Embedded - 239: Tweet My Boots

Episode Date: March 29, 2018

What do you do after space debris, hacking dinosaurs, and judging robots? If you are Dr. Lucy Rogers (@DrLucyRogers), you build an organization devoted to promoting the Making industry: Guild of Makers (@GuildOfMakers) Lucy’s personal site is lucyrogers.com. She wrote the book It’s ONLY Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English. Guild of Maker’s Twitter hack chats are weekly on Tuesdays at 8pm UTC. They use the tag #MakersHour. Lucy programs in Node-RED, a visual language.

Hello and welcome to Embedded. I'm Elysia White here with Christopher White. Our guest this week is Dr. Lucy Rogers. We're going to talk about robots and dinosaurs and makers. And I'm just hoping all of those things all together. Hello, Lucy. Thanks for joining us today. It's great fun to be here. Could you tell us about yourself? I'm a maker. I solve problems by inventing and making stuff. For example, as we've already

alluded to, I put electronics in robot dinosaurs, but I've also made a wine bottle that lights up when you send a text message to it so you never have to drink alone you could always have your friends texting you to say they're having a drink at the same time I've made eight inch tall mannequins for a dressmaker for her marketing campaign so I make all sorts of things. And you also were a judge on some television show? I was a judge on BBC Robot Wars, where robots pitted against each other in an arena in a fight to the death. I just want to bring that up because we're doing Lightning Round next,

and it won't make sense. So with lightning round, we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask you for all the details until later in the show. Okay. All right. An easy one. A tip everyone should know. Don't try to catch a falling soldering iron.

Okay. That's a good one. Yeah. I've been, I've been known to... I usually catch it on my leg. Should we bring back the dinosaurs? Always. Favorite getting started board? Raspberry Pi.

Robot you'd least like to meet in a dark alley? Canine. Always gave me a bit of the creep. This is the Doctor Who canine. Yeah. Okay. Robot you'd most like to have a beer with? Oh, it's a killer lot every time. A killer lot.

Okay, we're going to have to look that up. That's one of the Robot Wars house robots. Okay. How long until we have autonomous Robot Wars on television? That's an interesting one. Ten years. Wow. That's pessimistic.

Okay. Can you be pessimistic about war? The question should should really be when do we have robots judging human wars that's more scary that is terrifying actually yes that really is what's a day in your life like these days varied it always involves twitter it if i If it's a good day, it involves making something. And it always involves a dog walk. When you say making, that means many different things to different people, from electronics to software to knitting. And I mean, just everything can be making. What does it mean to you? To me it's using creativity and imagination to make something physical and I know that making does cover all those other things photography, art, computer games is all making but to me it's to make something physical usually with my hands and so how does this come in to match with the electronics and software side i mean i i sometimes play with clay

that's making and yet when we talk about making with the capital m it usually does involve some form of science technology. It often does, but it doesn't have to. I have a city and guilds qualification in woodturning, and I don't touch the electronics in the lathe. I just make things with a chisel and a lump of wood. So I haven't got the electronics making in that part. But sometimes I put the two things together. Recently, I had to make the end fall off a concertina for a musician in a comedy band. He wanted to be playing and then the end fall off the concertina. So I started using solenoids for that and a button. And so when you press the button, the solenoids would unlatch and the end would fall off. And it actually transpired that that wasn't a really good solution.

There wasn't enough friction involved. And so I ended up with magnets and kitchen cupboard locks. So that problem didn't need an electronic solution. Did you at any point in thinking about this problem consider explosives? Yes, but he said he wanted to be in the background rather than the foreground. I wanted to put smoke in and all sorts, but he wasn't having any of that. You started this Guild of Makers. What is that?

The Guild of Makers is for people who make and may have done it for a hobby, but now want to sell their stuff, are starting to make products, are starting to want to give up their day jobs and make for a living. But there wasn't really anywhere to go to talk to other people who were also doing this. And this is both craft side and the more technical electronics-y side. So I know woodcarvers who, they can belong to the guild of woodcarvers, but that is just for woodcarving. If they wanted to talk to someone who's doing something maybe slightly electrical, even a knitter, they would have to cross boundaries, cross disciplines, whereas the Guild of Makers is for any discipline. And it's helping become professional. It's helping the maker industry and those who are

or want to become makers in the maker industry. The UK has always had a rich tradition of artisan industries. I understand why we have more of a maker community in the United States because it's a hobby. And so there's this idea of going from hobby to professionals is odd. But I mean, maybe it's just my bias. But you know, I think about the, well, Wedgwood was one of those, uh, it's a ceramics place that Christopher's looking at me like I'm crazy. Uh, and,

