Embedded - 271: Shell Scripts for the Soul (Repeat)

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

Alex Glow filled our heads with project ideas. Alex is the Resident Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Her page is glowascii and you might want to see Archimedes the AI robot owl and the Hardware 101 channel. They have many sponsored contests including BadgeLove. You can find her on Twitter at @glowascii. Lightning round led us to many possibles: It you were building an IoT stuffed animal, what would you use? Mycroft and Snips are what is inside Archimedes. If you were building a camera to monitor a 3d printer, what would you use? For her M3D Micro Printer, Alex would use the Raspberry Pi based OctoPi to monitor it. If you were going to a classroom of 2nd graders, what boards would you take? The BBC Micro:bit (based on Code Bug) or some LittleBits kits (Star Wars Droid Inventor Kit and Korg Synth Kit are on Amazon (those are Embedded affiliate links, btw). If you were going to make a car-sized fighting robot, what dev system would you use? The Open Source Novena DIY Laptop initially designed Bunnie Huang There were more software and hardware kits to explore: Google DIY AI Arduino Maker1000 Raspberry Pi Chirp.io    For your amusement Floppotron plays Bohemian Rhapsody Alex gave a shout out to her first hackerspace All Hands Active Ableton is audio workstation and sequencer software. Alex recommends Women’s Audio Mission as a good way to learn audio production and recording if you are in the San Francisco area. There is an Interplanetary File System and Alex worked on a portable printer console for it. Elecia is always willing to talk about Ty the typing robot and/or narwhals teaching Bayes Rule. She recommended the book There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.  

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. Our guest this week is Alex Glow, and we're going to talk about making projects, all kinds of projects. Hi, Alex. Thanks for joining us. Hey, what's up? Could you tell us about yourself as though we met for the first time in the alleyway of the Supercon conference? Sure. So I would probably be bouncing around a bit.

So just kind of imagine that. And I would say, hey, I'm Alex Glo. I'm, oh boy, I would definitely stumble over it. So this is very realistic. I do the video channels for hackster.io, which is an online community for hardware developers to share their projects and do contests and things. So what I do is run our video channels. So I build projects, I write up tutorials, I teach people how to use new and cool technology and tools. And I also get to interview cool people like you, but on another day, maybe. Maybe another day.

It might be fun. And I introduced you as Alex Glow, but it's actually Glowowski? Glowowski. Maybe you should say. Sure. Yeah. Everyone thinks it's a stage name. And I get that question fairly often.

Like, so the Glow is just a shortened version of GlowKI, which is the anglicized version of GOWATSKI, which is this Polish name. And some people call it GLOWACKI instead. I'm kind of glad we went with the S instead. But I don't know, it could have been ALEXWACKI instead, who knows? I like the fact that it's GLOW and ASKI. I mean, that just so represents what you do. It's perfect. Yeah, it's kind of perfect, right? Okay, so let's do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're well-behaved, we won't ask you why and how and all those things.

Christopher, you want to go first? Yes, I will go first. And I will cover the fact that I'm scrolling around the document by talking. Okay. If you were building an IoT stuffed animal, what dev system would you use? What dev system? Okay. So I'm sure we've all seen, I've definitely seen my share of IoT stuffed animals that were very creepy.

And while that's sometimes a goal, it's usually not. So there's like, you know, physically creepy and conceptually creepy, right? So I think that a lot of the things that IoT stuffed animals would be doing, like, for example, that German one, I forget what it was called. But they found out that, you know, it was really hackable and so people could speak through it and say creepy stuff to your kids or hear what your kids basically spy on you and stuff and that's always suboptimal. So with things like that, I would always opt for something that is not internet connected

and or that you have full control over. So there's a couple of systems like Mycroft and Snips.ai that are very privacy focused versions of things like Google Assistant and Alexa that basically make it so that you can fully control, you know, what it accesses. You can maybe even run it offline. You can set up your own wake words. So like instead of, you know, Mycroft or whatever, you could say Jarvis or whatever. And so I'm actually looking at building not a stuffed animal, but a differently designed kind of interface for that. In fact, that's whatY vision kit to do some cool little AI sort of emotion detection stuff. But if you're, I would probably make like some kind of stuffed animal and put either Snips or Mycroft in it in order to have it like assist me with things like maybe language learning or

something. Okay, so for the second lightning round question. Oh, sorry. Yeah, fast. Oh, sorry. No, that was fantastic. Your questions are too good. We'll circle back all around. Yeah, and we're definitely going to talk about the robot, Al. How could we not? But I do have another question, sort of in the same vein. If you were building a camera to monitor a 3D printer in your home, what sort of system would you use? Well, so I actually have a 3D printer in my home. Oh, yeah. What sort of system would you use? Well, so I actually have a 3D printer in my home.

Huge shock there. And I use, I have an M3D micro printer and it can be run off of Octopi. So there's this Raspberry Pi system. It's an image you can download that basically lets you run 3D printers off of a Raspberry Pi. And that way you don't have to leave your computer connected to it.

And it even has a little option where you can just plug in a camera to your Raspberry Pi and use that, so I'd probably go with that. Cool. Is that what you use, Christopher? Uh-huh. Nice. If you were going to a classroom of second graders, what boards would you take? Well, the micro bit, the BBC micro bit is a board that has a five by five LED grid and an accelerometer and it can talk to each other by a radio and you can program it with like block programming. It's kind of based on this other

one called the code bug. That's an even sort of like cuter sort of bug shaped version with a little clip on places you can clip on alligator clips and stuff. So those would both be good choices. Or Little Bits, which is like a sort of Lego for electronics. They've been having kits, the Little Bits. They've been having just the most adorable kits with Star Wars.

I saw they have a collaboration with Korg where you can build a synth. Like, what? That's so cool. A little expensive, but so cool. I saw they have a collaboration with Korg where you can build a synth. Yes, that was really neat. That's so cool. A little expensive, but so cool. Last one in the style of the question. If you were going to make a car-sized fighting robot,

what dev system would you take? I would definitely still want that to not be internet controlled. Nothing could go wrong. That's the last thing I need. Oh, boy. So I actually contemplated doing a smart car system based on an Intel Edison, but that was years ago. Let's see what I do now. Maybe I would use the novena uh so the novena or novena i'm not sure how you say it but by bunny huang is this totally diy laptop system that's designed to be completely open source to the point that like you build the case and

everything and it's got this uh this uh configurable array called the peak array, after Nadia Peak. So you can sort of screw things in wherever you want. And so maybe taking that to kind of a maximalist viewpoint, where you would turn it not into something that's small and portable, but just outfit it with... You've got tons of space. You can put everything open source on there. It'd be super... I don't know, it'd be really cool. All right.

