Embedded - 240: Belgian Waffles

Episode Date: April 6, 2018

Jasmine Brackett (@asiwatch) spoke with us about @Tindie’s electronics marketplace, this year’s Hackaday Prize, and tips for wearable electronics. If you want to buy on Tindie, check out their homepage tindie.com. If you want to sell, that is straightforward too: tindie.com/about/sell.   There is an Embedded contest for the Tindie Blinky LED badge, a nifty little learn to solder kit. Contest ends April 20, 2018 (midnight UTC). You are to send a number to us using the contact link. Closest one wins. One number per person. You can also get these badges at the Dublin Hackaday Unconference (April 7, 2018, Dublin, Ireland) and at meetups where Jasmine is a presenter. Thank you to Ben Hencke for some good questions. He talked about his Tindie store with us on 220: Cascading Waterfall of Lights. Jasmine mentioned the RC2014, homebrew z80 computer kit. Both Tindie and Hackaday are owned by Supplyframe. Finally, we talked to Emile Petrone when Tindie was a fairly new thing on 72: This is My NASA Phone.

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. This week we are getting greedy and talking about money. We're going to talk with Jasmine Brackett about selling hardware on Tindy and winning money through the Hackaday Prize. Hi Jasmine, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

I'm Jasmine, I run Tindy for SupplyFrame. Previously I was a community manager for Hackaday.io. I'm part of the team that launched the first Hackaday Prize. I lived in the US for five years, before that I was in the US for five years before that I was in the UK and I worked for places like the Victoria and Albert Museum and International Planned Parenthood and I was an online shop manager for the British Red Cross that leads to many things and I really was only going to ask you about supply frame but now I want to ask about everything um before we do that though lightning round you've heard the show uh we're going to ask you short questions and we want

short answers and if we are behaving ourselves we won't ask for lots of details we'll see how that goes okay favorite animal i think kangaroo mouse i didn't know that they existed until I saw one, and then I was absolutely delighted when I did see one. Capes, yes or no? Depends on the dinner party. Favourite Burning Man installation? Oh, there's so many. It really depends on my mood. Whatever mood you're in now.

I think one of the most impressive ones, which is the name I can't remember, but it was referred to as the Belgian waffle. It was this great big structure that was made out of, I think, lots of two-by-fours. It was massive, and you could have lots of people inside dancing, and it lit up beautifully at night, and then it made the largest fire I've ever seen when it burnt. All right. Well, I can include a video of that. It looks really cool. What is the maximum number of hacks per day?

Maximum number of hacks? I mean, you used to work at Hackaday, so I wondered what the maximum number. On hackaday.comcom I think there's more than 50 in a day, but on Hackaday.io, I'm not sure what the rate is now. I've not been looking at it. But it's got to be I don't know

30, 50 When the Hackaday prize launched there was a whole bunch of them in one day so maybe a couple of hundred. How many LEDs can fit on a skirt? You stumped her. Yeah. Maybe it's how many LEDs should fit on a skirt.

It's how many LEDs can fit on a skirt and the batteries not weigh you down. Hundreds, hundreds, and hundreds. Hundreds, hundreds and hundreds. Okay. One more. Do you have a tip everyone should know? How to, uh, you can fold anything with a hood inside its hood. Okay. That goes along with the Cape question really well. Yeah. Uh, Tindy, that is what I asked you here to talk about. And when Emil was on the show like four million years ago, we talked about, let's see, dinosaurs and Tindy being the Etsy of hardware. But that was so long ago.

What is Tindy now? It's still quite similar in that it's an Etsy for hardware in some ways. But it's also evolved. So it's not just small batch electronics. It's developing as small to medium-sized businesses. And there's a lot of people just starting out still um i guess we've doubled in size uh in the last two three years each year on here so there's definitely more sellers and more products available to people what would i buy on t? What kind of products are there?

There's loads of sensors and breakout boards and shields, microcontrollers for any of your next projects. There's things to make robots, or there's STEM-friendly kits for beginners to learn to solder, or kits to make midi and synth boxes um there's parts for nixie tube clocks or there's complete clocks nixie tube clocks that you can buy there's a lot of retro computing um modules and tiny pi based game boys and Arduino-based Game Boy clones. There's people who are selling PCBs for modding your Game Boys and old retro computers as well.