and they have beautiful art and it was, it went, well, I should stop explaining and just go with, I feel like you already have a rich, uh, history of this. So I'm surprised. I'm happy, but I'm surprised. We do have a rich history, but that's mainly it. It's history. Our manufacturing died and was on the decline for many years as the UK as a whole

took up more service industries rather than actually manufacturing and making. So all the potteries, a lot of the potteries closed down. So we don't have as many as we used to. We don't have as many craftspeople as we used to. And the education system, if you were good at doing exams, you were pushed down the academic route. And if you were good with your hands, you were pushed down the academic route and if you were good with your hands you were pushed down the more practical route and there wasn't any crossover it all seems to be a the practical route wasn't as good now I know that to become a master craftsman takes many more hours and dedication than to get a PhD. But it wasn't seen as the same type of career path.

And so, I mean, I think it's all coming back that we can be creative. Factories don't want people to really be creative. They want you to make a product the same every time. And that's what managers are there to do is to make sure that you you stick to the rules you do it the same way every time and at the end you get the same product out at the end whereas if you can use your creativity you'll get something bespoke out at the end which a lot of people want maybe not in maybe not in your car i think that's that's that is changing as things get more mass produced and automation moves factory jobs from being people to being people supervising robots. But yeah, I think people are looking, at least there is a market for people looking for things that are handcrafted and made with different kind of attention. Yeah. I've written a book and I belong to the Society of Authors,

which has been going since the 1800s. And the Society of Authors will offer me a load of benefits, such as I can network with other writers. I can go to the children's authors group and talk with other children's authors. I could ask questions about my accounts and how to set up the company. I can ask them questions about my contracts. So all these things that Society of Authors has already got, I wanted for makers because I didn't know, should I become a sole trader or a limited company or a PLC? And what's all the difference? How do I go from here? How do I get insurance? How do I sell these things? How do I get my items on the Amazon marketplace,

for example, there was nowhere, I found easily, I could go for these kinds of things. That makes a lot of sense, especially as you were talking about the different tracks in your education system, that if you do the practical track, you may not learn about computer marketing and that may be what you need in order to sell. So how are you going to teach these things? Well, we're really just at the beginning of this journey of the Guild of Makers. We had our launch just a week ago and it's all very exciting, but we're still finding our way. But we are getting partnered with legal firms so they can give us information on what we're doing, on how to set up a company, which is the best type of company for

which type of business. We're partnering with business people who can give us information on how to price our things, how to cost our items. So we're partnering with a lot of organizations. IBM have partnered with us to give us training on how to use their software which we can then um actually start investigating data so if you've got a some kind of project or something that wants to use a lot of data or interrogates a lot of data you can go on the ibm courses we've partnered with autodesk who do um computer-aided design software and they're helping to train us on using various CAD packages and so we can then design things for 3D printing. So we're partnering with a lot of companies who are really keen to get makers involved. And how about the makers? How are you finding them?

It all started about last June, June 2017. And I was discussing with a friend about, I wanted to go to a maker fair. And in the UK, most of the maker fairs are aimed at under 18s or zero to maker. So you can't solder here. Now, by the end of this hour session, you've soldered a couple of LEDs and a resistor in. I wanted to either move the kids out of the way and have a go myself, which apparently isn't that politically correct to do. And I wanted to talk to the people running them running running these courses and running the thing saying oh what do you do oh you make that that's really exciting but there wasn't something for the grown-ups it was mainly aimed at either beginner beginners or children and so

I thought well you know I wonder if it's just me that wants this group, this professional institution of grown-up makers who are doing it professionally. So I started Makers Hour on Twitter, 8pm to 9pm UK time, hashtag Makers Hour. And a host will pose five or six questions during the hour and people would just respond and we've done 41 42 makers hours uh since last june we've had 25 different hosts from all around the world four or five different countries we've had humanitarian makers join in we've had leather workers, we've had the electronics side, all asking different questions. But it's not just the host that holds it together. People then start talking to each other. And I've seen on Twitter, someone will post, how do I do this? And then someone who they met on

Makers Hour will respond. And so just building this community. So when we actually met, there was 50 or 60 of us at the launch, and we'd all been tweeting on Makers Hour. And so we all met for the first time, which was absolutely amazing. Oh, you're the person who makes that. Oh, how do you do that? And it was just great. do you think being able to meet people in person is an important part of it for me it is it's it's difficult when you don't really know other people in your village in your town who do the same sort of thing as you so oh you make with electronics okay um how does that work but when you find other like-minded people and they've other they don't have to be with the electronics it could be um someone who's passionate about knitting who's passionate about sewing who's passionate about their woodcraft

that passion comes through and the respect that you get for one another for just because you make something and you spend the time to actually put your physical work in and often your soul into these things. Talking on Twitter and talking electronically is good and it's a great start. But I find you have the conversations of yes and when you're with somebody so for example I was using a laser cutter to I was making a wooden spoon for a booby prize for a pub quiz and someone said yes and you could laser cut on that wooden spoon the booby prize. But on the back, you could put a smiley face or an unhappy face or there was there was always taking it one step further. Whereas on my own, I would probably say that'll do. If someone else is there, they can say, yes, and why don't you as well?

