struggling with similar things that, yeah, that's a whole nother project. The simulator is a huge project, at least as difficult as making the device. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, there's this sort of goal that I think most people I know who make these big light art projects have where, you know, you really want to have a good idea

of what it's going to look before you build it. You know, it's really helpful for one, so you can ask for money if you have a really nice picture of what it's going to look like. But the, you know, it's really hard to visualize this stuff. You know, I've used, you know, a couple of different 3D graphics packages, but, you know, accurately rendering something where you have just thousands of individual light sources that are all actually pretty small, um, current global illumination algorithms don't really do that especially well as far as I've seen. So, um, and then I've, and then it also depends on what they're in. I mean, are you looking at them under clear, which case they're pinpoints, or are you looking under some diffuse or some really heavy diffusion? It's going to make a huge difference to how they interact with each other. a while ago was sort of a kind of 2D tool inspired by that.

And I've tried to use 3D graphics packages to do that in 3D, but it's really tough. Just the amount of actual simulation involved to capture all the different bounces from all the light sources becomes kind of a lot. It becomes a physics project. You can do ray tracing, but you're going to get one frame per hour or something. Yeah, exactly. Well, so what I do sometimes is I'll do some kind of slow process, whether it's

in the computer or physical, to just get a photo of what the light from each LED would look like. And then, you know, so far I had this installation that I built in Toronto recently, where to map out where all the LEDs were, I, you know, would light up each LED, then take a photo with a DSLR, then process that photo into a map. But I also want to use that kind of data set for simulation. So if you can come up with a data set where, you know, you know, kind of what the light output from each LED was, now you can go in software, kind of recombine those into an image that simulates what it would look like to have a particular light configuration for one camera viewpoint.

So your art installation in Toronto, will you tell me about it? Oh, yeah, yeah. This was a project we did just like a couple months ago in Toronto at the TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival. They have a big building in downtown Toronto. It's really beautiful, you know, with like five cinemas. And every year they run a kids film festival. And as part of that kids film festival, they have kind of a pop-up children's museum with a lot of, you know, interactive games and experiences and kind of learning toys called the Digi Play Space. And so, this year they commissioned me to create the title wall for their exhibition. So, it's a big 16 by 8 foot wall, you know, LED lit, interactive. Interactive how?

So, the interactivity, I wanted something that kids could really put their hands on, because I guess I'm personally kind of frustrated with things that are just, you know, camera-based or screen-based. So this became something where there are, let's see, there are 24, no, 32 of these circular kind of spinners that are made of wood, MDF, that kids can kind of reach up and turn. And each one almost acts like kind of a paddle directing the flow of this kind of virtual fluid up through this wall. And this fluid is actually light. So, light kind of bubbles up from underneath the floor through these strands that kind of weave together and break apart. And as the light enters these kind of bubbles with the spinners inside

them, kids can actually reach into the spinner and turn it to change the way the light flows. And you can turn it slowly to kind of hold on to the light and move it just a little bit. You can turn it quickly and it'll actually kind of fling the light outward with centripetal force. So, the whole thing's got like a particle-based fluid physics model and it's controlled by all of these angle sensors that are built by actually reading the color off of a little sticker on the back of each spinner and then there are you know a few thousand leds embedded in between these layers of wood that then kind of you know spread out across a the back of the sculpture, and the light comes out

through holes on the front. So you don't actually see the LEDs. You just see this kind of smooth light that comes through the front surface. I don't think I'd actually seen anybody build an absolute position sensor with a color sensor before. It was a weird choice. I mean, usually you just use gray code and IR reflection sensors. But the space I had was actually a little bit tight for something like that.

And I would have to build a custom board, which would be another thing to add to the schedule. So this let me use these existing color sensor boards from Adafruit that have a little, you know, RGB light sensor and a white LED. And then just printed RGB stickers so that as you turn it, it actually traces out a little circular shape in an RGB color cube. And then it can just do some math to find a line that passes through the center of that circle and calculate the angle. So how difficult was it to design from another state? I mean, Toronto is not close to your home here. Another state?