What does YOLO stand for? You obviously love owls. That is the correct answer. Questionable content. Do you have a tip everyone should know? Yeah. do you have a tip everyone should know yeah so this is one that i always get asked but i always forget about this most important one which is that if you're doing something with electronics on a table especially with like lots of little screws and stuff even if you're using one of those little mats where you can put all the components and stuff. Just wear a skirt. Or like, wear an apron

or a kilt or something. Oh, true. The amount of times that has saved me from having to crawl on the floor hunting for something that I dropped, like, oh my god. Totally. Or surface mount soldering, you know, all those tiny little things. Yes, when they fall in your lap, they're really easy to find if you have a skirt

on. It's so good. Life hacks. Hashtag. Alright, I have to buy some skirts. Seriously. your lap they're really easy to find if you have a skirt on it's so good life hacks hashtag all right i have to buy some skirts seriously okay so so let's get to owls because i know everybody out there's like going owls tell me about the owls uh you have a robot owl you mentioned that in ai y vision okay so tell me so uh ai y stands for diy ai it's a system created by google to basically make it easy for people to mess around with artificial intelligence and they do so it's this cute little cardboard kit that you put together a little box that has in this there's a voice version and a vision version the vision version comes with a little um camera and an activity led and um

a little piezo buzzer for audio feedback as well as a little light up button that sort of shows you the status and you can hit the button and take a picture. And it runs on Python. So they sent us one of these and I was introducing it to the Hackster community. So I put together the kit and then I was like, well, for Maker Faire, we should make something really cool with this, right? And I was like, I'm going to make something that gives away stickers. I'll just cut to the cool part. Basically, a bunch of stuff happened, and then I decided to make it into a 3D-printed owl robot on a servo gimbal. So, you know, a pan and tilt gimbal that can sort of look around and stuff. So in one of his eyes is the camera, and in the other eye is the piezo speaker.

And then, since I couldn't fit the button in his head as well, because it's kind of a big arcade button, I made a little top hat for him as well that's 3D printed. And so all of this you can sort of download and mess around with. I've been tweaking the design a bit, but basically he sits on my shoulder thanks to something that my friend Mohib said, where he basically assumed that was going to be the case. I was like, sure, obviously. Duh. case i was like sure obviously duh uh and so he sits on my shoulder and like looks around to find faces and stuff and then he like figures out if he thinks they're happy or sad and like makes little noises to show whatever emotion he thinks you are and his little hat sort of lights up with uh blue for sad and yellow for happy um and so he's really cute and i run his servos off of

a separate system right now it's an arduino maker 1000 so that uh you know at any given point probably something's broken so either his you know ai part or his motors are working and he's kind of fun for people to like interact with and stuff oh man there's so many so many more plans with that i've recently replaced the arduino for the motor control with a raspberry pi that responds to this system called chirp it's an audio protocol tell me if i'm going on way too long about this no we're we're quiet because we're fascinated keep going. So chirp.io is this system where you can control, you can communicate between electronic devices using audio. More specifically, using something that sounds like R2-D2 noises.

Oh, wow. Yes. Finally. So you don't need Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or anything like that. Any kind of internet connectivity. You just need, you know, the app on your phone or like a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino or something that can send or receive the messages. And you can hear it yourself. It goes like, oh, I could play something from it.

Maybe if I can get that working. But, so now he had, I programmed some little animations that he can do where he, you know, you play him a little owl and then happy emoji. So it can send, you know, Unicode emoji as well, which is amazing. So I sent him like owl and happy and he'll do this like little sort of weird fake laugh that looks really awkward and creepy right now or like owl and sad and he does a little sort of like you know droopy head like like sort of shakes his head side to side as though he's super despairing um and then i can send him a cheese emoji and he stands up straight for a picture because otherwise yeah like the thing about having an animated pet right is that you take him to conventions and things, and people are like, oh, can we get a picture? And he's like looking off somewhere in the distance or like down at my feet or something like that.

Yeah. And he never stands still, so I have to like unplug him and like manually turn him that way, which is really bad for his motors and really stressful for me. And this way will just be so much better. I'm glad this is the pre-holidays or the holidays episode because i am coming up with a great list of things that i want to do while we're off and that i will need more gear for and they all involve owls well no i mean i like owls but it would be an octopus come on oh yeah and that's a great thing

you can adapt the platform to all kinds of different things, you know. Well, and I like hearing about chirp.io because I'm doing an underwater thing and it actually has an acoustic modem and I just want to hear it. What? I'm waiting to get an acoustic modem so I can hear what it actually sounds.

Yeah, it's going to sound like a modem. Yeah, it's going to sound like an old-style modem. Ear, ear, ear, ear. Oh, man. There was this, there's that person who does the Flop-O-Tron array of floppy drives that they cause to make music. Yeah, yeah. The stepper motors. They did Bohemian Rhapsody, and they actually threw in an old-school modem there with some little solos.

Oh, we'll have to find that. I haven't seen that. It's super good. So we now have gone through a whole bunch of different processors, a bunch of interfaces. How do you learn all this stuff? I mean, I know the STM32 line. I know the TX2. but this is a lot of stuff

yeah so um a lot of the stuff i don't get to learn in great depth so i'm constantly sort of like having to get up um sort of bone up on new technologies and new boards and things and a lot of the time to be honest i'll like you know read on it, make a video about it. If it's something kind of niche, like a 3D magnetic IMU sensor that's specifically for automotive applications or something like that, I'll learn a bunch of stuff about it enough to do a video and then I'll kind of like, it'll, my brain will wander off in other directions. But there's some that just are so versatile and so useful and have great community support that they keep coming back up. And obviously, since it's like a big part of my job, then that's how I have the time to learn a lot of that stuff. Like I learned it like it's my job

because it's my job, you know. But also, this is just fascinating. I kind of assumed that if my job became just electronics, that I would end up doing no electronics in my free time. But that's not the case. I do lots of other stuff, but I still happily spend evenings doing that. Which is kind of good, because my schedule is super weird. The best thing about my job, honestly, is flexibility. So I'll typically roll in around like 11 in the morning and then leave at like seven or eight at night or even later if i'm 3d

printing something because in the morning i feel like i'm able to do creative stuff like i work on music or writing or something like that um and then uh i sort of get myself prepared for the day and sort of woken up and then i go in and start dealing with emails yeah and then I do that sometimes and then I have another creative spurt kind of later in the afternoon that I can apply to my job but I've used my first one for my own stuff which is what I care about I'd love to see what you work on although maybe you don't want to share like maybe this is like your public thing and then you have private projects that you don't talk as much about i don't know no i'm pretty open about what i'm working on um i do uh some i think they're called zines but that's not what i call them i call them comics and i try to do a technical one.