Which is always to me inspiring. Or you just look at someone and say oh right so i went to a talk and someone had made a asteroids game using it was seble de la um he he he's made a gun that shoots a laser at a projected asteroid screen and out of this gun is comes smoke and that smoke came from an e-cigarette and i wanted that smoke system for some firecrackers that i was making some indoor firecrackers and so i was talking to him say how did you make the smoke how did you do that how do you make something that can smoke inside without setting all the fire alarms off and so we got chatting and uh i used that idea so by seeing other people and seeing what they do you can have the conversations so sometimes it's

hard to actually start chatting to people in real life but yeah it works when i think of guilds i i think of formal apprenticeship and things like that and moving from you know novice to journeyman to master and i know that's not what you're talking about with this but do you have some ways of connecting people so oh this person wants to be a mentor and we have these people who want to be mentored uh is there kind of a more formal uh rendezvous process there's not a formal process yet but we've had quite a few people say, I know someone who's looking for an apprentice. I know someone who's looking for work experience.

And we put that out to the community and people have come back and said, yes, okay, I can take, I can take one student in this area for this long. Um, yes, we're looking for an apprentice. We can do that. So one of the things i'd really like to take forward is the apprenticeship scheme but we're also looking at in the future of having an accredited membership scheme so at the moment anybody can join and it doesn't matter what your skill level whether you're a beginner whether you're advanced whether you've been doing this professionally for 100 years or or for minutes, it doesn't matter. You can join as a member if you think the benefits of joining suit you. And it doesn't

matter where in the world you are either. You can still join. In the future, we're going to have accredited membership where your item is peer reviewed or what you make is peer reviewed. And so not only will you make a good quality product um to on time and to budget and it's it will be fit for purpose so we'll have people looking at all these things and you'll charge it so that you can have a sustainable income so you're not just charging for materials you're actually including your time in that and once you've got that we're going to say you're not just charging for materials. You're actually including your time in that. Once you've got that, we're going to say you're an accredited maker and you can use the Guild of Makers stamp. So anyone looking for, oh, I need someone to put something on the end of my conveyor belt or I need someone to design a shop window front with all singing, all dancing puppets in it, something like this. They can come to the Guild and say...

Sorry, we have one of those nearby. Nearby that we go visit often. You can come to the Guild and we'll be able to either put you in touch with these people, or you can just see that they've already got the accredited Guild of Makers stamp. This will help a lot of individuals and sole traders who maybe can't get the word out themselves. Before we go on with this, I do want to ask you a little bit about some of the background, because it is important to see how we got here. And I am going to lead up to the question of how do you have time to run this organization and do your own making? But to start that, to start this whole process of how we get to that question, you've done the BBC Robot Wars.

You've written a book. What was the title of the book? It was for kids, right? It wasn't actually aimed at kids it was aimed at um it was it was aimed at me because i was i was working in the space industry and i knew a lot about the small bits that i was working on but i didn't know how it all worked together from the launch system to where the the satellite was going to go um how you put the rocket motor in, what fuels you use. So I didn't know the big picture. And so I asked, where's the big picture book?

And I was pointed in the direction of children's books, which was mainly how do you have a we in space, which was interesting, but not really the bits that I needed to know or I was given really big tomes with a load of maths in it so maths I can do but it's hard work and I just wanted a plain English version of a rocket science so the book's called It's Only Rocket Science an introduction in plain English and it takes you through the whole process of what is required to build a rocket without any maths and without any formulae. Was this before or after you started looking at the problem of space debris? That came, the book came before and in the research for the book, I realized that there

was a problem of space debris. And you have a PhD? I have a PhD in bubbles. Going to need some more explanation. What kind of bubbles? I have a PhD in making bubbles. I think technically we call it fluid dynamics. That makes it sound harder. The bubbles is definitely more fun. I looked at a piece of