Okay, so Toronto's not. I just don't want to offend the Canadians. It's true, no. From another country. Oh, I mean, normally it probably would have been terrible, but I actually had some amazing collaborators I was working with. I built this in collaboration with the new media department

at Ryerson University in Toronto. So I was designing, you know, I was like writing the software and, you know, writing software that then created, you know, CNC, you know, cut files, that kind of thing. I did that work from the Bay Area here. And I didn't actually see the piece in person until it was actually already assembled and up on the wall. They would send me photos and, you know, we would talk over Skype and we would, you know, we would send emails back and forth all the time. But yeah, it was both amazing and kind of nerve wracking. Amazing because the team at Ryerson, led by Steve Daniels and David Bouchard and 26 new media students, the team was amazing. And it was just such a pleasure to work with them.

And such a relief when I found out how good of an experience it was for everyone. It was also super nerve-wracking. Because I feel like I really like the balance between the design and the hands-on work. I find it really hard to just stay in the code or in the design the entire time. And I would feel it, I would find it unsatisfying to just build something that I didn't design. So I kind of have to have that back and forth. And so, yeah, just designing it and then trusting this other team to do the physical fabrication and a lot of the kind of manufacturability work and, you know, setting up CNC jigs and, you know, figuring out

all the details of like, you know, what paint to get and, you know, how to actually mount all the bolts and that kind of thing. You know, it was an amazing experience and I am really happy it worked out, but it was also much different than what I was used to. How many LEDs were in this? Oh. I have a video running right now. Yeah. It must be a lot. Yeah.

I'm actually, I don't know this number off the top of my head. I think it's in the neighborhood of like 3,000. You did say six foot by eight foot. And so it, of course. 16 by eight feet, yeah. Oh, it is 16. 16. Oh, that's why that guy's so short.

Okay. Yeah, it is beautiful. I saw the videos when they came out and I was just stunned because it just was something you wanted to touch. And it had such nice light diffusing everywhere and it did stuff. It's something that I, yeah, I'm pretty happy with it. I guess I try to make things that work on a lot of different levels. Like you can just kind of come up to it and see that like, oh yeah, that's a pretty light thing and then just move on and that works. But I've also had people just spend hours with it, just figuring out kind of all the nuances of how it works. And that's really gratifying to see, to see, you know, to see it working in different ways for different people simultaneously. You know, especially when there's a crowd and you can see one person is interacting with it in a particular way and another person maybe doesn't quite get that, but then they

see it, you can see that light bulb go off. Or when people kind of help each other out. You know, when a kid is getting really engrossed in one part and doesn't even notice that something amazing is happening three feet away and then they notice and then they run run over there um or when the kid asks for for help you know to get their have their parent like pick them up to to reach the spinner that's really high um you know those moments are great it seems it definitely seems like the kind of project too where you don't really know what it's going to do until you have it and you're surprised by something emerging from it i well that's actually that's something I try to aim for. I feel like, um, I want to say all my

projects. I hope that's true. I want to say all my projects, I try to surprise myself. Um, and that's true of the workshops too. Like I want to create an environment where I can take somebody who's never, you know, programmed LEDs or never, you know, soldered an Arduino before, and I want to get them to the point where they can surprise me. And I don't think it's that hard. Like, I think that the things that can surprise me are really the things that are about them. And it just takes giving them a little bit of skill and a little bit of confidence, and then you can really get people to surprise you. So I think that's easier than a lot of people think it is,

and I want to do more of that. So art engineer, is there something wrong with the word artist? Oh, no. I mean, well, yes and no. I don't know. I mean, artist is complicated, right. I mean, I, well, yes and no. I don't know. I mean, artist is complicated, right? I mean, nobody really knows what an artist is. Okay. So, Silicon Valley, and certainly here we have an artist community and we have a maker community and we have an engineering community. And sometimes that's all the same person. And

sometimes those communities don't seem to understand each other yeah how do how you definitely fit in all three how do you think they perceive each other uh i i think there's still a lot of issues that we as a community need to work out um well artist and engineer so those are two that look far apart and yet aren't as far apart as some people think. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I'm still trying to work out this conflict, like in my own life, like I'm feeling this out every day. You know, before I really had the confidence to think of myself as an artist at all, I don't think I really noticed much compassion for the arts kind of coming from a, like the kind of hard engineering part of Silicon Valley. You know, I remember this feeling that,

