Embedded - 176: Let's Go Light It Up

Episode Date: November 16, 2016

Toni Klopfenstein (@ToniCorinne) joined us to talk about what it is like working at SparkFun(@SparkFun) and why open source hardware is important. Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA.org) has a certification program for open source hardware projects and products. Some of the SparkFun products and posts we talked about: Tinker Kit SparkPunk Sound Kit FLiR Dev Kit with its hookup guide and neat video Digital handpan (electronic drum) blog post Inflatable Friends (balloon robot) blog post Open Source Hardware Summit was in Portland, OR in October. Hackaday Superconference was in Pasadena, CA in November. Their site has the 2015 videos available. (There was an Embedded.fm show about it too!)  

Hello and welcome to Embedded. I'm Elysia White alongside Christopher White. I'm pleased to have Tony Klopfenstein from SparkFun on this week. Hi, Tony. Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. So, we said you work at SparkFun, but can you tell us more about yourself? Yeah, so I've been at SparkFun, but can you tell us more about yourself? Yeah, so I've been at SparkFun now for about five and a half years,

and I am currently the quality assurance manager in the engineering department. And so what that means, I have a team of four people under me, and my team kind of works on documentation, the code, 3D models, fritzing diagrams, pretty much all of the supporting materials for our products and supporting materials for the engineers as they're designing their products. And I have many questions about what that entails. But before we get deeper into that, we're going to do lightning round where we ask you questions and we want short

answers and then if we're being good we don't ask you for more details okay that usually doesn't work out but christopher you go first okay most important tool to your daily work soldering iron keyboard mouse or pencil for my daily work i say keyboard. What language should be taught first in university courses that teach programming? I'd have to say C. Cool. Hardware or software? Personal preference, hardware. For work?

Well, yeah, for work and for personal use. Okay, cool. Favorite fictional robot? Oh, I think that would have to be a tie either between Data on Star Trek or R2-D2 in Star Wars. Yes. That seems like kind of playing both sides of the field. Well, you know, they were both my favorites.

Let's get out the Star Trek versus Star Wars question. Should we bring back the dinosaurs? Hmm. I don't know. Personally, I would love to see a pterodactyl in real life or a T-Rex, especially with all their feathers. But I think that would be a pretty terrifying prospect for humanity. What science fiction concepts do you think will

be real in our lifetimes? Maybe replicators of some kind I think with all the 3D printing that's happening especially in like the biomedical world and stuff like that I think that's maybe the closest I could see actually happening. We were already supposed to have the hover cars and that's happening, especially in the biomedical world and stuff like that. I think that's maybe the closest I could see actually happening. We were already supposed to have the hover cars and that's not happening yet. Hacking or making? Hacking. Should the F in SparkFun be capitalized? Yes. Should the Q be pronounced or left silent? Sorry. Most favorite electrical component um oh that's a hard one uh i guess leds you know at the end of the day everybody loves a blinky thing and there's so many different

ways you can interact with those in systems so um yeah I guess without going into more detail that's my choice do you have a favorite flux I'm sorry do you have a favorite flux oh uh no I actually don't okay then then one other last one okay if you won a million dollars in the lottery would you keep doing what you're doing? To a certain extent, I think I would probably change my day-to-day job to have a little bit more interaction with the public and do a little bit more outreach than I do currently. But as far as playing with electronics, absolutely. Excellent. So I actually thought you had to work a lot with the public.

That was sort of, I didn't expect you to say you wanted to work more with the public. Yeah. So that actually changed for me a little bit in the last year. I was, last year, actually right about the time we were at the Hackaday Supercon, they had just promoted me to manager. Previously, I was just the engineering quality assurance person. So I was the only person in the department doing that. And I was pretty much the only person responsible for doing revisions of products and working on updating documentation, working with tech support to fix any problems with products that customers were bringing up. And they promoted to him promoted me to a manager and unfortunately when that happened I ended up having to start doing a lot more paperwork and a lot less hands-on time which also means a lot less uh hands-on time for workshops and stuff like that so uh yeah it's that's like the one downside of that I I do miss getting to do a lot more

workshops and interacting with the public and teaching classes and working with kids so and so what is your day like a typical day for me a lot of meetings we've got a couple different teams that I'm on so I'm we have a team called the fellowship of the. And what we do is we look at all of our products and we kind of review their life cycles. And if there are any complaints coming in from tech support, from our education department, just general feedback we're getting from customers on the comments or in the forums about something with a product we look at, is it worth revising, you know, on a cost analysis type thing? If we're revising something, what sort of changes do we need to do?

