Embedded - 147: Bolts for Tuco

Episode Date: April 13, 2016

Micah Elizabeth Scott (@scanlime) joined us to talk about her new art and engineering projects. Micah's site is misc.name/ and her YouTube channel is micahjd. She launched a Patreon page. Wiggleport has its own site (wiggleport.org) and github (github.com/wiggleport). Check out the art in the repo! The Bela project on kickstarter has some overlap. Micah will be keynoting the 2016 Open Source Hardware Summit in Portland in early October. Her Eclipse project (video) was at the NEAT exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA.  Micah has been on Embedded.fm before: 101: Taking Apart the Toaster (mostly aboutCoastermelt) and 41: Pink Universes Die Really Quickly (mostly about FadeCandy). Micah mentioned Boldport and the kit-of-the-month club. (Video of her building the first one!) Also: the BigClive channel on YouTube. Thank you to Planet.com for sponsoring the contest. Check out Planet.com/careers! 

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Eliseo White. My co-host is Christopher White. And this week, we are happy to have Micah Elizabeth Scott back with us to talk about art engineering. Before we get started, Planet Labs makes satellites that image the entire Earth daily. They're looking for embedded engineers to work on their onboard software, onboard their satellite for their newest flock of satellites. I went to Planet not too long ago. I got a tour, so I have a few things to say from experience.

These are nice people. Alvaro was on our show. We talked about the moon photos photos and it was super cool. Sean was on the Amp Hour talking about his difficult to house robot pet. And those two are just really nice people. Everyone I met there was nice and I wanted to talk to them more. And the tour was all satellites and art, space and beauty. They call themselves space hippies because they don't necessarily want to do those things that you don't necessarily want to do. I'll leave those lines there and you can draw in between them. Overall, the tour made me want to work with them, though

the commute to San Francisco is not in my cards. There are some openings in Berlin too, but that also seems a little far. But for you, now's your chance to apply. Get your foot in the door. Take a tour. Definitely take a tour. Check out their careers page, planet.com slash careers, and email them embeddedfm at planet.com. Don't be shy. Try it. They can say no, but you might still get the tour. For putting their advertisement in the show, Planet is letting me give away their stuff. Two copies of my book and two of their t-shirts will be awarded. They may also send some of those neat Planet and Blazend laser-etched coasters, but you may not get them.

You know, there are perks here. To enter the contest, tell me where on earth you'd point your satellite. Kevin said he wanted to look at archaeological sites to find the outlines of ancient foundations. Jonathan worked on a project that involved counting trees automatically. He's got some ideas for planets ever improving imaging systems. And I think Kristen likes to test boundaries. So what's your idea? The winners will be chosen randomly.

Get your answer in by April 22nd, which is actually coming up soon. Yeah. And send your resume to Planet. Hi, Micah. You still here? Yeah, I'm still here. Happy to be here. Sorry, that was a bit long.

Thank you for coming back. It is always good to have you with us. I'm so happy to be here. For our new listeners, could you introduce yourself? So, I'm Micah. I've always kind of built things. Since I was really little, I've been interested in hardware and software and taking things apart and putting things back together. And that's led me in a lot of different directions. I started running this blog a while ago where I would just make projects and post them. And then when I got older and I graduated, I started working in Silicon Valley. But since then, I've been doing more random stuff and just kind of publishing whatever I can that'll help other people find their creativity with technology.

And you've been doing art, a lot of art. Yeah, I mean, it comes and goes. I think art has a cycle to it. You can't do it continuously or you start hating it, but I've been doing a lot more of it lately than before. And you've been doing videos lately. Well, in late 2014, I did a couple of these videos, part of a series that I called Coaster Melt, which was sort of reverse engineering this particular optical drive. And that was kind of an interesting, really intense, deep dive into something. And it was hard for me to do that specific kind of video really sustainably. And of course, at that time, it was this kind of thing that I did did on a lark and it didn't turn into a sustainable kind of series, but I liked it enough that I've been trying to figure out how I can do more of it. And recently I finally had the right combination of time and motivation and equipment and space

and everything to be able to just make more videos and start doing it on a regular basis. Okay. I have some specific questions about the videos, but we should do lightning round before we get too far into it. Oh, am I supposed to go? Then I have to choose this one again. All right, fine. Dinosaurs, bring them back. No? Yes. Yeah, I mean, they're already here, right?

We've got birds. All right, fine. Do you listen to podcasts? Yeah, I like podcasts. What's your favorite? So I think it depends on whether we're talking just like video or audio. As far as audio podcasts, I think it's probably a tie between this show and The Amp Hour. Although I also really like 99% Invisible.

Yeah, I can see that one's really cool too. How about video? Because I don't watch a lot of video. So I'm curious. Yeah, I've been finding, you know, I like video from sort of an informative perspective, but I also really like video that makes me feel like, you know, I'm just kind of like hanging out with someone, working on a project with them. Sort of like this idea of parallel play, where even if you're not working on something together, it's just nice having someone keep you company and doing something that is kind of similar. So along that line, you know, I like EEV blog from Dave Jones, but I think my favorite YouTube channel along those lines has been a Big Clive's channel. And I think he's on, I'm terrible at geography, but I think he's on an island somewhere in the UK and he just, he takes things apart. He, you know, he makes

weird light fixtures. And he buys weird things on eBay and talks about whether they're safe or not. And he does all these random things. But I guess I like his style. And I like having that kind of, not necessarily like a teacher or a mentor, but even just kind of somebody who's going to hang out with you and work on similar things. Cool. I'll have to check that out. Let's see. Hardware or software? I'm going to have to say hardware. This would have been a tough one for me for a long time,

but I think lately hardware makes me mad a lot less than software. 8 or 32 bits? Oh man, this is also a tough one. And I think in the past, I probably would have said 8-bit because I just, I love them so much. And that was really what I learned on. But nowadays I'm probably going to have to go 32-bit just because I really just, I have so much more patience for processors where you can use pointers normally. And it's just nice to have a regular kind of linear address space. Like you can get on pretty much any 32-bit processor, but not a lot of 16-bit processors or 8-bit processors. They're just so easy. It feels sort of bad that they're so easy.

