Embedded - 244: Magic And Electrons

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

Kristina Durivage (@gelicia) described her path getting into making and hardware hacking as a complement to her day job working in front-end software. Kristina’s portfolio.gelicia.com includes write-ups on her projects (TweetSkirt, Kitchen Playset Game) as well as links to her talks. Or you can skip to her github.com/gelicia repository. Kristina has a chapter in the 10 LED Projects for Geeks book coming out from NoStarch Press. Thank you to Patreon Embedded supporters for Kristina’s mic! Elecia and Kristina both recommend the classic Robert Aspirin Myth Adventure books!

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White, here with Christopher White. Our guest this week is Christina Duravage, a software engineer by day and hardware hacker by night. Before we get started talking with Christina, I want to mention that I am once again looking for a new gig, either consulting and mentoring or contracting and writing code. Please let me know if you need help, show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm or logicalelegance.com.

If you'd like a little help, well, now's a good time to ask for advice. First hour's free, so send me an email. I'm not hard to reach. And if I'm too busy, I'll let you know. Hi, Christina. Thanks for joining us. Hey, how's it going? Could you tell us about yourself as though you were on a panel at a conference? Yeah. So, well, my name is Christina and I am a front-end engineer for my day job. And then I started picking up electronics as a hobby somewhere in the past, I don't know, five years or so. And I have done a ton of projects since then, and I find it a really fun way to spend my time. So I try to talk about that. Cool. You've heard the show a bit. So you

have heard about lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask for lots of detail, but we'll see how that goes. Sounds good. I'll try my best. Okay. What's a tip you think everyone should know? We'll probably cover this again later, but keep battery size small. Or think of batteries first, because it's the hardest thing to build into later. Do you tend to complete one project or start a dozen? I try to complete them, like the big ones, but I'll have, sometimes there's projects that you sort of give up on, and those kind of go on the shelf for a while. So I'm not really great at it, but I try to complete the ones that I'm really particularly motivated about. Favorite programming language, either for work or for fun?

Well, I hate to say JavaScript because everybody would make fun of me. It's both my favorite and least favorite programming language, but probably JavaScript. Do you modify clothing to hack or do you make clothing from scratch? Generally trying to make it from scratch just because if I end up having to redo it, it's a lot less work to have to modify something that I've started, or it's easier to just sort of, I try to keep the stuff that I make myself very simple. So that way, if I'm not too emotionally invested in it, if I need to do some rework later. Something you know now that you wish you'd known five years ago? Don't trust everyone as an authority who in my greatest example of this is i went to a

hobby store to look for a servo that i needed and the it was just a like a um rc car type hobby store and i asked the guy if uh these servos could be used for arduino and he said no and looked at me like i was on from the moon or something. And I'm like, like past me five years ago, me would have been like, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about. So whatever. And then left, but I was like, okay, can I just see it? And sure enough, it was just like the same continuous rotation servo that you buy from anywhere. So I've had similar experiences at hobby stores. Yeah. Confidence. That's all you need is confidence, and people believe you.

Confidence, yeah. Do you have a favorite voltage level? Five volts, just because it works for Arduinos and particle photons and all that. And the WS2018 LEDs. All right. So you said you are a front-end engineer. WS 2018 LEDs. Alright, so you said you are a front-end engineer. Now, I'm an embedded systems engineer, so I work on devices. And I know there are front-end engineers

and back-end engineers. And mid-end engineers. I assume that front-end engineers are in charge of the wheels and the back-end are in charge of the brakes? I don't know. What does that mean? Yeah. So like the backend people tend to do more with databases, like getting stuff out of databases faster or adding columns and the middle, which there isn't really

a whole lot. Usually it kind of like, what is the middle is split up between the front and back end. But the front end engineer, that's what I do is tends to be getting wireframes from the, like the designers and building that out and into whatever. And for my job, whatever JavaScript library of choice, framework of choice, and actually designing the website or taking the designs and implementing them. But you do fairly data intensive applications, right? Yep. Yeah. So then we'll end up getting like talking to the database people or the backend people

about how what the data should look like and what we'll need to actually display what the designer wants. It can be really tough to display data in a way that is human readable. I mean, Tufty had all of those books about how to do good data visualization. How do you, are there principles? Are there things you learn about how to do these data visualizations? Yeah, it's generally, you try to think of what question the user will have when they enter into your application and get those questions sort of

answered as soon as they can. So that way, that's sort of the, you know, you're never going to be able to get nail 100% for everybody, but you can try to get the most bang for your buck from without having the user having to click around a whole bunch. So trying to keep that in mind is a good thing when doing designs and stuff like that. So customer-focused design is a thing for you too. Yep, yeah. That's for the work stuff. I think you said in one presentation that programming the Arduino is harder for you than your normal gig. What do you mean by that? When you tell JavaScript developers who already kind of have a bunch of different layers that can go wrong,