equipment that makes firefighting foam. So if there's a petrochemical fire, you can't put water on it because the oil will come to the top. And so you have to smother it in foam. And depending on what type of fire it is, how far away you are, will depend on what size bubble you want to put on this fire. And I was looking at the piece of equipment that made bubbles. Nobody knew how they made bubbles. They just knew that it worked. So I made the whole system out of Perspex so I could see through it. I got a high speed video camera, which back in those days

was a VHS recording. The whole system took up the back of an estate car. Nowadays, you can get it for the size of a laptop, but it was 40,000 frames per second, and I watched bubbles being formed. You say you have a PhD in bubbles, and yet clearly this is deeply technical. And many of the things you've worked on have been deeply, deeply technical. And yet you do make it approachable. Do you have any strategies to help other people do that? No, I just put it in the language. I understand it. How did you get from bubbles to space debris to writing a book and judging Robot Wars for BBC?

Is there a path? not an obvious one not an obvious path at all when i was still at school i was 17 18 we had a club at school that was called the great egg race after a tv program in the 80s in the uk and the tv program was get an egg as far away as possible transport the egg as far away as possible, transport the egg as far as possible using just the power from a rubber band was the premise of the show. And then it went on to can you fly an egg? Can you move an egg around? So we had this club at school that did something similar. And I remember we had to set party poppers off at the opposite end of the, or far away as possible without touching them. And so I'd set myself up at the other end of the room and I used, we were in the physics lab. So I used a ticker tape trolley. It's a little trolley with three wheels and I put it down a ramp and off it went down the other side of the room and it knocked

the bench over that I'd been holding my party popper off on the bench fell the party popper went off right under the nose of my teacher who was marking um who looked up looked around looked at me and said I think you might like to do engineering as a career Lucy so I went into engineering but it took me um 30 years, 20 years to actually go from there to finding the career that actually does that kind of fun engineering. I was sponsored by Rolls-Royce Industrial Power Systems. So I was working on substations, electricity substations for a few years. And then I was working in industry at the company that made firefighting equipment, where I did the PhD in industry. So, you know, I did some proper jobs. And then I set up a computer consultancy, which paid really well, but it was

boring as anything. One day when I was meant to be doing a VAT return, so doing my accounts for the year, I got an email saying, would you like to become a scientist in residence at the Guardian newspaper? So I thought, well, yes, that sounds fun. And the whole idea was for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, as they were at the time. And they wanted to get scientists and engineers into the media so that the media could learn about scientists and scientists could learn about media and so we wouldn't have this disconnect of boffins say and all the scientists say why are they saying that about us and all the media saying what are they talking about so I did a three-week stint at the Guardian newspaper in the UK, in London, and discovered that I could

put stuff into plain English and had a wonderful time there. Tim Radford was my mentor for the three weeks. And so it just really took off from there. But also when I was doing my qualification in woodturning, which I did as an evening class because the PhD was getting a bit too much. So I thought I'd carry on with some practical things in the evening. And I was told to write up as if I was writing a how-to guide. So we've got books called Haynes Manuals uh for cars which show you a picture and then some words like take the wheel off by unscrewing the nuts and then lift the wheel off and then it shows you how how to do this in pictures words and pictures and so i started the writing up my um my qualification in in woodturning of okay this is how i turned, okay, this is how I turned a bowl. And this is how I turned

the legs on a stool. And this is how, which gave me something I could go back to and refer to. So once I'd done that and realized that not only can I turn stuff into plain English, but I can also turn practical things that I'm making into a recipe, if you like, of how to do it, I could then go back to that recipe and say, oh, how did I? Oh, yeah, I did something like that. And I can't quite remember how I did it. And this was back in the days when the internet was still quite new. And there wasn't the YouTube to just go and have a look at. And so that's how I started writing how to's recipes on how I did things. I remember writing once just for my own personal blog

how to make a snowman and it was it was it was absolutely full of photographs of and you get the snow like this and the dog is here for scale and then wrap a scarf around it and put a hat and you need a carrot and some coal for the buttons and so all this thing and so because I was writing these for my own fun people picked it up and started asking could I write for their blog sites could I write for their web pages could I write for their magazines and so I did and I often have oh I've got this project that I really want to do, but I can't justify spending the time to do it. But this company wants to pay me to write a blog on a make thing of my choice. So I will then make the thing, write it up and kill two birds with one stone, which has been great fun. Do you introduce yourself as a writer or an engineer is there a single word that is the default maker all right interestingly though it's only since i started thinking about the guild of

