Embedded - 130: Criminal Training Camp

Episode Date: December 17, 2015

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) spoke with us about laser turrets, tearing down quadcopters, flux capacitors, the moon, and culture at work. Alvaro's blog Alvaro's github repositories including Proto-X quadcopter information, Silta bus monitoring, and Skype video message exporter for OSX. One of the inspirations for taking apart the Proto-X was watching Micah talk about herCoastermelt project. We talked to her about it on episode 101: Taking Apart the Toaster. One of his reasons for going to Planet Labs was knowing Shaun Meehan, check out his Amp Hour interview. Daemon by Daniel Suarez Video of Supercon talk on laser shooting robots Podcast Award nominations open in early 2016

Welcome to Embedded FM. I'm Alicia White alongside Christopher White. This week on the show, we have the giggles. Also, we have Alvaro Prieto. If you don't know him, well, now you will. Before we get started and maybe to calm down on these insipid giggling attacks, I'd like to remind you that the podcast awards are coming up and that I really want nominations because I'm some sort of competitive dork. So that's happening in January. Please keep your eye out. And now...

Hi, Alvaro. Welcome to the show, or whatever this is. Hi. So tell us a bit about yourself. I'm an electrical engineer, technically, but I write firmware for a living. I also make stuff at home, usually in areas I know nothing about. So mechanical and sometimes firmware and electrical and stuff like that. Yeah. Engineer.

All right. Well, I think there's a little more to it than that, but we'll get into that. And before we do it, I guess we're going to do lightning round again. Okay. Are you ready? No. That was question one. Yes.

Okay. So these questions are going to be fairly short, and the goal is one-word answers, which we may ask for explanations for later, but we'll try to keep it, you know, snappy. Christopher, do you want to start? No. Okay, favorite programming language. C.

Programming language you think colleges should teach in the first class that cs majors are required to take python i like that those answers aren't the same uh do you already have star wars tickets no what mac or pc mac android or ios ios Mac. Android or iOS? iOS. Object-oriented or procedural? Procedural. 4 p.m. drink, champagne, coffee, or Mountain Dew? Champagne. Oh, nice. Bendy straw or straight? Straight.

I don't know. I thought you enjoyed the bendy straw. You can bend straight straws. Introvert or extrovert? Both can't be both depends hacking or making depends no no this is you asked for one word answers and you're getting them i don't think depends i mean diapers or depends diapers what okay so going back to the bendy straw thing yeah alvaro did not grow up in the united states he was unaware of bendy straws existence well how come on the champagne train. You were fascinated by the champagne straw. It was champagne with straws.

Oh, that was the incredible part? That was very incredible. Yes. Only America has bendy straws. In a train. Slytherin or Ravenclaw? Whoa. Ravenclaw. Jar Jar or Ewoks?

Ewoks.oks favorite airport oh it can be international or domestic you can hate all airports Christopher does Zurich I'm out

alright well which is most important to your daily work? Saturn, iron, keyboard, or mouse? Keyboard. For work, do you do hardware or software? Both. If you have to choose just one? Software. For fun, do you do hardware or software?

If you have to choose just one? Hardware. Your Twitter description says traveler. What's your next goal destination? Oh, my next one. I'm thinking about going to Patagonia once I can walk again. And I've also always wanted to do Trans-Siberian Railroad. Well, you don't need to be able to walk for that. Nope. But there's other things you need to walk for. Okay, so for those of you who aren't in the studio,

which is pretty much everybody but us, Alvaro came over today, and I had this grand plan of getting him to help me maybe get a Christmas tree, because Chris wasn't able to. And Alvaro shows up with a cast on his leg. And I ask, how did you end up with this on your leg? So we had a work holiday party on Friday and I danced too much.

That just really, we should have done that instead of lightning around i mean that just says so much about you uh yeah it's not the first time so where do you work uh planet labs i believe we've heard of them what do they do they make tiny uh earth imaging satellites to take pictures of the earth every day. The whole earth. That's a goal. And they're tiny and they're cheap and they fly in flocks. Yes. Who works for them?

Who works for them? No, just me. Oh, I mean, I do and a bunch of other great people. He's only been there a little while. That's true. How long have you been there? A month and a half. Where were you before?

Apple. Apple. Apple. Yes. I asked you to be on the show a long time ago, and then you said you worked at Apple, and I'm like, oh, never mind. Yeah. What did you do at Apple?

Most firmware engineer in an R&D group. Can you tell us anything else? Depends. Come on, you don't work there anymore. What are they going to do, fire you? I got a very nice letter after I left reminding me of all these things I signed. Yes. You guys designed the battery with the hump, didn't you?

No. Nobody's going to take credit for that one no some of the things i did one of them got mentioned like side mentioned on a wired article actually which is kind of neat um but most of the stuff is either not released not public or non-existent. Or not legal. I... You probably should say no. No?

It's one of the things about working for a startup like Planet, is that they really can't not use your work. Yeah. I mean, your work has to go into space, because... Otherwise, why am I there? They can't afford having any extra stuff,

including people. Yeah, it's great. So what are you doing there? Right now, I'm part of the manufacturing tools, reliability kind of area. So I'm automating all sorts of things for testing satellites before they

get launched. Well, before they get built even. Just making sure they work. Which is sort of important even though they tend to launch a lot of satellites.