like here's an actual physical layer where you could possibly electrocute yourself or possibly burn yourself on a soldering iron. Or you just buy a part that doesn't work and you can do everything you can in the code for debugging, but it's just an actual physical problem that can be very tricky to deal with when you mostly do just like software. I see that and I understand. And I have to admit that looking at JavaScript applications, I'm lost in the number of libraries and knowing which one is currently in vogue and which ones will make me look like

an idiot. So, it's funny to hear everybody thinks the other stuff is harder. Yeah. Well, yeah. And I mean, the thing with, there's always going to be someone that thinks your opinion is wrong. So, you just kind of have to do your best and go for it. One of the big differences that we hear about, which may not be accurate, is how fast things change in the front-end, back-end, and the web world. Whereas with the embedded world, things change, but they're usually on the periphery. It's, oh, there's a new processor, and it can do this. But most things are done in C or C++,

and there aren't a ton of libraries we're importing that are changing rapidly um is is is there a big difference where you guys are having to keep up with just really rapid changes in the frameworks you're using and uh people abandoning things or dependencies breaking sort of i mean yes and no there's always stuff changing probably faster there's like the quote-unquote marketplace of things are are more probably evolving more rapidly with software just because you don't have to actually like ship stuff out but on the other hand it like what you choose to bring in and what you choose to adopt uh is up to you and up to your team and your bosses and all that. And so Minneapolis has a lot of like big, like Best Buy and Target are all out here.

Those are kind of like a couple of big ones and there's other employers too, but they tend to be a little bit more, you know, risk adverse of needing everything to be super current all the time. That makes sense. Yeah. So it's out there, but you don't necessarily have to, you don't have to be there. Like I let other people, there's other people who love to do that stuff and they can, you know, make the to-do lists on every new application or every new framework that comes out. They're probably all in Palo Alto.

Yep. Yeah, exactly. Let. Let San Francisco worry about that. So I have another question related to your day job, but we're going to get to the hacking soon because I mean, that's more what the show is about, but you mentioned doing pair programming at work and so many people talk about it and I've done it with one other person that I connected super well with, but I almost never do it my team's too small often it's only me um and and while I can pair Bergkarm with myself people look at me very strangely what is it like for you how do you do it and it's just uh if it's the team that's local here uh just two people in a room or multiple

people in a room with TV up, and there's always someone driving. And either if it, you know, it kind of depends on if it's someone who's more experienced that's driving or less experienced that's driving. And kind of talking about some of the solutions, you know, as it happens rather than in code review. So that way, especially for something that's a little bit more complex, it's easy to go on the code review and be like, well, why don't you do this and come back? Well, I did that like three days ago and here's the whole thing of why it won't work. But if you work with someone with you right there, they can be with you in that process of trying different things

and seeing why maybe the most obvious solution didn't work the way that everyone had planned. It's also good for Juju developers, having them drive. And there's different ways you can kind of guide them along. And generally, I like to ask questions, like if they get stuck, like, okay, what is the next step of the process for debugging this? And it's good for making sure that your knowledge isn't siloed or kept in one person. One of the reasons it worked for me is that the person I was working with and I had

very similar skill sets, although different knowledge, and very similar personalities. Is that a requirement? I mean, you said junior developers versus senior developers work together. That makes sense for sharing the information, but doesn't it just slow down the senior developers? It does, but, I mean, it would slow down the process a lot more if something happened and that person wasn't there anymore.

So it's sort of investing in the team and investing in the junior developer, helping them get up to speed, and sharing knowledge is generally worth it. I worked with way too many cowboy developers who just sort of do everything and then don't share, and it's not really a great, it's not a good team and it's not a good place to be, except if they're them.

Then they get to feel super productive all the time. But being on the outside of that sucks. Yeah, absolutely. Nobody knows what they're doing, and nobody can figure out the code. Yeah, they commit stuff. You look at it and it's like, I mean, like, I guess I see conceptually how this works. But, you know, if I ever if they're on vacation and something happens, I'm going to have to spend a lot more time looking at this than if they would have, you know, worked with somebody when they were doing it. And it's good, too, because i'll get caught up like you know i've i'm at senior level and i get caught up on the silliest stuff

sometimes and it's a lot better to have someone help me from going down my own rabbit hole of like oh you just need to do this like okay yeah and i think if you have a senior and a junior and you end up producing the work of two medium seniors, then that's better. And you're training your junior. I think it can work. I wish I could use it more often. But let's get on to hardware hacking. Yes. Where should we start with that?

