Embedded - 205: Questions about Dumplings

Episode Date: June 22, 2017

This week we talked to Addie (@atdiy) and Whisker (@whixr), the Toymakers (@Tymkrs). They make electronics kits, videos, and conference badges. Toymakers site (tymkrs.com) has a link to their IRC channel, videos, and Tindie store(including those amazing heart simulators, the easy to make Amplify Me, and Protosynth Midi). Their reddit community is r/Tymkrs. It has a lot more information about the CypherCon 2017 badges. More about CypherCon at cyphercon.com. Some of their ZombieTech podcast is available on YouTube (along with First Spin and Patch Bay, see the playlists to find grouped series). Note that Rabbithole is the name of their hackspace as well as the video series documenting project creation. Episode 200 has the violin we discussed. We seem to have talked about a lot of other people on the show, especially shared friends and past Embedded.fm guests (some of whom were on ZombieTech). Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories with their online and Sunnyvale store. This is run by Lenore (40: Mwahaha Session) and Wendell (124: Please Don’t Light Yourself On Fire)  Joe Grand (58: Use These Powers For Good) John Schuch (74: All Of Us Came In Sixth) Alvaro Prieto (130: Criminal Training Camp and 200: Oops) Some fiction for you: Black Mirror (Netflix) Feed by Mira Grant [Everything by Mira Grant / Seanan McGuire is on my “devour immediately” list! -El] MiTel SX Technician’s Handbook 

Hello and welcome to Embedded. I'm Elysia White alongside Christopher White. This week we have the toy makers Addy and Whisker on the show. They've done so many amazing things I have no idea what we're going to talk about. Maybe electronics, conference badges, Tindy, zombies, could be anything. Hi, Addy and Whiskery. It's very exciting to have you today. Hi. Addy, could you tell us about yourself and Toymakers?

Sure. So I'm Addy. By day, I'm a nurse researcher. And by night, I'm a Toymaker with Whisker. And we're a couple in rochester minnesota and we do all sorts of projects um with electronics like uh conference badges and kits for tindy and we do woodworking projects music um yeah just a little bit of everything. And Whisker, what would you like to add? I mostly just try to keep the to-do list under control. When you have as many sort of interests and directions as we do, it gets a little bit overwhelming. And being the full-time member of the operation, it's sort of up to me to make sure that things don't go totally off the rails, I guess.

I don't know. From the rumors I have heard, it's usually off the rails. Only when you want it to be off the rails. It's intentional. Which is all the time. Let's go straight to lightning round. Straight to lightning round. Sure.

Why don't you start, Chris? All right. Preferred voltage. 3.3 for me yeah i like that uh negative 90 volts and zero that's fun technical tip everyone should know time you're breathing when soldering so that you don't breathe in flux fumes. That's a good one. Life is just a series of being one cable short from everything working well. Do you prefer to complete one project with focus or start a dozen and let the best project win? No comment. We do both.

But I'm more serial than Whisker is. He's definitely the parallel guy. Yeah, you know, I can't concentrate on one thing for more than a day. See, I have to get it done. Favorite fiction, movie, book, whatever fiction, you've encountered for the first time in the last year? Very good question. Can I change it to a series?

Sure. Black Mirror, huge fan. Hmm. You'd think this was nonfiction, but the Mitel SX-200 Technician's Handbook. Yeah. All right, I need to know more about that. Like now?

Yeah, right now. I'm trying to revive a 90s era PBX. Let's put it this way. The manual is not what I would consider to be non-fiction okay favorite musical instrument uh viola oh gosh probably my commodore 64 and the last one best dumpling filling okay let's make this very clearly dumplings are not round balls of dough that is not what a dumpling is dumplings are uh well they got stuff in them so best one is best one is ground pork uh, ginger, garlic, and a splash of sesame oil.

And I totally defer to her on that because she is the expert. Boom. Is a ravioli a dumpling? Oh, that's a good question. It's the closest thing, I think. This is going to be like, is it a sandwich, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it a dumpling?'t it yeah yeah dumplings okay

sorry go on uh italian dumpling i guess you could yeah you could call it i mean sure it's more so than like those you know chicken and dumplings it's like that's like a bait and switch right you think oh man i'm gonna get something in this dumpling no just it's just a ball of dough right exactly kind Exactly. Kind of raw. Anybody. Right. Anybody can do that. It's mushy. It's funky.

Yeah. So no Chinese dumplings all the way. So I was going to ask, is a calzone a dumpling? No, that's a sandwich. No, that's huge.

That's a, that's in its own category. Okay. Now I have all sorts of questions about dumplings uh badges though you have just finished making these incredible badges that are also boxes that light up and they're just really neat but maybe i should let you tell me about them? Sure. So the badge that we made, we just finished in end of March, was for a conference, CypherCon, which is essentially a hacker conference for Wisconsin hackers, although I'm hoping that it'll go to the Midwest.

But essentially, the cube, the theme was fringe science. And so we had to come up with a badge that embodied this idea. And we're like, all right, well, what's fringy? How do you do that? Right. Um, you know, we could make crystals. We could make, I don't know, something weird like jellyfish or something right yeah um but then we were like but uh so we got into crystals and we're like that'd be cool but i can't imagine a bunch of

bearded hackers wanting to wear crystals around their neck right unless they're hippies and um And so we're like, well, we can keep the 3D shape. Yeah, the idea of attaching facets of a crystal together out of PCBs sort of is where the three-dimensionality of it came in. But then we thought about manufacturing that is going to be no fun. So it's going to be a cube. All the sides are going to be the same because that's easier. Right. And so we thought, okay, well, that's cool.