It's kind of launching is still really expensive. Yes. It's just now that this year is going to be Mission 1, which is going to be like over 100 satellites,

you can't just wing it as much anymore because if there's one flaw and they all have it, that's a lot of money. So do they all get launched? When you say Mission 1, hundreds of satellites, is that one launch with all those satellites? So there is going to be one launch with uh our bunch of our satellites and that way we can get the orbit uh that we want so sun

synchronous that way they're always taking pictures at the same time of day um right now and previously it's mostly launches from the iss or whatever rocket you know has extra room. And you might be one, two, eight, twelve at a time. And launches from the ISS means that... They throw them out the window. They actually just throw them out the window. Almost, yeah. They actually go into the ISS and these deployers and then the astronauts mounted on the Canadarm or one of those.

And then they open up the door and its spring spring loads out it's really cool it's really cool there's a video of it uh an astronaut talk which is really cool how close do they end up staying to the iss that whole time then because they don't they don't have a lot of velocity but i guess their orbits decay well they're going the same speed as iss initially which is yeah so they actually use drag because there is some atmosphere to separate the satellites out. And then you can use that too. It's like they have little wings and can use... Solar panels.

Solar panels, yeah. I got a tour and it was very cool. Patrick was great. That was part of my reward for asking if any of our listeners wanted to work there. I didn't even... That didn't even click when I started there that people asked me later, oh, was it because it's a podcast? I'm like, oh yeah, I totally forgot.

I should have. You actually knew somebody there, Sean. Sean and Alex, yes. And Sean was on The Amp Hour that time with Chris where, with Chris Gamble. Yes. It was like six hours long and it started out in Antarctica. It was awesome. That was one of the best shows.

It involved giant robots as pets. They are so cool. Yes. Yes. But yeah, I mean, I heard about Planet way back with that show. And then another friend got a job there. And then I asked him to get a tour a few months ago and then they asked me to work there.

And by accident your tour included an interview. Yeah, it was pretty sneaky. So you do a lot of off hours hacking or making, which I guess depends. Yes. You know, I started the bendy straw story and I never got back to why diaper versus depends was funny because depends are adult diapers. Oh. It's a brand name.

Not aware of that. Explaining the joke. Yeah, but like 10 minutes later, it's like the brick joke. Yeah. Okay, so hacking or making, you've been doing a lot of stuff. What have you been working on? Most recently, I built a flex capacitor, a portable flex capacitor for the holiday party.

It was Back to the Future theme. The injurious holiday party. Yes. Injurious, whatever. Okay, so a flex capacitor, did you travel through time? I wish. You're a holiday party. Yes. Injurious. Whatever. Okay. So, flux capacitor, did you travel through time? I wish. I could go back and tell myself to not dance so much.

But no, yeah, so that was a kind of weak project because I had no costume. So, it's easier for me to build a flux capacitor than a costume. It's true of so many things. Well, that's what I know. Give me fabrics and I will fail. So this was mostly lights, box, controller. Yeah, some WS2012Bs. I cut them up, put them inside some tubing, spray painted a box,

and used a 10C I got at the Hackaday conference and made them pretty colors. Yeah, it was very simple. How did it go over? How people liked it. What were other people dressed as? A guy was dressed as a DeLorean, which was really cool.

A lot of Marty McFly's's doc browns and any rick and morty's yes yep there is yep uh okay so that was a recent uh project but there's been a lot more yes uh you were the guy who took apart the quadcopters oh that was about a year ago the proto x's yes um well one of many but um yeah i i don't know why i did it i guess i was bored and had one and went left alone too long with a little tiny drone yeah it was in december so probably not much going on and i had a I don't know I had a few and seemed like a good idea at the time didn't have any dancing to do

well I was recovering from hip surgery so I couldn't dance yeah so these are the quadcopters they cost about 30 bucks they come with a controller and they're about the size of half a deck of playing cards yeah

they're small i mean really small they literally fit in the palm of your hand yeah um and you not only took it apart and looked at this stuff inside you also looked at the communication what did you find there yeah so i i don't know where i got the idea but i wanted to kind of uh steal them like basically be able to take them away um just for fun so i figured okay if i figure out the radio protocol i can build my own controller and then depending on how that goes i can use it to control other people's quadcopters. So since I have no radio experience, I just tap the spy lines on the radio and use my salient to look at the packets. Then I generate more traffic

and then I figure out what the packet does. And then I remove the microcontroller from one of the remote controllers and I connected an STM32 spy just to basically use the controller as a radio. And then I could control it from my computer and then I made it a mouse and keyboard control, which is the worst possible control for quadcopters.

It's not very intuitive. No, it's terrible because the mouse is great. If I had two mice, it would have have been great but computers don't like that um you would need to go straight and like write your own driver i guess um but i was able to control like forward back left right with with a trackball actually and then the up and down was the keyboard which is discrete so you have to click click click up and then it's going too high and click click click down and you overdid it and now it's crashed and um then after that i got a ps4 controller and then i used that which was much better and i think you guys saw that at the bring a hack dinner um and the most i did was kind of a denial of service thing so i was able to sniff the kind of uh not really key exchange but they agree on a number and they use that to

not really encode but just to address the packets so if you were able to listen to that initial pairing when you turn on the remote you can sniff the packets and also transmit as if you were that i just don't have a powerful enough radio so all I could do is push a button and then the quadcopter would crash. Well, I... Which is fun. Yeah, I can see how that would be quite amusing and possibly useful to some people for larger quadcopters, but that's a separate issue.