When I go on, it's often because I have a part I really want to use in a system, but I don't want to wait for my electrical engineer to get it together and put it on a board so I can play with it. And so I often go to the components and look for like a flash chip of the variety I want. That used to be like all I used to tend to for, but now there are more complete systems. Has that been a big shift or is that just me noticing things? I think it's not been a big shift, but there definitely are more complete systems and products on Tindy now than they used to be. I think it's easier, it's much easier to ship a bare PCB or a small board or component. And so a lot of the people who were doing that started early and maybe built up into dealing with larger products and projects

and now sell bigger things. Other people also have just more elaborate projects that they want and they're trying them out in tindy i think now that it has um this market has grown and it's appeal and people know about it more people see it's a place to go to buy uh handmade electronics whether it's complete or as parts yeah i noticed a few months ago i was looking for some audio stuff that there's higher-end kits for headphone amplifiers and things like that that I didn't remember seeing there before. So it's more of a complete product, and then you can build it yourself

or something that somebody came up with. It's pretty cool. Definitely the synth section and the audio section has many more complete products, and they are really well documented or um they're also really the kits are really well documented but there are quite a lot of nice end products and because we don't um that people can sell them on their own sites and they can sell them on tindy it it doesn't really hurt for people to put them up on tindy how does tindy for people who don't know how does tindy compare

with things like spark fun and adafruit so we're really the the marketplace uh where you're buying directly from the seller so the seller will when when the order goes through the seller will ship your order to you whereas with adafruit and spark fun um everything comes from their warehouses and their their their shipping when you place the order um it's kind of consolidated in that way if you're buying two things on tindy from different sellers they'll be shipped from those individual sellers um and it means that the sellers do have to deal with all the shipping overheads and costs and labor and but we charge less than the other solutions oh yeah you're taking a smaller piece of the pie yeah but it's a good way to start out and then you can kind of ramp up and work out

whether you want somebody else to deal with the logistics for you. Or if you also need people to help write documentation or you need other ways to bring it to market, then definitely Adafruit and SparkFun can help a lot more with developing your product with you. Whereas we want you to have a product that you list on Tindy and it's kind of ready to go is there a roadmap like you start out and you go to tindy to make 10 or 100 of something and then you go on kickstarter and you make a thousand and then you go on adafruit or sparkfun and then eventually you end up on target's shelves is there a path like, or is that even the right way? I think definitely some people, I think, have done that,

or at least there's definitely people who do just try things out. They just test the waters on Tindy, and then they'll work out that people do want this, and there is a demand. But then they might go to Kickstarter or Indiegogo and get the funds to be able to do a larger production run. And there's definitely people who've got successful enough that they've decided to set up shop somewhere else

or on their own site, but they did start out on Tindy. And I think it's interesting that sometimes people sell on Tindy because they want to sell. And other times people sell on Tindy because they want to make something and it's easier to buy in quantity. And so essentially they're not selling to make money they're selling to cover their own costs yeah there's definitely a lot of hobbyists who do that or either they're buying components or they're buying the pcbs for their own projects and think

maybe somebody else will want this and either they'll kit them up or they'll complete them and sell them on sunday um there's a lot of people that it's their side project and they just kind of want to see their work get into the hands of other people and see it out their projects out in the world and so um yeah those those sellers are very passionate sellers um they often offer a lot of documentation and support as well. And they're trying all different new things. And it doesn't really, they're not starting projects because they're going to be moneymakers. They're starting projects because they want to do it.

As a consumer, as a customer, how do I know that I'll get what I buy and that it will work? So the sellers, we have a review process for the product approvals. So we'll double check things and we'll make sure that there's photos of the item and there's ideally documentation and schematics if possible. If it's an open source project as well, they're links to their GitHub or the Hackaday.io page. And so in that way, we can kind of verify to some degree. And then if the seller ships the item and the customer finds that it doesn't work, we'll work with the buyer and the seller

to make sure that there's a they either get refunded or a replacement is sent um or but a lot of the time sellers will go through and troubleshoot products um if worse comes to worse and it doesn't happen very often um we we've not had a fraudulent seller that's shipped a product to a customer since I've been working for Tindy. That's cool. I mean, it's a hard place to have the distrust of strangers selling to strangers and multiple strangers. With Adafruit and SparkFun, there are a few people that everything goes through. And this is less constricted, but that makes it scarier. So it's good to hear there's both a process and that you don't use it