And then making sure that information gets out to the proper people who will be doing that revision. Another team I'm on is our design for manufacturing team. So what we've been focusing on a lot over the last six months is updating our Eagle libraries and making sure that all of the parts are designed in the same format, that all of the information that needs to be in there is in there. So kind of a huge cleanup on that and making sure that as we're updating these parts that we use in our libraries, that it's actually matching what works best for our manufacturing floor

and for our quality control team. So they, you know, if they're testing boards that we're not designing things with issues built into the ICs, for example, where they're going to have shorts or something. So that's a lot of what my day-to-day job is. And then again, it's just, you know, management. So it's a lot of scheduling projects, making sure priorities are set and communicated clearly to my team, and then just generally helping out in the department if there's anything that comes up. SparkFun used to be the place I'd go to to get parts for maker projects, for my own projects, to either look at a new accelerometer for my own amusement or to get a kit to build for something. And I find that I'm seeing and using more SparkFun boards in prototypes. And I think that some of my clients are going to start shipping some SparkFun boards as

OEMs. Oh, awesome. That's a huge shift. Has it changed the flavor of working at SparkFun to go from hobbyist to producer? I actually wouldn't say that that has totally changed for us. I think we have expanded a lot more recently. We've been focusing a lot on the education market. And so a lot of work has been going into kits for classrooms and supporting materials for teachers, including curriculum, including professional development for them and stuff. So I think that's been more of a shift for us away from the prototyping hobbyist electronics, but it's

certainly not something that we've forgotten. We're still very actively focused on that market. And, you know, we're always looking for things that our core customers, you know, those hobbyists, those makers would be interested in, like you were saying, you know, the new accelerometers or sensors or controllers or anything like that. So there has definitely been a shift, I think, in regards to the support that we provide on our products. You know, back, you know, many, many years ago when SparkFun first started, we didn't need to have tutorials.

We didn't need to have very clear, concise example code posted. And that is something that the community has come to expect from us, which is wonderful. I'm all for sharing the information and making it easier for folks to get involved with this stuff. But I think that's been more of a shift rather than away from hobbyist to prototyper. Yeah, actually, now that you say that, it makes a lot of sense. I remember getting my first few SparkFun boards, which were probably accelerometers, realistically.

And I don't think I could get those accelerometers any other way. I mean, Pololu had some TTL to UART widgets long before the FTDI cable ruled the world. And Adafruit had a few things. But the accelerometer vendors, the microcontroller vendors, didn't seem to understand that having a $15 dev kit made a huge difference towards whether or not I could use their system in my products. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that was, you know, that's one of the big things that changed too in the market is when SparkFun first started, we were really one of the only companies doing that

and offering that to the community. And that has drastically changed over the last 10 years. Like you said, you know, Pololu's got a lot more options. Adafruit obviously has grown leaps and bounds. Seed Studio, you know, there's Tindy now for people who are making these things in their garages so they can sell those to folks. So I think that's been a huge change as well, but it's great, you know, it's becoming more common and it's a lot easier to find people that understand what hobbyist electronics are and so that's you know that's a great thing more people involved with it more cool projects coming out of it so are the vendors learning from what you're doing to to any degree

or do you feel like you're the value add that provides um kind of, this is how you really use this versus the data sheet? I would, yeah, I think people are starting to realize, again, like I was saying, a big change for us has been just that supporting material that people have come to expect. And I think that's still a hard thing for some of the bigger vendors to get their heads around. Even just the data sheets,

they have a lot of times we run into the issue where, you know, our tech support team will be looking for information from one of our vendors and they'll have out-of-date data sheets or they won't have links that are live or, you know, all of these basic things that if you're going to provide this information to people, you need to have these things easily accessible.

So I think that's something that they're still working on. But I would say that they're definitely paying more attention than they used to. Which is good. And a lot of the microcontroller vendors now have cheap boards. That used to be really tough to get. I mean, the days of the $ thousand dollar development board yeah are sort of waning yeah which is yeah and i think part of that is too just the uh leaps and bounds in the quality of tools available to hobbyists and hackers at home uh you know even for spark

fun for example you know when we started we were heating all of our boards on old hot plates to reflow them. And I think that's where a lot of people started, but that's even changing. And especially, like I was saying earlier, with 3D printers becoming so much more accessible and CNC machines and all these things making it a lot more accessible for folks to do these things at home. I think they're realizing that they have to make it more affordable. So 3D printing. We have a 3D printer and we've played with it a little bit, but not a lot. What is the gateway to get people to actually use their 3D printer? Is there something you would suggest we go look at printing or look at making?

You know, for me personally, I think it's finding a project where you need something on that. I know, you know, of all the people I know that have really gotten into it, I think for most of those people, they had a specific problem they were trying to solve in a project, whether it's they needed a custom enclosure or they, you know, they, for example, have a tripod for their camera, but they lost the little adapter between the camera and the tripod. So they, oh, well, I can 3D print that. And so I think it's, that tends to be where I see people having the most success getting into it. They have a specific problem that they're trying to solve and they think that this is a possibility that this technology is a way that they could solve that. I, you know, I have personally just been working through one of the AutoCAD Fusion 360 tutorials and sort of a start here and you know make a build something as sort of like a homework assignment and it's for me personally that's not nearly as exciting as oh i have this project and

i actually want to solve this problem and then i have that motivation to learn the ins and outs of the software and how the 3d printer works so i that's personally i think the best way to get into it yeah that makes sense but it is chicken and egg I mean well but that's the same thing we would say to somebody who said who would come to us and say well I know basic should I go learn C I'll go read a C book okay but why right you know do you have a project that you need need it for then you should yeah so it's hard to do things without something in mind and just push through some sort of like you said homework exercise exactly and just push through some sort of, like you said, homework exercise-based thing. And enclosures is the thing that I keep thinking.