Kind of. I mean, it's almost like, I mean, one of the things that really struck me about ARM when I was really learning that was just how much it seemed like the processor itself was geared toward the C programming language, which it was just such a departure from other processors I'd used. Form or functionality? Oh, man, I'm going to have to go with form because I often I think I look at more things than I use. Making or hacking? Hacking, definitely. making or hacking hacking definitely i think making gets you know making is all about uh i think making gets gets easier after a while where hacking i think it keeps challenging you least favorite planet i mean pluto isn't even a planet right that would have to count

all right you're just gonna kick it while it's down Pluto isn't even a planet, right? That would have to count. All right. You're just going to kick it while it's down? I mean, yeah. Tabs or spaces? Always spaces. How many spaces are in a tab? Are in a tab? Zero.

How many spaces should a tab be replaced by? I'm going to make you mad and say three. Three. No, no. Four. Always four. Three. No, I worked somewhere that used three tabs.

It was terrible. I think it was one of those compromises that they made just so that everyone would be mad. It really sounds like one of those. I want two. I want four. Okay, fine. We're going to use a proportional font too. Six spaces. Most important daily work.

Soldering iron, keyboard, mouse, pencil. Cat. Definitely cat. Cat is best at knocking anything on the floor. If I want any of those things on the floor, cat can do it. Yes. Mike is cat too, Kost, has his own Twitter channel and sometimes a voice in the video. Yeah. I've been starting to collect videos of him occasionally, but he's just always on. Like,

if I was recording him all the time, he would need his own YouTube channel. Artist, engineer, or teacher? Oh, man. I think this is also something that would change depending on what month you ask me. But I think the thing that keeps coming back more often is teacher. It's just hard because I don't always know how to do it. And there's this part of me that really likes being the kind of lone tinkerer, you know, just ignoring the world and making something, you know, on my own. And I guess one challenge I've had lately is how to do that while also being a teacher, because that's a lot of what I enjoy, you know, how to convey that experience to other people.

What's a day in the life like? Oh, a day in the life. Let's see, a good day, a bad day, a normal day. A good day a bad day a normal day a good day a good day um all right so you know maybe wake up at you know between eight and nine or so hang out with my cat for a bit have coffee and a bite to eat and and then i'll often do some combination of, you know, researching things online that are related to projects that I have going, you know, building something, you know, editing video. I think I really like having a range of projects around so that I can find the thing that fits my mood more so than forcing myself to do things that I really can't make myself want to do. And of course, you have to do that sometimes, but I feel like that's been one of my goals in life is to try to figure out how to fit

what other people expect me to do with what I want to do more often. I understand that. I had a friend recently who was telling me about how much, who's a contractor and she wanted to retire and I was like okay here have permission retire but she instead she was waiting by the phone because she still had the thought that she had to be a contractor and so it was like giving yourself permission to do what you want. And then if you know, if somebody calls, then go ahead and you can, you can always go back. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people are afraid of like, like, I don't know how pervasive this is, but I at least feel like people are afraid of, of leaving this world where you have, you know, continuity on your resume. And if you go off and

do your own thing, or you do something that you don't know how to describe to people that you're suddenly going to be untouchable in some way. And I just haven't really found that to be true. I mean, if you're following your passions and doing things that you're actually interested in, then you can always explain that. And that's always going to make you better at what you're actually, you know, better at being a person, really. Yeah, I think the truth is, if you're doing something, that looks good. And if you can explain it, if you said, well, I took three years off to, you know, watch every television program from the seventies, that's probably a different thing. Well, and maybe that'll help if you're, if you're going into a job where that's relevant, like, you know, maybe you're like one of those people who trawls through video clips to prepare

things for the daily show or whatever. And maybe that helps. But yes, if you can find something you want to do, it is so much easier. Both to keep the enthusiasm level up and the rest just, I don't know. Yeah. I totally understand. I've got like 12 projects going and it's because, it's not because I don't like any of them. It's just because today I want to do this. Yeah. I think that's, that really ties into why I've been finding the video so rewarding lately. Um, like when I do a project for a client or when I, you know, when I'm like working for a big company or even a small

company, they almost never care about the same parts of the process that I care about. It isn't about, you know, the aesthetics of that experience that you're having with you and the thing that you're making and the entire world of possibility around that. You know, that doesn't matter at all. And so, the thing that I really get into and the motivation that I have for doing this thing is kind of running kind of perpendicular to what the client or the employer wants. So one thing that I like about videos is that it kind of takes a different spin on that. And it's not so much about the end product, but it's about how do you take that experience and that journey and kind of magnify it as much as possible so that people can see

the parts of it that you're interested in, maybe the parts that they're interested. I watched your video where you took the very first of the bold port kits and put it together and i i admit that i i thought i heard about the kit thing and it was like okay sure not my cup of tea probably fun for some um but then and then i've seen videos watching people build things. And again, it was like, all right, maybe not for me, have fun. But watching you make it, I was like, oh, it's so nice to watch somebody else solder. How do you, how did you get the idea for doing that? Oh, I mean, I feel like that's one of those things that I would have liked to do for so many reasons. How did you get the idea for doing that? take the thing that I like about it and share that with people. So, to try to almost turn it into a bit of a photography project and, you know, how do I take that kind of tactile experience of

putting this thing together and appreciating all the details and how do I share that with people? Because you talked about how the board was laid out and why it was important and the Boldport folks, Sarge Rimmer, is that his name? I had seen one of his boards. It was a seahorse and not straight lines for wires was just kind of blew my mind. And then this kit is just, it's got all these different options and wiggly lines and yeah well i think it's it's partly that that particular like that fact where he breaks from tradition like that itself is i think part of what he likes um so the next kit i think he's about to start mailing them out um and it's going to be different but still kind of unique in its own way and it's i think the next one takes inspiration from the the cordwood construction

style that was used on like the apollo computers and some other early, very dense circuitry. And so it takes something else that's very strange and that you wouldn't use nowadays, but has this kind of historical and aesthetic relevance and kind of tricks you into appreciating it in a new way. Tricks you into appreciating it. Yeah, okay. But how important is it that the boards be pretty? Well, I mean, I think it depends on, like, from what perspective you're asking that question. I mean, I think for Saar, it's important. And I think, you know, in some of my work, I think it's important that the boards are pretty. And when Saar likes his boards to be pretty, I think I appreciate that. But that feels like a personal