Like it's a cube. What does this cube do? Obviously you need to have LEDs and you need to make it glow and make it pretty. But I am a huge fan of LEDs having information, right? So they're not just showy for showy's sake. And so we're like, well, we can make it like Conway's Game of Life. You know, we could put that on the outside. But meh, like other badges have done that.

So what can we do? And we thought, well, why don't we make it like a map? And we're like, well, a map to what? And so, Whisker was essentially suggested a text adventure game. And so, we're like, okay, all right, we can do a text adventure game. Well, what's the goal of this text adventure game then? And he was like, well, why don't we have them fix a computer or something? And so, okay, you them fix a computer or something?

And so, okay, you can fix a computer, and then everybody's happy. They've fixed this computer in the course of a half an hour. Now what? And I'm like, well, if you're going to have a computer in this game, then you might as well be able to use it, right? And if you can use the computer in the game. I've got to interrupt you because you're telling it completely backwards. Oh, come on. Okay, go ahead. We have a cube. You can hook it up to your USB port on your laptop, your phone, whatever,

and you get sort of a text interface, right? So I was rolling a text-based time-sharing operating system on it, and I had to design some applications that ran on the thing. And of course the first application anybody's going to want is going to be like Adventure or Zork or something like that because it's super fun. But at some point in making that happen, it clicked in my head that you can reverse the idea there. So it starts with the text adventure and in the text adventure you fix the computer and then you're in the computer and you can use the computer um and uh once you're on the computer uh you've got infrared uh transceivers on both sides of your badge and it's in constant communication with everyone else's badge

so once you're logged into the time sharing operating system on your badge you can hack into the time sharing system on the badge next to you and then from that one into the next one down the row you know just think of a bunch of hackers sitting at a conference watching a talk and somebody's hacking their way down into the aisle right yep it's fun and so that's that's wow yeah so it was feature creep on feature creep yeah and so we were like well if you can play with a computer then you might as well play with other people's computers and this is a hacking conference so

if hackers can't hack into other people's badges well then who can wait a minute given that it is a hackers conference yes I don't know that i would plug anything anybody gave to me into my computer's usb port it's a yes that is a very good point and that was actually that was definitely a concern um so we had uh so we set up a terminal

actually at our uh table to for people to try it, to decide whether or not they wanted to plug it into their own computers. Yeah, I brought a 1980 green phosphor Apple monitor and a IBM clicky Model M keyboard, and they could plug their badges in right there. It was running on like a Raspberry Pi, right? So of course the hackers, a lot of them were using it to play with their badge, but it's a hacker conference.

So as soon as we went to go give a presentation at the conference, we came back and the hackers had hacked the Raspberry Pi. So I think after the hackers realized that we weren't going to put anything malicious on their computers, they were more willing to play around with it. A simple internet search, and pretty much anybody trusts us

to go into places we're not supposed to or to plug things into their computer. It's pretty obvious that we're harmless. How long did this take from concept to to having a finished one i mean it sounds really like you know fairly complicated this is not oh we got some leds and we're going to blink them or we have an lcd display and you know donkey kong's on the badge no rfid with my personal information that you can sell to vendors. Right, right. I think the initial Crystal talk was, what, in like June? The Node to Node talk was, we went out to Mater's,

cool German restaurant in Milwaukee, on day two of the conference the year before. And over lunch, Spatzle and you know good german food addy and i were talking about the node to node jumping idea so it really started about a year before we delivered it but in earnest um i think the programming started in like october i think so yeah i. I think around October, November is when we started all of the actual intense work and we had a deliver at end of March.

So, so Addy does all of the like procurement of the parts and dealing with the PCB fab and doing like the final routing of the boards and plotting the Gerbers and all that sort of stuff. And I do the artwork and a lot of the code. And for this project, we brought on Peter to help with pick code because he's like a pick guru guy. We actually had two processors on there to be able to do it. For me, it was like Addie chained me to my desk for six months because I had to develop a time-sharing operating system and a suite of applications in it,

and I only had 3K longs of memory to do it in for program space and operating RAM, which is no small task. So she just walked by occasionally and beat me. And how did they communicate? The processor to processor or the node to node? The node to node. So Peter did the pick, and we picked a a particular pick that had two irda um

hardware you know drivers in it and uh so we've got a rx and tx module pointing one left and one right out of the side of the cube and uh he just cooked up a little simple protocol that allowed them to detect when each other are around and pass bytes between and once a byte comes in it sits in the buffer on the PIC and the PIC presents it to my processor on an I squared C register and I'm just sitting there pulling it waiting for bytes to come in. Then I parse them and do the routing and pass them back out through. Okay. What about the processor to processor then? So that's all I squared C and it's just this massive wall of I squared C registers that I would use to, you know, tell the PIC I need to this, or what's the status of that?

Because the PIC could do things like monitor the battery voltage for me. It was a soft power switch, so the core processor could tell the external processor to reboot the system, which is pretty funny in the text adventure. There's a table with a hypercube sitting on it, and if you pick it up and play with it, the badge actually shuts off because you've broken the space-time continuum. Stuff like that.