That's a whole other radio, but yeah, that's something I would like to do if i had more time so you don't you you just decided this was what you were going to do one weekend yeah it's it's one of those things that you're like oh this is this would be neat i started doing it i put a little bit a lot of other stuff online and then people say oh that's cool or oh i was trying to do that and that's very encouraging so then it's like all right i'm gonna double down and actually do it and then post the results so it seems like you could have expanded that and i don't you probably already thought of this and control multiple at once or yes record and playback so you could dancing

dancing quadcopters if you want yeah so the the problem with the little ones are oh i get it um the problem with the little ones is um the control is not great so if you could control many at the same time they're probably crashing to each other because you have to trim them differently um i thought about many ways of doing kind of either visual feedback of sorts to be able to control them remotely but know where they are that way you don't crash them because they have lights yes so i thought about lights with video but i had a weird idea with like an array of microphones because they probably have a unique sound to them um certainly after that one crashed into the little ball of cat fur it had a very different sound yeah um but i again i the things i haven't done so you have actually been

recently working on using camera to identify things with the oh the shooting robots yes yes tell me about shooting robots so this is actually one of my earliest projects um not the laser one but back in 2006 right after i graduated from high school i heard about um defcon the conference in vegas and they had a defcon bots robot contest um and i thought it was the coolest thing it was bb bb guns autonomous bb guns that would shoot at these targets um i had absolutely no experience i was right out of high school i could program in q basic and visual basic php q basic was still a thing in 2006 i started in 2000 i'm still boggled so in 2007th grade i when i moved to the u.s i uh i learned q basic so i uh this robot contest seemed amazing but it was like i don't know anything about motors or anything so my dad's friend was gonna go and do it and i thought oh

maybe i can work with him. He initially said, yeah, let's work together. But then kind of backed out, backed out on me a few weeks out. So I just like, I'll do it anyway. And I got a webcam mount with some servos, a USB servo controller. I destroyed my dad's only webcam at the time and I put it all together and then I went to Vegas by myself to the competition I ended up getting fifth out of six which was incredible because it was mostly much older people or teams and it was a great experience again I had no idea what I was doing but I was able to have a little robot shoot these targets autonomously. And these were infrared lit targets, which was much easier to see. I basically put some developed film in front of the webcam and all the light was kind of oranges, orange and red and infrared was white.

So my image processing was not an official basic. And since I didn't know how to interface with the webcam, I was able to tell the webcam to take a picture and it would save a jpeg and then i would read the jpeg and i would split the image and i would saturate it so you just had black and white pixels and i would split the image into just a grid and i would count the number of white pixels and move in that direction until the number of white pixels was in the middle and then i would just shoot until the light disappeared so that's how i started um i did that one year and then i went to college and then uh the competition stopped happening after a few years i couldn't make it because i was traveling and working every summer during college so i couldn't couldn't go to vegas

for five days um and two years ago they said they're bringing it back but this time it's with laser beams so not shooting bbs they're just aiming the laser yeah it's a different kind of dangerous um well so so the first year it was these ping pong balls on a model train and it was five ping pong balls that would light up blue and they would move around in this train track and you had to shoot them all you had to do was shoot them um this year it was same train a little bit faster but it was a green laser and it was always on laser and hitting the targets with the laser was not good enough you had to actually send a 9600 baud encoded message with your kind of your player id to um actually register shots so it's a little more complicated um yep but you participated in

yes with the laser one yeah well i did the laser one, I guess, 2014. 2014, I had, it was a laser cut robot with a friction drive and like little pulley and belts and gear motors. And that one was, we got first place that time. And I won a really big quadcopter, which I later built. And I still haven't reverse engineered that one the radio but it was parallax something or other it's huge scares me and um yeah i tried it in my room tied to a chair just to see if it worked and it was terrifying and then this year i wanted to completely change the design and i used the laser

with mirrors with galvanometers which is super fast but the whole image processing is different because now the camera and the laser are completely separate from each other they're not before i would move a camera and the laser together so So the laser's always hitting, you know, pixel X, Y. And now the camera's static and the laser's moving. So it requires a little more math, which is fun. But again, you've got to learn it. And so did that go to DEF CON or is it going this year? It went this summer. And we got third place, I think.

We had a problem the modulating the laser it wasn't registering the hits uh during the final round so yeah that was fun what is defcon like i've never been oh it's a lot of fun um it's a lot bigger now when i went in 2006 it was a few thousand people now Now it's well over 10. I don't know if it was 15,000 or something people this year. Um, it's, it's a hacking conference.