very much. So there's also the Tindy fraud guarantee. So we do cover buyers and sellers 100% against fraud if it's done on our site. With sellers, we also see if they have an online presence as well. We see if they're involved in other communities. And so you can kind of tell from that if they're playing you in any way. So you do have some guarantees for the seller as well as the buyer. How do I sell on Tindy? You register for an account and then you click on create a listing or sell on Tindy and then you can start filling out the information for a product

ideally you'd have your product already and some pictures a description and any relevant links to your documentation and then when you submit it we take a look through. We'll have a look and see whether the title looks good, the photos work, and you can add a video as well. And then we'll approve it, and that goes live, and we'll promote it. Okay, so the path here is I take Chris Gamble's intro to KiCad, I make a little blinky board, I it on tindy i quit my day job um does that all sound about right ideally yeah um how do how do you differentiate i mean how do how do sellers differentiate themselves

when it is very possible to have the same idea as someone else? So there is a little bit of competitiveness, and a lot of people differentiate themselves by having good documentation and good support. Also, there's a lot of variation that people can do on things they can add different connectors generally or add slightly different functionality or make the form factor smaller that seems to be a very common way that people seem to compete but there seems to be a lot enough room for a lot of

variation and when people are looking for these kind of hardware shortcuts, they often find one that will suit their needs on Tindy. And those people are prepared to pay for that. How do you, you in particular, not Tindy, but also Tindy, how do you help people market their things? So we make suggestions regarding their product listings um we'll help with uh when i'm looking through i'll look through the titles and and see if it's obvious what the item is uh we'll also i'm laughing because there's so many times that i'm on like an open source project and it's like five pages of just acronyms in gobbledygook and all i want is one line to tell me what is this thing yeah we'll we'll try and help um and if we're not clear on what it is we'll go back and ask them

can you clarify what this is or also what's included in in product. What are you actually going to send to the customer? Is this a bare PCB? Is it a kit? Is it fully assembled and tested? We'll ask them these questions to try and clarify that in the product listing. And then from that, that should give us enough information that we can then promote it on our social media and maybe write a blog post about it and then also share it on different on hackaday

io and other places like that we also encourage sellers because sellers know the most about their own products we encourage them to let other people know about their products um and whether it's on forums or news groups or discussion boards, they also know the types of people that are most likely to buy their items as well. So we do help generate, Tindy does help generate traffic, but the sellers that are most successful are the ones that are engaged with their own communities. It's hard though. I mean, if I'm an engineer and I make something and I'm ready to share it, you've now said that I need to document it, which many engineers are not great at.

And now I need to build a community and do some marketing and social media. Do you have sellers that need a lot of handholding in this area, or do you mostly draw people who pretty much check all the boxes? There's a bit of both. There's a bit of a whole spectrum. And there are definitely sellers who just make amazing products, who then list them on Tinder, and they don't really do they don't really do any social media or marketing but they've written a good description um and it just gets picked up

because it's a good product um and it's been promoted through tindy and on our social media but the sellers who sell the most are ones that are more active so it definitely definitely helps because people would rather hear from the seller and how excited they are about the item than from i think from our marketplace unless um, they'd rather hear directly from the sellers. As somebody who is always trying to find new ways to market things, I'm never really good about going to things like Reddit or Hacker News and posting the show notes because I feel like I'm proud of what I made, but I don't really want to bother other people. Do you have advice for Tindy sellers who are having that problem

that marketing is to some extent interrupting other people or bragging or any of those things we're kind of taught not to do? I think if you have a good product or even if you're just excited about an idea and you've just started, if you're talking to other people about what you've done and you share it on somewhere like Hackaday.io, there's also a lot of sellers who didn't start out as sellers. They started out having projects like Hackaday.io. There's also a lot of sellers who didn't start out as sellers. They started out having projects on Hackaday.io

and maybe other places like Hackster and other communities. And other people were like, I really want to buy that. Where can I buy that? And so they didn't necessarily realize it was a product. And then they decided to get a few boards made and put them up on Tindy, and then they sold decided to get a few boards made and put them up on tindy and then they sold them that way and it people are really interested in what you've made especially if you can show a larger project with it as well and the other things that you've you've done with it it's not it's it is hard to market things sometimes but it's a project that you love.

And other people will enjoy your enthusiasm about it and find out about it that way. Persistence and keeping at it. So Ben Henke was on our show, I don't know, a couple months ago. And he was talking about his Wi-Fi LED controller, Pixel Blaze. He joined Tindy about a year ago. And so I asked him if he had any questions, both questions he would have had getting started a year ago and now questions he has having some, but not being super experienced. Ben, when he started, hadn't shipped anything commercially. What do new sellers need to know about shipping?