question, like, you know, what color solder mask to use or something. Excuse me, I need to write that down for the lightning round. You know, something looks aesthetically pleasing that's often a shorthand for this is well-designed too. It can be. I mean, I think, actually, I think I've heard Saar talk about this. I forget whether it was in an interview or one of his videos. But,, people who are experienced with electrical engineering will kind of see his work at a distance and not look closely and think, oh, that's know a lot about high-speed design. Like, that used to be his thing. But, you know, now he is focused more on that beauty that isn't just, you know, for the electron's benefit, but is something where you can see that internal beauty, but you can also create something that has surface level beauty that people can see. So, I mean, maybe that's why I like his work. It kind of approaches a similar problem to what I'm trying to solve where, you know, I see that interior beauty and I want to bring that out so that other people can see it,

but I also want it to have that exterior beauty that gives you kind of an inroad to see the stuff that's inside. So there's one project that really makes a lot of sense with your work. The NEAT project, Eclipse was what you submitted to the Jewish Contemporary Museum and they had an exhibit. Yeah, the exhibition was called NEAT, New Experiments in Art and Technology. And it was kind of a follow-up to an earlier exhibition, Experiments in Art and Technology, EAT, which I think was in the 60s. And it was a great exhibition full of, you know, a variety of different artists working in kind of technological media. I think they included a range of artists from, you know, kind of their late 20s, you know, up into late career and tried to get really a sense of how the medium has evolved over the decades. So, it was a really amazing thing to be part of.

I put probably way too much of myself into that thing and kind of burned myself out a little bit, necessitating kind of taking a step back from art and going back to tool making for a month or so after that. It's funny you say that. I know that that's true, that artists need, it isn't all like creation, creation, beauty, pouring out your soul. You have to sometimes, i don't know well your soul is tough like you know you you have this hole where the soul used to be that you have to fill afterwards yeah i mean if you were a cow and your job was to give milk you can't just give milk all the time sometimes you chew cud and the farmer says you you should get to work. Yeah. Oh, Christopher's look, you should

totally see this. He's totally looking at me like I have lost my mind. Just your metaphors there. I read that Sanderson book. It's terrible. It's fine. Okay, so what was your project in Neat? Could you tell us about it? Yeah, so the project was called Eclipse, which the name of the project really came from, I think, more of the approach that I took to it than, I guess, the final result, which I guess that's part of what stressed me out a little bit, was I kind of went down this path, and I thought the path was interesting, and then it led me somewhere, and I'm like, oh, this place is all right. This

isn't quite where I told them I would end up, but we'll try to make this work. kind of a non-human entity that you can have almost like a dance with, kind of a physical feedback loop that you can kind of step into its space and start interacting with it in this way that you don't necessarily notice at first, but then it sort of, you know, if you notice that it's playing off of your movements, then you can kind of react to it further. And so, I wanted to kind of set up this system where, you know, it's kind of this ambient kind of orb to it further. And so, I wanted to kind of set up this system where, you know, it's kind of this ambient kind of orb that's giving off light in all directions. But then you approach it and it's almost like it's sort of tricking you into getting closer by taking the side of it that's closest to where you're approaching and kind of dimming it and throwing

the light elsewhere. So, it would almost be saying, well, you can get closer and look at me from a different angle or you can see what's actually going on inside, but you can't just hang out back there. And so, I wanted to set up this interaction where people would move around and where, you know, if you kind of overcrowded this thing, then it would almost, you know, kind of go into darkness like it was being surrounded by too many people. So, that's kind of where the name Eclipse came from. And then in actually building it, I started from the inside out. And I was starting with that idea of this sensor that you can approach. And I didn't, you know, originally I thought of, you know, a lot of the kind of standard techniques that, you know, kind of creative

coders have for this kind of problem with cameras or Kinects. And I prototyped a few of those things, but I really liked the idea that this wasn't kind of a room that had all this special wiring to it, and it would then be kind of creating this artifice of an experience for you. But I really wanted it to be almost like this alien object that was self-contained and would really sense the environment on its own and not have to have this kind of life support system around it. So that led me to this kind of crazy sensor design where I was making this dodecahedral circuit board with IR emitters and receivers on it that would blast out modulated infrared light and then use that to kind of detect where objects were around it. And I was trying to do this from the inside of

kind of a glass sculpture. So, there was like a sphere made of plastic and broken glass and then the sensor would be inside of it kind of peering out and trying to see people in the infrared spectrum while the other parts of the sculpture were emitting light in the visible spectrum. Did that work? Well, kind of. I mean, parts of it worked. It was one of those things where I think I set my sights at this thing that was super complicated and I didn't get there at all. I ended up building this sensor that, the sensor kind of worked, but I didn't have nearly enough time to, you know, to really finish this interaction that I liked or to, you know, to filter the sensor's results so that they could be really reliable.

And so I ended up with this thing where that design of the sensing component really just, you know, filtered outward and affected the entire layout of this project. But then the final thing didn't end up being interactive because it didn't end up having time to finish the sensor. Oh, no. And it was fine. I mean, I was kind of frustrated about it at the time, but I was also just like, I'd put so much time into this thing that I think at that point, I was also ready to just find, you know, kind of a stopping point where I was happy with it for that particular exhibition. And then just tell myself, well, you know, I can easily, you know, if I've built the hardware for this thing, then I can always go back and improve the software for a future exhibition. So that's

kind of where it's at right now. I have this thing that has a lot of additional capabilities to it that right now the software isn't using. And I still ended up liking it, but it also kind of frustrates me in that way that any project that has unrealized potential would frustrate me. It sounds like that potential will need to be realized at some point. Oh yeah, it totally will. And it's, it's segued into a bunch of other things. I mean, right now that installation, I mean, one benefit of it being kind of a relatively small self-contained thing that kind of throws light out into the room and absorbs light from its surroundings is that it's not that big to just store in my studio for the moment. So I can, you know, keep it around and keep working on it until the next time I can exhibit it. But it also kind of prompted me to go into that toolmaking cycle and to take some of the technological bits and pieces that I developed for that project and just work on making them more available to people. And that's what launched Wiggleport, right? Yep. Okay.