So they have tons of security workshops, talks, all sorts of stuff. I mostly go to hang out with people and, and have fun. Um, the competition was great. Now they have the dc dark net which is kind of a

live rpg of sorts where you i don't know if you have you guys wrote the book demon by daniel suarez nope oh well it's based on a book it's really it's a great book actually um but they you basically they had a soldering kit you you put it together and you can actually exchange keys with people so it encourages some social interaction because you have to go exchange keys then you get points for that and they use that to um you have to go report the keys back to the demon which is this you know computer program somewhere and then it gives you quests to do so okay your quest is to learn how to crack uh wpa encryption um or to learn how you use pgp or use tor and you have to learn these things to prove that you did them and then you get points for it so it's a pretty interesting game where you have

to you have to learn how to lockpick. So there's these lockpick boxes and for every lock you peg, you get more points. So it's kind of a side thing to DEF CON that's a lot of fun. This year, it's like 600 or some badges were made and people just run around and do all sorts of fun things with them.

So who usually goes to DEF CON? It sounds like it's a criminal training camp. A little bit, yeah. I mean, I went when I was 18. Please don't do anything to me. It was a joke. Everyone. Oh, everyone's super nice.

I mean, there's everyone, right? You have the business types. you have the government people, weird hobbyists like me that security is kind of fun, but I don't really do much in that area. I always wanted to as a kid, but never really did. Well, Natalie, I mean, you spoke to Natalie. She's a regular. Natalie Silvanovich, theagotchi yes deconstruction person um i mean she gives workshops there hardware hacking stuff like that

um so it's like a less businessy black hat which black hat is like a super business oriented very expensive conference where people go learn about all the latest security things. And DEF CON's more fun, I would say. There's tons of parties as well. Yeah. But I mean, it's just like any big conference. Well, mostly dudes. And there's talks, there's workshops um yeah so this gets back to a question i had for you about culture um you went from apple which has a very defined and secretive culture

to planet which i mean doesn't... Doesn't. It doesn't. I think they describe themselves as hippie scientists. They're definitely on a path to do good in the world and maybe at least break even if they're lucky. How are these different places to work i mean that i i uh i know what everyone else is doing which is new at apple i you might not know what the person next to you is working on that's a thing silos um very very silos um at planet everyone talks about everything we might not be able to tell the public about

everything we talk about but at least internally it's it's incredible everything i know because they're just super open about it they're super honest they tell us oh we're if they're money stuff they tell us um if there's all the business stuff all the technical stuff if they have problems they tell everyone every monday we all get together during lunch, and every team will come up and talk about what's going on. I really like that part. A lot of startups are more transparent with the money side of things because a large part of your compensation ends up being stock options,

and you need to know how much it's worth and blah, blah, blah. I still don't know how that works. It doesn't stock options. Yeah, it's all fuzzy. Oh,

now I feel like we should go through the snow white guide to, to stock options. They're actually going to have a little thing next week for us. There's a bunch of new people so all right well uh but there's what else is different um i mean some of its geography apple was in cupertino san francisco and so there's just some innate mental change and And I don't live in San Francisco. Oh, that's fine. I don't know what makes those two an hour apart and mentally more than an hour apart.

Yeah, so I used to bike to work all the time, which I can't quite do anymore. It would take me a few hours. The location, yeah, it's very different um Apple had everything I mean I could go to the doctor right down the street like a block down I could like cafeterias all over the place people everywhere um a planet in San Francisco it's a small company right so you can't afford doctors and all these things. And they bring in food, but it's going to be, everybody's going to have some food that's all the same.

And Apple, you got all the cafeterias with their different menus. Yes, the food was really nice. So that's different, but I mean, those are just kind of perks, which everyone has different perks like planet has free massages right apple we had to pay for them but it's you know whatever somebody out there is laughing really hard i know like well it just just things like that it's um it is different but i i i mean it doesn't really affect my day-to-day that much. What about tools?

Resources, yes. We have budgets now. It's great. Yeah, we have to be much more conscious of, you can't just, oh, buy whatever it needs to get the job done, which is great, but if you're trying to make money first, you've got to make money first you gotta be careful um also resources just uh like intellectually right at apple i i worked for one of if not the best firm

engineer of the company which a planet it's it's very few of us that do firmware right so you don't have like your traditional mentors and these kinds of things, which at the same time gives me much more responsibility where I actually have to do these things and think about them. I can't just wing it and then, oh, hopefully they'll tell me if I'm wrong.

Now it's a little more serious, I guess, if I screw up. So this is your first startup. Yes. Do you find you're getting more done in the same amount of time? And do you find that you have wider classes of things to do? Wider classes? Wider classes of things to do.

Yeah. Things that you may not have even considered that you needed to do at Apple because there were 50 million people all doing little things. Well, I was at an interesting team at Apple. It was like an R&D kind of internal, you could say internal contracting team. We did work for all these different teams, so we were always doing different stuff.

But at Planet, it's pretty similar, where I am sometimes working on satellite hardware, sometimes just doing scripts or server stuff. We have a tools team that does all these great things, but they're busy sometimes, so we have to do it ourselves. And if you need something, you just go get it and make it. So, yeah, I mean, I guess I'll end up doing more stuff at Planet. When I went from HP Labs to Crossbow,

which was a 45, 50-person startup when I got there, it was like going without a net. I mean, I understand what you're saying about not having backup and not having all the tools. You get to try all of these things you didn't expect to. I mean, I had always believed that version control was an important integral part of embedded software, but I had never had to choose a version control system,

which was what I did the first day at my new startup. Was that before Git? It was long before Git. Before the dark times. Before CVS? I chose the nifty, shiny, scary, new version control known as SVN. Oh. And never regretted it.