For him, it was hard because his first order was international. And his second order was under postage and charged to the customer. So what do you have to say about shipping and what people really need to know? Shipping is definitely something you should research before listing a product. And also whether you want to ship internationally or not we encourage people to ship internationally because more than 50 of the market out there is international when you're in the u.s um we have our largest market is in the u.s but we also have a lot of people who buy stuff in uk and germany and australia and a lot of makers and a lot of sellers are based over there

and also in Australia and many other places. But with shipping, yeah, if you're... Check with your local post office roughly how much your product is going to cost to ship. And if it's international, ideally you want to do it tracked. If insurance is expensive, then factor that into your pricing or self-insure. So self-insure to sort of one in five losses for international. It's not always that many, and it also depends on where you're shipping from and to which countries but make sure that you

have a grasp of how much is roughly going to be to the us uk germany and australia and then also you may have to do a small amount of research when you're shipping regarding custom forms. It also depends on the size of your product. You may also want to, depending on whether your product is, how complete your product is, whether it's a completed device or not, and what it does, you may also want to check on what the laws are in the other countries. That's a lot of stuff. That is quite a lot of stuff. For someone getting started.

That's a lot of stuff, but that's for quite a complicated, catch-all answer. If you're sending bare PCBs, you can probably just send them in letter post and it'll be fine. But going down to the post office when they aren't super busy, and Google will tell you when your hours of your local post office aren't super busy, and having a conversation will save you lots of time and money later. Because you can pick up those nice little boxes yeah especially in the u.s you can if you're shipping within the u.s then you can get boxes for priority mail um and that makes things a lot easier it's all tracked

and nicely done don't send anything from if you're u.s don't send anything international first class and expect it to be tracked because it's not always tracked, even though they say it is. I'm making it sound like it's worse than it is, but it does require a little bit of research and it's okay to start out with just us or just local wherever you are shipping and build up to international once you've you know yeah made a friend at the post office definitely and also if you're if you're listed on tindy um and somebody from another country tries to buy your item will ping you and say can you add a shipping rate for the uk and then in that case you can add it and the buyer will be notified okay uh next question about what kind of people buy on tindy um what kind of technical experience should i expect customers to have when i'm going to sell something

so there's it depends on the product to some degree um there's a lot of people who are experienced electrical engineers, but there are people getting into this stuff. So you should make it clear if your item's high voltage or it requires other pieces to make it work. You can list the bomb and just make it obvious that people are going to need to do some soldering or some knowledge of various other things to get it to work. In that way, it will put off people that want an end product.

But then on the other hand, there are clocks on tindy where you can just order and they arrive and you put them up on your wall so some people will buy those things as well and then there's also the learn to solder kits or the beginners kits where there are definitely you know they're aimed at people that are new to this stuff or children. I noticed that Tindy had a few learn to solder kits or badge kits. What are those for? So one of our sellers, Part Fusion in Ireland, they've been selling this um i can solder kit and it's basically um an led and

coin cell battery on a pin and it's just been doing really really well i mean it's i think they've sold almost 8 000 of them and also on tindy um and we thought it'd be fun to to make a badge for DEF CON last year. And I was talking to Brian Bencho from Hackaday. And he was like, we can do this. We can do this in 12 days. We can design it and get it produced and shipped and kitted and take it to DEF CON, which is in 12 days' time. And so we did that.

Brian is such an optimist, and I never thought I'd did that. Brian is such an optimist and I never thought I'd say that. And he's written about it all on the Hackaday blog and they just did so well that we thought this is better than t-shirts. So we got a bunch of those made up.

We're not selling them on the site but we're giving them away at events and we're also using them to sponsor, giving them to other events so that people can use them to learn to solder at other people's events as well. Do you think I can give away a couple? Yep, definitely. Alright, we'll sort out the details later, but anybody who's listened this far at the end of the show will tell you how you can win a Learn to Solder kit kit i'll make up the

details between now and then i hope uh okay back to you ben's question uh how do you pick a price that's a good one because you pick it too low it's hard to raise later but pick it too high nobody buys it you don't get the experience i think most people have a tendency to try and go too low. So you should definitely try higher. Somebody at an event recently asked me, they were like, I'm only doing a few at the moment and I'm going to do them by hand, but if I develop these further and i send them to production they're going to cost more per unit um that person is not valuing their time because yeah