you know, and maybe this is just the part of Silicon Valley I was in, but this feeling of, you know, the engineering is kind of the hard subject and, you know, they're the ones doing the real work and everyone else is just overhead. And, you know, it's like the feud between like engineering majors and liberal arts majors in college, but still happening in the workplace today. So I feel like that's still out there, and there's still a lot of just misunderstanding. Engineering, I think a lot of engineers think art is easy and i feel like going to look at this project all 3 000 lights controlled with the physics simulation and big moving things and just the construction the fabrication is non-trivial do you think this makes engineers see art as requiring engineering? Well, that's maybe one of my semi-secret goals, yeah. Less secret now. Yeah, and certainly less secret. But yeah, no, actually, that's what I like.

Part of what I'm trying to do by looking, kind of pulling apart the cracks at the intersection between art and technology is, you know, I want to help both sides understand each other better. And yeah, maybe part of it is making some things that I really primarily want to exist because of their artistic merit, but that are also accessible to engineers, if that makes sense? It does. It definitely does. Because I am more drawn to art than I can look at from a little bit of engineering perspective, because that's what I carry through my life. And if I can get into it through that door

and then look around and be the surprised kid and say, oh, this is all beautiful, that is art I tend to appreciate more and for longer. Yeah, that's good. That's something I'm trying to aim toward. It's like, I want to figure out how to create things that, you know, I see good art as like a lot of roads that all maybe lead together and then branch back out. So, you have a lot of different ways all maybe lead together and then branch back out. So you have a lot of different ways to approach a concept and then it kind of brings people together, but then it also gives you inspiration to kind of branch back out and find something new. So ideally I'd want to

figure out how to do that for people with a lot of different backgrounds. And I think maybe what I'm bringing to this is someone who comes, I mean, I feel like maybe what's unique about my background is that I kind of happened to get really deep into engineering. So I have that experience, but I feel like, you know, maybe my personality is more geared towards, you know, creativity than just kind of pure getting things done. And what about maker? How is the word maker perceived in the art community? I don't know. I mean, I don't know if I can, I don't feel like I can speak for the art community. I feel like community has been really difficult for me for a long time.

Do you think you have to be in the art world to be successful as an artist? I mean, I hope not, because I'm certainly, I don't feel like I'm in the art world. I mean, I run into people who, to me, seem like they're from the art world, you know, like they went to art school, or they had like parents who considered themselves artists. I feel like I had that kind of driven out of me as a kid. You know, if anything, I had art teachers who were not supportive and made me want to avoid the field. And then I had to kind of rediscover it later. The thing that frustrates me is it seems like that there's become this dichotomy where you're

either an engineer or you're an artist. You're either a scientist or a liberal arts person. And I don't think it always used to be that way. I mean, I feel like... Da Vinci would say that, no, it did not have to be that way. In other eras, you know, people, they'd go home, they wouldn't watch TV, they'd sit around their piano or something from whatever job they had because that was the entertainment they had, or they learned to paint or something and it wasn't that oh i'm a painter so i can't do this or i'm a lawyer so i can't do art it was these are all parts of life and they all intersect and i i feel

like there's this this artificial sort of dichotomy introduced somehow whether through education or whether through uh some sort of cultural thing that's happened. And it's unfortunate. I definitely still feel this pressure towards specialization. So like, I mean, I've even got a project kind of going on right now where I, my intuition is to just, you know, do all the engineering and fabrication myself, but other people are kind of pressuring me more to outsource. And it's like what I'm realizing is that the part that I really like is the multidisciplinary part. It's the kinds of things that you discover when the same person is doing the creative side and soldering all the wires together.