I'm like, oh, well, if I do this, then I can build that. I can use it to build an enclosure. Because buying the enclosure, you never get the right one. Yeah. Yeah. And the other big thing that I think I've seen a lot of lately is people either making costume parts or accessories for costumes or props and then also for gifts for people you know so especially if

you're making something for someone who's not in the hacker maker community that's a really cool little gift you can print out their favorite you know sci-fi character or whatever. And that's a cool, unique gift that you've made by hand. And I think people really appreciate that. So what's it like working at SparkFun? I have this image in my head that you play with dev kits and sensors all day long, building giant robots that catch on fire or Rube Goldberg machines. That's what it's like, right? Sometimes.

It depends on the day on how big the robots are and how much fire they catch on and whether that's intentional or not. We've had everything from one of our engineers bought a jet engine on eBay one time and showed up at the office and was like, hey guys, I bought a jet engine. eBay one time and showed up at the office and was like, hey guys, I bought a jet engine. Let's go light it up. And then there's been other days of, oh, well, we're retiring this product because it's been nothing but headaches. We're going to have a Viking funeral for it and set it on fire. So there's a wide variety of, you know, catching things on fire because that's what they're supposed to do versus we're just tired of it. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of playing with new toys as they come out, new sensors.

There's also, you know, it's a lot more research, I think, than people realize of looking at new products because we're very lucky being SparkFriend in the market. You know, there's a lot of people that want to work with us, which is fantastic. But unfortunately, we get so many people asking to work with us that we do have to pick and choose at times. And so a lot of times what the work involves is looking at products and doing the research of how viable is this for our production line? How viable is this going to be for our support team? Is this something that our customer base will actually be interested in going on down the line? Is this something that we can build an ecosystem around?

So there's a lot of research involved with it too. So it's not always just playing. It does seem difficult to find something that is useful and educational and the right price point. And you have to have time to build these tutorials and boards and code and all of this yep if somebody out there sitting if somebody's sitting out there thinking oh they should use my thing what is the process like what what do they need to have before they really even come to you uh before they come to us, I'd say they need to have sort of the, you know, the 30-second elevator pitch of why is this something that the community

would be interested in, and they need to have good documentation. It's exactly what you're saying, you know, it takes a lot of time to build up all this supporting material. And that beginning, that is a good indicator for us. That makes sense. I mean, you want to make it easy for people to use, and if they've already made it easy for people to use, then it's a much straighter path. Exactly. And it also, you know, I think in general, if you spend the time documenting your project, you're a lot more likely to find issues with it and find those little bugs that would come out eventually. And so I think it just also shows a lot of testing and care that has gone into a product. That is true for so many levels of engineering.

Yes. So what is your favorite tutorial? Oh, geez. My favorite tutorial? Oh, geez. My favorite tutorial. Do you have one? Is it one you wrote? Is it one somebody else wrote? There's just so many good ones.

I think we have a pretty good one on the FLIR cameras. That was a pretty good one. Those are the thermal imaging cameras? Yeah, yeah, that was a pretty good one those are the thermal imaging cameras? yeah, that was a pretty good one also one of our engineers recently just made an electric drum and that was a really neat thing, he did that with the Teensy Audio Shield and was working on combining scales

so that was really interesting and unique and then we had another it wasn't a tutorial it was a blog post I think but one of our engineers Mary built up a balloon robot that had little wings that would move and actuate when you talked at it and it was just really adorable this giant balloon floating around the office kind of wiggling his arms at people as they were talking so that one was really cool i want that one yeah what's even better is you could make it follow you like the drones can make it fall and then you like and somebody says what is that and you're like what i don't see anything and you just make them think they were crazy. Exactly. You could do it with one of those shark balloons.

Exactly. Yeah. Okay, so lots of favorite tutorials. What about kits or devices? What would you take home for your own time? Oh, geez. Or what have you already taken home? Yeah, I'm trying to think of which ones i have already i mean uh any of the lily pad ones are really great i i've really been enjoying i've been working a lot more on my own personal time working and making costumes which is something i haven't really done in the past and so doing a lot more textile work and so it's been interesting

seeing how I can incorporate the electronics into that and figuring out new ways to do that um and so I really like those but uh any of the sound kits too those are always fun we've got the um spark punk and spark punk sequencer and those are those are super neat little kits you can solder them together and then you have I believe it's an h-channel sequencer or synthesizer. So those are fun to play with. Yeah, geez, there's so many. That is one of the problems is sometimes I'll go to SparkFun to get something.