I can start about kind of how i got into it okay start at the beginning do the storytelling method uh so i my dad so my dad's an electrical engineer and he um from a we're gonna really get into the story of christina's life here but uh from a from a wee age uh my dad would try to get me to look at electrical diagrams and understand kind of what was going on. But being like, you know, a kid who's into like dinosaurs or whatever, the utility of what he was trying to teach me, I never really grasped it. And I remember him trying to be like, well, you could build robots. And I'd be like, okay, cool. Robots are cool. But then, you know, back when I was, uh, that young, there was just not that, you know,

there wasn't as much out there that you could just go to the store and get robot parts, uh, as easily. I don't even know where maybe Radio Shack had some stuff, but, um, so when I was graduated college, I had, you know, just kind of a regular day job. My dad and I started brainstorming. Well, I was sewing at my parents' house for some reason. I think it was dog sitting or something. But anyway, I was sewing at my parents' house and my dad asked me, like, do you ever think

about putting LEDs in clothes? And I'm like, that'd be really cool but i really have no idea how to do it and so we started kind of throwing ideas back and forth uh it started as like what is uh the when you have a lot of leds like regular leds kind of together and like in a matrix um there's a word for it um key matrixing uh oh oh there's like a guy's name charlie charlie plexing yes i'm like there's a guy's name involved in the the word but yeah so we did one of that and he was showing me that stuff and we had some problems with like leds ghosting and it was really just like my mind was a little blown but um we moved on to the uh

neopixels the 20 28 18 leds and um you could cut a strip of them uh and reattach it so it went like up and down and up and down up and down until it was a rectangle and so we had i think an 8 by 8 or an 8 by 10 um smaller array and then it just sort of grew and grew. And once I figured out the functionality of the particle line of products, and it really let me, I could program the hardware stuff and figure that out and kind of then put that aside and then get into the web stuff that I knew really well. And that's what I really like about the particle photon stuff, is just there's like a separation of problems there that's really, really fun to deal with. So anyway, the LED arrays grew, power problems grew, my knowledge grew, and then I've been trying to figure out what other things I can put LEDs in ever since. One of your projects involved a Skrillex concert?

Skrillex. Skrillex? Yep. I've heard the music. Yeah, there is a, so I went to MineCon Paris. I don't remember what year that was, but one of the things was a Skrillex concert. So I sewed EL wire in a skirt and the EL wire from Cool Neon. And they've got, Cool Neon has this battery pack that's like eight double A's. And it's really, really cool.

But this was baby Christina, not really. The thing about batteries I mentioned before is I tried attaching like a little harness to attach it to a skirt, but I put it right on the hem. It was like maybe a knee length skirt. And then the, the EL wire went around the bottom hem, but then I tried putting the battery pack there and it was way too heavy. And it like really like salted my dancing game, which is not that great to begin with. And, uh, I think the battery pack kept falling out and stuff. So, um, it wasn't, I mean like EL wire on the hem of a skirt is not super exciting, but, uh, I learned a valuable lesson about batteries that day.

So where do you put your batteries now? Um, try to do it in the lower back. Um, usually the, uh, the skirts that I make, uh, I'll have like a belt that has like a zipper pouch in it and then have it on the back part. That's like a really good spot to put it. It's nice and anchored and doesn't move around too much. And having a nice thick belt usually is good for holding things on. Yep. Yeah, you can handle the weight and then um i switched to uh the well i haven't done any bigger projects but these uh there's these anchor core power anchor power core 5000s that

have uh put out pretty good amount of juice and have a pretty good battery life um so i switched like my the not the tweet skirt but the tech sash um i switched from using like the, not the Tweet skirt, but the Tech Sash. I switched from using like the big heavy LiPo batteries to little Anker power cores. And I like those a lot better. Okay, so we have a Tweet Sash? Yep, well, there's two and they're kind of the same thing. So I started out with the Tweet skirt, which is like a skirt, skirt that like knee length skirt. And then, uh, along the front of it was a, the, um,

the led strip like soldered up into a rectangle. And so that made it really flexible, uh, uh, vertically. Um, so that way it could kind of move and flex with like the, the hem of the skirt as I walked around. And then, um, I have it hooked up to Twitter and there's a moderation process because Twitter and, uh, just hook it up to the president's account and let it go. Oh yeah. Nope. Not going to happen. Uh, so like tweets would come in and then I would pull up a website on my phone, um, that I would log into and then say, yes, this is good or this is garbage. And then it would get queued up to show on my phone that I would log into and then say, yes, this is good, or this is

garbage. And then it would get queued up to show on my tweet on my skirt for a certain period of time. Or if there was another, no, another in the queue, it would just sit there. So that was really fun, except for it was very, very, the LED array that I soldered myself with the strips broke a ton. And I had too many conventions where i was soldering under a table or like the first mine minecon when i minecraft convention that i wore it to and it broke and i didn't bring a soldering iron because again baby christina and uh i had to tweet out like hey does anybody have brought a soldering iron and luckily there's a maker uh maker space that was demoing uh there that had some so i got to

get snuck into the demo hall before they opened and soldered it up and that was all very fun stories but i got tired of having to fix it all the time so um and then the moderation process was fine but a lot of times people just they want to see what they wrote right away yeah they don't want to have to wait for it to go through all the because there's like besides just the waiting for me to okay it it's got to get queued up and go through the whole thing so um i switched to a um like the pre-made led arrays that are like i think 32 by 8 or something um that are all just like one piece. But those aren't as flexible as the strips put together. So they go, the pre-made one goes, it's a sash and it goes just across the torso where it doesn't really need to bend that much. And it went off text messages, which I was a