So I've been working on taking one that I did about two years ago about Bayesian inference and math and what it really means when we talk about Bayes' rule. And I wanted to also learn a new drawing program. So I took my messy comics from then and i'm working on making really pretty ones now or less messy ones i regarding the zines versus comics thing uh i talked to do you know doc pop he's a an sf guy who does like lots of yogio stuff and lots of zine stuff but uh i asked him what's the difference between like a zine and a mini comic because that's what he calls his stuff they're a little like you kind of fold a page into eight you know eight pages or whatever and i think his deal was that a zine is more sort

of like a bunch of stuff cut and pasted and a comic is more like single focus but i think also it's like it's obviously not a super strict medium. That's kind of the point, right? Well, you convinced me I'm sticking with comic. Yeah, you do you. Either way. Have you seen Cigar Mercury's stuff? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

What was that? Well, we haven't had her on, but maybe someday. You and I have seen her. She does the electro cuties jackets. Right, right. Okay. Sorry. Yep. Yeah. but maybe someday um you and i have seen her okay she does the electro cuties jackets right right okay sorry yep yeah and she does um some technical explainer zines like there's one called how does the internet okay i've seen that one yeah i just didn't recognize the name yeah she goes by sailor hg and julia evans also has a bunch of them. And so there's been this idea that you can spread information amusingly. I love it.

And I love it, yeah. It kind of reminds me of that Walt Disney quote, even though he was kind of an a**hole, or should I say he was kind of a jerk? Kind of a huge jerk but um he did say something of value which is uh this thing of i think i wrote it down somewhere it's like i would rather entertain and hope that people learn something than educate people and hope they were entertained like the more that you can interweave you know like people don't want to read something super dry or some people do but you know if sometimes you have to but if you don't have to if you can if you keep keep people engaged uh while you're educating them that's definitely a bonus and this idea that you don't have to be super formal or have the right background or

education in order to be able to like share something of value um yeah super good that actually uh leads me to a question I kind of wanted to ask you. You don't have a double E degree, do you? No, no. I went to college and I was going to study linguistics. Then I realized that I just sort of wanted to learn languages. So I did that. But Spanish and Russian, if I saw. Are there more? Well, I also studied, I took an intensive Mandarin Chinese course, but I wasn't able to go very far with that because I had other classes. But yeah, I majored in Spanish and I did the whole intensive Russian sort of course at the residential college. and that was awesome. But, so yeah, no formal electronics training. I mostly learned through the hackerspace communities and originally sort of through FIRST Robotics in high school.

So how did you go from I graduated with a Spanish degree to I'm full-time learning how to do hardware and present it. Yeah, well, so, okay. So even in college, right, it's like your major doesn't define you. Like your job doesn't define you or your major doesn't define you. You don't have to stick with one thing. So even in college, I was doing things like setting up my, you know, the university gives you a free server. And so I was sort of playing around with setting up a website on there and learning how to mess around with VPSs, for

example, like virtual private servers that we got some server space that we could do stuff with. And I was always, you know, fascinated by that. And I feel like if I weren't doing technology now, I'd be doing something else. But like, like you with the zines, you're not limited to, or pardon, comics. I think that makes everything stronger. But to answer your question, after college, I sort of helped get off the ground this new hacker space in Ann Arbor called All Hands Active. Shout out to aha and that was where i first learned how to use an arduino and stuff like that i started building this uh project out of an old make magazine called the five dollar uh cracker box amp which was like

an amplifier that you can build into a ritz cracker box. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, it's not actually $5 if you get all the parts from a check, but I also didn't build it into a cracker box. I just built it into some like, uh, corrugated plastic or whatever. But, um, so, you know, just gradually sort of over the years and it's very project based. So if you i think a lot of people who get into software who don't do boot camps or formal training uh learn a lot through just having specific projects that they want to accomplish and you always have to learn something to achieve something new right so you sort of build your skills gradually that way and And then in terms of doing it professionally, so around that same time in 2009,

I started a blog where I was getting into, I decided that I had a bunch of free time. So I would try and make one project per week. And I was going to be taking notes along the way so that I could remember how to do this stuff. And in my head, I was like, oh, well, I should just put this on the internet. Just because if it's going to be my brain, I might as well share this stuff with other people. It'll help me remember too. And kept doing that and started giving talks about my explorations with audio electronics and stuff. So people sort of, just by, I think the most important thing with being able to do what you enjoy as work if you choose to do that is to just do it when you have the time with the motivation you

have and share the crap out of it because that's how you spread the word that you're doing this stuff and when someone is looking for someone who does the things that you do like either for a speaker for a conference and they want to pad out their roster or whatever, they'll think of you. And that way you build your reputation and you get to have more opportunities to do cool stuff. How do you share what you do? I mean, now you have Twitter followers and YouTube followers and people know who you are. But that zero to being the person somebody thinks I have to invite to a conference. How do you make that transition? A lot of that is about people, right?

So I was doing the blog, so that was there. And then if I met someone who was interested in one of the projects I was doing, either through the hackerspace or whatever, then I would say, oh, hey, you can look at my blog here. I didn't really get on Twitter until a few years ago. But when I did, I already had this sort of backlog of things I could talk to people about. But honestly, most of it is just in person. Like I would go to events where I was interested in what they were talking about. You know, the first step to being a speaker somewhere is to get into that community by going to the events. And so just by nature of being interested in this stuff, I was attending, for example, at, I forget what it's called, like Ann Arbor Brew Tech or something. Doug Song, the founder of Duo Security, is a huge badass,

total badass, doing really cool stuff, helped make the skate park happen in Ann Arbor. But he runs these events where makers can meet each other. And through the hackerspace, you know, Mitch Altman and Jimmy Rogers came through and taught a couple of workshops. And then there was a maker fair that got started in detroit so i met del doherty and sherry huss for the first time uh as long as well as some other people and just meeting the other people locally who were interested in doing that stuff