But yeah, I mean, you go from having to implement X on a system to having to implement a system. And it is a little daunting and freeing. And you're not a pigeonhole. You're not a pigeon in the little hole anymore. Now you can try it all. Find out if maybe server-side scripts is actually more fun than what you were doing. No. Well, no, of course not.

But, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are things that are directly affecting the company that I get to do now. You know, if I do something very well, it's actually going to do a lot of good. Whereas Apple, if I do something awesome or terrible, maybe no one will notice. of like my team will notice bags of cash in the bank it's not all cash though i mean you can't solve everything with money um what it's it's true um you you can you can try but it's easier to solve things with money oh yeah

it's definitely much more comfortable but then there's a lot of waste that goes with that as well. When you assume you have so much money, then you're just like, Oh, I just buy all these things and you never use them. Why? But yeah. Yeah.

It's different. It's different. Yeah. I like them. I like them both. I mean, it's a different experiences. Apple But I like them both. I mean, different experiences. Apple is learning tons every day, just so much.

And now I'm actually applying all that stuff that I learned, whether I liked it or not. Well, there's, yeah, there was some reasons to go back and forth from big companies to small companies. Because you do different kinds of learning in different spots and it's often hard to learn the theory stuff that you might have been getting in apple while you're applying the things i mean you sometimes you can learn both at once but sometimes it's just really hard to do both for yourself well a lot of the lessons i learned at apple while i was doing it you my boss would say, oh, why do you do it this way? Why do you do it this way? Why don't you do it this way?

And at the time, you're like, okay, that's what they told me. And sometimes you look back and you're like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm also, I mean, I haven't been working that long, so I'm still in the, whoa. Well, before Apple, you worked at TI, so it's not like you just have built lasers that spit fire uh robots that spit not yet not fire fire will happen do you have plans for actual fire spitting robots i i was joking but what i give a gle. I have a lot of butane cans.

Amazon, yeah. I have to do something with them. Is Amazon shipping your packages in butane cans? Well, no. I got an apple. They had breakfast. I still want to know how this is going to lead to butane cans. Well, exactly.

So, I had this awesome breakfast. I would get there at like 7.30 every morning, and they have an omelet bar. And they would do it where the salad bar usually is, which means they don't have grills. So, they have these portable stoves. And I wanted a portable stove because I have an electric stove at home, and I wanted a gas one. And I figured if these guys can do this every day for two and a half hours, these stoves are probably the best. So I saw which one they had and then I bought one and that takes butane cans and they're pretty expensive locally at like the

Japanese supermarket. So I got Amazon and Amazon was like a 24 pack maybe. And it was really cheap. Think of how much money you were saving. Again, it seemed like a good idea at the time. So now I have them and I don't cook as much as I thought I was going to. Yes. Yeah, so anybody who has suggestions for Alvaro and his 23 packs of butane, can. Just email the show. has suggestions for Alvaro and his 23 packs of butane. Can. Just email the show.

We'll pass along whatever you're. Well, we'll think of something. Think of something. Didn't the Amp Hour last week talk about how you should have exploding boards, that that should be part of your curriculum? No? I haven't. Oh, okay.

I'm behind. I'm a week behind. That's always what I say, too i i'm pretty good i have a very long commute it's true i've listened to so many podcasts i've read so many books it's great uh okay so before ti you worked for National Technical Institute for the Deaf? You looked at my LinkedIn? I did. Oh. I cyber-stalked you just a little bit. Well, yeah, so that was actually at school.

That was a college job. I went to Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, RIT. And NTID, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, is kind of a partner with RIT. So, like, most of my classes, we had interpreters. And there's an entire college devoted to, like, hard of hearing and deaf people. And I worked on the website there. So, I would walk down, like, the next building from my dorm, and I did web development. Yeah, PHP,

ColdFusion. It's terrible. ColdFusion. It's a thing for web stuff. You don't. Just go on. Alright, that's good. Christopher, do you have a question ready? No. Because I don't.

Let's see. What show is this? I know. Well, we got the giggles and then i got all distracted uh let's see i think we met we probably met before this but the first time i was like this is alvaro and he's cool we should have him on the show was uh when we took the champagne train to san francisco Emil and Jen Castillo. And I brought champagne in cans because

that's the kind of class act I am and you can drink on the train. We're going to a party. That was for one of the Hackaday hardware developers didactic galactic. Yeah, we might have met at Sophie

the party Sophie did that was the Sophie party yeah she set that up to announce last year's Hackaday Prize right and it was fun but I have since found that you know like everyone

like every time I'm like have you met oh yeah alvaro hi how are you and you're just like how does that work i don't know i don't like talking to people what advice do you have for people who'd rather prefer to sit in the corner and play with their phones instead of dancing on the tables and hurting their legs i did not dance on the table this time this time this time no i'm i'm i'm kind of like that too uh when i don't know people i'm actually pretty shy once i'm introduced to someone all bets are off and you won't shut me up but i am terrible at like introducing myself

that's why whenever i know people that i think are awesome they don't know each other i'm like hey talk to each other and because if someone did that for me i would talk to them um so i kind of feel like if you know people that are fun and they don't talk much get them talking to each other and then leave and then leave what good does that do you well it's gonna help other people meet each other i guess i don't know no i mean the core of that they'll do it to you another time right maybe they'll know people and then they'll introduce you i don't know i feel like no the core of that your advice there i i do agree and appreciate um it is a lot easier to say hi have you met my friend yeah instead of hi i'm somebody it's just so much easier to yeah push it off or go meet someone with a friend like oh let's go introduce ourselves or just

it's less creepy when it's creepy when it's not just you. If it's a group of people, like, oh, look, there's someone over there. Let's go talk to them. But if it's just me, I just stand there. Oh, groups are the worst. How do you break into a group? No, no, no. So, let's say there's one person there, but I don't want to just go by myself.