makers that i have realized that i am a maker i am a maker first and an engineer second i always used to describe myself as an engineer because that's the qualifications that I did. I did a mechanical engineering degree, my PhDs in fluid dynamics, again, mechanical engineering. I'm a fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. So all the qualifications, all the paperwork I've got is in engineering. But if I actually look at it, every project that I've done and everything I've done throughout my life, I've always been a maker. I have got things I made when I was six years old still around my house. I have got pottery that I made. I have got some

embroidered, an embroidered rug that I made. I was always making. My family were always making. And because it was such an ingrained part of who I am, I hadn't separated it into actually that is who I am. I am a maker until recently. And I thought, actually, my degree, my PhD was in making bubbles. It wasn't in the maths. It was how are bubbles made? So all my previous work at rolls-royce i was in the manufacturing department i was how do we make the bits that go into a

substation i've always loved to make you also have been well you've been on television and you are a writer and you are a speaker and yet you said in a tweet recently that you're an introvert. How do you balance that? What I mean by introvert in being an introvert is that people being around people tires me out. I enjoy it, but I get exhausted by it. I don't gain energy from being with people. I gain inspiration, I gain ideas and I gain friendship. But it really is hard for me to do it constantly and to make the small talk. I find uncomfortable. However, I find that if I have something in common with someone.

So I used to go to conferences and find out who else was tweeting at that conference, arrange to meet whoever that person was by the coffee bar and say, oh, hello, I'm on Twitter too. And we'd have a common interest. We'd have a common thing. Not only were we at this conference together, but we also tweeted. And so it started from there and I found a seed to start a conversation with. And for me, that was much easier. And so for Makers Hour, when we had our launch, there must have been 95% of the people had chatted with someone at Makers Hour already. And so we sort of knew each other. And so it just made life so much easier. But I also know that if I'm doing

something like a conference, the next day or the next week, I really need a quiet week of not being with people. Yes, I always need to schedule the downtime. And it is easier to talk to people you kind of know, even if they're Twitter friends. I have found that small talk, agreeing about the weather is sort of like finding somebody in Twitter. It allows you to start agreeing about something else and to go into a deeper conversation. It's that ramp. Small talk can be, but like you, I find it kind of tedious. Okay, so now back to my big question. You are a maker.

You want to build things. You want to communicate how to build these things. You want to actually put your hands on the material and form something physically. The Guild of Makers is just an idea. How are you balancing this relatively big project with communication and websites and marketing and all of the things you can't touch with your own personal desire to be a maker? It feels like an administrator and a maker are two different things. I am getting together a team to do a lot of the bits that I can't or I don't do very well, and they do very well. So now that we've started and we've got established and we've got some sponsors and some sponsorship money coming in, some membership money coming in, I can now start to build that team and pay people to do the things that the guild needs and i can carry on doing my making so i don't want to the guild of makers for me

is not how i'm going to make a living uh the guild of makers is something i want to be there so it's got to be able to wash its own face it's got to be able to do its own thing and i'm more than happy to shout for it to be a spokesperson for the guild um to run the guild but all the um to me all the hard work of actually doing the administration will be outsourced. Well, that makes a lot more sense. What are you making these days? I've just finished making a steampunk advertising sign that I can control all the lights. So it's like a makeup mirror in a dressing room. So it's got a big mirror, all the lights. I've got 24 volt incandescent lights, so the old style light bulbs all the way around and my company logo in the middle. So you can see through the mirror, but I've laser cut my company logo so you can see through to the mirror. And I can control each of those light bulbs individually and so i can have them chase

around or flash um and and looks really cool i'm pleased with it what are you using to do the control that's a raspberry pi in there and the the power because the those those bulbs are um you're gonna have to have some more power than just Raspberry Pi GPIO. Yeah, it's got a separate power supply, but they're 24 volts. So they're not alternating currents. They're not normal light bulbs that we just put in the house. They're ones that are used on boats and caravans and things. And I've had to put in some extra electronics for the Raspberry Pi to switch a open collector driver,

which is a bit like a relay. So the Raspberry Pi switches the relay, which switches the lights on and off. And what are you programming in? Node-RED. I always program in Node-RED. It's a visual flow programming language, so it's all drag and drop. And I just have to drag and drop so I can say, ah, when this signal input comes in, do turn on GPIO pin 3, pin 4, pin 5. Do these things.

Add a time delay. switch it off again. I'll put, use it, and so you can dim it, PWM. So you can say, okay, only put it on at 50% brightness. And all those things are available in Node-RED as drag and drop. And if the node isn't there already, you can write a function node in JavaScript, or I can ask my friends to write a function node for me in JavaScript because my programming skills are still a bit on the dodgy side. And it all works beautifully.