And sometimes it's just extra work, but sometimes it really leads you to discover things that you wouldn't have seen otherwise. And I think that's valuable. But I think when you pursue efficiency, you often lose sight of that because, you know, you can be a lot more efficient to get someone who's more specialized in something to do it. Yeah, and that efficiency probably comes from, we need to make profit. Whereas art is, in some ways, the least profitable thing around most of the time, and very inefficient, but it produces things that are more profound, I think. Well, you still have that pressure for efficiency, though, just in terms of the realities of artists who have to pay rent and, you know, have to compete for funding. And it's, yeah, it's, I feel that idea that one person can have that can cross disciplines rather than

it being another example of, you know, I feel like a lot of these large multidisciplinary art projects tend to seem more like kind of civic construction or like architecture projects where like, you know, the art in it is kind of the idea or the concept, but then the implementation of it seems to be a lot more like the kind of large-scale manufacturing and construction that I'm used to in this country. Mike is going to have my Chihuly rant already all said before I can start. Sorry. No, no, no. It's nice to hear you say that, because Julie is this glass artist, and he's amazing and and he's done a lot of things but uh many years ago he branched out and now he very seldom has anything to do with his well he does the design but he doesn't do the implementation and i thought his work after

his he uh had an injury so he can't do the uh craft, and he does only design, and I think that loses so much. There's something special about being able to do the whole thing and say, this is mine, all of it is mine. And sure, maybe somebody else fabs the boards, or maybe you do allow somebody to cut some MDF for you and solder some wires, but I can appreciate that. No, no, I understand that's the boring part. I still want to do it because that makes it more mine. It makes it more me and it means that I can find these other things that would never have happened. Yeah, that seems really important to me. And it reminds me of, you know, that feeling of reverse engineering the software that was written by one person and finding that.

Yes, it's a connection. Yeah, I miss that. And I see so much, like, I see the opportunities for that kind of waning in the future as more things, you know, maybe become more anonymous, which it's weird because we have so much ability to share ourselves with the world, but the way the world's become structured now, it's like much harder to actually have an object exist that, you know, is because of a particular person. You know, we think of these things that exist as, you know, coming from, you know, a company so much more often than from an individual these days because it's just so much more often than from an individual these days, because it's just so much more practical. Even the things I work on, I don't feel as much like they are mine as I used to.

Although that's some because I'm a consultant and not an employee anymore. Well, even when I worked full-time on a thing, it was so hard to feel like that thing was actually mine. It was always, you know, some combination of, it was almost like the individual problems I was solving felt like mine, but the end result of it all wasn't. And that got kind of discouraging after a while. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I know that feeling. There's plenty of stuff that I've finished and shipped, and I'm proud of this artifact that we've built. And then I realized, but a lot of it's silly, or it was somebody else's idea, and I didn't agree with it. But I built it because they were the ones who were driving the design or who had come up with the product idea. So I was like, yeah, I solved all these difficult technical problems,

and I made this motor work and this laser and this timing stuff. And it was really cool, but the product was dumb. It's so disheartening. I find that's the hardest part about, well, definitely one of the hardest parts about working for oneself is that you don't have anyone else to blame. Like it's always kind of your own, at least for me, it's like so much of my own self-doubt all the time. It's like, oh, I could have just partitioned that off and focused on the problem and made it someone else's responsibility to be sure that this product actually should exist. But now I feel just responsible for the whole thing.

But that lets you do things that I don't think other people would naturally do. Like, going back to Coaster Melt, you decided you needed to build an entire ARM simulator in Python to break out the main CPU and talk to the board without having to program the one on the board. And I was like, oh my god, she just decided I'm going to do this and did it. I mean, I don't know. A lot of people would get to that point and go, I'm not doing that. That's way too much. That's crazy. No. Well, I mean, I don't know. I've, I've got a history of doing crazy things like that. Um, it was really cool though. I mean, it was, it was, it was crazy in all the right ways. Uh, this is reminding me of, I would, I would look for excuses to build hardware.