they're not valuing their time and uh and they said what kind of what should i do and i said that they should factor in how much it costs to get it produced and then charge that from the beginning so they can see whether people are willing to pay that um yeah so a lot of people forget to factor in things like possible shipping losses or damages um they also forget to factor in their own time and the cost of like shipping materials they, if they do want to do some marketing, or they want to be able to give away a couple of promotional items too. Stickers are not free. Yeah, either stickers along with orders, but also things like they want to give away some of their product

to people that might review it as well. You should factor that into your costs. And I was suggesting at a meetup a while ago that you would want to be at least three times your bomb. And Mitch Altman said at least five or six times your bomb. And then I think that also the extra buffer also gives you time to breathe. It also allows you to, if you are successful and you are selling in slightly larger quantities and building up, it gives you, it makes it so that if there is a customer service issue or some of the things you've ordered,

some parts you've ordered are incorrect you can just buy new ones or you can deal with the customer service issue and just send out a new a new piece without it really impacting you're not worrying about how much these these extra things are costing and it gives you space so that you can spend time developing documentation or getting involved with the community or going to events and putting up workshops and things like that which will in general help you'll get feedback about your product from the community yeah you definitely want to factor in a good buffer on your pricing. And then if you're finding that it's not working, generally it's not because the price is too high.

If your product solves a problem, people will buy it. How does this work if, let's say I've got a product and I price it at $30 and my bomb cost is $10. And I figure I'll make half a dozen, you know, a week or so maximum. So, you know, if I'm assembling it myself, that's a few hours of work. It's not a big deal. But is there a mechanism by which I can kind of keep myself from getting into trouble if it's suddenly super popular and a hundred orders come in and suddenly I'm soldering day and night and the value of my labor is now 50 cents an hour. Is it,

can you say, Oh, there's only 50 in stock and I'm not going to make any more for a while. Or how can you protect yourself from suddenly having to fulfill a huge number of orders? So you do set the inventory on, um, on Tinder.

So you can say that there's 10 of them. And then once they go out of stock you can there's a wait list essentially and then people can sign up to the wait list and then when you put more back in stock everybody gets an email to say that it's back in stock and it's first come first serve when that email goes out so if you were only putting up 10 and 100 people on your list, then some people were going to be disappointed, but they'll stay on your list until they purchase it or they take themselves off the list.

Okay, that makes sense. There is a little bit of protection there then. Yeah. So some people get a bit frustrated if they miss it two or three times. Yeah. So it's good to change the time the time zone sort of do it in the morning and then do it in the afternoon release new inventory if you're going to do it on a weekly basis so that people in different time zones have

a chance well and that gives you a buffer you know if you do this a couple of times and you're finding that lots of people are ordering it you can say okay well i need to stop making these myself i need to find a cm to to do the assembly or something like that or you need to start charging more right well yeah i mean i remember at leapfrog it was four times bomb was like where the price started and at higher end consumer consumer goods, it's 5x BOM. And it's a handy metric because the BOM is the BOM. You don't have to really question that. I mean, there's questions of is that assembled PCB or raw PCB, but that's probably not the driving force.

So that's how much it should cost. And if you're at 1x or 2x bomb, you're not charging enough. You're probably understripping at least, yeah. Definitely. Okay, so going on to more questions from Ben. How do you balance quality, uniqueness, and selection on Tindy? We invite anybody to list things on Tindy. And we don't really reject too many items as long as they're DIY electronics.

Items that are not listed by either the designer or the creator. So somebody has either constructed it or designed it and maybe sent it off somewhere to get it made, but is basically very involved in the process from the beginning. If it's not listed by those people or that company, then reseller items get put into the supplies section. So they're not promoted in the same way. But we really want to be the home of diy electronics and maker made items um so a lot of it's just the the uniqueness comes from our community

and the quality is kind of checked by the community as well. A lot of the sellers are on Hackaday.io, and a lot of the buyers are on Hackaday.io as well, and people will talk about different things. People will also leave product reviews as well on Tinder, and you can only leave a review if you've bought the item. You can't just come to the site and leave reviews. Do you have statistics about the sellers?