And I'll be all ready to check out. And then I'll be like, oh, you know, I should check to see what's new or what's interesting. And three hours later, I now have to prune my cart because I'm way over what I plan to spend. And I'm not going to get to play with all of this stuff. And it's going to go in the garage. And I know that I shouldn't hoard, but how can I let this go by me? It's a real problem. It really is but on the other hand a client recently asked if i had a

a certain board and i just went to the garage and yes i do in fact yeah it's it's kind of a joke around the office that we're you know the hackers makers community we're some of the worst hoarders because you see a board and you're like oh i don't need that right now but I'll need it eventually and for exactly those situations yes do you get to work much on your own projects I mean costumes are awesome and lily pad that's sort of arduino but with a heavy emphasis on sewing yeah I've been working a lot more on them in my free time. Not so much at work anymore, but in my free time I do spend a good amount of time on that. I actually went to Burning Man for the first time this year and sort of dove into the projects headfirst for that one. and some WS2812 LED strips and had it changing colors and varying and also built up a little music box for it and just different lights for our camp and stuff like that. Little projects, but it was lots of time spent on them, so it was a lot of fun.

Was this a SparkFun camp? No, this just happened to be a bunch of us who work at SparkFun. But I would say, oh gosh, we figured this out right before we went. And I think it's about 20% of our company or so has gone or goes. So there's a lot of folks who are into that just because they get to play and make all these cool robots and all sorts of stuff. I can see how that would be a nice overlap. And all of the 28-12s that fall on the floor and need a home, I could also see how those would end up at Burning Man.

Absolutely. So you mentioned last year's Hackaday Supercon. Did you go this year? I did. It was actually last weekend, so i just got back on monday from that and it was a second year of it was great i think they've really got a a good format for that conference they've got a lot of really amazing projects coming in and getting shown off um and yeah i'm excited to see what they come up with for next year i was listening to the supply frame podcast with uh dan hinch and he said that the thing that was different about supercon was there wasn't there were no v of engineering, marketing, whatever's in the presenter list.

It was all engineers who loved what they did. Yep. Yeah. And you can really tell too. It's the projects that people were presenting on stage. They all were very passionate about it. They all had a lot invested in it emotionally and it was really inspiring to see. Were you teaching a workshop? Not this year. No, I actually workshop? Not this year, no. I actually got to just go and enjoy it and got to learn about everybody else's projects this year, which was really nice.

I didn't quite realize how much I was missing last year teaching the workshop. It was great getting to teach the workshop, but that couple-hour chunk out of the middle of the day, unfortunately, you miss a lot of really good talks doing that. So it was nice this year having the opportunity to hear all of those well and i i actually went to your workshop because you were talking about the spark fund thing which was the uh esp 8266 wow i'm just to toss those numbers around. WH-2812 ESP. That's the little cheap Wi-Fi thing, and SparkFind has a board that has it. And I had been using it, and I was like, okay, I'll go to the workshop. I can help out.

And it was interesting in part because some poor people didn't get to spend nearly as much time playing with the Wi-Fi coolness. They had to do stupid computer tricks to get everything going yeah uh that's that's definitely something our education team has to deal with a lot and so they they have the luxury of they have a classroom set of laptops that they bring with them so they can get everybody on the same system it is but it also gives people a lot more time in the classes to actually get to play with the products. And even with that, there's always the one computer that throws some crazy error that no one's seen

and nobody knows quite how to fix it. Exactly. How do you go about designing a four-hour workshop? How do you build the curriculum so that most people get onto the same page? I think initially you have to start out defining exactly who your audience is. If you're going to an elementary school to teach kids that haven't really had much of an opportunity to work with microcontrollers before in the past. Obviously, you're going to want to kind of minimize the depth of the project that you're working on in the workshop and make sure

you kind of get that high level understanding for folks. For example, though, the Hackaday Supercon, that is a group of people that, you know, it's kind of expected that most people have already, especially if they're signing up for that workshop, have played around with microcontrollers before and at least know the basics of Arduino, for example, or programming in general. So I think you have to start with defining the audience, but then also it's just trying to make sure you don't go too in-depth.