little bit sketchy about, but I'm like people's like a little bit more willing to attach their phone number to their identity. So I wasn't as worried about it. And then I would not wear it to like, you know, places where I was worried about, I would wear it to places with grownups basically where, or places where I could shame everyone to act like grownups. And I say that, but I, uh, there was a, we have a thing in Minnesota called mini demo where, uh, startups, or they asked me to do it just as like a maker person, uh, go up and give PowerPoint free, but you know, not really, uh, demos of their startup ideas or whatever. And so I went up and I put the number up on the big screen and I said, all right, guys, remember there's a code of conduct, please be adults. And the first thing I got was in all like butts, butts, butts, just like across

the thing. And I just laughed. I'm like, you know what? I'm not even mad. That's good juvenile humor. I'm okay with that. So, yeah. And so, that's kind of the whole process. So, um, just trying to limit the amount of, uh, lag so people can just see their stuff go through faster and then, um, uh, make it more durable. So that way I don't have to bring soldering irons everywhere. What do you have in your travel toolbox now? Um, well, I usually bring a soldering iron anyway, just because. What do you have as a travel soldering iron? I have a USB one that people are always surprised it works, but I've never used it for a long project. And I don't remember, I think I just looked up USB soldering iron on Amazon or something. It's not a name brand, but it does pretty good for just when you need to touch up something.

If I'm like traveling with a huge suitcase, I'll just bring my regular one and just have the, I don't know, just it's worth the space to have a nice soldering iron. The USB ones, I think they charge a capacitor. So you end up getting more power than you think you do for short bursts, but you shouldn't use it to build a whole board yeah yeah people ask me like i just you know how does it even work and it's like i just shrug i don't know it does doesn't fry my computer and it just seems to work so it's good enough for me magic and electrons in there somewhere yep exactly so you've mentioned Particle, and I did see some talks where you talked about Arduino.

Are these your favorite platforms? Yeah, Arduino, just for ease of use. It's good, kind of easy to upload stuff to, easy for finding lots of support for. And the Photon, they also have pretty good, there's a lot of people using it. So you have a lot of stuff you can search for online. And then you have the just the the Wi Fi baked in and the particle cloud baked in, makes it super easy for me as a web developer. And that's what I try to tell either other web developers about. Just it's, it's just so easy to get going with that. As long as you can kind of get over the,

how intimidating hardware can be if you're not in that, that field. And the photon is the one with the cell modem. Nope. That's just the wifi one. Okay. I don't like this. The electron has the cell modem.

Okay. Yep. Yeah. And I don't use that that i use my phone as a wireless hotspot so it's kind of effectively the same thing but then i don't have to worry about canceling a monthly plan or whatever it's just i just use my phone okay back to batteries um if you're making a skirt and you're lighting all these lights do you how do you,

how do you, are you worried about getting burned by the battery? No, it hasn't happened yet. So, I mean, I don't know. Yeah.

I don't know. God willing, it just hasn't happened yet. Sometimes the batteries get a little warm, but I guess I just probably put some fleece or something or felt in it. So to have some padding. But the nice thing about the text scrolling ones is that most of your LEDs are off for most of the time. So your current is, you need a lot of current, but you don't need so much that it's going to really go through the batteries.

Or you'd have to have a dangerous amount of current going, if that makes sense. It does. Where do you get your LEDs? eBay a lot of times. Just try to anticipate what I'll need in two months and get it from the slow boat. So you don't do Adafruit or Spark fund or any of the no i'll get my boards i'll get my boards from adafruit uh and uh i got like their last ada box um that kind of stuff but

for just kind of leds bulk leds i'll just tend to go for ebay which is probably not great but i do love adafruit a lot but i'll try to get i'll get the expensive stuff there leds are pretty cheap yeah do you do any hardware design besides the electronic layout of actual wires and leds um no i don't it's all out of my wheelhouse i uh i tell people i just know enough to be dangerous like i, I have the art of electronics. I bought it. It's sitting on my bookshelf. I know conceptually how electricity works. But for me, it's just what I need to do to get something built.

And then I can ask my dad for the rest. It's handy to have a family member who's a double E. Yeah. Yep. It absolutely is. He's, like, more double E. Yeah, yep, it absolutely is. He's more or less obligated to help me. And you sound a little apologetic that you're not doing hardware design. I guess I wish I, I don't know.

I say I wish I would have more time or motivation to do that stuff, but I really just like building pretty things. So, um, when I need to build pretty things, a lot of times it's led wire battery, Arduino, and, um, just different layouts of that without having to get into it any more than that. Uh, I did get, uh, my boyfriend got me a pair of these mace tech RGB glasses for Valentine's day. And I was like looking into how to hook one up to the particle so i could have their uh glasses with leds on like the front part of it and uh i was looking at the layout trying to figure out how to hook it up like through serial to interact with the photon um and then showing it to yeah and I just was like whatever and I ended up just using they do come with a they call it the hacker arm which is just kind of like a proto board arm without anything

on it but like little pinholes and so you could put the I just put like a photon on that and ported the library over and that was a lot easier I ask not to make you feel uncomfortable, although I think I possibly have. Sorry. I don't do hardware design either. Oh, really? No. I just thought all EEs do. I'm not an EE.

Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I do software. I just, so many times the hacker community expects you to do everything from backend database design to particle to laying out boards. I mean, I don't know why people have to apologize for not having all the skills because nobody has all the skills. Well, it seems like people do. Yeah, I think the internet people all do, but then, yeah.

The internet people all do because you see the things that they show you. Yeah. You see the final products, and you don't see the struggle. You don't see them going to ask their friends for the piece they don't know. You don't see the electrical engineer asking, oh, my God, how do IP addresses work? Right. It's nobody knows everything. And I get a little frustrated because.

And I always come back to it's hard to learn things without a reason. Yeah. And so if you're just feeling like, oh, I should learn this because everybody else knows it. That's how I feel about KiCad. It's not really a reason unless you have something specific you want to do with it. Right? Like, oh, I want my career to expand and I want to be doing electronics in my career. Okay, that's a good reason.

You should probably go to school, you know. Or there's this project and I can't get past this step without making a board. Okay, that's the time when you start talking to people and doing tutorials and stuff but just in the abstract you know this happens to me all the time it's like i'd love to know how to do this so i'll get a textbook and then i'll put it on my shelf and just stare at the spine for three years yeah and osmotic learning doesn't work as nearly as well as i hope it would. Yeah, I don't know. I have aspirational, yeah, aspirational bookshelf.

Well, I mean, I look at KiCad, I look at schematic capture, and I can read schematics fine. I just don't write them. And then I go and I take classes about robots and AI, because as much as I'd like to be able to do electronics, what I really want to do is play with robots and make things smarter. So I don't know. Personally, I'm going to stop apologizing for my inability to make schematics. I'm just going to accept that and move on. And the world will have to live with my hand-drawn schematics forever

or until I change my mind I like that yeah that's that's a good way to go about it okay so enough ranting how do you keep yourself going when the technology is hard when you're when you need to learn something but it's not easy it's just uh my end goal always is so like cool in my imagination um that it's like well this really sucks so maybe just stop doing it for the night or you know take off for a few days and just kind of noodle over it or whatever and maybe do some like passive google searching or asking some friends or um just not really fully committing yourself and committing time to solving that specific problem but just sort of getting a better idea of maybe the general edges of it or something

where you just are making some progress or not, or just being okay with not making progress and, uh, uh, going for that from there. Um, trying to remember the last time that really happened, I guess it was this morning. I can't like be all like, I just know everything now. Cause I was trying to get Bluetooth to work, uh, on this, um, the Bluno, which is the DF robot, Bluetooth beetle. And,. And I haven't done Bluetooth stuff in forever. And it was just like, well, I can get it to work on one app on my phone, but that's fine. That's enough. That's all I need. Sorry, I'm not going to debug your problem on the air. Afterwards, we can talk more if you want. Okay. Well, no, I figured it out. Bluetooth is hard. Bluetooth is hard to get into.

And then once you've got it wired, it does get a lot easier to manage what expectations you have. Yeah. Expectations management is a big part. That's one thing I've learned. So having an application you care about and that you dream about and then taking breaks, sleeping on problems is incredibly helpful. Sneaking up on them. I liked the idea of moving around the edges. I do sneak up on problems sometimes.

And then I'll look and I'll realize that I've figured it out. I just didn't mean to. What's bad is when the problems notice. You snuck up and they turn around and they scare you. Like that. Yes. Do you have deadlines for your projects? How do you get them done?

My deadlines recently for things have been, like the closest thing I have for deadlines on these projects are if I'm doing something for a convention. Like the last electronics project I did was for an anime convention in the wisconsin dells uh and i was cosplaying a character from a dungeons and dragons podcast who has a magic umbrella and i really wanted this magic umbrella to be leds like on the like the what is the there's a word for it the out the part of the umbrella the bigger

part of the umbrella whatever uh canopy canopy and uh trying to get so my my thing with that was just getting it done for that convention otherwise i'm gonna be like i'll still be a fine cosplayer i just won't have my sweet led umbrella so So having stuff like that is good. And even when it gets frustrating, you know that you're going to be showing it to a bunch of people who are going to know who you are and appreciate it. Even if it breaks after the first day or whatever, you'll still have a good audience and you still get some good pictures with other people and stuff like that. How do you have the time and energy to do this after a full week of software development? Well, it's, uh, I haven't been doing software development that, like, I've been doing it

just like the job stuff. Yeah, after a full job. Yeah, I don't know. But it's not, like, this is fun. Like, building light up stuff and, like, going to a convention and looking like awesome and like being a beautiful, bright creature is is really fun. And that's that's motivating enough. And then there's also something about making something physical that you get to hang on to. Um, like most of the websites I've done, well, like the websites I've done for my job tend to be, um, they're very utilitarian. Like they solve a business problem or