So tell us about Wiggleport. Oh, man. So Wiggleport is, I mean, it's a little bit like what I was trying to do with Fade Candy in the past, where I took a thing that I developed for my own art project. In this case, it was an LED controller board. And I put in some additional effort to try to make it something that would be useful for a wider audience. And then I put it out there. And I think with Fade Candy, it was reasonably successful at being something that, you know, it was approachable by people

who were really new at electronics or knew the idea of making interactive art. But it was still something that I personally found interesting and that I think people who, you know, were more advanced in, you know, just learning this stuff on their own would still appreciate and would still use in their projects. So I wanted to kind of try that again, but with a more ambitious scope. So instead of just this idea of connecting, doing a really good job of taking LEDs and driving them from a USB port, like with Fade Candy. With WigglePort, this came from kind of an audio interface that I built custom for Eclipse. And it blossomed into this much more complex idea of, I guess, making it easier for people to kind of send and receive signals from their computer that are all synchronized

with each other really tightly. So I remember many, many years ago, Curtis and his brother wanted to play music over the internet. And that's very difficult because you can't sync up. It's not possible. Yeah. Is it like that or is it something else? It's, I mean, it's a variant of that problem where, I mean, I feel like there's this whole large problem where, you know, time is difficult. It's difficult to write programs that think about

time as a finite resource. So a lot of times you just assume that your program runs infinitely fast unless there's a reason to worry about time. And that works for a lot of things, but especially audio or other things where the human brain is really sensitive to latency, that breaks down pretty quickly. So then there are different strategies. You know, you can just try to make the overall latency very low so that you, you know, you don't have to specifically worry about time, but you can just guarantee that, you know, no matter what goes on inside this black box that you've built, the time it takes to go from input to output is short enough that you don't really need to worry about it. Or another approach is you can actually kind of, you know, via timestamping things or other methods of synchronizing, you can have a bunch of streams of information that might not necessarily

be low latency, but you've taken some effort to make sure that they all, you know, are kind of replayed at the same time. And then that's what you see more often with like video and audio content. So the idea is if you had mixed kinds of content, maybe lights, maybe audio, maybe some sensor input, you'd want to minimize latency from the sensor input triggering something happening with a couple of other signals that you'd want to be firing really close together. Yeah, that's the kind of problem that I was interested in making easier to solve. And especially this, you know, the kind of variant of that where you have inputs and outputs where, you know, you might be producing some lights and producing some sound. And a lot of the time, it's not that important if they're

really closely synced. But if you have the opportunity to synchronize them better, then it makes the whole experience sound much better because your brain is noticing all those extra synchronicities that would have been a little bit off before. But then I think there's also maybe room for something that goes even further into that realm. And this is, I think, where things get a little murky, where I, you know, I want to solve this problem that seems hard, that seems interesting, but I don't really entirely know what I'm going to do with the results. Like, I have some ideas and some inklings about problems where that synchronization, you know, isn't just a nice to have, but would actually make or break the project. But that's, you know, isn't just a nice to have, but would actually make or break the project.

But that's, you know, that's more an area that I'm kind of researching now and that I hope to research in the near future rather than something that I feel like I have nailed down. Now, I of course want to ask you, what do you have in mind? But I think you just said that you aren't quite. Well, I have some ideas like so one experiment um you know so what if what if you could build a new type of 3d printer that instead of um you know instead of having a head that moves around depositing things kind of in one dimension or an optical thing that displays these two-dimensional images one at a time you know what if you had a way of generating a pattern on the surface of something in two dimensions or even in three dimensions, and then you have a way of kind of extruding that pattern, you know, through space as another dimension. So I'm imagining something that's maybe a little bit like the current crop of maybe resin-based 3D printers where you have a pile of goo and you shine light into it and the goo solidifies. But what if you wanted to do something where you had a metal plate and you have actuators

that cause the plate that can kind of push the plate up and down at all the corners. And now by vibrating those actuators at different frequencies or different phases, you can set up standing waves in the plate that would maybe push around some kind of 3D printing media. So I think if you've seen cymatics, you know, people make interesting pictures by kind of vibrating metal plates with audio frequencies. And this is really mostly dictated by the kind of vibrational modes of that metal plate. But I guess the thing that I find interesting is, you know, what if instead of this mode where we're accomplishing things in physical space by kind of carrying out a list of instructions one by one with motors, what if instead we have this

mode where we're thinking about how to create patterns from interacting vibrations. So maybe you have some way to set up this standing wave on the plate that then much more quickly than if you were actually moving something around with motors pushes all the little particles of media into a particular shape. And then once you've got that shape, maybe you use like electrostatic force or something to cause those all to stick to something else that you're using as your build plate. And then you change around your frequencies and build up the next layer using, you know, a slightly different wave. And I mean, I have no idea if that kind of thing would work, but it's like that kind

of thing where you want to take, you know, things that are in, you know, in the physical world that move around faster than we can see, but still slow enough that it's easy for electronics to interact with them. I think it's that world that I feel is kind of invisible to makers and kind of DIY folks right now. And I want to provide more visibility and control into things that have kind of audio frequency signals to them, but aren't necessarily audio. That sounds amazing.

I hear I was just going to attach speakers to all the heads of my electronic drums so they all acted like real drums well and that would be i mean that would be amazing i mean this is part of the challenge but you're reinventing 3d printing so that's fine i mean the weird thing about wiggle port is like i want to do that thing that i did with fade candy where i make like a little thing that has a very obvious like oh this is what you do that you build like 3d art objects and and that that kind of works for a lot of people and that it can be kind of an educational thing on its own but that there's also a path for it to be something that's still kind of novel and weird if you've already you know if you're like a jaded old engineer like me who's seen it all

i was going a totally different direction i mean mean, simultaneity is pretty powerful. I mean, you can do lots of stuff with it. It's the basis of what ShotSpotter was. It was finding gunshots by timestamping things. But I, yeah, okay. And it's sort of a weird niche because if you want to do something after the fact, well, you can stick GPS timestamps on it

and correlate it all afterwards and whatever it doesn't necessarily have to be you know all connected to the same computer or if you want something that's a distributed system where you have you know a bunch of little nodes that are all doing their own computation and they all have pretty low latency but they don't have to talk to each other but then there's this space that i think that i was kind of trying to hit with Wiggleport where there's some good reason to have things connected to one computer or even if it's like a Raspberry Pi. So, you know, I think I thought that that reason might be so that it would be easier to, you know, to develop things in that environment. So that instead of thinking in this mindset of, you know, how do I develop this thing that runs, you know, 12 instances of that they all have to communicate with each other? How do I of automation things that

are around that size, or a lot of the things that you would currently use, like just a multi-channel audio interface for. It's still one of those weird enough areas, though, that it's been difficult for me to kind of reassure myself that all the right niches exist, and they're all kind of, you know, there's a continuous path between them. Do you mean manufacturing and building it wise or using it? Oh, using it. I mean, I think I did enough. So I spent maybe two months or so kind of, you know, doing more research and prototyping and design.