Obviously, as you saw, you know, it's even if you have a good plan and you have you know the files of okay you're going to go to this url and you're going to download this and you're going to install this and then install this library there's still always things that come up and you need to build in that time to troubleshoot for a large group so and I also um something to be careful about for anybody who's doing a workshop is especially if you're working on something that involves a chip or a system that is based on wi-fi you know making sure that you have the bandwidth available for you where you're doing that workshop and if not bringing in whatever tools you need for that so i think i

think those are the two big things with that. And then it's, again, it's just trying to make sure, you know, don't skip steps and don't assume that everybody knows what you're talking about. I think that's a big thing that happens a lot of times too, unfortunately, is that people assume that everyone is on the same page and they don't necessarily think to go through all those basic steps. And that can unfortunately leave some people behind. So it's something to be aware of and be cognizant of when you're writing up your slides of okay yes this might be obvious to me because I've done this so many times but I want to make sure I include this information for participants and it's always a nice resource for later exactly

yeah so one of the other conferences you've been to recently was the portland open source hardware summit summit thank you yeah uh what was that like uh that was great um again it was a lot of really passionate folks talking about open source hardware. And something I really appreciate about the open source hardware conference, and part of the reason why I got involved with it, is it's not just electronics. I think a lot of times people in this field, you say open source hardware, and they immediately assume you're talking about Arduino

or all these sensors or breakout boards that everyone's making. And that is part of open source hardware, but it's these sensors or breakout boards that everyone's making. And that's, that is part of open source hardware, but it's a much bigger world than that. You know, there's biomedical stuff, there's farming equipment, there's housing, there's, there's a hundred different things that this open source hardware term can encompass. And I think that's a really interesting thing about that summit is that we do generally bring a lot more people from different areas and different areas of expertise in to talk to each other. And I think it's good for folks that do go because they can kind of compare notes as to what are the difficulties of open sourcing something in one realm versus another. How do you open source biomedical? Well, again, it's the same way that you do any electronics project.

You just make sure you're trying to source parts that are easily accessible for people, that you don't need to spend $10,000 for a chip. If you can find a cheaper option that makes it more economic, you do that. Make sure you document everything make sure you're open sourcing your building plans or code or schematics any of that stuff and make sure it's all bundled up nice and neat and somewhere where folks can find it so but that's a pretty big cost i mean we were talking about making tutorials is hard and making open source hardware is more difficult because you aren't documenting for your colleagues.

You're documenting for a more public audience. Even if you assume they're knowledgeable in, in electronics or, or biomedical, you're still doing external documentation instead of internal documentation. Why, doing external documentation instead of internal documentation. Why would a biomedical company accept that additional cost? Well, first of all, it doesn't necessarily need to be a biomedical company. There's one group, and their name is slipping me off the top of my head,

but they actually just open sourced plans to make an EpiPen because they saw that, you know, as this whole conversation was happening earlier this year about the outrageous cost for EpiPens that so many people need and the costs were becoming unrealistic for a lot of folks. And so they saw this problem and wanted to help. And so they figured out how to make an open source version with parts you can get off the shelf. And they just wanted to help. And so they, they figured out how to make an open source version with parts you can get off the shelf. And they just wanted to share that information to help the community. So it wasn't, you know, that's not necessarily a company doing that. That's someone who had, again, they had the passion about that project and they wanted to share that information.

And I think, you know, as far as like companies specifically, I think especially in the medical field in general, there is still a lot of focus on patents and proprietary information and stuff like that. And I think this is one of the big problems with open source hardware and open sourcing in general is just convincing companies that you still can make money if you open source your your plans you just it forces you to innovate more and faster and provide added value to the products yeah i mean i phrased my question as biomedical but it was really more how do we convince commercials uh businesses to invest in open source hardware because it is a little bit of an investment it is a little more than they would do and they are losing their secrets well plenty of

companies don't have a problem investing in open source software now there's a lot of contributors to linux for example because it's kind of a two-way street if i write the software for this then you know my products are better because they can interoperate. So I think it needs to come from that angle where, okay, there's value coming in both directions. It's not just that we're giving something away. It's right. At the end of the day, part of the thing about open source hardware is that, well, people, if they want to reverse engineer your product, even if you have patents on it, eventually they're going to figure out how to do that. And, you know, is it really saving you that much time and money in the long run? If then you're going to have to spend all that time going after people who violated your patents or your

trademarks or anything like that. And so, and I'm not saying that, you know, people shouldn't enforce these things. That's absolutely important. But at the same time, do you want to spend all your money getting lawyers involved? Or do you want to spend that just making new products that are going to keep your customers interested in you as a company it's it's a different value for the company and it's just they need to make that decision for themselves um and i think it's also you know just sharing the information about and making it easier to understand what open sourcing hardware is. Yeah, so at the Open Hardware Summit this year, Tracy Irway gave a great talk

about the difficulties she's faced at Intel in trying to encourage the company to embrace open source hardware and open sourcing a lot of their material. And, you know, this is, it's Intel, which is one of the giants in the field of electronics. And there's that much more kind of history of patents and, you know, trade secrets and stuff that the company has.

And so it's a lot more of just sharing that information and educating folks on what open source actually means to encourage them to embrace it. And that's definitely, it's a hard problem, but I think it just is going to take that time of making sure that we're educating folks and making sure that it's easy to understand and showing them that it does actually work.