when they ran events i would go to theirs if we events, they would come to ours, etc. Yeah, it's all about people, right? The more you can meet them in person and just generally, genuinely share interests, you know, you get each other stoked about what you're doing. And that's totally what happens. Like, sometimes I go to an event and it feels like I'm just doing it out of obligation or whatever, pretty rarely, but sometimes. But then I get there and it's like, oh my god, everyone's talking about stuff that I'm fascinated by. I went to this thing yesterday, a biohacking sort of mini conference called Body Hacks West. And I had a horrible time getting there. And I almost gave up because it was such a ridiculous day. But I went and these people were talking about CerebroVoice, which is a system that lets you use sub-vocalization to control your devices. And I had just been talking with someone on the internet, on Twitter, about what the privacy implications of this technology would be, like if you can do it from afar. It turns out that anytime you read something, if you grew up speaking and hearing, then you probably started to learn to read

by speaking aloud. And even grown-ups still make extremely minute muscle movements when they read, as though they're reading aloud. And you can detect that. So you can use that to control devices. And people who grew up not hearing with sign language will make minute hand movements. Yeah. And so I got to ask them this question about, oh, you know, could this be used if someone has really high tech camera technology, you know, to sort of see what you're reading from afar, which would be kind of a huge, you know, vulnerability. And they said that the tech is like pretty far away from that right now, just because of the sensitivity that you need, even with on the skin contact.

Still, it's, you know, that's a good thought to have that early, right? Yeah. A lot of people, that's the thought that you have when the problem starts to arise. Like, okay, now we can do, oops. I think that's why you need such cross-pollination, right? You have people who aren't domain experts but have tons of valuable like they care about security or whatever you know so with your projects that you do on your own before you you became your job how did you learn what you needed to i i you know i like to learn but sometimes i just wish i could matrix

download start matrix download it and videos like don't work for me yeah i'm a reader and i totally get that not everybody is but how do you do it how do you stay engaged enough to get through the difficult part of learning so i'm also much more reading focused uh kind of a dirty secret isn't it i actually i don't learn by video is almost at all unless it's something very specific and software based where you kind of have to see the person do it but like mostly i still learn through reading stuff as well and the internet honestly like i i can't imagine having this kind of a life before the internet um where you can just get instant answers to those little questions and stuff. Actually, now I'm getting more into in-person classes again, because it seems like it's so

hard to get to. So, you know, you'll get stalled out on a project, right? And I often have a ton of different projects going at a time. And what will happen is that I'll hit kind of a wall or a stumbling block or something I can't get through in an evening in one and the next day I'm off back into work or onto something else but then you know months later I'll just find that missing piece and it'll slot into there and that way like that thing will get wrapped up and so a lot of it is happenstance sort of having a bunch of stuff going on at one time, and then you resolve sort of things as the solutions arise. But more specifically, if I have something in particular I really want to get worked out, I'll just read through forums.

Like Google all the error messages. Just figure out everything that you can possibly... My keyword game is amazing, right? I'm sure yours is as well or like you're just like okay i need to learn this thing and then you sort of drill down into that recently i needed to learn um i'm working on this new project the glow up which is like an open source version of this basically a face-mounted sad lamp that you can use against seasonal affective disorder and jet lag and uh i needed to know a lot of stuff about that, like,

you know, which wavelengths work and, you know, what, how many lumens do you need? And does it even work? And how long do you have to wear it for? And what are the safety concerns with shining lights in your eyes and stuff, right? And all of that, I was able to mostly jack from companies that have recently started releasing these devices and learned a lot of other cool stuff along the way. But yeah, just Google, man. I'm just anytime people complain about the Internet, I'm like, don't you remember? We used to argue about stupid stuff. We just look up now yeah and another cool thing like i'm not personally dyslexic but the amount of the life change i've heard from friends who are like the way that the education system didn't serve them in the past and the way that you're able to cram knowledge into your head now with audiobooks is ridiculous like i got back into audiobooks because i was dating someone who

had been this or was dyslexic and then like this idea that you can listen to them you can learn to listen to them on like 2x speed if it's something that like I listen to fiction for fun and I'll listen to that on a slower speed but like if I want to cram into my brain something about like I don't know but there's all there's so much information available for free from the library in audiobooks that I can just have on my phone. I don't have to go anywhere. It just comes into my ears. It's amazing.

Podcast too. Yes, exactly. Yeah, totally. Obviously, yeah. What is the hardest for you to pick up? Software, mechanical, hardware, keeping it working? I mean, these are all different disciplines and they all require a different sort of thought process. Which one is the most natural

for you and which is the hardest? I think the most natural stuff for me is mechanical, which kind of makes sense. I've been using my hands my whole life, right? And software is definitely the hardest. Software to me, it feels like quicksand, right? Like, it looks solid, and it's like, it was solid six months ago. Like, why wouldn't I be able to run this again now? And it turns out that I've changed something small in my development environment. And, like, suddenly nothing works. I'm like, no! And, like, dependency trees, or whatever you call them oh my god like that those

are the death of me like that so i can sort of muscle through an electronics project in an evening if i need to but software you can just sort of go down these deep deep deep rabbit holes where you have so many different factors like nothing exists in isolation which i know that there's i know there's like you know developing environments and little sandboxes you can make that alleviate that, right? But even maintaining that and remembering what I have on my computer when it's not like something I have mapped in my brain, because I don't have a map of the whole system that's set up on my computer. If I need to know what version of Python or Node.js or whatever is installed, I have to go and check. And I know everyone else does too, but it's just not something that my brain does naturally. Which might be weird because you'd think the language stuff

would help with that, right? But I think it's more of a state tracking thing. I don't know. The whole tools thing is a pain point for all of us. I should have been an analyst. Even people who are like, software, that's no big deal. But the tools, yeah software that's no big deal but you know the tools yeah that's a problem yeah i did start um go down a pretty cool rabbit hole a little

while ago where i was trying to so like i know that the way that we visualize electronics is kind of backwards right or electricity like when you say positive and negative it's not that the electrons flow from the positive to the negative, even though that really is a helpful visualization for me and it's really natural. So I tried to like, OK, how does it actually work? The electrons, like which is the cathode, which is the anode. And once you get there, that's pretty rough because like the cathode on an LED is not the same sort of. It's not. It's not the same. So on an LED, the positive leg is, let's see, the,

oh, I'm gonna get this wrong, is the anode, I think. And on a battery, it's like the opposite. So the, I would, I've like, I've looked this up like four times, and I know that I'm probably getting it wrong again, but I made this whole little analogy with there being an animal lizard and a cat on the other end of a string, and the animal is trying to not get eaten by the cat, so it keeps throwing things at it, and those are the electrons. And so then cathode is the positive terminal, and the anode is the

negative and so like you know in a on an led right the cathode accepts the electrons the anode like spews them back out towards the battery uh but it's still not perfect maybe i was thinking about making a xenobatter eventually in fact uh but did not get that far. There's a book called Electronics for Earthlings that tries to put electronics in this form. And they do some neat things with cars and bridges and traffic lights. And, you know, for the month after I read the book, it all made sense. Yeah. That'd be amazing. I'll totally check that out um yeah so

spark fun uh sorry says cathode it's are negative and anodes are positive but i totally get like batteries are the opposite and yeah right electrons i mean thank you ben franklin for lots of things but our whole positive negative being backward not a plus plus. And I do mean the pun. Well, one thing that kind of blew my mind when I was in school was everybody talks about electricity and, you know, things travel at the speed of light. And so you have this mental model of electrons blasting through a wire. Because they don't. The signal transfer goes at the speed of light or some significant fraction depending on the material. But the electrons themselves are crawling if they're moving in much at all.