You intended these to be hacked. I mean, not only was there in-the-game play as part of the hacking and getting onto this timeshare system, but did you expect the hardware to be hacked or just the software? Absolutely, yeah. The hardware was definitely expected to be hacked. We already knew from doing badges for this conference previously that there were some hardware hackers in attendance

that brought tools with them. So we knew that that was a major possibility. And let me tell you, it is difficult and somewhat nerve wracking to design a product from scratch on a good day to a normal client. But when your client is 400 nefarious, evil hackers who you know are going to beat on it and take it apart the day they get it and try to break it it makes it so much more uh stressful so i was i was sort of stuck with the job of walking up and down the hallway and informing people what they could do with the thing because it's such a big

you know concept and it sort of needs a few seeds planted in the audience to make sure that, you know, they get what's going on. And there was about four kids, like college kids, camped out in an alcove. They had found an outlet and they had a soldering iron. They had a pile of Arduinos and laptops and they had taken apart their cube fully. And they had, uh, bodge wires and, you know, little probes attached all over the circuit and it was hooked up to an arduino to their laptop and i walked up and i looked over their shoulder and i asked the kid ah you're trying to dump my e-prom are you and they're like yeah yeah but it's not working very well i'm like well those processors are talking to each other over the same i squared c bus that the e-prom uses to you know get the program I squared C bus that the EEPROM uses to get the program into

the processor initially. And the look on the kid's face when he realized that all the stuff that he was getting was just noise from the processors pulling. It was great. So people did hack at them at the conference. I wondered, I mean, it seems like such a big thing that, and you're at a conference, so I presume you're there to like see speakers and stuff. But people really do this at conferences? I must go to really boring conferences.

I think it depends. You're always going to have that contingent who decides that their mission is to mess with the badge during the conference. Like the goal for them is that badge. And these particular students were the same ones, were the only ones actually that managed to solve the Cypher from last year's CypherCon badge. And that's actually, that informed our development for this particular badge so let me back up a little bit our our first badge for uh cypher con was an xor stream cypher

is that implemented in 7400 logic right of course you're. And Whisker had created a 3-bit encoding schema. And so we were like, oh, man, this is our first hacker conference for me and Whisker. And we're going to see people hacking this and figuring out the ciphers. And it's going to be amazing. Well, of the, I don't know, 200, 300 some people, most of the hackers were like, oh, is our goal just to turn on all the lights? No. And I mean, it's like, no, that's no. Why would we, that's so stupid.

Like we made it more challenging than that. Come on, hackers. How dare you? Don't disappoint me, right? And it just so happened that these three or four students were the only ones who figured it out. And so we were like, oh, my goodness, we are making our badge for you next year. Like this, like all of our brainpower is just going to be to make you guys like challenge you guys.

And one of the things that they had mentioned in the first conference was, man, if you guys had been super tricky and put a puzzle within a puzzle, that would have just really gotten us, and it would have made it that much more fun. And we're like, challenge accepted. So this year's badge, one of the applications on the time-sharing operating system, was a software simulation of the previous year's badge. Oh my god. Well, now you've set a precedent. Yep. was a software simulation of the previous year's badge.

Oh my God. Well, now you've set a precedent. Yep. And so for this year, what we realized was that there are different levels of people, right? There are different, some people will just want it to be easy, blinky. They just want the pretty.

And then some people will want the puzzles. And so for this particular badge had I want to say, what, four different levels? Yeah, four or five tiers, I'd say. Four or five tiers of enjoyment. So the first is just, you know, it's pretty.

It looks nice. The LEDs are flashing. Really was pretty. I i mean not just the leds but the way the leds interacted and how they went and the design of the pcbs there was a lot of pretty to it can i just say thank you and thank you one thank you too uh not too many people know but uh there was only one board with vias on that cube. All of the other sides don't have traces or vias to the outside, like to the outer layer. So all the traces had to be on one side.

That's a new kind of routing problem. Yeah. Well, yeah, I need that metal as an extra layer for my art, right? I mean, why waste it on electricity when you can use it for art? Right. Well, and they were going around people's necks. So there was the chance that they would touch, I don't know. You didn't want to electrocute the people who were trying to use your things.

Very true. Even if they're hackers, you still don't want to electrocute them. You didn't solve my puzzle, electrocuted. Zap, zap, zap. So yeah, so the first was the LEDs. The second tier was the game, right? Because once you get into the game it's fairly it makes sense you know you're like oh okay i gotta walk around here not die from acid poisoning yeah no problem

and the third layer would be getting into the actual computer correct and using the operating system yeah and the operating system is not um you know for a complete lay person who doesn't do computers they you know they they don't know what any of these items necessarily do right and they may be intimidated when i saw people play with most the feature in the os part of it was the ability to uh set up the color of their badge so So one of the applications in there, you could set the color and animation patterns on the LEDs. Yeah, that was the popular one for them. And then the next tier, of course, would be hacking into another person's badge

because in order to hack into another person's badge and to actually change colors on their system and all that is to gain root. But to gain root, you have to learn how to use the low-level programming language that Whisker came up with called Tis But a Scratch. So, and it was largely based off of brain f*** and... Beep. Beep.

And so, what was it didn't you say there's somebody there who had worked on the on the development of yes somebody somebody had done a uh a compiler for it so they were pleased to see an implementation of a very similar language in the badge. And with a lot of these things, the ability to hack in and get root on a game-ish system like this is too fake and gamified. And I opted instead to actually put an interpreter in the operating system that you could write your own programs for,

but build in a problem with it, a subtle problem with it it that if anyone who was a security expert looked at like the man file for this thing they would spot it and go oh i see if i do this then i can escalate my privileges and go forward and conquer yeah but that you're but the guy um so the guy who had made the inter was it the interpreter or compiler whisker for brain was like oh my gosh you actually made this language usable yeah i don't know if either of you have ever used esoteric programming languages but uh t-bass only has eight operators in the whole language. And to do anything useful with a language that simple is basically you wouldn't want to.