something like that. But, um, you know, you, people go in and put data in and look at their data and interact with data and that kind of stuff. But then going and building like a, like a really fun skirt that you get to actually wear and go out in the world and people say like, Hey, that's awesome. Um, that's super motivating and it's super fun. It's very rare that in our work life, people say, Hey, that's awesome. Yeah. Usually not too many things that we get to do. Even if they think it's awesome, they're not going to like, they're only going to leave a review saying it sucks. So. Right. Yeah. so i've made the mistake of looking at reviews of things that i've been involved with yeah don't do that get very angry hey no that's not right at all wait a minute so you you make

these and then i expect like many makers somebody says well you should make a lot of those and sell them. Yep. Do you think about doing that? Yeah, I, you know, I started a, like a business, like I had my business for contracting, but then I was like, let's just have another name for it. But honestly, I just how to mass produce stuff and how to handle if things break. Like the, the sash is pretty durable, but I still don't want to be on the hook if things keep breaking, especially because it's, there's so much involved there. So I guess I'd rather just put the time and effort into showing other people how to build their own and giving the code out. And then also like people have built the stuff, like the,

the components of the sash, someone, I think it's the switch embassy, if I had to remember the name, but they made a shirt that you could, they made like the electronics and like a little, um, like a little pouch for the electronics to go into. And then you could attach that to something that you already had. And that, if I was going to do something, that's what I would, I would do. I don't have to worry about sizing or keeping like a clothing inventory or anything like that. It would just be like, here's a thing that you can put in whatever you want. Um, and, uh, I'm sure they're successful, but they're, I mean, I have a pretty good career for software and I'm not going to drop everything to go do something like that. So that was kind of a meandering answer.

But no, no, you hit the points I was actually hoping you would. OK. Yeah. Yeah. You could totally go do that. Other people are doing it. You could do it. It isn't fun.

It isn't fun. Yeah. You're doing this. You're doing this hobby because it's fun. It amuses you. It makes you laugh. It makes other people laugh. It makes you feel good.

Why do we have to capitalize on our fun and make it work? Well, that's just one aspect of it. Like people expecting you, oh, you're doing this great thing, so you could turn it into a bunch of money and don't you want a bunch of money but there's also the aspect of people want what you're making yeah and that's flattering and nice and and writing about it for me is enough okay you like it enough go build it yeah um but i wish i wish early in my career someone had said don't try to monetize your hobbies because then they don't become hobbies.

It's a good way to ruin them. Yeah. It is a really good way to ruin them. No, like writing, uh, so I have a book coming out now. I'm a chapter in an led project book coming out in June. And, um, so, uh, full disclosure, this book was in process for three years. So there's stuff that, you know, the book know, the book will be great for kind of a high level or, you know, how to build some of this stuff. But I wouldn't follow my project exactly as written.

But that, you know, writing that book was not the most fun way for me to spend my time, but it also was not terrible. And I really like, you know, taking all the pictures and getting everything assembled or whatever. So and that that was, that's my way of doing of monetizing, you know, get my book, I guess, but every if it is the title of your book, I think it's made by O'Reilly, but only because you're connected to some of the O'Reilly people I know. No, it's not O'Reilly. It was, it's no stretch press. I did. I talked the O'Reilly people I know. No, it's not O'Reilly. It's No Starch Press. I talked to O'Reilly a few years ago, but this is No Starch Press. I think it's 10 LED Projects for Geeks. The editor, and that's who they list on all the websites, is John Beichtel.

Yeah, I have a book in there about how to, or I have a chapter about building the tech sash, and it goes through everything, but if you're listening to this and you're going to get the book, just all the power stuff, just get an anchor power core instead. Oh, there are a lot of people we know in here. Wendell and Lenore wrote chapters. All right, I will totally link this. 10 LED Projects for Geeks from no starch press cool

yeah how do you decide what you are going to write about online versus trying to get paid to write versus working on your project instead of writing about it i, there's only so much time in the day. Yeah, for me, it's just when I, I'll write about it after I've done it and shown it and gone through like the different iterations of the tech sash or the tweet skirt or whatever. They've been out in the world. I've written, you know, shown them to lots of people. I've gotten lots of feedback

and I kind of know what to expect. And that's when I'll write about it. That's, or that's when, if someone comes to me and says, write a chapter for a book, I'll be like, yes, I can write about this. And I know the kind of the fuller picture for this, but like right now I'm playing with, uh, making led resin beads and I'm just sort of tinkering with it. And I don't know if they're going to break. But that's kind of right now, just playing with an idea and then seeing how it evolves over time when you have more time to play with different things. And when you wear it out, people will always give opinions on this or that.