Like, I think it's on the order of a few microns per second or something like that. So, yeah, when they draw those pictures and they show electrons, you know, zipping around, they're barely doing anything in reality. And then you can go in down those deep holes of like, once you get into like, well, why isn't it? And why is the gravity is instant? You get into like gravitational waves and that's a whole bunch of other stuff that I don't know, but I would love to. Oh, there's not enough time to just like to study everything, right? But you want to. You totally do. I think that's a big factor of nerds is that it's really hard for us to be bored because there's just always, always more rabbit holes to go down.

You know, that's a good thing to say. We had some guests over and they are nerds and they were kind of tired. And we had a weekend where we did not that much. We played games and we hung out and we chatted. But the goal was to not find a project and start it. And like three times things happened. And I was like, oh, okay, we're going to start a project now. We all looked at each other like, nope, back to the couch.

I love it. Yeah. back to the couch i love it yeah when chris came down with his uh with his synthesizers i was like oh they're gonna be gone forever that's a trap too oh i'm still not getting into modular since because i know i'd instantly lose all my time and money oh boy but yeah that is so important though being able to like lie fallow our our, like our culture as much as everything else, the nerd culture, especially with Twitter and everything is very focused on, you know, producing things constantly and having a presence. Constantly. Yes. space you've got to have it be part of your values system that this lying fallow is a necessity like they do it for agriculture right you're supposed to leave fields to just kind of do their thing

for a while and it's good for the earth and it's good for your brain like and while you're doing that of course like if you try to meditate and clear your mind suddenly all these ideas come up um and that's you know that's life but got to be able to let yourself detach. I totally admire that. You talk about, I mean, doing projects is part of your job and you do it at home. How do you make the differentiation between work and home? And then how do you make the space that gives you time to recharge creativity the short answer is i don't well you're because you are creative yeah so um my room i'm looking around it right now and there's a sewing machine on the thing uh on the

table here right next to me and there's like a bunch of random lamps that i made like over to this side and i'm like i think just i really enjoy being among it all the time even when i'm able to like keeping the space clean is super important right like just having it be kind of tidy and mine almost never is but that's when i experience the most sort of like peace and calm um but i also don't mind i think it comes in waves right you have waves where you're like super into doing stuff all the time and then i just had a week where i was like i'm just gonna chill uh not necessarily on purpose like i felt like this urge to do stuff but um i naturally just

kind of like leveled out and um i wish i could say that i cleaned my space in that time and that's definitely a strategy that helps but um i think that as much as having downtime is important so is just being able to switch gears so if i've been doing electronics all day i'll come by or come home and make something like i made these arm warmers with like some old tights and some nice soft black suede the other week and that made me like so happy uh and that that feeling of just having to finish something small carries you through yeah so yeah right finishing things yeah and so i have so i have like some little projects like i just also made some some fidget earrings i call them

which is basically just some little metal bars that have these old um black pearls that i picked up in ohio like years ago and you can slide the beads around on the metal rods and wear them on your ears so you always have a little fidget toy and that took like you know half an hour to make and I did it half asleep I was just like I want this to be a thing and it was so refreshing and I felt so sort of recalibrated I guess guess, having made something tactile. That's why electronics and mechanical stuff is good for me. It's so tactile, you know? For me, it's writing and software. If I'm doing a lot of writing at work, a lot of technical writing,

then I'm okay doing my own software projects for home. And if I'm doing a lot of software, like just producing software, then at home I want to do creative writing or reading and thinking about creative writing. Because those are both things I really enjoy, but one of them is only fun when I get to do it for me. And so I do recharge by doing something. It's just doing something different and being able to do something small and different, accomplishable. Sometimes work doesn't feel accomplishable.

There is no end. Email never ends. Email, you send it away, it comes back, it never ends. I hate email so much. But it's necessary. It lets us do cool stuff, right? Well, there's this thing called decimation where you just delete delete nine emails, reply to the tenth, and delete nine more. Oh, my. It makes it go really fast, and you miss a lot of information, but if they really cared, they would send it ten times.

Is this like... No, this is not real. I have never done this. I have always wanted to do this, but no, I've never. That's amazing. For recharging, I think it's so important to be doing it just for yourself with no necessary timeline. It's nice to do a small thing that you can finish easily, and that helps so much. But also, I stopped taking commissions because I can only have one big obligation in my life it's nice to have deadlines to work to for other things but only if they're like self-imposed so um another thing that actually for me music is really great because not only is it fulfilling creatively and you can like play a few songs in 20 minutes or something, you know? But also, the way that it physiologically sort of molds you. So when I play guitar and sing, for example,

it sort of forces me to take really deep breaths and be mindful of my breathing in a very purposeful way. Like, I'm sucking in a ton of oxygen and pushing it back out, and also sort of going through this laundromat of emotions or whatever, right? I think that songs are like shell scripts for the soul. You can sort of use them to go from one emotional state to another through, like, little tweaks or whatever, you know, through the story of a song. And the breathing as well that comes with singing is just like this very good

way to sort of make sure that you're taking in a bunch of oxygen, feeling your feels and being an animal for a bit. Like we forget that we're mammals, right? Yeah, I think that's really interesting because I've done a little bit of singing recently and I haven't done a lot and I'm not good at it certainly, but having to do some has kind of trained me or informed me that I'm really bad at breathing. Because it's like, oh, well, this is, you know, this is an enforced form of breathing. You have to have the right breath to do this right. And I don't feel right after doing it.