Um, even when I was working on software and VMware. We got the new Mac Pros in, like right after the Mac Pro came out. And, you know, there hadn't been like a powerful desktop machine from Apple before. And we were trying to get the VMs running on it, but everything would just crash right away. And it would crash in this super low level code that was like swapping out the entire state of the CPU. So you couldn't actually debug it at all. And I had the greatest excuse to take a soldering iron to that brand new Mac Pro and find some undocumented debug port on the motherboard. And I made some stupid little microcontroller thing where you could run some weird sequence of out operations and it would show up on a terminal somewhere. And that was the kind of stuff I really enjoyed doing. I would find excuses to do that as much

as I could. That is the fun stuff too. That's where I really dig in is when nobody's telling me I can't do that. Yes. Oh, well, you know, maybe I will disassemble this thing that we bought from somebody else and figure out where this code is instead of talking to their support because they aren't very responsive. Nobody's telling me I can't. So that's what I'm doing this afternoon. Yep. Yeah. And I mean, maybe that helps like, you know, getting this. I think I was trained to not really expect the support to be responsive and it would be easier to just take it apart and see how it works. So yeah, that was really common and might have been, I mean, that was where I got my IDA license. I got VMware to buy it for me because I used it a lot there. So you have made a living as an engineer and now you are making a living as an artist and to a lesser extent teaching. I don't know if that plays a huge role. Yeah. I mean, I'm still trying to figure out how to break even. I mean, I'm still,

I'm still to a large extent living off of savings from my past career. Um, cause you know, getting paid for making art is hard and I'm still getting started at this. So, um, I'm kind of expecting it to take some time before it's like profitable. And also it's pretty clear that I'm not doing this for the money, I guess. Because if you were doing it for the money, it would be almost easier to go back to writing code. Oh yeah, no, it would be so much easier to go back to writing code. If I were doing this, and this is maybe something I find frustrating is that, you know, now, if I were to go back and get the same job I had in like 2006, I think I would just be surrounded by mostly people who are doing it for the money. Whereas maybe that was less of the case before,

I think. I think, I don't know, maybe I'm just getting cynical, but I've been seeing a lot of people in the field who just seem to want to get into software and stay in software because it's lucrative. And I mean, that's just never really motivated me. And it now means that I'm surrounded by less people who have similar motivations. That feels like 1999,2000 all over again yeah I mean it's definitely happening more in like the web sphere in San Francisco which is not something you know I've never really been that interested in web software cloud computing yay

cloud aka other people's computers yeah see I see that but I also see all of the makers. I get exposed to the Hackaday folks and all the amazing stuff they do. And they're not doing it for the money. So I guess I do know some people who are still doing a really good job, but if you didn't pay them, they wouldn't do this.

They would do something else with their free time. But then there are all of these people. We have pictures from Maker Faire where there are huge lines of people who are doing this definitely not for the money. So, you know, I think it's some of each and where you sample from. This is true. Yeah, I found Maker Faire kind of difficult recently just because it's gotten so big and so crowded. I'm not somebody who likes crowds usually. Well, we're not going either.

Yeah. Okay, to switch subjects entirely, if you're amenable. Sure. You've been very upfront with your struggle with depression. Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's easier to be upfront with it in some ways. You know, there's always, you know, there's always like a potential downside. It's like if you share a problem, it's always a reason for people to stop talking to you or leave, you know, they can make it worse. You're giving them kind of this power over you. But I think in a way,

it also kind of alleviates the loneliness that comes with the struggle. So, it also just kind of goes with this part of art that I think is in a large part, just being as honest as I can about life and trying to share as much as I can. So yeah, whatever I can put out there that might help or at least, you know, might make me feel better sometimes. I think I have some serious problems with anxiety myself. And one of the things I've found is talking about it to people is how often somebody will come back and say, oh, yeah, I've been dealing with this struggle and I'm having the same. And it's surprising to me how many people are out there who aren't saying that they're having problems and yet they are. And it does make it a little easier because you realize you're not alone. Yeah.

The isolation is so hard. I mean, I think a big part of what made things worse for me last year was living in this place in San Francisco where I was surrounded by a bunch of other people who, you know, I moved into this place thinking that it would be a lot of creative people who were, you know, spending a lot of time being creative, but instead it was a lot of people who were spending a lot of time just like partying and, you know, being 21 all the time. And that just kind of made me withdraw even more. It's like when I'm depressed and then I'm in a house full of people who are having a good time always, then it just makes me want to withdraw even more from them. Yeah. And I mean, to be fair, I have walked the depression road a bit and not right now, but I expect someday it will happen again. And it totally sucks. And I do think we need to talk about mental health as a thing that doesn't just happen to other people. Yeah. Well, I wonder what, like what resources we can start building as a community,