It would hurt you. Even with compilers to help you out or whatnot, it would still stink. And I made some slight changes to the language that I'm sure anybody in a computer science department would look at and say, I want to write a paper about the possibilities of what you could do now with that. Just sort of a clever little thing. It was fun seeing one of the developers for one of the compilers related to it

noticed it and was like, dude! It made me feel happy. Did people get all the way to this? I mean, did you have to help them? How deep did people get on their own, and how many talks did they miss? Well, I've been to two CyberCons, and I haven't seen a single talk. Except for our own so yeah so i i mean actually beyond uh just getting into another person's computer right right um there is also the woods um which i have not even gotten

into and the panopticon yeah the woods drove everybody nuts um in the uh in the text adventure there's you're you're in a missile silo and it's sort of like a bunker and there's this big like sealed metal door that you can't open and there's like clues on it written on it and people were just obsessed with figuring out how to get this door open and it turns out you get it open from the outside going in. But to get into that, you have to attach to the badge using a special USB cable at a special serial speed, special parity, etc. Because the PIC is smart enough to be able to detect what kind of cable you're using, what speed you're connecting at. And then once you get in that far, there's a whole series of puzzles and things that you got to solve to open that door. Did anybody figure this out? This just seems a little too hard.

One person? Yeah, I think there was at least, I remember that one guy for sure, because that's all he did for day two. He would just walk up to the table. He'd ask Peter for any clues or hints or whatever. Peter would say something, grin, and then the guy would just get this sort of dejected look and run back to his corner and start hacking some more. Yeah, I think this is a great way to streamline interviewing. You just take a cube like this, something like this, you throw it at the candidate, and you come back in three hours. And if they haven't figured anything out then okay move on i i had an interview with uh potential

clients and they handed over their device and i pulled out a screwdriver and they got a look of horror on their faces that wasn't what i intended well how else am i supposed to do what i'm supposed to do i was gonna ask how how thing was was this received as you expected, but it sounds like given that people went as deeply as, as they did, that the answer is yes, but yeah. Was this received like you expected? So the, there is a little bit of a delay in registration. And so we weren't able to give our presentation at the very beginning. And so a lot of people,

so part of the cube had a social flag feature which is you could press a button aim at your badge at another person's badge and it would light up you know so it was kind of like a ticker almost where or counter where it would say okay like you've given me a flag and that would count towards points towards the whole conference, like competition. And so a lot of, for the most of day one, that's what people thought this did. That it was just a little social flag. Oh, hey, hello, like, let me throw a flag at you.

You throw a flag at me. Now we're buddies. La-di-da. Move on. After the second day's keynote, we were able to show our video. And after the video happened, it pretty much went crazy from there. People were like, wait, wait a minute. There is more to this badge than just

a social flag thing like that is not even the point of this badge um so yeah so then a lot of people started uh i guess skipping talks to to do to play with the badge and to ask us questions and and all that so yeah it was it was quite nicely received if you'd gone back in time and handed this to me in 1982 i think it would have occupied me for five years you've been like my computer but the thing with just having one is it's not nearly as much fun you have to you have to have a handful that's true it's true. It's true. And one of the coolest features actually was Relay.

And essentially if, for instance, you're logged into My Badge and Whisker's logged into My Badge, then the three of us can talk to each other. So I guess we kind of made like a little internet. Yeah. Like circa 1978 internet but internet better than that do you have plans for next year's badge i ain't saying nothing to you it's a dodecahedron tetrahedron i think would be very pretty. But the boards should be clear. So we do have plans.

And it, you know, whenever you do another badge, you always have to think about how you're going to outdo yourself. Yeah, I think you might have set the bar a little on the high side. So yeah, so outdoing this one is, you wouldn't be able to go in the same path per se. But I think our next year's badge is actually going to be on par. If we can get it, get it, all the parts working correctly, then I think it might be on par. We did give you the electroshock idea, so make sure that.

Yeah, that's true. You know, that's honestly not as bad as some of the suggestions that came up on those last days of working on firmware, Peter and I. Because it has a giant lipo on the inside of the cube, we were like, hmm, I wonder if we could pulse that and get it to catch on fire on purpose. Oh my gosh. That's the next tier. Mission impossible style. Don't type wrong. Is this a job, a hobby, both?

I mean, this is a lot of work. Yeah, it's a product. That's a whole, I mean, that's a complicated mass produced product. You could sell this as a product. Yeah, whole i mean that's that's a complicated yeah you could mass produce a product yeah i'd buy several oh thanks um i would say it's both at for me at this point it's it's well past a normal full-time job you know most people work their 40 i don't get to do that anymore it's more 60 hours or more every week on you know toy maker stuff so but but there is a certain satisfaction in in going from concept to product

in such a short time frame like you know there's a deadline right there's no there's no ever expanding budget that can that can uh accommodate i don't know extra features you know that you have to get it done by the conference date otherwise shame and horror right but so um we enjoy it but it is it does also pay bills so cool and yeah wow is there a lot of competition in the in the amazing puzzle electronics badge market alvaro does one for defcon so it isn't just this conference i'm not joking i'm actually interested yeah um that's a very good question everyone's i feel like everyone is always watching other badge makers to see what features are being implemented, right? To see how much you have to up your game, right? With the advent of yet another badge.

I'm sorry for everyone after. Yeah. You've blown the curve. So it does seem like there's a lot of competition between, like, you know, the people who are making unofficial badges for DEF CON and stuff like that. They do seem to like to one-up each other a little bit, which is cool. The way that I approach it, the only person that I have any, like, competition against is just my friend Joe, because he's, like, the originator of the idea of an electronic

conference badge. And I had no intention of getting into this. And Joe did DEF CON for five years or something like that. He did their badges. And he's a close friend of mine. And I didn't want him to ever get the impression that I'm competing with him to ever get the impression that, you know, I'm competing with him. So instead of competing with him, I just completely annihilated him. And yeah.