And it's like, oh, well, I wonder if I just don't know how to do this so doing that actually was really kind of revelatory because it's like oh this is a normal kind of thing you were supposed to be able to do right but yeah and i had been singing for years before like i learned what breathing from the diaphragm actually is and like i was like whoa this is like magic i can like sing twice as long on a single breath what uh and harmonicas harmonicas make me feel that way because you have to control your breath on the way in and out and i just don't have the capacity right now i'm like i can keep control control it like coming in and then like being used up but not like timing uh i don't know. I feel like harmonica has got to be a really special kind of control that people have.

So what are you learning now? Are you engaged with something new and exciting to you or building more depth in something that you've already learned? Definitely. I took a class in Ableton about a week ago, actually, and I've been doing little doodles in the program ever since. And that is incredibly empowering. So I always saw it as this kind of, I downloaded it years ago and tried,

I was like, there's too many hotkeys, there's too many little boxes that I don't know what they mean and how all this stuff sort of goes together. And I knew that if I just sort of took a day to kind of learn all that stuff, then it would come together, but I didn't have whatever it took. So a six-hour class was like the perfect format for that, because you just get introduced to what a scene is, what a track is a clip is and how do you how these things work together and like just little stuff like how you get this type of uh an instrument into this kind of a like so that you can use it right with a keyboard yeah and uh there's this great organization in uh in the bay called women's audio mission and they had some really cool

young interns and like everyone in the class was super awesome and I just left feeling like I had gone from zero despite banging my head against it to like feeling like I could could wizard something up in like a little while and something basic but I have like like I'm I'm able to teach myself how to make drum loops now and like actually be able to use that. And it feels so empowering. So because when I thought you said you took a course in Ableton, that that was some location, maybe, I think maybe people are getting that it's a music composition and arrangement software. Yeah. It's right. Okay. So I have some really good friends who are musicians and musicians, pardon.

And I was able, I didn't want to like prevail upon one of them for like, you know, a huge course or whatever. But now I'm able to ask them questions about how they use it and stuff. So Ableton, I asked my friend this actually, like, I was like, is it a DAW? So DAW stands for Digital Audio Workspace or work something or other. Workstation, I think. But also it's comparable to Pro Tools, which is another sort of like really sort of full featured recording, editing and also synthesis. So you can pull in synthesizers and plug in like a little USB keyboard in my case or anything up to, you know, a full fledged MIDI controller of different types. There's ones that are shaped like guitars and like like um imagine heaps mimo gloves or like a glove yeah so you can like plug that in and then you ableton is what the mimo gloves talk to to trigger different types of loops or you can hook different

gestures up to certain effects like reverb or delay or whatever, or other effects like a filter that makes you sound like you're yelling down a tube. And so that's where you can really shape your sound and also generate new sounds by composing them with

a MIDI controller or just your computer keyboard, honestly, and one of the instruments they have in there. So it basically makes my whole, I've always, no, for like maybe 10 years, I've been doing music with like a guitar and voice and or mandolin, or sometimes piano. And I feel like I've always wanted to be able to add in things like drums, which I can't play, or be able to edit things together more intensely so that, for example, I can make it sound better or I can add effects and things.

And now I feel like I have the power. I have the sort of grasping, the starting grasping point, whatever you would call that. Yeah. It's nice to be able to get the independence to do the whole thing. So I want to go back to Hackster.io. How is it different from Hackaday.io where people put up projects or instructables? What is Hackster.io? So I will admit that I had done an Instructables residency before. And when I first heard about

Hackster, I was like, this seems like Instructables. And I think Hackaday.io wasn't around yet at that time. So what drew me in was the fact that it has these ties to the companies that make the electronics. And while it is not a corporate platform, it's very much sort of community driven. Each company that makes tools for electronics builders, or developers, for example, Arduino or Raspberry Pi or Microsoft or Samsung or Intel or whoever, or even 3D printers or software people, they have their own hubs on Hackster. And so you can go to the Raspberry Pi page and see all the Raspberry Pi projects on there. And you can funnel down by individual products and stuff that they produce so like i have a pi zero w and so i can see what i can build with that and so it's a huge inspiration engine in that way plus um most

of how we're funded is those companies you know using their hubs they can embed them in their sites so if you look at arduino.cc for example and you go to the project area, that's just Hackster with a skin on it. So we have these, you know, we can support ourselves that way, which means that there's much less in terms of advertising or whatever, even though there's this close relationship with the companies. And we're able to do a lot because of that, which is really cool. But I think that integration with the companies and the ability to really easily search for how to use one particular thing with another particular thing, it's really sort of discovery and exploration based, which I love. And you get a lot of contests, too. Yeah. So we're doing a contest around it. And that's actually what I wanted to build the glow up for the sad slash jet lag glasses thing,

because I thought that we could make something that looks beautiful, but also provides use to people in the winter right now. Or, you know, if they're at a conference that they traveled to from far away, it can actually be something that you don't just like leave in your drawer or whatever i'm i'm somewhat baffled by the badge thing but i know many people who are doing awesome badges for reasons i still don't understand but respect uh it's they're pretty and they're interesting and talking to the toy makers

about the complexity of their badges oh my god it's so cool it is very cool and yet i i don't know that that's how i'd spend my time but that's cool yeah that's i think it's a kind of yeah i think it's a kind of two i think it's a kind of two-way thing right where like so people who have those skills but have never really felt like they could express themselves artistically are finding that they have this medium available to them where they can put those skills to use in a way that lets them express themselves and like show their like enthusiasm for mr robot or Futurama or whatever. And not to say that people who do PCAVR don't do art in other ways,

but, like, I feel like if I had all these hardware skills and I wanted to express myself somehow, people think that they need to have, like, an art degree or, like, go learn to use paintbrushes or something like that in order to make art, and maybe that's part of it. Also, for me, like, coming from the other side where I don't have those skills yet, this gives me kind of an inroad where make art, and maybe that's part of it. Also, for me, coming from the other side, where I don't have those skills yet, this gives me kind of an inroad where people are suddenly publishing these tutorials on how to make really cool-looking ones,

and that's totally... I love shiny things! And I love being able to produce things that are beautiful, right? And so it sort of gives me this motivation to uh i started designing my own set of like modular tech jewelry pcbs called charmware uh just as a way to understand how to make pcbs and develop that skill in a way that isn't super dry and boring uh and so that's the value that it has for me. And that makes sense. I tend to shy away from making PCBs. And it makes a lot of sense that that is a way for the PCB people to really show off what they're doing in a physical medium. I get that.