And I think I convinced myself pretty thoroughly that this is something that I can build and that, you know, I have a pretty good idea of what the, you know, what the kind of physical and electrical and mechanical constraints are around it. But it's harder for me to see, you know, well, if I build this crazy general tool that you can take apart and put back together in whatever way you want, what is the market for it going to be? And I mean, it's easy for me to convince myself that if I do this, it's going to be like a more open or more hackable version of, you know, this half dozen things that are out there. But I don't know if that's enough. Like, I don't know if I can make something that just survives on being more open and more hackable. I think it

might also need to be something that provides, you know, something that's new on its own yeah i can see that but i okay so going back to before that so if i wanted to like make an art installation that had speakers all around a room and they could all connect to the wiggle port so that the speakers would play different things and you would hear different things depending on where you were would that work? Yeah, that would be, I mean, you could do that in a lot of different ways, I think. I mean, if somebody just came up to me asking, you know, how would I do this art installation? I would probably ask, well, do you need these things to all communicate with each other?

Can they just be a bunch of separate little microcontroller devices that all just play back their own sound sample on their own? No, because I want them to interact with the people essentially but i want the people to be able to move like if like i want to play my song walking through a room but i don't want anybody else to hear my song and i want the speakers to be able to maybe connect see me walk through a room and so yeah that that does mean they all have to work together because then if chris walks through the room and wants to listen to different music that's a really that's a harder problem yeah and that that actually does bring to mind an area where um i mean one thing where wiggle port might actually help out more so than just buying an off-the-shelf multi-channel audio interface is that you can get a lot more channels for a reasonable amount of money with something like WigglePort.

So where a lot of channels might be helpful is in an area where you have an ambisonic system, where you have speakers that are... Imagine just a spherical room just covered with speakers, and you can use that to recreate sounds that seem to come from any location, regardless of how your ears are shaped. And so that kind of environment right now, you'd require just ridiculous amounts of super expensive equipment. And so maybe I can say, well, you know, compete on price and openness, and I can do that kind of a thing. But using, you know, a pile of Raspberry Pis and these cheap wiggle port boards. And maybe that is a useful niche for some people. Or the thing that you're talking about with sound that kind of follows you around a room, there's this technology, parametric speakers, where you can use these little beams of

ultrasonic energy that then, because of the air's non-linearity, you get converted back to audible sound. And that might be an interesting area of research too, because like right now, most of the parametric speakers I see use dozens or even hundreds of these ultrasonic transmitters, but then the electronics controlling them, you know, they don't have the ability to control all of those transmitters independently and make like a phased array or something. Usually they're just running a couple of separate audio channels out to all of these things running wired in parallel. Beamforming is the coolest thing I have ever heard of. Yeah. Yeah. Beamforming, that's something where like, that's one of my, probably at the top of my list of things that I need to do more research on to see if wiggle port is actually useful for it,

because that seems like something that wiggle port would be super awesome for. And yeah, I just need to make sure I can come up with a good proof of concept showing that like, yes, this is actually awesome. And then I think that'll help a lot with the project going forward. But you did run into a roadblock that I think you lost some momentum when you realized it wasn't as novel, as innovative as you hoped. Well, I don't know if I lost momentum, but I would say that I've redirected the momentum. So I guess this is a sequence of events. So like last, you know, near the end of last year,

I finished this Eclipse installation. And just for the purposes of that, I had built this kind of tiny circuit that had basically turned into a proof of concept for Wiggleport, this thing where Raspberry Pi was driving nine speakers independently with separate DDAs and amplifiers. And that was fine, but I guess I had just gotten so burned out

from the art side of it that I just wanted to do toolmaking. So I'm like, okay, I'm just going to work on the toolmaking side for a while because I know that'll be relaxing, and I know that's something I can make progress on. So I put a lot of effort into that. And I think one of the things that I was really worried about early on was really finding a technological niche. So could I make something that really took advantage of this local minima in complexity that I noticed when building

this contraption for Eclipse. Because for that, I wasn't using anything nearly as complicated as a traditional multi-channel, you know, audio interface for that. It was like an FTDI USB FIFO chip. And so I had this 8-bit parallel bus that was going out at a fixed clock rate. And then I used one of those as like a control line and seven of them as parallel data wires for a bunch of I2S buses. And so I was just really running a bunch of standard stereo D to A converters off of effectively a glorified parallel port. And it was this interesting niche where I had built hardware like that in the past, like this thing where I would take a USB FIFO or a Cypress FX2 or something else where I could

just get data in and out of the computer fast. And I would just use very minimal logic around that just so that I could stream something into the computer or something out of the computer. And in the past, I've used this for controlling motors or as a simple logic analyzer or for reverse engineering. And it's always so much more work than I think it should be to get a bunch of bit streams in and out of the computer in sync with each other at a fixed rate. And so part of it was just like after re-implementing that enough times, I was thinking, well, okay, there's got to be someone I can make this for who will appreciate it if I just make one of these that's nice in general. And I guess that led me into this

design exercise that turned into both kind of a circuit board and a modular design where there would be kind of a central unit that has this USB FIFO and a small FPGA. But then there would also be these plug-in modules that would have the interface between those 3.3 volt IOs on the FPGA and whatever analog or optical or motors or whatever else you want to connect to it. So it started to look a little bit like one of these FPGA developer boards that you see all over the place. But I think I also had this opportunity to do something new and kind of bridge this FPGA development world with kind of the world of

people who want controllers to run their art installations and their big room-sized projects and whatever. So I think I can make something that gives you the flexibility of having the ability to just route these fast digital signals around and do pretty much whatever you like to them, but without having to, you know, to deal with these peripherals that just give you a pin out. And then you're kind of left to write your own Verilog code and your own drivers and your own user space applications and everything else. You know, I wanted something that was much more like the ease you would expect from like a regular audio interface, but instead of a row of, you know, quarter inch jacks on the back, it gives you an interface that you can use for regular audio. But if you want to go a little

bit deeper, you can tinker with it and give it some custom Verilog or give it a little state machine or build a custom board for it or whatever, you know, level of depth you want to go. And when you go deeply, you don't have to, you know, level of depth you want to go. And when you go deeply, you don't have to, you know, kind of reinvent all the other wheels just to get back to this point that you would have been at if you just bought the audio interface. This sounds really, really complicated. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, so it isn't that I like lost momentum so much. It was more like I, I got to the point where I,