whatever that means, like, you know, people who hang out together on the internet or people who know each other in real life in the Bay Area or whatever, like, how can we actually support each other? Because I've been around, you know, groups of friends who are pretty open about mental health and supporting each other, but then somebody's actually in a bad situation and it's still really hard for them to get help. Of course it is. I mean, even if you have supportive, close friends, it still doesn't make it at certain levels of intensity it's it's very hard to

understand what somebody's going through and so yeah saying oh you should go get help you know okay well that maybe ignores the fact that said person has been getting help for 10 years and they're in a bad spot right now and that's not the right answer for them at the time. And I do think it comes back to this engineering culture versus the art culture too, because engineering is a very logical, reasoned, scientific, rational profession. Emotions are for wimps. Emotions are for wimps. But for me coming up you know

as a as a kid through my education and having a real science background it's extremely frustrating to have a mental health issue because it's completely irrational and so i keep telling myself well this is ridiculous this doesn't make any sense none of the things that you're thinking are rational here's this logical argument why you know what you're thinking is is is false but it doesn't work because there's a whole there's all this stuff in your brain that's all messed up so uh but there are whole therapies that that's what you do yeah yeah cognitive behavioral behavioral therapy but you know all these things are a long struggle but i feel like in the engineering community it's not talked about

you know i don't remember talking to co to coworkers about similar issues at jobs. You know, might talk third hand about, oh, so-and-so had a real problem, you know, that kind of thing. I once told my boss that I was having trouble with depression and I was going to take a couple days off. He freaked out. And I was like, no, it's not really bad. I just can't handle this and everything else. And, you know know afterwards he wanted to talk about it all the time like no thank you but no yeah actually I've found that like the worst thing like actually the worst thing for me with depression

is people who mean well but don't know what to do, which is terrible because everyone wants to help, right? But so, like, I've off and on struggled with, you know, suicidal feelings for pretty much my entire life. And it's just one of those things that's just a fact of my life. It comes and goes. Sometimes it's worse than others, but usually it's not that bad. And this comes up in conversation with, you know, my housemate a while ago. And then this kind of freaks her out. And she's like, basically, oh, you just have to not kill yourself, like, for my sake. And that to me just tells me- No pressure. Just for my sake. Don't do it for my sake, but no pressure on you on that. Yeah, exactly. So, then that tells me, okay, I just have to completely not tell her about any of my problems because this isn't going to go well. And then some time passes and I'm having

a problem and I talk about it to a different housemate, which then ends up telling that person. And then before I know it, I'm like a hostage in my own apartment because she's threatening to call the cops unless I check myself into the hospital, which then actually happens. And I end up with a bunch of police officers outside my door while I'm trying to go to sleep. Folks, don't call the police for mental health issues.

Yeah, 5150 is not a good thing. Don't do it. It's not the right answer. They're not well-trained to deal with it, for one thing. Yeah. And especially in this case, I felt like a large part of the stress that had been building up to that was the feeling that all the people in my vicinity were just going to go out of their way to make it someone else's problem. And to just, you know, the kind of nimby attitude. And so, that felt like it was the same thing, except now they were

tossing me off to the cops, which is the last person I wanted to see Okay, so some people out there are thinking, yeah, okay, I don't have these problems but what if I am someone who is around someone who does? What advice can we offer to not get into the position of, I don't want to talk to you because you are putting pressure on me to change my brain, which if I could change, I would, I would, I swear I would.

How do we help people be more accepting? Because frankly, those of you who've never had this happen, it might. It doesn't just... It sneaks up on you. It does. it might it doesn't just it sneaks up on you it does and it's i think both anxiety and depression tend to be things that sure if you have it when you're a kid it tends to get worse but it can show up at 40 or 50 it can also be one of those things where just something really intense happens in your life and then things aren't really the same afterwards. Yeah, very much. The only advice I have, which is stupid,

is there's a website called Captain Awkward. Oh, that's great. And what they do is they provide scripts. You don't have to be the person that invents the my friend just told me she was thinking about suicide, what do I do? You go to Captain Awkward's site, you search around, you find the script that says, I don't want anything bad to happen to you. I love you. I'll support you. Tell me whatever you want. It makes me a little nervous. If there's help, let me help. But if I can't, that's okay too. I'm still your friend. And those sorts of scripts,

you may not know what to say, but they will give you a pattern to talk to. And so if you're around somebody who needs mental health help, go to Captain Awkward. It's a great site. Actually, if you're having trouble at work, it's also a great site to tell your boss to shove off in a very polite way. So that's one. But do you have, what would you suggest, what do you wish your former housemate had said to you or done for you? I mean, saying nothing would have been a lot better. Than calling the police, yes.