That's what makes it so cool. like what what if you could do like a no well i was gonna say what if you could do like a pcb comic or whatever but clearly you're happy like not everything has to be technological and not everything has to be uh electronic that's definitely a thing well if i was gonna do when i would use the off and off the shelf pcb and then coat it in plastic and then write some weird software for it. Because software is where I'm at. And if I wanted to put together a little IMU and a magnetometer and a light and a little processor, I could do a million cool things with that and wear it around my neck like a necklace. Yeah, the level to which they're still called badges is a little ridiculous. Like I get this one from Spectra that's like an entire computer like if you took it back to the 80s people would

wait burn them at the stage what is this alien technology you brought oh it's a conference badge yeah like you know now you have like a separate badge and another badge. So it's obviously not really the badge anymore, but whatever. So at Hackster.io, there are a whole bunch of channels, and you're a moderator on many channels. And you have videos on some channels. Where do I get started as somebody who has never been to Hackster.io? I log in, i see some projects that are interesting but it's it's too much where do i where do i find you and how do i figure out

how to take it at a pace i can understand yeah so uh you mentioned the channels and if you it depends on sort of your level and your interests so for example if you're i know that you have experience, but if one were coming from a position of wanting to get started with making in general, we get a lot of people who are like, I don't know how to do electronics, but I want to learn. So there's a Hardware 101 channel

where I've done a bunch of tutorials to sort of get people up to speed on what the components are, what the basic boards are, and what an Arduino is, etc. Or if you are into it, like if you're into robotics or home automation or wearable tech, whichever sort of angles you're coming at it from, because

it's a medium, right? Not necessarily an interest in itself, although that's definitely true. But everyone's coming at it from their own sort of interest areas. So you can join the AI community or join the vehicle hacking community. Or for me, it's bikes as well. And that way, you'll get projects sort of sent to you that are new things

that people are publishing in those veins. Or if you look at your toolbox, and you're like, I have, you know, two of this type of Arduino and then like, um, oh, what else would people be working with? Suddenly my brain is like toast. Or like two Arduinos and a Raspberry Pi. Then you would go to those specific product pages and look at what people have been building with those and sort of cross-reference and be like, oh, here's a thing that I could build right now. Or you can follow us on the social media stuff, which I can't look at

because then i end up with 80 tabs open and zero minutes left in my life but yeah um or you can just go to hackstra.io slash video and then you'll see all the things with my face on them if that's a thing you wanted to do but um i i like to think that we keep it pretty interesting. I get the sort of flood thing, though. That's a big thing that we tell people who are trying to launch a new product. Often they'll say that you can build anything with it. And that's honestly just overwhelming. Not helpful.

You've got to give them that. What do I do with it? You can do anything. Well. You need a starting point, yeah. Constraint is helpful. That's one of the good things about the contests. Even if you don't participate to win, it gives you boundaries.

And then you can start going from there. Totally agree. What would you want to build right now? Are you building any electronics? I have this typing robot that has a really, really cheap robotic arm, like $50 Mi Arm, and a really expensive brain, the TX2, and a camera that is not fixed. You can move the camera wherever you want. And I probably need another camera because I need depth. But my goal is to overcome the limitations of exceedingly crappy mechanics

with fancy, fancy software. Oh, that's great. So yeah, it's fun. And right now, most of my job involves a lot of that, including the robot operating system. So I haven't been working as much on my typing robot because I'm using everything I learned from my typing robot in my paying job. Wow.

Which is pretty cool. I wouldn't have gotten this job if I hadn't spent so much time playing with my typing robot. I love that. Do you have a name for it? Ty. Ty P-E-P-T. That's great. He's really great and he's fun and he's ridiculous and there's so much failure.

Works just badly enough to be comical. Yeah. I remember I told him to type hello and he typed help. And I was writing the video at that time and I'm like, that is perfect. I really couldn't have asked for that to go any better. Wait, how do you talk to him? Oh, well, I did put speech recognition on, which, again, doesn't work well enough to be working, but works well enough to look like it occasionally works uh so i can talk to him that way um but mostly i i type and say type hello and and on a different keyboard it types hello that's awesome what uh system oh you said the tx2 yeah yeah so it's linux based and uh a lot of open cv and um ai stuff

are you using pockets the pocket spphinx for the speech recognition? I am using Pocket Sphinx. Nice. And when you say dinosaur, it gets like stop sign. All right. It works not good and that is

fine with me. I kind of like not good. Yeah. Our community's movements are sort of jerky. They're not very naturalistic, but it's also kind of shy and cute in that way. Oh my god, yes. I did this mode where it's

a camera and you have a laser and the robot follows the laser like a cat and it even wiggles its butt as though it's gonna pounce it was and the jerkiness of it is so cute do you have videos of this oh yeah i do project pages i'll send them to you oh yeah you need to do my research that's oh that sounds great how long have you been building it uh let's see him i guess last year was when you spent a lot of time on it. 18 months ago was the first time I presented him at LA's Hackspace.

Crash Space. Yeah, Crash Space. That place is great. And the Pasadena Lab. Super cool. Was that like for an event? Did you have a deadline or were you just like, I'll make it and bring? We were in the area. We were going to be in the area and I know the Hackaday people pretty well.

So I said, hey, I'm going to be in the area and I want to present this thing. And they said, okay, sure, let's do something. And so they let me come and we did one of their evening talks. And somebody was going to talk after me. And then afterwards he was like, yeah, I'm not going to talk after that oh I mean that's a great sign for you did you still get to like talk about what they were doing or yeah no well he he kind of uh he did talk to the people who were interested but uh I was also sitting in the front of the room talking to people who wanted to play with my robot, which was fine.

I'm all for that. That's my favorite part of talks is like the hangout with people afterwards. Mostly. I like speaking a lot. And I'm pretty shy in person. I know that on the podcast it's weird to say that, but I'm sitting at home in front of my computer pretty much in my jammies. Yeah. And when I go to a conference, I have to be on.

And when we hang up with you, I will probably go back to the couch and finish reading murder bot diaries or something silly. Wait, is that a thing? Oh, yeah, it's totally a thing. What? Wait, who's this by? Martha Wells. She won a couple of awards for it. I think it won the Hugo Novella Award this year or last year.

No way. That sounds amazing. It is very cute. Yeah. It's too short. That's the killer part. Yeah, I have to go start the next one. Cool. But at conferences, you hang out and you're there and i only extrovert for about an hour at a time i feel very similarly i gotta recharge after yeah and then i just want to nap that's super good i wanted to play you a quick

chirp message just so you can see what it sounds like I won't tell you what it says I'll try to decode it if you download the chirp messenger app or if you get it set up on a device then you can totally you could have was it Ty? decode it for you

so here it comes, it's kind of loud okay there you go doesn't it isn't it super rgtdc that is very cool is it dense enough that you could learn it how many characters was that that was um so i actually wanted to know if i could like slow it down so I could just like hum or whistle it to him. I don't think it can be produced or understood by humans yet, like in its current form, but that'd be cool. Wouldn't it? So this is 12 characters right now.