Are they startups, hobbyists, side projects, bigger companies? The majority, I'd say, are side projects. We have had at least one seller quit his day job and sell full-time on Tindy. It's Spencer Owen, who has the RC2014. It's a homebrew computer. Check it out. We do have a lot of other companies, small businesses on Tindy, and a lot of those people will have their own website,

and they'll just have Tindy as another avenue because they know that it's another place to sell. It's another market that they can reach. And you have mentioned Hackaday.io and Hackaday and Hackaday Prize. Maybe we should talk about the relationship between Tindy and Hackaday. It all goes through that shadowy empire known as supply frame it does but what is what is the relationship supply frame acquired hackaday six years ago um and then they started hackaday io and they

started the hackaday prize and all that kind of good stuff. And then about a few years ago, Tindy became available. And so SupplyFrame thought this is a great opportunity because a lot of people on Hackaday do want to sell their products and other people do want to buy them. So Tindy is a great marketplace that would complement this. And so I think Emil and Amber and a couple of other people from Tindy came over for a little while. There was a little bit of overlap, and then Amber was here for a while.

And then when she left, I took over Tindy. And, yeah, that's where we are now. Okay, so the Hackaday Prize. I do feel a little bit of irrational ownership of this because I was a judge for a few years. So I'm always really excited about it. It is starting anew. And there are all kinds of rounds, and then there are finals.

Can you give us a little overview of it? So it's an innovation competition where there's over $200,000 worth of prizes. And basically what you have to do is you go onto Hackaday.io and you document your project. You can do that on your own or as a member of a team. Basically, what you have to do is you go onto Hackaday.io and you document your project. You can do that on your own or as a member of a team. And you have to build a prototype. The idea is to build something that matters. And this year's theme is Build Hope.

There are five rounds, and they each run for six weeks um we're in the middle of the first one which is a open hardware design challenge and um so basically go on to hackaday.io and just get your idea down um then the next round is robotics module challenge and there's a power harvesting one and human computer interface challenge and then then the last one in August will be musical instruments. And the idea with the rounds is that when you enter them, each round will be judged, and the top 20 from that round will get $1,000 to help move their, they can use those funds to move their project forward and then from the 20 from each round so there'll be 100 finalists and they'll go towards the large

prizes which are fifty thousand dollars um twenty thousand dollars fifteen and ten and five thousand dollars um grand prize also you can get a chance to be a resident at this play frame design lab as well which is pretty cool okay so if i understand all that there are five rounds with different themes and in each of the five rounds you're going to choose 20 of your favorite someone's favorites according According to rules. Not just favorites. It's not just whims. It's not just, yeah.

Wow, I like the color of your background. And each one of those 20 people, for a total of 100, because they're 5 times 20, is going to get $1,000. Yes. Now, the whole 50,000 thing seems very exciting, but that seems really hard. This whole 100 people get $1,000 seems a lot easier. Is it? What are my chances here? I mean, I was just trying to find out how many entries there are at the moment.

I forgot to check earlier. There's more money even i mean because you you are giving out uh some money for people who get likes on their projects so for the first round um the depending on how many likes you get you can get a dollar for each like up to i think four thousand dollars4,000. $4,000 is the total pot. So that can help you get off the ground. I think each individual could get up to $200. Yes, that's right. So, yeah.

And remember, if you send me your project, I will like it, whether it's on Twitter or on the contact link on embedded.fm. I have no shame. I'll like anything. But it has to be liked on Hack contact link on embedded.fm. I have no shame. I'll like anything. But it has to be liked on Hackaday.io. Yes. Yes. Can't just be in your mind.

No, no, no. You have to send me a Hackaday.io link to your project. And then I'll log into my Hackaday.io and then I'll push the little skull. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think there's a, it says there's $930 remaining. So you can go for your 200 likes by starting your project now.

You can go to hackaday.io slash prize to find out more information and see when the different rounds start and end. And also you can get the full rules. I think the Packaday Prize is open to anyone over the age of 18, and you can enter over the age of 13 as long as you have parental consent. And there are a few countries that have said, no, you can't, but those are listed. Yeah, there's a few countries where you can't win because of the rules of the country. And that's why they've been excluded.

I think you can still enter, you just won't get the prize. But you can go for glory. And it is pretty amazing how the community helps each other. I mean, I'm not one for doing great at community things. But I, as a judge, it was really fun to go through and read people's comments and, and they were usually very positive and have you looked at this and are you aware of that? And, oh, there's a different way to solve this problem. And it was nice. It was nice to have other people looking at things.