Is this Joe Grant? Yes. All right. He's been on the show. So now we're going to have him back and ask what his plan is to recover from annihilation. He'd be like, I'll let whisker take it but there but there is a a certain amount of competition um in in the market but there's also some camaraderie because uh badges are a labor of love right so everybody understands the torture that comes with parts procurement

and with making sure that your boards are fabbed correctly with prototype iterations, with programming and feature creep and things like that. So while we are competitive with each other, at the same time, we're like, oh man, I feel you. Well, and it's a time thing. You can't be late and there's no i mean while we're saying it would be fun to play with these are for this conference i mean you

don't really get to resell them later very much you have to change it right um if you wanted to make a puzzle this so it's a it's a run, and yet it needs to be very, very good. Right. Especially because you have these hackers or these people essentially saying, well, this isn't as good as last year's badge, right? No, I don't like that. Right? So there is that, too.

And we picked up some tricks doing all of the educational videos over the years that relate to this. So we used to do videos of our projects just for the sake of doing a video for our project. But eventually, after interacting with a lot of the folks in the sort of small run electronics community, everyone kept encouraging us to take little pieces of these projects that we were doing that made sense as useful products for others and just snip out the bits that were like that, turn that into a product, and then throw it up on Tinder or whatever and move on to the next project.

That way, as you're doing these big, long-term things that are one-offs, you still get something at the end of the day that can continue on and move on and fuel the community and all these sorts of things. And I think we've been paying close attention to the next few badges that we've done after our first one and make sure that

we pay close attention to anything like that in them that we can take out as good R and make sure that we pay close attention to anything like that in them that we can take out as good r&d tech that comes out of it okay so let's talk about your tindy store what do you have on there tindy uh we have a lot of our electronic kits obviously um for mostly music applications at this point so amplifiers uh filters, like MIDI-related kits or modules. Oh, no. Look at... No, keep me away from here. You don't like MIDI?

No, no. No, he loves MIDI. I'm just looking at the store and going, I'll take some of these. Yeah, so actually, Whiskey, you should tell them about the Protosynth MIDI then. So Jason Toddick had gotten a shipment of breadboards in for his store and there was a manufacturing defect on them and you couldn't quite fit um ices and stuff down into the breadboards so he sent me like 20 boxes of breadboards and they were just sort of taking up space around here and one day i was staring at them and i pictured a synthesizer where the top

section of the synthesizer was just breadboards and you could build whatever circuit you wanted and it's already hooked to a keyboard. So, you know, it's just sort of grew from there. And then I realized later that a keyboard is a lot harder to play than just hooking it into Logic or some other MIDI sequencer. So we did the Protosynth MIDI version and, you know, a nice hardwood case, all the breadboards are built in, the MIDI circuits built in, some MIDI to CV stuff in there, you know, for those of us who aren't just satisfied using off-the-shelf synthesizers, we want to build our own for those guys and gals. So a lot of our modules on Tindy are breadboard friendly so that you can use them with a protosynth MIDI. And yeah, so those are some of our modules on there.

I know that MIDI is this language that instruments speak to computers and then computers can replay the MIDI things so that it sounds the same. Long ago when I was at LeapFrog, when we had to do music, we'd write it, we'd get it from the musical people in MIDI and then I could play it on my toy through the MIDI synthesizer. I don't understand what proto-synth MIDI is. Given that understanding, can you explain more? Sure. So most consumers saw MIDI from that point of view, where MIDI is a thing that my sound card supports.

And I have a MIDI file, and the sound card turns that into sounds I can hear. And that's kind of a user application of MIDI. It's not what MIDI is. MIDI is basically just a serial UART current loop at a very specific speed. And it's just a way of transmitting information back and forth. But of course, you can take that data stream and save it as a file and then have an application parse that file and generate some sounds out of it like the Sound Blaster cards did back in the day. But yeah, I mean, that tech goes all the way back to like 1982,

I think was the original MIDI spec. And the first big consumer implementation of it that most of us saw was the Sound Blaster cards and such yeah midi is one of these amazing things to me because i still use it in the studio for stuff and you know for recording and it's i can't believe i'm still using this protocol from 35 years ago that is basically was future-proofed i mean i know there's been extensions and changes as time went on but the fact that we're still using that it still works just fine it's just amazing the uh interesting part of a lot of people switch like usb to midi or just midi over usb whatnot but in my studio

one thing that i like to use is like the um yamaha mid, matrixes, um, where you've got like eight inputs and eight outputs because I've got like whole credenges of MIDI, uh, equipment. I need to control it all from one little cable coming from my, you know, newfangled logic pro X system. So it's one cable to a box from the eighties that splits out to a bunch of computers and other weird stuff from the 80s. But it works better than any of the USB plug-in MIDI boxes that are on the market today. Seriously, this spec is so old, why can you not support it well? I don't understand.

Sorry. Studio nerds. Addie and I will go away and get coffee. You and Chris have a good time. Okay, but you have lots of other kits. That one's actually kind of expensive. But you have some 20-ish and less kits that let people

sort of get into electronics, put their feet in, and yet don't necessarily require understanding old protocols like MIDI. Yeah, the best-selling kit of all time on our store is Addi's Amplify Me, which is just a through-hole, solder-it-up-yourself LM3D6 amplifier kit. And I would say that we have sold at least 40 times many of those as anything else that we've done because it's at that perfect entry level where pretty much anyone can pick it up, hook it up to a 9-volt battery and some speaker they ripped out of something. So props to Addie. She has

totally won as the top seller here at our design studio. Hardly. But it causes our development of kits to go towards the easy to use rather than the for the hacker um hackers use so when we first started we were like oh man you know there's going to be tons of people who want to get their hands dirty and like figure out the nitty-gritty of bytes and bits and um how to do uh shift registers and things like that uh those actually haven't sold that well and so um we're like well we looked at uh evil mad scientist labs yes and

yep and we were we're like you know they are doing really well why is that and part of it is because their kits, even though they are PCB, you know, they have PCBs, they have parts, they're all complete. They're kind of a plug and play. I think it's because she makes really good coffee. Yeah, she does make very good coffee. You have a story for that too. Wow, if I drink that stuff every day, I'd do a good job too. But their kits are all like you plug and play them, right? Yeah, you have to put them together, but by the end of it, you don't need to think particularly hard to make them function, right? And so the same thing with the Amplify Me and the Candle Simulator, those two are bestsellers essentially.