It's a hard battle, and I'm not sure it's going to get any easier, but I do, I'm excited about open source hardware because just like open source software, it makes for a great demo. It helps me learn more, helps me have examples. And then I don't reinvent the wheel each time. Absolutely. So do you go to these because SparkFun sends you? Some conferences, I mean, initially when I've gone to them, it has been because I've been sent by work.

That's actually how I got started with the Open Source Hardware Summit a couple years ago. I went to the one at Boston. But I actually just really fell in love with them, and I really enjoy those conferences. So I've actually been advocating a lot for myself. And then, especially with the Open Hard open hardware summit I got onto the open source hardware association board and was serving a term on that so that also was that was a secondary

thing outside of spark fund but because I was involved with that that was a reason to go to the summit. And does SparkFan only sell open source hardware? No, I wish we did, but unfortunately we do have some products that we've worked with folks on where they can't open source the source code. So there are a few things that we don't, but we generally try to stick close to open source options, especially if we're working with external folks. But sometimes, you know, it's just it's hard to avoid that.

For example, I don't think technically any of our like our soldering irons that we sell, those are an open source technology. So, you know, I was last week, I actually pulled up one of your schematics for a board I knew and pretty much sent it to my EE and said, why doesn't your schematic match this schematic? Why do you have all different values of resistors and why do you have more resistors and what about the capacitors? And I'm pretty sure he was ready to kill me after that. So I'm not sure everybody out there is in favor of open source hardware, but possibly it shouldn't be used as a weapon. Well, it's good, though. Everybody should be able to be educated on the tools they're using. That's the whole point of it. You know, it's make it accessible, make it so folks can understand this stuff. That's how we get new and better ideas coming out of it.

Yeah. So what does it mean to be open source? I heard that the association is having a certification program. Yeah. So I guess two part question there. So the open source hardware association has a definition, a common definition on their website, which anybody can go check out, ashwa.org. And this was a response to a lot of confusion in the hacker maker community as to what open source actually means. A lot of times you'll hear the term open source

being thrown around with products that aren't actually open source. A really common example of this is the Raspberry Pi. That isn't an open source being thrown around with products that aren't actually open source. A really common example of this is the Raspberry Pi. That isn't an open source platform. But there's still a lot of confusion as to what that means. And so folks think that just because there's peripherals for it that are open source, that means the Pi is, but it's not. So a lot of what the Hardware Association is trying to do is to, again,

make that clearer and make that easier for folks to understand and educate the public on that. And the certification program that they just announced at the summit, or well, didn't announce, but started at the summit, they had announced it last year at the 2015 summit, is a self-certifying program. So they have a list of all the rules of exactly what things you need to do in order to actually release an open source product. And what they're doing is they are allowing folks to self-certify and they have a logo and then that you can put on your product.

And again, this doesn't necessarily have to be electronics. It could be farming equipment. It could be housing, you know, anything hardware related that someone wants to open source, but it has a country code. And then I believe it's an eight digit identifying number. And all products that are certified under this program, they'll be put into a repository. The repository is public.

So you can go, anyone can go and look at this list of products that are certified as completely open source. It has links to all of the documentation for the products. It has links to the licenses used on the products, the versions of each of the products. And so it's a really good repository of knowledge for someone looking to work with open source products. And then if someone, for some reason, isn't complying with the certification that they have signed, Oshawa then can go to them and say, hey, look, you're not using this stamp appropriately,

and you need to stop doing that. This is adding confusion. People don't actually, they think this is open open source but you're not open sourcing it so um and i i believe uh they had 50 or so products after the first month um and they all just got their certification stamps and i believe they were from nine different countries which was a really really great thing to see so that is pretty exciting yeah and the reason i mean raspberry pi is an open source in large part because of the broadcom chip they use which is not available and has secret sauce inside yep exactly um the most of the rest of raspberry pi is open source where the the sch are available, the Gerber's are available, the software's available.

Yeah, but the fact that somebody couldn't go order those parts and build it at home, that's the problem with that. But it is really hard when you're building something commercial that you're shipping in quantity to make sure that people can buy the chips in small quantity. Sometimes chips only come in units of 100,000. That's true. And it is a very difficult problem.

But again, that kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier as far as getting the vendors on board with this and getting them to understand that it can be a value for them to release those products in lower quantities too. And the only way we're doing that is encouraging folks to open source more products and show that to the vendors as well that this is actually viable. And that it is desirable on the consumer side. Exactly. desirable on the consumer side. Mm-hmm, exactly. There is some fear, possibly unfounded,

that open source hardware and software is more hackable, more likely to be targeted for security attacks. Yeah, I think that's a fear that a lot of people have, but I think that also ignores the fact that if you're open sourcing something, whether it's software or hardware, there are a lot of really good people out there that are working with this stuff. And if they see a problem, they're going to bring this up and they're going to work with you to help you fix that vulnerability. And I think that's, in a way, that's a good thing about it because at that point you're not worrying about, you're not, if you find a vulnerability on something that's open source, you don't have to worry about that feeling of, oh, if I bring this up to them, are they going to come after me because I did hack into something proprietary, even if you

are trying to fix a problem. So I think there's, it is a fear, but I think at the same time, it does encourage folks to work together more and to fix those problems. Yes, for all that there have been some well-publicized hacks to open source software, at least you know about them. Exactly. I'm sure that there are some other ones that you don't know about for your operating system that isn't open source. So, yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. Let's see. Do you have, going back to SparkFun for a few minutes.