Yeah, and definitely Hackaday.io is a great place to either just get feedback or also find collaborators. Also, if you have a certain set of skills, but you want to do a project that incorporates other skills that you would like to know more about, but maybe don't have right now, you can also find other people who have those skills to be able to develop your project with you. So, yeah, generally it's a very, very friendly and helpful community it's always great to ask questions on the stack or when people post projects to see the kind of responses they get it's yeah it's a great great place and hackaday.io is a little friendlier than hackaday.com just in case anybody's read the comments on hackaday.com definitely that's my's my opinion, but I'm pretty sure it's true. Yeah, I think the demographic, although there's obviously a lot of overlap, I think the people on Hackaday.io want to be there.

And so the more helpful, more experienced engineers or community members from Hackaday, that they come over and they want to be there. The ones that aren't interested in helping other people tend to not come over. And then there's also a lot of, I think, a lot of people from university age who have started on Hackaday.io and they've just started projects and they're just really enthusiastic. And so it's this nice kind of mix of people there. And you're going to go talk more about the contest in the UK. What's your plan there?

I'm going to go around, we're going to go to the Hackaday Dublin on conference, which is happening on the 7th of April on Saturday. But then after that, I'm going around the UK with Jenny List from Hackaday to talk about Tindy and find new sellers and meet some of our existing sellers and see what great projects they have or what they have in the pipeline. And so we're going to be doing Hackaday Tindy meetups in Nottingham and Newcastle, London and Cambridge. And some of those are related to other events like Pi Wars, which is happening in Cambridge, and Make Fair UK, which is happening in Newcastle at the end of the month. I'm also going to go to Makeacon DE, which is in Heidelberg in Germany,

which is from the 12th to the 14th of April, and to talk about Tindy. And remember, not only will she have excellent stickers, she may have these solder boards. I mean, I've got loads of, I've got loads of Tindy badges. Given, given all this meetups and,

and conferences you're going to, um, you, you, you, you were giving presentations like a lot but when i first met you you were pretty shy you were pretty insistent on staying out of the spotlight i think i still am um i've been trying to push myself to speak in front of people about tindy because if i don't do it uh tindy is a pretty small team we have erin who's our developer and then the supply frame customer service team we share

larry and james who help out part-time on tindy um customer service so um but when it comes to events i tend to be able to pair up with other people um like mike stitch and sophie kravitz and people who are more comfortable um speaking in front of people love the limelight well um and and yeah i've had a little bit more practice than me but also uh so i often am able to let them say thank you for coming here and this is hackaday and this is tindy um but also when you when you do meetups a lot of the people there are really just, you don't need to do very many presentations. You can just introduce people. And also with the networking, people are just very happy to see what other projects other people are making. And they're just interested to talk to each other about the projects.

And it's very easy just to invite people and they'll entertain themselves and then if you throw in sort of beer and pizza then people are really happy but you have been doing presentations has it gotten any easier it's a little bit i think it's about being prepared that definitely helps and when when i feel unprepared is when it's a little bit i think it's about being prepared that definitely helps and when when i feel unprepared is when it's more difficult so do you have any advice for people who are reluctant you're never going to do it unless you start trying i think that's small steps so just try find some smaller meetups or groups that you can speak in front and then work your way up um you'll get feedback um there's also sort of there's sort of um things like taste masters and things like that i've not managed to get to one

of those yet but i would like to well Well, you've done that, right? I mean, do you think that's useful? It probably would be for a new speaker or for a very reluctant speaker. I did it as a fairly accomplished speaker, and they kept telling me I was doing things wrong when it was that I was not following their rules. It was not that I was not making an impact or whatever I wanted from my speech. I already knew the organization parts and the enunciation and the ability to carry my voice, but I didn't know their stupid rules for impromptu or whatever.

But the point of speaking in a small group is a good one because it's obviously very hard to go from no public speaking to, Oh, I'm at a conference. Yeah. And Toastmasters will help with that because it, it, they do stress,

um, both the outline style of presentation, making sure you know what you want to say, but also practice those hand motions and think about how you're going to say. Those rude gestures. How you're going to say things and how your AV equipment is going to help you so that you don't get lost. You don't want your slides to be the star of that show. And they would help with when you should be the star and when you should let the information be the star. They talk about all those things and it can be quite helpful. And if you find a good group, it's very good.

And they come in different flavors. There's the professional group, and there's the casual group, and there's the, oh my God, we meet at six in the morning group that I've never been to. So yeah, it's worth checking out. Okay, continuing on questions in your favorite subject, which is not going to be speaking, it's still going to be you. You make things. What do you make? I've made Victorian bustle dresses and some other historical clothing.