Once you do the quasi-hard work of putting them together they just work and um so i think as we make continue making kits like that's one of the things we think about is making it into a complete product rather than just a component of, I guess, a larger process. Yeah, if any of you are in the valley, you know, sort of area there where EMSL has their sort of shop thing. Sunnyvale. Yeah, Sunnyvale, California. And if you're in the area and you get a chance to go visit them, do, because their shop is amazing and they're so friendly and awesome people. They really are.

Lenore and Wendell are great. And the easier stuff, it makes sense to me that the easier stuff would sell better because there are so many more learners and people new to this and people who have skills in other areas but don't know, let's pick on the proto-synth MIDI, would know how to use that, would have at least a quarter of the skills to be able to build it themselves. And so they look at it and say, oh, well, should I build this or should I use my amazing skills and just buy one because I clearly have an income. I totally see why kits that are finishable would sell better because those are the kits I would buy. That's the thing. Even as an engineer, you think, well, is it worth my time to redo it myself or should I just

buy it? Because I know it'll work. And that was the definite motivation behind that PSM. I had to do that myself. And I know how long it took to actually do that kind of thing for myself. And I figured if I made it clear enough that it has a lot in it that you don't have to do yourself if you just buy it, then the people who are like me, who like building this sort of stuff,

could skip that step and just get to making things on it, which might be good for some people, but not for me. I would not have bought one. That's always the hard part about selling things is, okay, I would make one of these, but would i buy one of these yeah right i'm too cheap so the amplify me kit did it come out of some other product you were saying about how with the badges you think about well could i kit this could i make this into a product, some subset? Was this one of those that it was something else and then it became a product?

Was that like a John Shook suggestion for you to learn how to do it? Yeah, John S underscore AZ said, hey, I want an amplifier. And I'm like, well, okay. So actually that one was probably the simplest too in terms of like inspiration. It was just one of our friends wanted it.

So I made it for him. But I guess the closest kit that we have, quasi kit that we have on Tindy that came from inspiration was probably actually my HeartMe. And the Heart me is essentially a cardiac simulator and it simulates 17 different cardiac rhythms it shows the electrical pathways uh of these different rhythms lincoln lights christopher's jaw is dropped i wish you could

see him as he's i'm following along as you talk about these things reading on he's reading on the online and he's just like, ha. Yeah. It was actually the first, uh, electronics project that I really put myself into. Cause of course, by day I,

at that point I was a cardiovascular surgery nurse. Um, and by night I was messing around with LEDs. And like I said before, I like LEDs to have information. And so I said before, I like LEDs to have information. And so I said, well, you know, I could show essentially how electricity flows through the four chambers of the heart. And so I ended up doing that.

Nerd. So I did that, and it was actually for a competition that was hosted by parallax uh the the company that does the propeller right and uh micrometric micrometric yep and in that competition so i had a heart a rudimentary heart me and what it did was it had an lcd which showed you what the rhythm was it had audio which lets you listen to what you would hear if you were listening to somebody with that heart rhythm and it also had a solenoid that would pulse and would feel like what you would feel if you were palpating somebody's wrist with that rhythm

this is amazing it's a huge educational thing we're gonna get this for your dad right sure yeah by all means um so yeah so this the heart me uh i've been working on version two for now i don't know three years or something like that. Because, you know, it's one of those parallel projects that I have. But eventually it'll be in a nice little container that has all of these elements to it. But one thing Badge is good for is learning all about manufacturing and dealing with sourcing at volume, blah, blah, blah. And yes, it has been very educational because if you just give somebody an ECG and you show them this cardiac simulator and say, okay, look at where, you know, these bumps and these valleys and dips and highs are happening. Now do you see, now can you why uh the ecg looks the way it

does so and so i've taught a lot of my nursing co-workers about ecgs using using that little uh lapel pin essentially gosh i don't even know where to go from here. That is so cool. Thanks. You mentioned earlier videos that you do some videos of projects you work on. And you have a YouTube channel called Rabbit Hole. Yes. Tell us about the videos. Sure.

The Rabbit Hole is actually a hackerspace that we host. In your basement? In our videos. Sure. The rabbit hole is actually a hacker space that we host in your basement basement. Yep. So our, essentially our, this house is pretty big for the two of us and the spiders were taking over the basement and I hate spiders. So we said,

well, why don't we get a bunch of hackers instead? So you said, I know who eats spiders nerd friends right so every friday we open it up um from six to two in the morning or three last night and uh we do projects you know um and hang out with other fellow nerds and so the videos are a i guess a document not a documentary but it's it's a way for other people to see that they too can um form their own quote hacker spaces if they want to and like some of the projects that other people in the world are working on and that getting from

point a to point z also has a lot of steps in between than just you know what most projects end up showing i guess yes i made this 20 minute video it must have only taken me about 25 minutes to do the whole project right right not the not, right, that it's taken. So, like, in a lot of our other videos, what we'll show is that is pretty much try to show all of the steps at least once to show that, yes, this is something you do have to go through in order to get to what you want your end project to be. So did you make a bacon printer? How did that get? So you want to know how I know about this? Okay, so I went- Who told you about this?