I had convinced myself that the technological problems were not just solvable, but solvable in a way that I would find kind of interesting and useful and worth doing. And then I guess, I guess the thing that caused me to, to redirect a little bit, part of it was just answering that question

and kind of getting on to the next step. Part of it was kind of noticing some progress that another open source project had made. And this is the Bela project, B-E-L-A, I think that's how you pronounce it. And it's a cape for the Beaglebone, which is, I think they originally designed it to to be a platform for creating musical instruments so it really focuses on low latency audio IO and Linux which is cool and it's it's like kind of adjacent to what I was trying to do with wiggle port where wiggle port wasn't specifically about low latency but that's probably something I was going to have to care about anyway wiggle port was much more about this

kind of synchronicity than the low latency but then of course if you get the latency low enough, then that kind of solves a lot of your problems anyway, because then you don't have to worry so much about that other kind of timestamp everything kind of approach. You can just assume that your code is fast enough again. So Bella is interesting because it really, I think, solves some of those more kind of introductory use cases that I saw for Wiggleport, where I want to give somebody, you know, an artist who may or may not know how to code, I want to give them this platform that helps them get a bunch of inputs and outputs into this audio engine so that you can, you know, build these systems where you have some digital audio components and some electronic audio components that are all kind of sending signals back and forth to create this instrument or interactive performance or something.

And so Bella has this answer to part of that. You know, they provide this thing that is low latency and self-contained and, you know, they're building a community around it and all of that looks great. But then it isn't designed as this kind of open-ended thing that can scale up to very large installations. So I'm lurking on the mailing list

and I see people ask questions about whether it can scale. And then it leaves me wondering, well, how much do we really need that? To what extent has this project solved the problems that I think people have right now versus to what extent do I really need to build this big modular thing? And so really, I guess the way it's redirected my energy is now I'm trying to answer that question. Do I need to build this thing that is big and modular and can kind of do all these things that

I don't even know if I need yet? Or should I just, you know, go with the simpler is better and all we really need is something that provides this entry-level experience, but doesn't necessarily give you this system that you can just bolt anything you want onto. Yeah. Okay. So they made a motorbike and you were making a pickup truck and you can't decide. Oh, it's almost more like, it's more like you were making a pickup truck and you can't decide if it's necessary. It's more like I'm making a McMaster car catalog and they're making a motorbike. I see. Yeah, because you went as far as developing a whole descriptor language for signals and clocks and everything.

Yeah. I mean, you've done something very general. I mean, I've started it. I mean, I think part of what led me in that direction was that I wanted somebody to be able to extend WigglePort without having to re-implement large pieces of it from scratch. And I guess where that led me is, well, I want WigglePort to be interoperable with existing audio software. So I need it to work with audio drivers, but I don't want it to be a normal kind of USB audio device because that doesn't really give me the ability to have all these other IO streams that are synchronized with it. And that also forces a lot more of the processing into the device. Whereas I kind of

found this kind of niche in the hardware where I could have this very simple piece of hardware with this very minimal FPGA and this really tiny USB FIFO, and then just do more of the work in software and have more flexibility at the cost of some efficiency. And, and that, um, and yeah, that, that I'm still, I'm still not really sure who needs that. I find it really compelling because I could do something like, you know, send, uh, waveforms out to my actuators that are driving a piece of spring steel back and forth and, you know, into oscills out to my actuators that are driving a piece of spring steel back and forth and, you know, into oscillation and then synchronize my like strobe light with it. So I can, you know, have that pattern seem like it's standing still and then maybe synchronize some

other light with that so that that pattern, you know, can then, you know, scan according to the way that piece of steel is moving, you know, so I could do stuff like that, but then I could also just do stuff like that by cobbling together parts to build an experiment. So, you know, so I could do stuff like that. But then I could also just do stuff like that by cobbling together parts to build an experiment. So, you know, I still don't know how much of that is what I want to share. It's like, you know, animatronics, special effects, Disneyland, people controlling large numbers of servos and things synchronized with sound and light. That would be perfect for, but I don't know how to get this in front of those people. Yeah. Could you use this?

Cobbling things together, what you did with Fade Candy was make it so people didn't have to. People didn't have to cobble them together. You had a platform that was much simpler. Yeah. I mean, I guess with Fade Candy, I kind of lucked out and hit this thing where, you know, the project I was building was also something that was easy to see a lot of other people had interest in. And I guess this is just kind of, I'm challenging myself to do something that's a little bit further out there. And it's not

something as simple as just, well, connect these LEDs that you already want to this computer that you already have. But here's this thing that I can see out there that isn't quite easy to do. And I guess it's more like, I'm wondering what, you know, what is out there that isn't quite easy to do. And I guess it's more like I'm wondering what, you know, what is out there that artists and creators haven't tried yet because they just don't have this tool. And so I'm trying to figure out what it is and how to show that to people. So that kind of led me more into the video and, you know, doing more experiments and just documenting those experiments. And, you know, if I'm going to be just messing with technology and trying to figure out what it can do for me, then, you know, I'd like to document that experience so that I can share it with more people. But you don't have any videos

about Wiggleport yet. Well, not about Wiggleport specifically. I mean, some of the stuff that I've been making videos about is, I guess, interesting for me for the same reason Wiggleport was interesting. How so? Well, so I've got a couple of videos now about these ultrasonic sensors. And that's a little bit of that same territory where, you know, ultrasonics to me are interesting because it's this, you know, it's sort of in between, you know, radio waves and audible sound where, you know, it moves through the air and you can't see it and it interacts with materials in ways that are not really intuitive to us because we can't sense them. But then I think it's also a lot less crowded and kind of hard for humans to interpret than

like the actual electromagnetic spectrum. So, it's maybe an interesting opportunity to, you know, to experiment with waves and to teach relative to waves. But then it's also maybe just interesting as like a sensing technology. And, you know, I think a lot of what kind of people who do art installations and, you know, interactive, immersive works, you know, VR works. A lot of people working on these new kinds of technological experiences, you know, need weird sensor technology and need new ways of, you know, computers and humans interacting, especially if they're ways that we haven't really learned to expect yet. So I think it's interesting to try to push the boundaries on the sensing and to try to give people more tools. And one of the things you did with the ultrasonic sensors was take a couple apart and really look