Okay, what else are you building? Or what was your favorite thing to have built in the last three years? I really enjoyed doing the light-up wine bottle, which I mentioned earlier. And I've got some boots that have LEDs in. And I hacked them so that I could now tweet them to change color. So if anybody tweets my boots, they change to that color. Are these Wi-fi or cell modem they are wi-fi so they connect to my phone as a hotspot uh and and that is node red what are

you using for the uh board on those because that can't be the pi that's too big no that's a Wemos ESP8266 ah yes is in there um so I've got a small Arduino um code on on the Wemos but that's actually talking back to the IBM cloud which has got a Raspberry Pi not a Raspberry Pi sorry it's got a Node-RED flow in the cloud. So I programmed it in the cloud. And all that's on the WeMOS is says, get the information from the cloud. That makes sense. These are different projects, they're smaller than some of the things you've done in the past. Do you miss the big, large, working with a huge team things? Or do you really prefer being able to do it all yourself? Interesting question. I like both. So I'm still working with the theme park on the Isle of Wight in the UK with the robot dinosaurs. They've built up their team a lot larger in the last few years,

but I still go down there and we discuss, oh, we could get the dinosaurs to do this, and we can get them to do that, and how do we do that? And I've trained them on Node-RED so they can program themselves now, which is great fun. So I get that feedback and that buzz of working together. But I have a very short attention span, so I like the short projects. And how important is it to write up these projects?

For me, it's very important because I usually, a lot of my stuff is open source because I have asked a lot of people for help. So I mentioned that on the function nodes on Node-RED, I've got a friend who will often write the JavaScript for me. When I come to use a flow for switching the light bulbs on the Steampunk advertising sign, I was using information straight off the web mainly from adafruit probably on that and i was using the adafruit board in the light up wine bottle and i was just using their how-tos on that so once i've put it all together i write it up as my how-to

crediting these others so that when i say oh oh, how did I do that? I don't have to go back to five or six different people and say, you know, we did that thing and you wrote me a bit of code. What did it look like and how did we do it? We can go back and have a look at the blog post and say, that's exactly how I did it. And I can take that little part out of there and use it. And now my friends who have helped me, they come back to me and said, you know, I helped you on that thing. Which project was it? Because I now need to do that again. And now my friends who have helped me, they come back to me and said, you know, I helped you on that thing. Which project was it? Because I now need to do that again. And I know you wrote it up nicely. I like that idea of using blogs as an open lab notebook in a way. It's not just to

share with the world. It's also to remember yourself and to have a reference that you've created. I mean, that in itself is an act of creation, you know, apart from the other stuff. And I also find that if I don't understand it well enough to write it, I don't understand it. I was talking about the Hackaday Prize yesterday, and I kept going back to the idea that one of the main judging criteria is how reproducible is it. And we finally got to the point that the people we were talking to understood it wasn't just whether or not I could build it, because the chances are relatively small that I'm going to try to build it. It's that the making it reproducible means that you've made me understand it enough. And then that's the

writing part of it is making sure that not only can I build it someday, but that you can rebuild it someday. And that we both understand it all the way down. Yeah. I write two different styles of blogs. One is a real step-by-step hand-holding, how do you do this? And some of it, if I haven't got time or I've made something else that I don't need the step-by-step guide to, I'll say, I found this on the internet here, and I found this on the internet here. And for example, I used a cable of sufficient thickness. So I didn't say how I'd calculated the cable thickness. I hadn't put all those calculations in. I just said it was of sufficient thickness and putting the responsibility onto the person who's making it because they won't be making it exactly the same.

They'll be doing their own thing somewhere along the line. Yeah, their hardware store will have a different cable anyway. Yeah. It's a robot dinosaur. What? I waited as long as I could. I'm sorry. Tell me about the robot dinosaurs.

Do they roar? First, do they roar? Yes, they roar. And do you have a triceratops? Yes, we have a triceratops. Can I borrow him? No. Can I ride him? Have you seen the video of me riding one no i haven't i'll have to look for that

no can you tell us more about them thanks i um had a phone call from the owner of a theme park who said, my dinosaurs are broken. Can you come and hack them? So I did. I brought the team together. All my life I've wished for that phone call. Ah, well, right place, right time. Yeah. What can I say? I had a reputation on the Isle of Wight. I used to live on the Isle of Wight. I had a reputation of doing technical things. And these robot dinosaurs had come in. There'd been a problem with the main T-Rex. So they'd been installed at Easter. the summer which was the biggest uh 80 of the visitors come during the summer six so just before summer one of the dinosaurs the big t-rex had broken and i wasn't available at the time so their tech guy locked himself in a room with raspberry pi and book on on how to program it and he managed to get this dinosaur working again and it limped through the summer.