Mm-hmm. dream of a kit that when all of the world aligns in five or ten years spark fun will sell this magical kit what will that kit contain oh boy um i would i would love to you know one of my passions is uh biomedical stuff so i would love to see us get a little bit more into open biology type things. I think that's still one area that is very intimidating for a lot of folks, which is definitely changing. That was actually one of the great talks at Hackaday Supercon this year. They had a gentleman who was working on building an actuator for his daughter's arm because she had lost functionality of her muscles and so she couldn't control her arm. And he figured out how to build a cast, hold her arm and would actually help her move her arm and help her rehabilitate and get that action back. And there's definitely a lot of good stories like that, but I think that's still an area that's intimidating for a lot of folks and i would love to see the hacker community get

more into that so i guess it would be something along those lines maybe um as far as the actual hardware in it i don't really know what that would look like though there are always new sensors coming out and new power sources. And I sometimes look at some of the wet lab stuff and wonder. I think it would be really fun to play with more of that. Yeah, absolutely. Combine it with a robot. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this story, I'm sure of it. I feel like there's a movie or two about that out there.

It's impossible. I had in my notes long ago to bring up the Tinker Kit. SparkFun has this Tinker Kit. Tell me about it. Why am I going to introduce it? Let's have you do it. So the Tinker Kit is a newer kit that spark fun has released it's uh kind of a beginner kit for working with the arduino platform uh we have our own version our own open source version of the arduino uno in there and it's uh we call it the red board um and it has a couple motors in it, a couple LEDs, some basic buttons and switches and trim pots. So kind of just getting started, how do you do the basic input-output on an Arduino,

you know, sensor input, all that kind of stuff, basic motor control. So it's a cute little kit. It's a fun kit. I don't know if everybody at work would agree with me calling it cute, but it's a good kit for getting your hands on and getting started with that and just learning how to tinker. And you're going to let me give one away, right? Yes.

Yes, we do have one to give away. All right. So, yes, this is SparkFun Tinker Kit. And I would like you to email me at show at embedded or hit the contact link on embedded fm and tell me what you would use it for that does mean you have to go look at it because maybe you're going to use it to talk to your eight-year-old about motors i think it's time talk to your eight-year-old about motors. Or maybe you have a plan that involves a cat, a rat, and a spider.

What? I don't know. This is why we don't have any projects going on. Your ideas are all terrible. That sounds like a very interesting project. I'd love to see that. I just want to make sure people understand that the comments, while not to be used at all in choosing a winner,

will be read and giggled over if they're suitably arcane or Rube Goldberg-esque. And then I will choose the winner randomly and give your email to Tony, who will then address and blah, blah, blah, and kit. I think there are a few countries that we can't support, but so far everybody who has ever emailed me is not from one of those countries. I didn't want to make it U.S. only, and so we had a conversation about internationally. It's all fine. Let's see.

Christopher, do you have any questions now that I've totally gotten lost? I had a vague question that I haven't really formed well, so it's going to come out completely wrong. Worse than a cat, a rat, and a spider? No. It seems like there's this really interesting opportunity to increase sales of things by also educating people on how to use them.

And it's kind of what Apple did in a certain way in the eighties, but you know, filling schools full of Apple computers, which didn't actually end up working out for them in the longterm. But is that something that's a conscious thing? Or is it just kind of, this is part of our mission and that if that happens, that's great? No, it's absolutely something conscious. And it's something that we're very focused on. Our education department has been very busy working with school districts and schools all

over the country, developing curriculum, doing professional development for teachers. So a lot of what they do is actually they will host workshops and they will bring teachers in and educate them on how to use these things in the classroom. So that way the teachers can take this out and then teach it to their students. You know, there's... That would be fun. Yeah.

That's a very different workshop, but that would be really fun. Yeah, it's really wonderful to see. Our education department, I think, is only like 10 people. So there's only so many people that can teach hands-on. But if they can teach teachers and educators and get them to then go out and share this stuff, it makes electronics a lot more accessible to a lot more people. So I would say it is very, very much so a conscious decision to educate folks on our products specifically, but also just on basic embedded electronics in general.