Yeah, I mean, that's, Captain Awkward is great advice. I'd forgotten about that, but it's a really great resource. And they're engineering background folks. So they kind of understand the social feebleness that some of us have. Yeah. I feel like so much of it just kind of comes back to like listening and compassion, which are often difficult for just people in general. But if you can listen and try to make sure that your friend feels heard without trying to solve the problem yourself,

then that'll help. Because, you know, the worst, like when you tell someone how to solve a problem that exists in their own head, it feels to me kind of disrespectful because you're telling them that, you know, you understand their head better than they do. Really, the thing that I have the most trouble with when I'm stuck in a pit of anxiety or depression is just making connections with people at all. So, you know, I don't want to say hi to my friends because I'm just imagining how bad it'll go. But if my friend says hi, then I'll probably enjoy talking to them. And, you know, I'll probably enjoy just, you know, going out for lunch and just talking about something unrelated or, you know, just talking about what I'm having trouble with, even if my friend doesn't have answers. I'm not expecting answers. I'm just expecting a connection.

And that's often tough for me because I want to fix it. Tell me your problems. I will fix them. Please don't tell me if I can't because then I just get super frustrated. But yeah, you do have to balance that a little bit of, okay, yeah, I have heard, I understand that sucks, I'm sorry. Hey, do you want to go buy shoes? Well, I understand where that comes from, too, because there's a semantic problem, right, with the word anxiety and the word depression. Because everybody says, oh, I'm really anxious about something, or I'm really depressed about something.

And that's the different level than the actual disorders. And so you say, you know, if somebody, you come across somebody who's having a problem, a real problem with anxiety and an anxiety disorder, and people tend to go to their own experience and try to help based on, oh, well, yeah, you know what works for me is this or that. And you're like, well, you don't really understand.

I'd like to destroy the world right now. And I really mean it. Being open-minded about other people's experiences is very useful. Yeah. So, yeah, I do agree with the listening because there really isn't anything you can do in the moment to help the person except very subtly guide them sometimes i mean sometimes my problems you know i don't want to go anywhere do not want to do anything i'm afraid of the world

but sometimes getting out and doing something does kind of shift the focus a little bit and and help but it's i'm not going to take the initiative to do that a lot of times. So it's kind of, it is kind of hard because sometimes there are things that do help, but nothing seems like it's going to help. Yeah. I mean, and sometimes the right answer is often very roundabout.

Like I'm actually seeing a therapist right now that I'm having a really good experience with, but I had the hardest time actually making that first appointment. Like, it was like, you know, sitting on the roof with a friend at like midnight and like sobbing and asking them to make, you know, not even asking them to make the appointment, but, you know, very, very tentatively getting to the point where they could, you know, put themselves in the position so that I could carefully ask, very tentatively, oh, could you, it's so hard. And so, if you can do anything as a friend to

make that process easier, it'll just mean so much. And if you are seeing a therapist and they aren't working, get a different one. Yeah, some therapists are terrible. Most people have to go through half a dozen therapists before they find one who can actually help them so if you're on trip number four and this person hasn't started to make you feel like you want to feel maybe just try out a different one that one's been very tough uh i think for the two of us finding somebody who we can talk to who we like i mean i had a there i had a traumatic experience and had really bad depression for a little while and went to a therapist and she helped mostly because she kept telling me that what i was

feeling was normal after such a such trauma and then at the end she totally ruined it. Like, we were saying goodbye, and she said something that just was like, I'm surprised this ever happened to you. You seem like such an organized person. Ah. And I just, yeah. That's terrible. It was. It really, really was.