I'm like, hey, look who I am. I don't know. I got my friends. Hey, let's go talk to that person. So who should I have on the show next year? You were the one who suggested Natalie and she was great. Yeah, Natalie's awesome. Wow, there's a few people.

I should have written. I thought about these on the way over and, um, all right. All right. I will. Have you talked to her from punch through design? No. Okay.

Oh, they're great. They're also, they do, uh, the, have you, the light blue bean?

Oh yeah. Were they at the hackaday thing this week yeah the hardware developers die why did you name it that chris gammill i might have been matt frederick both of you yes you know them both so um but yeah they're great um let's see it's okay i didn't really mean to put you on the spot like yeah i will get you a list uh and you have been working on a new project silta oh that started two weeks ago yes um it's that's actually bridge and finish um i the word silta means bridge oh in finnish um i the word silta means bridge oh in finnish the language yes sorry i thought we were finishing something no no no and finish done no no no the the word silta is i i worked in finland for a bit and they have really cool and weird language and so i have this project that's um

i mean i don't know if you've used the Bus Pirate. I'm familiar with it, yeah. Yeah, so it's basically when you're working with a sensor, you need I2C or SPI. You either have to get another device that speaks that and then write some code and then test out the sensor. And, oh, is my I2C code not working or is the sensor not working? And it takes a while. So there's tools that you can buy to do this, but I didn't have any.

So I had a lot of SCM32 F4 discovery boards, and I've used them a lot. So I'm pretty familiar. I already have code to get a USB console up and running. And so I made this bridge that basically lets you talk i2c spy toggle gpios do analog inputs digital outputs all um through usb and you can do like a serial terminal just type the commands in or i wrote a python wrapper around it so you can just open this Cilta bridge and say whatever.itc and you give it a list

and then it sends the packet out and then you can prototype sensors. Actually, I'm using this at work for testing stuff, but Planet is totally okay with me doing open sourcing. So it's great. And so you put this on GitHub or Hackaday? Yes, that's on GitHub right now. There's no documentation at the moment

oh i see i will document it all right there's a readme file with how to use it but i haven't documented all the functions and stuff it's been kind of a mostly work on it on the train actually it's been a busy six weeks since you started a new job yeah it's been it's been crazy because the hackaday conference thing happened and i thought it was going to be a lot smaller right it was well it was small i i know but they said oh if you give a talk we'll give you a free ticket i'm like okay oh we can get a free ticket and and then i found like it was a few hundred people and like oh that's a lot for me you talked about the laser turdine system yeah is that right yeah they they um i submitted two talks i had submitted either

quadcopters or the proto x reverse engineering or the robot and they asked me which one i wanted to do which i said both but you know there's no time um and you said it depends because yeah it depends on the audience everything depends it's all relative right uh yeah they said it was more about making so making laser shooting robots i would consider making proto x i would consider hacking because i'm like taking it apart i'm not producing anything quadcoptery but i'm like figuring out how it works i did write some software on the side, but I guess that's how I differentiate it. With making it something completely new from scratch that I built

and hacking and modifying something to make it do something else. Or taking it apart to understand it. And then modifying it. And then modifying it to do something else. Yeah, that was actually... Oh, I know why I did the quadcopter now it was um um micah's uh coaster melt yeah the the dvd writer project that was that blew my mind when i saw those videos and she got firmware dumped the firmware and then put it in a bitmap file or something, and then you could visualize it

and you could see, oh, here's the instruction, and this and that. That just blew my mind. So I wanted to learn reverse engineering with a simpler project than I happen to have the quadcopter. Okay. I do remember now.

It wasn't just the drinking. So did you end up using... What? I'm asking a remember now. It wasn't just the drinking. So did you end up using... The drinking? What? I'm asking a question now. Yeah, okay. So did you end up using those techniques on that project or did you start hacking it and then just do your own thing? It was mostly my own thing. It was just to learn.

It was mostly inspiration because those were much more advanced than I've never decompiled with IR IR these encrypted firmware and and I thought I might get to that point but I didn't have to so I never had to dump the firmware because I just tapped the the radio and it was a lot easier that way but yeah that's what that's what the inspiration was no that was a very inspiring video because it was like, this is possible? Why didn't I think this was possible? Of course it was possible, but I didn't ever think.

Yeah, Micah does some of the coolest stuff. Whatever is going on right now with, just follow Micah on Twitter. She's got some neat art thing going on. When I watched those videos, I thought it was science fiction. She actually. He's got some neat art thing going on in San Francisco. When I watched those videos, I thought it was science fiction. Because it was like, it was just this, you know, I've done this kind of engineering stuff for a long, long time. And then watching that, I was like, okay, that's, what? Yeah.