Do the teachers come to you and say, I want to do this in my district or classroom, or do you go to the districts and then end up with teachers who are a little nervous and frightened of electronics? It's a combination of both. Part of the reason our education department was even created was because we were having so many teachers asking for more help, more hands-on time. You know, how do I use these parts in the classroom? I think there's a real opportunity for learning here for my students. How can I do that? And so I think it sort of organically came out of that. But, you know, we definitely, we have definitely had workshops where you have some teachers who don't have any experience with this type of hands-on

hardware work and they they are very nervous about it or they don't necessarily know you know they don't necessarily know if it's really right for their students and so it's part of having that education team is also just getting folks to understand like to get the educators more comfortable with uh hardware and hacking and all that kind of stuff so where do they get the money for it uh well a lot of teachers i know um do as so many wonderful teachers do and a lot of times they're paying for it out of pocket initially but a lot of what we've been working on more uh is trying to work with school districts and ensuring that the teachers are getting funding from the school districts for this and that they're getting the support from their communities.

So it's been a little bit of both, I think. There are grants. I mean, there have been a lot of grants recently about getting more low-level technology in classrooms. Yes, there's a lot of grants, and a lot of it is also to, especially at least in the higher education realm, a lot of colleges and universities are using our kits in their classrooms, and so the way they kind of work around that is they just, you know, unfortunately they put it on the students, but instead of buying a textbook, you buy this kit for your class, and then you work through it so um there's that's that's one approach to it but then also I think a lot of grants and uh you know there's been a lot of great stuff coming out

where the White House has been embracing a lot more of the the maker movement and stuff and there's it's been getting a lot more focus on a national level so I think that's been helping as well so developing the curriculum is hard I remember when I worked on educational toys, you couldn't just teach it the way that was apparent the first time. There's some psychology and education theory in teaching things. Do you guys worry about that? Or do you kind of teach them how to use it and hope that the teachers will develop more curriculum suited to their situation?

I think it is something, I don't know if we would necessarily say that we're looking at it from a psychology standpoint, but we are definitely aware that you can't necessarily go to every student and teach them the same way and teach them the same thing the same way um and i think uh like for example you know one of the ways that we've looked at this is you know little kids you can't necessarily teach them how to work with an arduino like very small children you can't necessarily teach them how to work with an arduino because they just don't have those skill sets yet but you can teach them basics of electricity using things like squishy circuits which is conductive play-doh so there are ways to work around it that way and i think adapting it to age groups is a big thing um something we also and something i'm personally very uh happy about that we do focus on is trying to be more encouraging of women and minorities into

embedded electronics and so you know working with like there's a group here in Denver the GSTEM it's a girls education or girls in engineering and STEM outreach so you know doing workshops like that and understanding that you have to be a little more encouraging, a little more welcoming, a little more going out of your way and ensuring that these students realize that they also can do this stuff and they can participate. So, again, it's not really a psychology thing. It's not really the way we're looking at it, but. It's probably not the right word, but yeah. Yeah, but it's definitely, yeah, we're very cognizant of the fact that not everybody learns the same way.

So, OK, so as I start to wrap this up, what is the best part of working at SparkFun? Other than the flaming robots, which I can only assume are the absolute high point. Those are pretty fantastic. I would honestly say, I mean, there's a lot of great things. You know, we have a really wonderful community there and we have a really good culture in the office. You know, we get dogs in the office,

which is always nice, especially if you're having a stressful day, you can just pet a puppy or something. But I honestly, I would say the best part for me is just the people I get to work with day in and day out, both internally and externally in the company. You know, it's this is a really amazing community in general. And it's really inspiring every day to see what ideas people are coming up with and what problems they're trying to solve in these unique ways that, you know, people before this was so much more accessible to folks and before

embedded electronics and open hardware and the hacking world was accessible to folks that it was, it was just one of those, well, a big company is going to have to solve that, you know? And I think that's, it's really amazing just seeing what people are coming up with. So that reminds me of the copyright notices at the top of most of the SparkFun code. The beerware. Yep. That says, if we're ever together, buy me a beer, and that's sufficient. Have you ever sued anyone for a breach of that contract? No, but we actually have had several people bring us beer when they've come to the office.

So they'll show up with a 12-pack and say, it's for your engineers. I've used your code. I was going to ask just how drunk does Jim show up to work most days? No, Jim doesn't, but he has written a lot of good codes. We're all very glad we have Jim on our side. If he ever decides to build an evil robot army, we're in trouble. Well, he might like you.

I sure hope so. All right. Well, I think it is time for us to get back to our weekends. All right. Tony, do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Well, I just wanted to say thank you

for having me on the show. And if anybody ever has any questions, feel free to reach out to me at SparkFun or through Oshawa. And go support your open source project of choice. That's the only way we're going to keep making this more common. So go out and support them.

Contribute or however you can. Excellent advice. Our guest has been Tony Klopfenstein, Engineering Quality Assurance Manager at SparkFun. Thank you so much for being with us, Tony. Thanks so much. Thank you also to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And of course, 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. You can sign up to win the Tinker Kit at those addresses as well. And you can of course check out Embedded FM for the blog, newsletter, and YouTube channel. Yay! A final thought. I think it should only really come from Dante's Divine Comedy. A great flame follows a tiny spark. 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. Thank you.