So trying to get all that together and listen to feedback or ignore feedback. That's when you can kind of write about it more. Okay, so LED resin beads. Yep. Two-part resin. You put the LED in. Are these the NeoPixel style LEDs? Yeah, the sequin or the little button where it's just an LED on a little board. So you have to pull the wires out still yep the wires are there then

you feed uh the wires come out one side of the bead uh there's still a hole in the bead for the like the thing that you you know string up uh through the chain or whatever but then so the wires come up and then you have it go feed up uh to the chain to the back of the neck and then have the battery pack and everything in the back of the neck okay so we'll see i gave one as a friend and i was like it was her birthday and i'm like well let me know if this breaks or gets too hot or whatever because as much as this is a gift you're also a guinea pig and i mean she's gotten enough comments and i don't think she minds her guinea pigdom too much but uh stuff like that is fun to play with is it frosted uh though i started out with clear the most recent iteration well i started out with clear and the leds facing out and the like the worst part about resin is you do have to let it sit for a day

without like tinkering with it which is like the worst ever yes but um the ones that i made recently have like pearl powder in it with these little like sparkly things and then the leds are faced in so that way the the when you have two different colors they sort of fade a little bit better uh yeah it's really really fun it's just um you know not it's not as dramatic as a tweets grid or whatever but uh it's quieter more subtle but that's that has a beauty of its own yeah and i'm thinking um if these end up being pretty durable and that you know i'm worried about the led heating up too much in the resin and frying or something uh but if they end up being durable maybe people want to buy them i don't know

yeah if you could give them a little air bubble to live in but i don't know how to do that and i can totally see you could put like silver glitter or any colored glitter yeah i'm all over this yeah it's really cool it's good stuff you just have to let it like you have to put it somewhere where you leave it alone which is rough yes do it at the end of the day yeah all right uh i yeah well i'm so distracted by that we're gonna have to move on because i just can't well imagine okay i'm gonna really blow your mind now ready uh led resin earrings that's another thing that i'm trying to figure out oh see i i don't wear earrings so that's fine okay but i as you were talking about it, I was like, I want buttons for my jacket.

Oh, that'd be so cool. Because that would be an easy power situation. Yeah. And everything's anchored well, but it would just be so subtle and quiet. And I could just totally see that. Although you have to make it well mechanically secured because you don't want the wires to be what's actually anchoring it, holding your jacket closed.

Okay, okay. No, no, no, we're going to go on. We're going to go on, and this is... Who are you arguing with? Myself. Who am I usually talking to? You also give talks. You mentioned you talk to the JavaScript and a group conference.

And I know you've given some other ones to less technical audiences. What's the best part about speaking? Just reaching out to new people. Like with, like I end up speaking at a lot of like different kinds of girls ladies uh women in tech type organizations and stuff and showing them the like felt owl that has a light sensor in it uh where it doesn't look like a traditional electronics project but it's like a light up stuffed toy or something like that uh that's really fun and i like seeing or, I gave a talk to some middle schoolers once and I talked about everything from like high fashion electronics, like the cute circuit is

doing to the kind of lily pad stuff, toy type stuff. And being able to show different people that there's more electronics than like, there's a lot of garage door opener projects. And there's more electronics than like, there's a lot of garage door opener projects and there's a lot of, you know, different things, but there's also like fun, soft, soft toys stuff that you can get into or the things where you don't need to make it look like it'll still look finished, but it's not like Apple super polished. If you get what I'm trying to say, like it's the aesthetic is different and that's's okay. You can you can go for that. And it's still it's still fun, super, like, it's still a really fun project. That's hard. It's easy to get discouraged,

because my, my system, my device doesn't have a pretty package. And it looks like I put it together with hot glue and, and duct tape, which is what what happened but I wanted it to look like a professional did it yeah and I mean well most of the time it's just and this was a big thing for me too when I was learning is like you get these a lot of these projects or these little like the kits or whatever that have the um the board and the jumper cables and the leds or whatever and so you end up with something cool but it's like well this is going to fall apart if i bring it anywhere and i don't really see again the utility in this but from like once you learn this stuff like i made a me and my friend jerry made a game where it was just your kind of standard maker kit arduino components inside of a kid's kitchen play set. And we made a game off of, um, you put

different like vegetables into the pan and then the, the game would tell you what vegetable to put in and you'd have to do it in a certain period of time or, you know, turn the water on or whatever. And, um, that's all stand like potentiometers. Uh, I think we used a capacitive touch sensors with different patterns on them for the vegetables and basic components, but then in a fun package and then hot glue, a lot of hot glue, a lot of hot glue, and different things.

And you can make a game. And it costs more than a game like that might be if anyone made it in huge consumer quantities, but you get a lot out of it. I mean, if you're making it for a kid, you know there's just this pride of they're playing with it. Yeah, and they're having fun. And we submitted it to Alt Control GDC and got into that. So we actually got to show it off at the Alternative Controller Expo at GDC and got into that. So we actually like got to show it off at the alternative controller expo at GDC one year. And you know, I really like the idea that more

of the game conferences are exploring the physical aspect, the physical games. It's not all VR and computer games. Yeah, it's really, there's, well, there was one where it was like they took stuffed dog butts and then mounted it to a board. And then like part of the game was like you were a dog in a park and sniffing dog butts. And then like, you got to do that to the stuffed dog butt. And that was like, well, that was really cool. But I mean, I don't think it's just for being creative

it doesn't have to be about i mean i'm sure that they had a game that they sold in some capacity but i would guess that they didn't like matt tried to mass market dog butt sniffers so many titles their titles are just spewing out um well it wasn't my idea, so unfortunately, because that would have been, that's good stuff. But I mean, you can even make something as simple as a tic-tac-toe board and do something like this and have it be fun for a family get-together. As an introvert, sometimes I don't like going to get-togethers. But if there was a game that I made that other people were playing, even if it was silly, like tic-tac-toe, that was not challenging, it still would be something to talk about. And so I wouldn't have to, you know, talk about people's politics or whatever it is people talk about.