What? Oh, I'm debugging with the power button or something. And yet it was all like, it wasn't 50 steps beyond where I couldn't understand it. No, but it was a different way of thinking. Yes. Yes, it was very different. Yeah. And neat.

Yeah, that was super, super cool. Okay. You brought things. Oh, they're upstairs. Oh, all right. Well, tell us about the things you brought us to play with. Pretend you have them because nobody can see. Yes, they're upstairs. Oh, all right. Well, tell us about the things you brought us. Pretend you have them because nobody can see. Yes, they don't know.

I'm telling you. Oh, I brought some stereo pictures of the moon. Yeah. From 1949. Yeah. So this just gets weirder and weirder. Yes. And I guess people, until you see it, it's hard to understand.

But you can't just take a stereo camera and take a picture of the moon in LVM3D. Yeah. Because it's too far. Very far. Yes. There's no difference between your eyes. But this is kind of a viewer where you look at it and you can see the craters and everything. It's sort of like a professional version of a view master.

You can see the curvature is really pronounced. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So you can see the curvature of the pronounced yeah yeah so you can see the curvature of the moon and the craters and everything and this was actually done by my great-grandfather um in 1949 and some of the pictures for example the left eye was the left picture was taken in february and then the right picture was taken in august and he has little

it's not absolute latitude and longitudes but it's a difference between the two points but basically he had to travel a great distance and get the timing just right to take these stereo pictures of the moon and not just he tried just doing the distance thing but that didn't quite work he also had to take into account the position of the moon because i guess it shows you a little bit different sides depending on the time. Well, you can't just take a picture, get in your car, drive for a few hours until you're far enough away. Because the moon moves. And then take another picture because...

Yeah, it follows you. Darn moon, it just keeps going. Yeah, so my dad just mailed me that this week and he asked me to figure it out and see if my friends could configure it out so am i i'm gonna try to figure out how to scan the the photos and we already have all the other information i'll put it online at some point and and see if the internet can figure it out well then figure out how to do this again with digital photos that would be sort of neat yeah that'd be cool so i don't know i don't know if it'd be much easier

um because i was thinking oh you could take it now we could take a picture at the same time from two different places but that might not be good enough because then you'll you won't get the the moon different sides right so that might not be quite the same this is the resounding silence of us all trying to figure out if this would work i mean he didn't have gps there so he had to do gps didn't exist exactly we hadn't even been to the moon right like the moon this is pre-polluted moon you know before that darn armstrong got there i i saw i sent it to some friends to work and and the first thing they say, they're like, oh, that's before I was littered with robots and illegally parked vehicles.

Christopher, do you think if we... I don't know. If we talk to people on the East Coast and say... You play Kerbal, right? You can figure this out. Well, what? You have a degree in physics. You keep reminding me.

Yeah, no, I was just wondering about you were mentioning the shift of the rotation of the slight shift in rotation it's called libration and I don't know if that really matters as much because yeah I'd have to think about it yeah because even if you're 100 miles apart relative to the distance to the moon

that's not that much right well I was thinking 2- a hundred miles apart relative to the distance to the moon that's not that much right well i was thinking two three thousand miles apart yeah but then the yeah i guess you'd have to wait then you wouldn't do it at the same time right because you'd have to do like an hour after moonrise or whatever yeah it reminds me of some imaging techniques that astronomers do sometimes when looking at distant objects, is they actually take advantage of the Earth being in different places in the orbit, so they can take quasi-stereo images, but they can see the object moving more or less, depending on how far away it is. But yeah, that'd be an interesting project.

If you figured it out without computers and GPS, we should be able to. I don't know if we will be able to. I think I was saying before, it's kind of embarrassing. We think we're so damn smart. I don't think that. I'm just like, I have no idea what I'm doing. Film camera and some paper and a map. Well, that's what I want to also figure out.

The coordinates are relative. It doesn't have an absolute latitude and longitude. Maybe I could figure out where he did take the pictures because we know where the moon was at that time he actually used a weird time zone it says gct which i think was something gibraltar civil time and apparently that was the thing back then i don't know so we gotta figure that too. What time base was he using? Sorry, I'm trying to frantically solve this all with Wikipedia in my head. And I keep coming up with 404s. Oh.

I get 500 server errors. Yeah, all right. Well, I want to go play with that now that's it yeah do you have any more questions Christopher no just thanks

thanks for shaking your head for that that's one thing that doesn't hurt when I move your head poor Christopher never sneeze never sneeze and never get old one thing that doesn't hurt when I move. Your head? Yes. Poor Christopher. Never sneeze. We're never getting a Christmas tree. Never sneeze and never get old. You can get a little Christmas. Oh, I have

ideas for Christmas trees. Yeah, this from the person who's only got one working leg. Oh no, I have like four and a half meters left of the RGB LED strip, so I was gonna coil it, do like a cone of spiral um just have like a wire yeah no they actually sell those that's no fun well and i never want

to find out people sell things and then you don't want to do it exactly you were all sad when somebody was finally selling my idea from 2004 oh i know that's because you could have sold you could have made a lot of money on it. Yeah. Did you see the little sad corner they were in? That's just my greed. Yeah, sorry. Oh, no.