inside what were they doing and talk about, you know, this is the piezoelectric crystal and here's how it works. And that was really fascinating because it's, you know, you actually get to see inside. What else do you have planned? Oh man, I have a whole, I have a whole list of things on my whiteboard. Some of them are, are I think just things that I wanted to do anyway, that I'd like to put on video because I can document the experience. So like, you know, just building, you know, just some new stuff for my shop, like a new clock for my shop, a thing that automatically throws bolts for my cat. But then, yeah, I think there are some things that are more, you know, more researchy, more kind of taking things apart. A lot of people,

myself included, like videos where I reverse engineer things on camera and just try to figure out what makes them tick. And I love doing that. I have this kind of standing excuse that I've created for myself where anytime I want to do some really hardcore reverse engineering, I can work on Coaster Melt. So I have Coaster Melt 3 on that whiteboard and I'm going to try to get to that soon. That'll be cool. Of the ones you've put up so far, do you have a favorite? Oh man, favorite. I don't know if I have a favorite video overall.

I think the one I did on the neon bulbs might have been my favorite kind of overall video because I really enjoyed doing all the macro photography for that one. And it's really nice to have something that, you know, I kind of get off on putting a lot of hooks into my work so that people who are interested in different things might have a way of appreciating it. And so if I make something that you can appreciate in kind of an artistic way or an electronic way or a photography sort of way, then that's something I like. So it makes me feel good if I can produce something that I like in multiple ways. And that one ended with something that was lovely. I mean, with the ultrasonic one, you ended up with a lot of parts, which was neat. A big mess on my desk yeah but it didn't end up going on your wall necessarily unless it your wall was made of sticky tape because there were a lot of parts and and you actually brought your uh your light and it's pretty just sitting there because it's it's in a it's in a box it's in a shadow box and it lights up. But you looked at the electronics and how it lights up. How important is it to you that these are instructional versus,

I don't know, versus, I don't want to say- Entertainment. Entertainment. Yeah. Okay, that's good. I think it's very important to me that they can be instructional. But as far as what people actually take out of it, I think that's entirely for them. You know, I guess I love making things that you can appreciate in different ways. And so if I make something and somebody just watches that and says, oh, that's interesting and, you know and doesn't really think of it for years, then that's fine. But if somebody goes out and builds it right away, that's fine too. But I think really what I'm aiming for is not really either of those, but I guess inspiration is really the best word I can think of for it because it's that thing where

it's not necessarily something you are going to do, but it's something you could do. And so, it might not necessarily inspire you to do the same thing, but it could inspire you to do something similar, and it can inspire you to think about that kind of a thing in your own life and figure out how it might kind of mesh with things that you're familiar with. I would have said empower. Yeah. I mean, empower that that's great too. I feel like actually I, I've been, I've been putting together a, it's like an intro video for,

for Patreon lately. And I've been trying to figure out how to frame what I do. And some of it is, is kind of this, this kind of empowering almost like how do you take this world of opaque technology around you and figure out how to actually pry it open? So Patreon, Patreon,

I don't know what, I don't know how to say it, but it's that place where if you like Ben Krasnow has a channel or as a site, but what are the, has a Patreon thingy? Page. I guess people usually call them pages.

I don't know. Okay. Thank you. And so if you want to support him making videos about whatever, his science, his applied science videos, you can, you know, for every video he makes, you give him a buck or two and it lets the crowd support him. And so you're going to put a page up. Yeah, I've got it. I've got it in progress. It'll be up by the time this is posted. So I'll give you the link and you can go in and see if you want to maybe give me a page up. Yeah, I've, I've got it. I've got it in progress. It'll be up by the time this is

posted. So I'll give you the link and you can go in and see if you want to maybe give me a few bucks. And so what are you going to do for the rewards? So I don't know. That's something I've been, I've been trying to figure out because, you know, I, I really want people to, to be able to feel like they're contributing, but I also don't want to end up in this position where I feel like I'm always worrying about what my patrons think and how to please them and all this. Oh, somebody gave me $10 and I didn't do anything this month. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know, when I try to think about this from the other side,

I mean, I support several people on Patreon and I usually appreciate the rewards, but the reason I do it is because I like them and I like the stuff that they're doing anyway. So, you know, I usually appreciate the rewards, but the reason I do it is because I like them and I like the stuff that they're doing anyway. So, you know, I suspect a lot of people aren't necessarily going to expect much, but I want to be able to set good expectations and I want to be able to give something back to people. So, I think, I don't know exactly how I'm going to structure this, but I think the best thing for me to do, honestly, would be something where I can, you know, I like giving away the things that I produce, but time is always limited. So if there's something personal that I can give people that's more limited, you know, like if I can, you know, if you give me, you know, a certain amount, then I'll give you some time every month to like, you know, as like a office hours, like working with you on your projects or something along those lines um that's tough i've seen people do that i think chris gamble did that a while back i think so yeah well he did contextual electronics uh i thought it was before that

actually he was doing sort of an office hour thing one of the things with contextual electronics is it's a lot more expensive to get the personal time right because it basically is an hourly value on your time and that's got to be pretty expensive because if you sell all of your time on patreon you don't have any time to do anything else and that's no good i think you're right that a lot of people would be like oh don't worry about it um well i guess what i'm trying to do is figure out how to just better align what people are paying me for for what I actually want to get paid for. And so, I guess Patreon is one way for me to try that. It's a way for me to kind of put an offer there and say, well, here's kind of what I want to do and what I think I'd be good at doing and what I think I can do that would be helpful for all of you. And if you think that's a good deal, then here's how you can help. And so, I mean, I really don't like building walls so that only certain people can get access to content. And I think a lot of what I think I really stand for is this idea of open access to things. So, I don't really see myself producing things that are only for patrons,

but maybe I'll do something where patrons get early access to some content. Or maybe there's some stuff that's like, you know, not necessarily kind of this core educational slash entertainment thing that I'm doing, but more just stuff that's like fun, you know, like outtakes or something. But that's still like, that's not like charging for the stuff that I am actually really putting my energy into. The thing that I really want to do is put most of my energy into the stuff that I'm not getting paid for. Okay, what do you want to put your energy into? I mean, I think it's got to be a mix of things. Because I just get really too antsy if I'm doing one thing for too long. But I think a lot of it's probably going to be doing more of these videos because that really brings together a blend of skills that I think it's very resistant to becoming monotonous. You know, I can do something that is kind of, you know, an exploration or,