Yeah, like having a good kind of icebreaker that isn't just like, well, the weather, you know, it's something that's just there that you can show and talk about. How are those Minnesota Vikings? Oh, I, I tell you, I have no idea. What do you wish someone had told you when you started out making? Uh, just, I brought this up before, but having the confidence to take advice or ignore advice, um, people have different, will give advice based on what worked for them. Um, and it can work differently for you or just, you know, based on how,

like as a, as a less confident person, you're not going to really go like someone gives you advice to like yeah you go tell them what's going on and you're like well I'm scared so you can just take people's advice or ignore it and it doesn't need to be um there's no shame in that like if you ignore someone's advice and because you like and then you mess up that's I mean that's probably going to be fine unless it's a big thing. Ignore the advice on which way to put the battery into the battery charger. That's not advice. Yeah, that's physics.

But you know what I mean. Most of the things that people tell you, don't worry about making a mistake while you're learning. Most of the time there's ways, you know, ways to fix it, or there's a way out of it. So know what advice to take and know what advice to ignore. Or ignore all the advice and make mistakes. And then next time you'll know which advice to take. Yep. Yeah, you can weed out who's giving you good advice that way, too. How do people find you?

I'm on Twitter at Twitter slash Galicia, or Galicia, G-E-L-I-C-I-A. There's also portfolio.galicia.com. And then you can email me at kderivage at galicia.com. And where did your handle come from? So in middle school, my, this, okay, again, going really back, uh, the deep reaches, but my dad had a bookshelf that I would take a lot of books from, um, and they were fantasy and whatever, which the, but, uh, I took this one called Thieves World, which was edited by an author I really liked.

And I really didn't get it was a little bit like just too much for middle school Christina. But there was I really liked the name of this person as I was struggling to understand what was happening. So I think she was the owner of a brothel. That's what I kind of have learned when I've Googled the name since then. Like, where did I get that but it was one of those things as I you know technology evolves and you get handles in different places like that name just sort of ended up following me until I was actually like in like introducing myself to strangers on the internet with it so it's just sort of followed me as I've grown up isn't it weird how you can have a perfectly good name and then you can

introduce yourself as someone else and everybody then calls you by that name? Yeah. It's kind of magical. We think we're born with our names and that there's no other alternative, but there is. Yeah. You just have to have the courage to say, hi, I'm whatever you wanted to say. Yeah. Or the first person that's like, I really don't know you as Christina. I know you by your internet name. And it's just like, whoa, that was easy. And I remember the Thieves World, the aspirin wrote a lot of work in there and for the longest time if i had had your courage i would have introduced myself as uh lynn thandy because she was totally my favorite character is that from thieves world

because i really don't remember that is okay sorry she was one of the the wizards okay and she masqueraded as a man it was just so cool um and to and i have to admit i had to look up her name but i i knew i was talking to you so I had the opportunity I don't keep all this in my head all the time yeah I read a lot of the aspirins like myth adventure books um but yeah thieves world was a little bit I guess maybe too serious for me but I don't know that myth adventures was not now myth adventures was very funny but yeah thieves world was a little serious. Christopher, do you have any other questions?

I mean, there's so much we can talk about, but yeah. I was wondering if you take any lessons from your hobbies back to work or vice versa, or do you have things from your front-end development world that you wish people doing embedded kind of things new or or vice versa uh i think probably expectations management and patience uh but that's sort of like whenever you're doing programming all that factors into everything but um you know don't be afraid of debugging but you know there's a lot of fancy debuggers that people always use but there's still a place for debugging with system.printout or control.log or whatever so don't be afraid to go back to basics with debugging is kind of the thing that i am not ashamed of anymore um yeah i don't know that's kind of it is just uh and then don't be afraid to start with a small simple project and that you can build off of uh rather than trying to build the whole thing

from right away that's good advice yeah it's a lot less frustrating yes do you have any speaking engagements coming up um Nope, not really. I submitted, but I haven't gotten accepted yet. All right. Sorry. Just the book. Yep. Yeah, the book's pretty exciting.

Yeah, finally. It's been a while. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with, Christina? Go out there and build stuff. Don't be too scared to start. Our guest has been Christina Dervage, software dev by day, hardware hacker by night. Thank you for being with us. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Thank you also to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And I mentioned last week we have the new overview on the blog, so it's easier to find stuff. So I do encourage you to go look on embedded.fm. Now, a quote to leave you with. This one from Bob Ross.

Sometimes you learn more from your mistakes than you do from your masterpieces. 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.