But after the summer, when they had more time on their hands, I brought together a team, including electrical engineers, electronic engineers, electricians, and also computer programmers. And we had a look at what was inside these boxes and changed it so that anyone at the park

or any of the staff at the park could actually say, ah, that needs a new one of those. Let's get a Raspberry Pi. We can just go to the local shop, get another Raspberry Pi. They're £35 or whatever. And we don't have to ship the electronics back from China, which will take six weeks and so they're raspberry pies is it really the software that's breaking or i i would think

that it would be more the mechanical parts no the mechanical parts they can fix themselves because they've got welders um and yeah the the motors were okay. They were mainly truck windscreen wiper motors, a lot of these, or truck motors. So there was cams going on. But it was mainly the electronics controllers that were going wrong. Either water was getting into the system or just something was fusing. And so some of the electronics had to come out. Some other power supplies had to go in.

And we used Raspberry Pis, one, because the staff could program them using Node-RED. So we taught all the staff how to program them themselves. So instead of just going on the pre-programmed, every dinosaur wags its tail, breathes, roars. And sometimes the roar wasn't in time with the mouth opening, which was a little disconcerting. And so they could reprogram all the dinosaurs themselves. And so the actual, the the brain the control system was a raspberry pi and then we needed a another electronics board which um someone else on the team designed and made for the park to actually control the big motors okay listeners if any of you need your robots hacked feel free afraid to call me. But Lucy, what is the next phone call you wish you could get? I mean, what would be the thing that someone calls and say, we want you to do this? And you're just like,

oh yeah, let me drop everything. I'll be right there. I mentioned that there was a program called The Great Egg Race on in the 80s and it was fronted by a wonderful man called professor heinz wolf who sadly recently passed away but i would love to bring back that program i would love to front that program bring back the great egg race uh do all those things that inspired me when i was a teenager uh to well, one to inspire the next generation, but actually just to have an awful lot of fun making silly things that inspire people. Do you, I'm going to go back to making in general, but do you see any difference between the communities in Europe, the UK, in the United States, or otherwise internationally? Or are people who are interested

in hacking and making basically cut from the same cloth? I was speaking recently with someone who said that the makers in the USA and the maker fairs in the USA are a completely different thing than the maker fairs in the UK. And I haven't been to enough in the USA, but I've met makers in China and in Vietnam and in Germany. And we all speak the same language. It doesn't matter if we don't actually speak the same language. We all speak geek and tech and making. And we all have that passion for let us make something that works and is fun or does something let us do something actually produce something and so yeah at heart all the makers are the same the how we go about it is probably slightly different and how we make money out of it is slightly different. But that's more research required on that front.

Yeah, one of the things that I wonder if, I wonder how Kickstarter plays in the UK versus the United States, because the path to making products often goes that route here and can lead to great triumphs and also great failures when even when failures of success when uh something is so popular that the person can't handle you know make making enough and keep up with it um so it'd be interesting to to find out if the paths are slightly different in different places i I know makers here in the UK use Kickstarter, and some have used it very successfully, and some have sworn never to use it again. Well, I had one more question about your book also.

It came out in 2008? Yep. So spaceflight has taken a quick turn since then. Yeah. Well, the shuttle was still flying when it came out. The shuttle was still flying, and then we had a number of years of doldrums, and now there's all these companies, SpaceX, Electron. Blue something?

Well, Jeff Bezos' SpaceX-like company that hasn't quite advanced as far as SpaceX has yet. But why are you laughing? Editorializing much? No, I'm trying not to editorialize. Actually, I think they're all great. My question is, do you feel like revisiting that topic and revising the book or in light of this kind of explosion? That's a bad word.

This expansion and democratization of spaceflight. I still love spaceflight. I found that when I was working in space debris, I couldn't do it as a one-person company. I really had to be part of a much, much larger team. And I'm talking hundreds probably rather than tens of people. And that's not me. I definitely want to work in much smaller groups. And for shorter periods of time, I didn't want to just focus on space debris for the next 10 years. I do have a butterfly like mind mind and all shiny i want to go over there now and do that

thing so although the space industry was fun the book for me was i didn't understand how it all worked and i wanted to write the book to understand how it all worked so for me it was that that's now done yeah and things are different but not that different the laws of physics don't change we hope often so far you have we've kind of covered this idea of small teams versus big and being an introvert and going out and finding friendships and to, there is always this problem that I want to know more people. I do feel that relationships are important to mental health and happiness. But on the other hand, I don't really like people.