And so, you know, you have to, therapists are human too, and you don't. Well, and there's all sorts of human too, and you don't. Well, and there's all sorts of different styles. And that's something I didn't realize when I first started doing therapy was these are not all the same. It's not a doctor where you go and they have, you know, this is how you give antibiotics for an infection. It's, well, you've got your psychodynamic people and your cognitive people and this. And these guys are going to talk about your mother and your childhood and blame everything on your past. And these people don't

care about your past. They just want to look at how you're thinking now. And some of those things work for some people and some work for others. And I didn't realize that. So, you know, for years going and saying, why? This is not helping. It must be me. So yeah, definitely, you know, after a few months, if you're not feeling like something's happening, but then again, you got to go through that whole thing again. Now I have to find another one.

And tell them the whole crappy story all over again. Yep. And wonder if this one is the one who's going to call the police because they've decided you are the crazy one. What? I don't think therapists call the police. They are. if you're... Well, it's never happened to me, so I'm not going to...

I hope not. I hope not, too. Well, so, should we go back to technology, or should we just cut it there? That's the thing with the electrons that move. Yeah, the electrons, they're like little particles and they go off of waterfalls. Yeah, actually, I really miss the old,

the Forrest M. Mims books. Oh, we rated Radio Shack. Yeah, going out of business. Our local one is going out of business and they had all the Forrest Mims book for half off and we just, this one, this one, this one. Oh, that's great. I still, when i'm when

i'm talking about kind of how i learned electronics i still like to slow show a slide of of his books reading through them recently i keep finding things i'm like that's how you explain it that's such a better explanation than i've ever managed and i don't really have a strong electronics background so i'm learning a lot too. Force memes books are awesome. Do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with, Christopher? That's the question you asked for the guest. Great! Christopher,

do you have any more questions? No. Micah, do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Oh, so if you have a 3D printer and you like cats, you can 3D print some bolts for my cat. I'm sure he would enjoy them.

Yeah, your cat. Your cat has a problem. He's a little atypical as far as cats go. And you had a video of this. You throw the bolt and he really fetches it it just like a dog does with the tennis ball. No, I think he likes the mouthfeel. Like he grabs, um, like the threads of the bolt between his teeth and the hex part is usually sticking out and he'll, he'll, he, he, so I'm, I'm standing at my desk, like

working and he'll meow and drop a bolt at my feet and then like rub against my foot and then I'll throw the bolt and he'll run excited after it and and bring it back to me so I discovered this by accident when I just had a bunch of these lying around from an old art project and then I found out that he likes the 3d printed bolts from the file from McMaster car even better than the original ones so I've just been printing them for my cat when my printer is idle what What kind of 3D printers do you have? So a while ago, I got the Thingamatic and have upgraded it a bunch, and then it kind of broke.

And now I still have it for like ABS stuff, but I recently got a Type A machine, Series 1. And I've been super happy with that. I really like the nozzle design, and it's got a big build volume and it runs off of BeagleBone Black. It's been a good design. Did you get another mill?

I do. I also have another mill. I was kind of gearing up the new shop with tools and I was really, really tempted to get a laser cutter but I decided to stick with the combo, the, uh, combo of 3d printer and small milling machine. So the other mill is really nice because it's, it's small, but it's super accurate. So you can mill circuit boards with, um, I think 10 mil space. Um, and you can also do, you know, small kind of 3d milled parts. parts. So I want to also use it for doing light pipes milled out of acrylic, which you can't do on a laser cutter because it just leaves a really rough surface.

So have you made boards with the other mill? A little bit. I haven't done a real board project, but I made some example boards. They had a lot of really neat examples. Yeah, it's a great machine. I've been really enjoying that and the Type-A machine printer. Excellent. My guest has been Micah Elizabeth Scott, art engineer. Her website is www.misc.name.

So that's www.misc.name. And it was really cool. You should go check it out. We'll have some links to some of our art projects as well as some of the other things we've talked about. I am so pleased you came back. I'm so happy to be invited. Thanks for inviting me. And thank you also to Christopher for co-hosting

and producing, and thank you for listening. If you'd like to say hello to any of us, email show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. Final thought this week is very relevant from Leonardo da Vinci. The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.