you know, a build or something like that, that would on its own be kind of interesting. But I would always kind of wonder like, well, okay, how long am I going to be doing this versus, you know, doing something that's actually, you know, going to, you know, I guess I would feel greedy about the experience. Like this is something where, you know, I'm enjoying this experience, but I can't share it. And if I, if I produce a video, then it's a lot more work, but it's work that I really enjoy doing. It's, it's stuff where, you know, I enjoy pretty much every part of the process. I like, you know, the actual investigation itself. I like the process of doing the photography and the video editing. And then I like the way that I end up interacting

with people through the internet, because I guess it's a lot less stressful than ending up in big crowds all the time. Yeah. Well, and your channels have been nice thanks i mean not only your part but your comments have been good too oh yeah i've been just amazed at how many yeah just very little negativity in fact i mean uh it's it's been really amazing how how many people just seem to like the stuff that i'm putting out there. Well, and you have a nice combination of, of watch me build it and watch me take it apart and, and I'm taking it apart. Does anybody know what this is? Yeah.

And that combination is nice. Yeah. I don't like channels that are really, that really try to be all like know it all. You know, like I, I like my favorite mixture is, is people who both, you know, have a lot of knowledge and how, and know how to ask questions and know how to like not know things. So I try to present that in my channel and, you know, to try to share what I know, but also be kind of honest about how confident I am in it. And also try to ask questions when I don't know the answer. Cool. It seems like the video thing aligns really well with Patreon actually. So I think,

I think so. I'm hoping that works. And I mean, I don't know. I'm trying not to worry about this too much because really, it's going to mean like, well, how much do I do this versus how much do I do contracting work? And how long do I stay in the Bay Area versus moving somewhere cheaper? And it's all those kinds of questions. But really, either way, I'm going to find some way to be able to keep doing what I like. So life is good. Yeah. Well, if you're thinking of more things to give out with Patreon, those drawings you did, the sketchy drawings. Oh my gosh, yes. I could totally give people prints.

Those are so amazing. The prints or stickers. Yes. Oh, and I make stickers anyway. I should make those Patreon rewards for sure, because I already have stickers that I make for myself and I could easily send them to people. You should have brought me some stickers. Oh, man. I'm sorry. I'm no good at remembering to bring stickers. You'll have to come back.

I did bring you a neon. Yes. And it is very pretty. Although it looks flame-like and it's on the floor right now. And I keep wanting to warm my feet on it. I know. It only draws like a fifth of a watt or something. Maybe we should put some resistors in it. Okay. I only have a couple more questions because I think we're about out of time. You are a keynote speaker at the Open Source Hardware Summit.

Yes. What are you speaking on? I'm still working that out, actually. It's still kind of all coming together and I don't know precisely what I'm going to be speaking about, but probably some combination of, you know, the kind of, you know, the state of

how open source hardware and software has been recently and the stuff that I've been doing. And yeah, that's still on my agenda for the next couple of weeks is to get things figured out. It's in early October in Portland. So you have a little bit of time to sort that out, but I was excited to see it. Yeah, it should be great. Yeah, I am always both excited and nervous and excited at speaking at

events like this. And then we've mentioned your cat a couple of times. Oh man, my cat's awesome. He's such a cat. Has he ever been invited to hang out or be on a podcast or anything? Does he have a Patreon page? He does not have a Patreon page.

I might have to do that. Yeah. Yeah. He could give out used bolts. Oh my God. He could. Well, he could.

I've thought that maybe, i don't know if i thought maybe people could send me uh bolts for tuco like i for a while i was like a 3d print things and i'll give them to my cat and this is this would be a way to like crowdsource the process of because my cat fetches things right i moved into this this new shop at the beginning of last year and it was a huge mess i had these these like quarter 20 plastic, like nylon bolts that I used for an art installation a while ago. And they were just everywhere. It was a huge mess. And Tuco just started knocking these around the shop and he discovered they would bounce around like some kind of little prey animal. And he would chase after them and they fit really nicely into his mouth. And he would bring them to

me and asked me to throw them. And then so I thought, well, I could 3D print these because, you know, he seems to like that shape a lot. But what is it about that shape that actually attracts him? You know, could we vary the shape a little bit and figure out, you know, so how do you crowdsource the process of, you know, genetically engineering the proper 3D printed toy for my weird cat? Or you just set up a camera and an internet thing so you can push a button and it throws a bolt for him. The internet of things. Finally, we found a use for it. This was one of the tie-ins for

Wiggleport, honestly. I would have a bunch of contact microphones on my floor and that would be how I locate the bolts. I suspect that if we ever get another cat at some point chris will be looking for to go ask ears he's so yeah his breed is a american curl and bengal so he gets the ears from that wow well chris do you have any more questions um i mean i have a whole bunch more but i've none that really applied on the air because I want to look at all this stuff.

Okay, we'll stop recording so we can play with your toys. Yeah. All right. Micah, do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Send me things that you want me to take apart. Okay. Yeah, I mean, if you have a thing that you would really like to see the inside of, then get in touch, and maybe I'll reverse engineer it on camera.

Best way to get in touch with you? Send me a Twitter message or an email. You can find my email and my Twitter online really easily. Yeah. Okay. So Twitter is ScanLime. And we will have links to your page. And I believe there is a contact or email, not too difficult to find. Yeah, there's like a whole contact thing on my, if you go to misc.name or scanlime.org or any of the other websites i have and of course you can

email us here at uh show at embedded or hit our contact link and we can forward things on to micah just let me know if it's okay to forward your email address i don't normally all right well my guest has been Micah Elizabeth Scott, art engineer. Thanks so much. I like that title. Subscribe to her channel on YouTube if you want to see good explanations of someone else doing all the work of taking things apart. You can also find her as ScanLime on Twitter and a number of other sites. And thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure as always. Thank you also to Christopher for co-hosting and producing and hopefully coming up with a brilliant title from all of the things we said. And of course you, thank you for listening. Check out our blog and newsletter. You can find it all on embedded.fm, the website, along with a contact link to say hello to us or to Micah, or to enter the Planet Labs contest show at embedded.fm for me or embeddedfm at planet.com to apply to them because it would be fun. And now, now a final thought for this week. Let's see. Hmm. From Ray Bradbury. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.

The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. Embedded FM is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive any revenue from them. At this time, our sole sponsor remains Logical Elegance.