So there's this big interplay between them. Do you have any advice for figuring out how to get over the hurdle of being in teams and being out there and finding your people? me it's been really interesting to find people on makers hour who are my kind of people and i didn't realize i couldn't specify who are my kind of people but it seems to be those with a passion for something and it doesn't actually have to be making i had assumed that my kind of people would be makers uh crafters of some description, probably into science. But I've made great friends with the musician whose concertina end wanted to fall off. And he's definitely not into science and I'm not into music. So it's been really interesting to see how that works on, okay, he's passionate about that. I'm passionate about this, but actually we still get on. And so to me, a lot of it has been about going into areas where I'm not expecting to find anyone

who I will get on with. For example, the dressmaker, I wasn't expecting to become friends with someone who made dresses. Fashion and clothes is not something I'm interested in. And yet, here's someone who is passionate about what they do and loves it. And so we can have that respect for each other and respect for what they do without actually having the in deep interest in the subject itself. To me, it's all about learning and learning new things. And so the more I can learn, the better. And the more people I can bounce off with varied ideas is great. I love taking an idea from one discipline and putting it into another area. And so that's often how I make my friends. I'm talking to so many people via Twitter, via WhatsApp, and we build

these relationships before we really meet in real life. And so we've got a relationship to start with. And so the next step of, oh, this is real life, let's have a coffee, is so much easier. I do find that the people I like tend to be people who like things. I don't necessarily want to have coffee with somebody who hates everything. It's just no fun. And I don't really care whether they like knitting or electronics. I just want them to like it. The enthusiasm is the key to me. It sounds like you're in a similar boat. Is that right? yes, and we could do this and then you could do that. And oh, isn't this great? The spirally round and round who just talk about the weather and the spirally downs who say, isn't everything awful and depressing? And I just want to spend more time with the spirally up people in the world. Spirally up. I like that. Spirally up.

I may be using that again in the future. Well, before we let you go, I want to ask you just a couple more questions about the Guild of Makers. What would I need to do to become a member? Become a member? Go to guildofmakers.org. Click on the Become a Member and fill in the details. That's all you need to do. You don't have to be a professional maker. You don't have to be a professional maker. You don't have to be selling your stuff. You could be an amateur. If the benefits of joining the Guild are for you,

go there and join. If you want to find out more about the benefits, and we have discounts from companies, we have advice from, as I mentioned, legal firms and other places. We have training courses. We have meetups so far only in the UK, but we're taking international members and we're looking at setting up some kind of licensing franchise chapters, something, in countries around the world because we've got interest from many countries who want to be part of this. So anyone can join over 18s only because of various legal things of taking names and addresses. But you can join. And the benefits for me, The biggest benefit has been meeting virtually, either on Slack or on Twitter, via email or in real life, other makers and suppliers who have the same mindset. And that has been a huge thing for me.

And there's a bit of a fee. It's 59 UK pounds for the year if you join before the 4th of april you will get not only till the 4th of april 2019 but you will also be given founder membership with all the benefits that that entails when i've worked out what those benefits are are you familiar with Boldport? Yes, he's a great guy. I wonder if there's some overlap with that. Do you foresee working more with other people in the UK cross-promoting? uh cross promoting always happy to do as much promoting as as possible for any kind of maker i i don't feel like i'm in competition uh with any of the other clubs um any of the maker fairs this is we're specifically for professional makers but but anyone, as I say, anyone can join. And you don't actually have to make something that's physical. You could be a photographer, a computer game maker.

You can also join. It's all about celebrating the joy of making. And that's what's at the heart of the Guild. And so we'll celebrate all of Sars' work with Boldport. We'll celebrate, yeah, all of the guild and so we'll celebrate all of sar's work with boldport um we'll celebrate yeah all of the maker fairs we're just enjoying making and that goes back to the people we want to meet are the people who are enjoying things the spirally ups spirally ups well lucy it's been wonderful to talk to you do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with if you want to know more join us on twitter for makers hour which is every wednesday evening

8 p.m uk time look for the hashtag makers hour and you will see various makers having a good chat and showing doing some show and tells showing what they've made asking questions and helping each other i attended last week it was quite amusing i do recommend it our guest has been dr lucy rogers maker in chief at guild of makers i feel like there are a lot more titles i'm leaving out there but that's's the ones she wanted. You can find Guild of Makers at www.guildofmakers.org. Thank you for being with us, Lucy. Not a problem. It's been great fun. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting.

Patreon supporters, thank you for helping me to send mics to guests. And of course, to all of you listening. Thank you for listening. You can contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm where you can agree or disagree with Christopher's humming. And now a quote to leave you with from Julia Child. Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses

on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.