The Toymakers have an IRC, which for those of you who are just too young to be listening to the show, that is an internet relay chat. And it's sort of like Slack that's open and anybody can join in poorly formatted Slack. Let's just go with poorly formatted Slack channel. And their IRC channel has many, many people, including many past guests like John Shook and Joe Grant. And people hang out there all day and they chat.

And I only logged in for a day and I got, oh, about 30% of my normal work done because I was watching their incredibly entertaining chats to each other. But when I was there, I said, do you have any questions? What should I ask Adie and Whisker about? And they said I should call him Whiskers. So hi, Whiskers. You can figure out who said that. There's only one of me. But they also suggested I ask about a bacon printer,

and I have to admit that piqued my interest. For the record, Whiskers is a possum finger puppet that lives in connecticut owned by our by our friend so so um there's this weird really really weird competition called the deconstruction and it's it's just really weird um but we decided to let our hackerspace be part of it. And so one year we decided to make, I don't even know what the theme was that year. I think it was like stuff to help improve the world or something like that. And we were chatting and we're like, man, wouldn't it be awesome if there was a printer

that could make bacon and one of our hackerspace members said yeah we could totally do it i just need a laser printer and another guy's like i've got a laser printer we're like well go back to your garage and get your laser printer you can laser print bacon have Have you guys seen the meme, you know, push button, receive bacon? Sort of a play off the iconography on the hand-drying units in public restrooms? Yeah. Yeah. So, in a laser printer, there are essentially two rollers with Teflon on them. The same stuff that you use, you have on in your cooking pan

and uh the rollers can get up to 400 degrees so technically theoretically yes you can actually make a bacon printer and so that's what we did we took it we took the bacon printer apart attached a screwdriver motor like a motorized screwdriver motor to one of the um rollers and then heated up the rollers and put raw bacon through it which was actually really disgusting yes i was about to say. But I think if we had put it through a few passes it probably would have worked. So first question, did anybody eat it? Second question, did it taste like toner?

Third question, if you wanted extra crispy, did you just print both sides? Oh yeah, was this one of those printers that would flip it over? Well, you'd probably have to flip it over yourself. You're not selling me on this. PC load bacon.

Yeah, so it wasn't amazing, but due to the magic of video editing, we made it look like delicious bacon came out. Tee hee hee. I think if the cooking shows can get away with that, you're fine. Yeah. We did clean the rollers

so there wasn't any toner I would have left it would you have tried it? no I'm a vegetarian that's why I can discuss this with impunity I have no skin in the game so yeah I don't think anybody tried it because even after a few passes it didn't it's not a very good plan in general yeah but it yeah but we had to try it did get into what

popular science magazine i think it did and it's apparently on one of the meme sites all the cool things we've done what do we get in popular science for? Yeah. So that actually was another question from your chat group, which was, do you have a favorite project separate from projects that have been, quote, successful or popular? Do you have favorites that are your favorite, but maybe nobody else's? I will cede to you first, Whisker. We should credit Mark Microchip for that. So in terms of projects that have been going on around here the last couple years,

I think the one that I enjoy the most is probably helping Beth build an electric violin. One of our Hackerspace guys, Ron, showed up about, what, a year and a half ago, something like that? Three years ago. Well, with his daughter. Oh, yeah, yeah. And she looked around, saw there was a wood shop, saw that there was musical instruments that i'd made and said can we build an electric violin i'm like well we can try and two years later i mean we have built an electric violin from scratch um from scrap wood laying around and designing

a preamp for the thing etc etc uh list et cetera. The list goes on and on. And that's been really fun, you know, just having something to work on every week that it doesn't matter if it's on a deadline or how well it goes other than that's going to hit me in the head with a hammer if it doesn't work well or something. Yeah, that's been fun. And that's on the videos. in the head with a hammer if it doesn't work well or something. Yeah. That's been fun.

And that's on the videos I saw. I mean, she played it. She plays quite competently, too. It sounds good for a piece of scrap cedar. Yeah. I don't know how I feel about a professional concert violinist is going to be playing some instrument that we built out of scrap wood that I found in the basement. It's fun. I mean, that's the best. I mean, then you have somebody who can show that it doesn't matter necessarily if your instrument is a Stradivarius,

it's more about the person. Right. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, I think doing it out of scrap words, the best way to show that practice and determination is more important than cold, hard cash. As long as you have access to the basement. Why are you staring at me while you're saying? Sitting in this room surrounded by piles of music equipment. And computers, brand shiny new computers. The only takeaway I have from that is that it's not necessarily about a specific project.

It's just that the older I get and the more projects I have under my belt, the more I seem to enjoy helping other people complete theirs. I get more out of those, I think. What about you, Annie? What's your... I think mine is actually more of a concept is that if I want to

build it I can do it so a large reason we around like right now as I'm sitting here the desk that we have is we built the sound panels on the walls we built the bookshelves we built the desk we built the flooring weves we built the desk fixtures we built

the flooring we put in ourselves like a lot of it is if not almost all of it is diy and largely it's largely because i'm a cheap person and i'd rather do it myself than pay somebody else to do it or buy buy it and um so my favorite project is probably just myself, I guess, in that I'm more willing to try to first make things myself than to buy it, and that I'm okay with making mistakes. That might be too meta. No, I may quote my favorite project as myself. That's kind of deep and kind of cool.