Okay. So it's not like the most blindingly fast protocol, but it's really cool. And you don't have to have any internet connection to do it. I'm really a fan of that kind of stuff where you don't have to... It works off-grid or whatever. Now I'm thinking about having multiple conversations at the same time. Could you layer them so that it could pick out what was directed? You're going to do DTMF with Chirp?

Yeah. I don't know do DTMF with Chirp? Yeah. I don't know. DTMF? Oh, no, spread spectrum, not DTMF. DTMF is the button sound, the phone buttons. No, this would be spread spectrum, where you're trying to interleave information. We've been keeping you talking for a long time,

and I feel like we have a lot more to talk about. I know, right? I feel like I've been talking a lot, and I could just listen to stuff from you folks. But you know what's great is that you have a whole website where you post you all talking about stuff for ages and ages, so I can just go listen to that now. That's great. 270 episodes. Dang! Congrats! Go listen to that now. That's great. 270 episodes. Dang. Congrats. Oh, yeah.

I was going to ask. Oh, no. I already asked you, like, how long have you been working on your robot? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's so cool. Hopefully, I'll get to work on it more next year, too. Okay.

So, just a couple more questions, and then we'll let you go. Cool. Do you have any projects that you really like especially projects that maybe have gone unnoticed oh actually so uh speaking of what we just said about um things that don't necessarily have to be online or whatever or work off grid so i made this project for defcon but it turned out to not be used at defcon partly because there were some technical issues partly because there was confusion but it turned out to not be used at DEF CON, partly because there were some technical issues, partly because there was confusion, but it's called PyPFS. I don't know if you're familiar

with IPFS, but it's a, it stands for the Interplanetary File System. And it's a, don't hate me, blockchain based. Okay, that's over with. It's a blockchain based, sort of like an alternative internet and so for example it's been used um it's sort of like a peer-to-peer internet where anyone can store the files and it's very secure because each file's address is made of a hash of its contents so if you change the contents at all obviously it has a different address so you can't like spoof that and it's been used for example to provide uh access to wikipedia in turkey they mirrored it onto the ipfs when it was banned there by the government so people were still able to get this info either from you know a public server that was sharing these files or people can get it from each other um and the way so yeah it's a really cool thing

um started by juan benet and he has a really cool few talks about it. And I built this into a Raspberry Pi. I wanted to make a mobile IPFS terminal interface thing. So it's made out of Lego. It's got interaction via arcade buttons on the sides. But you could also like plug in a wireless keyboard if you wanted more uh intense interactive capabilities but i wanted this to be sort of self-contained and not super hackable because defcon uh so it um basically allows you to look at different files on the ipfs pull them up and then you can print them with a little thermal printer and take this little like piece of IPFS with you. And so I was really excited about that. I thought it was cute because it's made of Lego and laser cut acrylic and stuff. And I actually had to design three new Lego pieces to build it. So there's one big block that holds like an arcade button and stuff. And I also just really wanted to share the idea that blockchain can be used for things

that really affect people's lives and has these applications that aren't just sort of cryptocurrency pyramid schemes and stuff. And I think this one does have a lot of potential usefulness for people uh and so i i had hoped that i wouldn't get more attention but also it didn't really work out at the event where it was supposed to be sort of a showpiece so maybe there will be another event in the future where i can sort of bring it out and be like hey look at this thing and um yeah that would be really exciting and you have it well documented i like the idea of a a a Lego piece that you can attach to a guitar strap. Oh, yeah.

That was really fun. Okay. Now I have to go read this, so we should stop talking because it's rude when I read while guests are still talking. So, Alex, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I guess just this idea that you don't have to be formally trained in something to explore it or to be able to share something of value on it. There's so much imposter syndrome and that never goes away. I feel like I've gotten over a lot of it simply by hearing people that i admire incredibly much um talking about how they have imposter syndrome like when i did the autodesk

residency um we had this dinner to welcome in the next cohort and people gave their thoughts, sort of one takeaway from their own residency. And several people in that room said that the biggest thing that blew their mind was that, like, they got to hang out with these people who were doing incredible stuff, who had these amazing skills, and were just making this huge contribution. And the people saying that were people that I thought, like, I felt that same way about them and I thought that they were doing like such amazing stuff that was like so impressive like this person came in who was I think her name was Iris who was doing these gorgeous sketches and she would print them out on large format sticker paper and like label everything and her her drawing skills and her

way of designing stuff was so cool and she came up with this like flippy design, like a flip book, but a machine. That was so cool. And, you know, people like that were saying that they felt like they had imposter syndrome in this room. And that really helped explode it for me because like clearly this is just a sort of human thing. And you have to get past that sort of feeling of being unworthy or not having the skills in whatever way, because everyone brings their own things to it. the sharing stuff mentality as well, right? Like, if I'd been like, oh, well, I'm not doing anything super special, or this stuff isn't very complicated, or I'm not very good at it,

so I shouldn't be sharing this stuff on the internet, then I wouldn't be have this. I really love what I'm doing today. And I think it's amazing that I get to do this for my job. And I wouldn't get to do that at all, without having just sort of not cared about that at the start. I guess because I didn't think anyone was going to see it, but it worked out. Yeah. Keep learning. Keep trying. Keep sharing. It works out. I like that. And it has value. Our guest has been Alex Glow, a resident hardware nerd at Hexter.io. You can find her as Glow Ascii, all one word, on most platforms like Twitter and Hexter. Thanks for being with us, Alex. Thanks. And thank both of you. This is so awesome. I also wanted to point out that Ascii in this case is spelled A-S-C-I-I like the, what would you call it? Text protocol?

Yeah. I mean, is there any other way to spell ASCII? I don't know, but maybe do it with another word. Like if I, I don't know. Before I was a huge nerd, I didn't know how to spell that. But yeah. Oh, y'all are so great. I want to talk forever.

There will be plenty of links in the show notes, including to all of these things, so you can spell ASCII. But also to many of the other things we talked about. I want to thank our patrons for Alex's mic. We really appreciate your support, and keeping our podcast sounding good is important to you as well as us. If you'd like to support the show, go to embedded.fm and hit the support us link on the top bar. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us in the normal ways, such as the contact link on embedded.fm. And now I have a quote to leave you with from Roald Dahl. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick out teeth. But if you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely. 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.