I made a 17th century polonaise. I also made a gown from the court of louis the 16th um i've made an led corset um i have helped with burning man art installations that my husband ben and i have made which is like things an 18-foot geodesic dome with a couple of skins and LEDs in each corner of the triangle and then a three-foot Perspex dome in the middle that you can touch and it changes the colours and the speed and the tone of the animations that are playing on the outside outer dome. We have also made a table where it's got over 316 LEDs. It looks a bit like a stained glass window.

And it's kind of just color washes and with different patterns and animation. We've taken that to Burning Man as well. We just put it out in the plier. It had a couple of benches that you could sit on and you can enjoy the sunsets or the sunrises and look at all the other giant bits of art out there. It's kind of a nice refuge place. The wearable things.

I mean, in the lightning round, we asked you about LEDs and skirts and you had a very good point that it's the batteries that are the important part in that story. Do you have other advice for people wanting to do electronics and costuming? I think there's lots of different microcontrollers and different boards and things that you can use out there. I tend to come more from the soft side, from the sewing side, uh, just bear in mind where your body bends. So that makes sure you don't like end up making it those bend points for, uh, where your wires are and things like that. I, I once sewed 32 foot of electro-luminescent wire onto a coat for a friend

and then when they put their backpack on it just broke all the connections on the shoulders it was quite time consuming to sew originally so I wasn't too pleased just think about how your body moves how it will be worn

and if you can take out the electronics easily so you can wash the item or if it's never intended to be washed how do you make it durable i mean okay so you look at where you bend that makes a lot of sense and and yet when i look at wearable costume electronics it's all it looks like it's going to break the first time you sneeze. I mean, hot glue, I don't know. Yeah, hot glue definitely helps when you're on your connections. Just to reinforce it a little bit. I tend to sew along wires um so the best way to describe it is i'll put a loop

and kind of tether the wire so that it's less likely to get pulled i'll tell them a strain relief yeah yeah definitely um but making things durable especially especially with LED strips, is a challenge. And I've not really found a good solution yet. But then I haven't really had a chance to make anything very recently. Do you hand stitch things or do you um do you go on the sewing machine i do both it depends on if i can if i can sew it on the sewing machine then i'll sew it on the sewing machine have you ever used that um electric wire the thread the conductive thread the conductive yeah i've tried I've not used it very successfully.

I found that I wasn't able to get enough current, so I didn't really try using it again. But there might be better ones out there now, because that was a few years ago. Yeah, there are a whole bunch of different kinds, and I never know which one to use. I assume the ones that are the least comfortable probably are the best wires. Probably.

I'm stuck on couldn't get enough current through it. Somehow forcing enough current through my clothes is a little terrifying. Yeah, definitely. And also if you have too many LEDs going off and your battery packs are against your body, they get very warm. Well, they get warm anyway. So, yeah. yeah yeah lithium polymer does not breathe no and it's kind of heavy so you do want your battery you do want to keep your battery packs close to your body if possible so like sometimes if you have a jacket and you just put

them in in the bottom pockets of the jacket and then you kind of move around your battery packs will hit into you these are things that i don't really think about i mean i always want to do something with my jackets to make them light up or do something but yes all right christopher do you have any more questions or should we let jasmine go about her business i think we should let her go jasmine do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with no all right all right all right well i want you to start thinking of two numbers um but don't tell me yet uh at after the show i will ask you for those numbers and whichever uh listener emails and and guesses the numbers closest to these. They have to guess both numbers?

No. They guess one number. They guess one number. And if they're close to one, they get one thing. If they're close to the other, they get the other thing? Yeah. All right. Well, they're the same thing though.

Yeah, I think they'll be. The badges. The badges, yes. Okay, Got it. Do you want to give any hints like a range or anything? Or should we just let them choose from all numbers everywhere? I like making them choose from all numbers. I think roulette. Okay.

That's a good clue. Well, then our guest has been Jasmine Brackett, Product Manager at Tindy. Thank you for being with us, Jasmine. Thank you. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Ben Henke for some questions from an actual Tindarian. He's Electro-Manage on that, if you want to look. Also, thank you for listening.

You can contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. We have a lot of links we'll be linking to in this episode, so please check out the website. Now, a quote to leave you with from Charles M. Schultz. Did we ever mention that Tindy's logo was a dog, a really cute dog? Not in this show. Robot dog. Robot dog. And the badge is a robot dog. So this quote is from Charles Schultz. All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed. For after all, he was only a human.

He wasn't a dog. 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.