I like it. Thanks. I am, however, reminded of Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec who said people who buy things are suckers. It depends to a certain extent, right? While advocating making everything from scratch. Yes. I would be remiss if i did not ask you about your

podcast before i let you go and sure i know that your podcast is no longer on the air and it's no longer easily accessible from podcast readers but it is still available on a youtube playlist and really it was an awesome podcast. Can you tell everybody about it? Thanks. So we've had three podcasts. Yeah. First one was Zombie Tech and that was inspired by a book called Feed.

It's actually part of the series. Oh my God. I love the Mira Grant and Shannon McGuire books. Oh, Feed was so awesome. Did you? Yeah. Yes. We got to talk the Mira Grant and Shannon McGuire books. Oh, she was so awesome. Did you? Yeah. Yes, we got to talk to Mira Grant. On Zombie Tech.

And I was totally fangirling. Oh, I would. Not going to lie. Oh, yes. You should, yes. She's fun. She's an awesome, and she's got a machete collection at home. Which she keeps under her bed, and she tells people that.

How else would you keep it? I certainly would not people i would not steal from i mean i wouldn't anyway but she would make a list of specific people yeah yeah so so we are actually super inspired we're like man that's like such a good idea being a podcaster or like having news from podcasts um and so we're like well wait we should do that for engineers but like frame it in the zombie apocalypse right so you're an engineer you're supposed to be able to make things you're supposed to create things one what do you do now and two how is that going to help us survive the zombie apocalypse and so that's what the premise of zombie tech was

and so we got to talk to a lot of engineers. Convenient metaphor to allow people to share their insider knowledge on the super specific stuff that they do. Right. And so we did that for a while. And then we also did two other educational podcasts, I guess. Uh, one was first spin and the other first C, which was essentially where whisker and our friend Roy Eltham, um, who's a programmer with,

uh, where, where is he at now? He was at valve and Sony online entertainment. Um, and he's currently at another gaming, uh, company,

but essentially it was them teaching me how to program from complete scratch to the point where I couldn't even get past the pre-word in a programming manual because it was over my head. Addie had literally never programmed in her life and she learned how to basically write really low level microcontroller stuff and now she's pretty good at it well i don't know about that but i i can make an led blink in any case um so so yeah so the first pin and first c was me learning

spin which is the higher level language for the propeller. And then C of course, which the propeller can also use, but it's obviously more universal than spin. And, but yeah, the, the one that was obviously more fun,

I guess was, was zombie tech. And these are, we, we still have all the files. It's just a matter of me having enough time to put them up on YouTube. And that's related to why we had to stop doing them.

We don't have enough time to do all of these things all simultaneously. It was going to kill us, so we had to pare back and pick what we wanted to focus on prioritizing that's very sensible it's okay wait a minute i'm looking on your youtube channel and i see first spin and i see zombie tech and then it is patch bay yeah patch bay is uh myself and a canadian record producer uh shane and it's just sort of two Midwestern chuckleheads who are into studio stuff, sort of catching up every week

and talking about what we're doing, who we're working with, what kind of stuff we're doing in the studio. It's pretty fun if you're into that stuff. If not, it will be very boring. I understand that. I know we have some listeners who don't do embedded software or any sort of thing like this, and I suspect they've checked out by now. Shame on them. No, it's kind of cool

that people would listen to us when they have to tune out every time we say something like volatile or, I don't know, propeller, whatever things we're randomly saying that mean other things. I don't know where I'm going with this. Anyway. Christopher, do you have any subjects we should especially cover again or should we let Addie and Whisker go back to fighting zombies? We should talk to Whisker for another hour about MIDI and to Addie for another hour about cardiology.

Yeah. All right. I like it. But no, I don't have any further questions, Your Honor. All right. Then I'm going to ask the two of you if you have any thoughts questions, Your Honor. All right. Then I'm going to ask the two of you if you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with. Addie, do you want to go first? Sure.

If you have a project, just take it a step at a time. Figure out the very core of what you need and then what's needed to support that and build from there and by the end of it you will have um a product that you can come on to embedded with and whisker what about you all right so with a lot of stuff I've done, it's been trying to focus on sharing information with others, connecting people together, building community, things like that. But these days I'm stuck kind of doing things just to make, you know, profit because I just need to do that for a while. So I hope that all of you out there will pick up the slack, put up more YouTube videos showing your projects, document them well.

When someone is trying to figure out how to do something these days, the first thing they do is do an internet search. And if you're not posting information about your projects, that information can't be found. So all of you guys, gals out there on the cutting edge working on new stuff, please share what you're working on. Because it really helps the people who are interested in getting in and don't necessarily have access to education. You know, they can learn how to do this stuff even if they can't go to school. Excellent. Our guests have been Addie and whisker the toy makers you can find them on various sites by taking all of the vowels out of toy makers t-y-m-k-r-s we couldn't afford any vowels

and we're not going to treat y as a vowel today. Some days you do. Some days you don't. You can find Toymakers on Twitter, Tindy, YouTube, and of course their own Toymakers.com where their IRC lives along with links to all of their other stuff. Thank you so much for being with us. Anytime. It was an absolute pleasure. Yeah, thanks. It was fun. Anytime. It was an absolute pleasure. Yeah, thanks. Fun.

Yeah. And with respect to what Whisker said about sharing what you're doing, I have been posting on our blog about my little robotic arm and what I'm doing with machine learning, and there'll be more posts about that. And Svek and Andre will be back soon with their more technical programming posts. So check those out, please.

It's kind of cool. I'm very excited about my arm and teaching it to do things. I would like to say thank you to the nice folks at the Toymakers IRC for some of the more amusing questions. And of course, thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Finally, thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Finally, thank you for listening. My closing thought today is from Disney's Toy Story because it seemed so appropriate. How dare you open a spaceman's helmet on an uncharted planet? My eyeballs could have been sucked from their sockets.

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