I don't do Christmas trees anyway. So, it's like I might have done it just because it was cool, but it's been done that way. Sorry. That's okay. I have too many other things I want to do. Exactly. Do you have something else you're excited about yeah no i mean the the moon data project sounds very cool but that's definitely that's not hardware so no that's different um well at hackaday conference

i met um michael osmond and he had not the hackety bash. He had something else he was wearing and I asked him and it was purple board, of course, and he, he said, Oh, this is the great fat. It's like the good fat, but great.

And I asked him, what is, what does this do? And then he said, Oh, this is a, I just started working on it it's going to be kind of a prototyping device that you know you use usb and python and then

you get itc but this one has high speed usb this guy with the lpc3 something or other that has a dual core processor and um all sorts of cool uh cool things oh high speed usb 5 built-in which is way cool um so this is a kind of like celta but better so i want to kind of do that instead and actually do it right and fast and awesome and he's got a bunch of connected boards you can connect to like radios and um all these other things and it'd be cool to work with other people for a change it is motivating it is hard yes sometimes it's hard to do stuff on your own yeah no that's why i post everything online because otherwise i'll do something and i'll do something else but if

people are like oh that's cool, then that is really encouraging. I mean, one of my other projects that it's pure software, I don't know if you use Skype at all, you can leave video messages. So let's say you're not there, someone calls you, you can leave them a video message. And I didn't know about this. And then my uncle, it was, a couple years ago, said,

oh, do you know how to export and save the video messages? I'm like, oh, I'm sure you just right-click it and save as. No, you can't. You can't save the video messages. And then I found out they're not even stored in your computer. You download them from Skype servers every time. So I looked into it because i was trying to help my uncle and i found out there's some sqlite database in your computer with some urls and then you could

go copy that url and download it so i wrote an app to automatically do that and just you run this it opens your skype database it finds the links, and then it just downloads them. And I sent it to my uncle, and he was super happy. So I was like, oh, maybe I'll post this online. Someone else might be interested. So I put it on the Skype forums. And this was for Mac, of course, because that's what I was working on at the time.

And then it became one of the top Mac posts because everyone was trying to figure out how to do it. And everyone was so thankful about these, like, oh, I can now export my messages. Because not everyone can go up an SQLite database and figure this out. So if it's like my grandma or something. And I thought that was great. You know, I'm really glad I worked on this project. And then I get a message, one of those.

So, you know, my dad just died and he left left me a video message and i was able to export it and now i have a forever kind of thing and then it was like okay like uh yeah that makes it all worth it which if i hadn't published it i don't know But it makes me want to make more of these things. Having people to talk to and having people encourage you is, I think, critical to getting us through those times when it'd be more fun to go to the beach or to read a book or have a beer and watch TV. And so it's this, it isn't external motivation. It's still internal motivation, but it's encouragement. Encouragement makes the world go round. Yeah, no, it's, yeah. I mean, I love movies, so I watch tons of movies, but. Oh, so do we.

Yeah. I'm not saying that it isn't useful to sit down with a beer and TV. It's totally. Well, you got to turn off the brain for a while. Sometimes, you know, it's also fun to build something just because you want to. Or because you have an uncle who says, I have this problem.

That's the most fun. When you're helping people solve problems, that's the best. Which I don't usually do with lasers. That's kind of just for fun, but occasionally helping people solve problems and shooting lasers. Those are the best. Yeah.

And quad copters, quad copters are a lot of fun. Yeah. All right. Um, I think we'll, we'll close it up. Do you have any final thoughts? I just need an Advil oh lucky i can't take advil so i'm allergic um final thought um i can't believe i'm the only able-bodied person in this room

we're we can add each other no i'm useless from. I'll take your leg and we'll have a half useful. Final thought. Yeah, don't be afraid to make stuff, I guess. I mean, a lot of my home projects have been in areas I know nothing about. And that's the ones that have been the most fun. Whether it's laser shooting robots or quadcopters or even the Skype thing. I mean, I knew nothing about SQLite and all these things.

The most fun projects are the ones that have been most enriching, I guess. Yeah, my best projects have been the ones I did knowing nothing about it. And I feel like some people are not inclined to work on things because they don't have the experience. Or they're afraid to break something. Oh, break it.

Yeah, I'm learning that. I'm learning that breaking things is actually kind of fun. Yeah, I've given up. It's worth just breaking it and learning from it. And then just record it. If you are going to break something, including yourself, record it. That way you can put it on YouTube for other people to learn. Yeah, that's my final thought.

Is there a video of you dancing? I hope not. Maybe. I don't know. Come on, Patrick at Planet Labs. Come up with this video for us. We'll link to it. Ooh. come up with this video for us. We'll link to it.

My guest has been Alvaro Prieto, engineer at Planet Labs and maker and hacker. It depends. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. And thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting despite his extreme pain. And thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting despite his extreme pain. And thank you for listening. Hit the contact link on Embedded FM if you'd like to say hello or email us, show at embedded.fm.

I think that's enough for this week. We may all need some more alcohol. Or beer. We'll see. So the final thought to tide you over until next week is from Frida Kahlo. I used to think I was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought there were so many people in the world. There must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same way as I do. I would imagine her and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too.

Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true, I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you. Embedded FM is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logico Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there.

Do not receive any revenue from them. At this time, our sole sponsor remains Logical Elegance.