Embedded - 32: Woo Woo Woo

Episode Date: December 24, 2013

Patrick Kane (@PSoC_Nation) is the director of the Cypress University Alliance, working with colleges to provide development kits and information to college (and high school) students. Happily, Patrick brought Elecia a new dev kit: CY8CKIT-042.

You're listening to Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Elysia White, and my co-host today is Patrick Kane. We'll be talking about education and the Internet of Things, both at the same time. Ely. Hi, Patrick. Thank you for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. We met earlier this year at the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference,

where you were presenting on an e-book format standardization group and the Internet of Things. It's an odd hybridization. How did you get into this? Well, I was kind of recruited from a conference in Bali, the Teaching Assessment and Learning in Engineering Education Conference where I presented a paper on the Internet of Things. And Ty was in the audience and he recruited me and told me about their e-book and would I want to be a part of the team. So that's how I got recruited for that.

And your business card says Director of Cypress University Alliance. That's Cypress Semiconductor, right? Right. Cypress Semiconductor has been around for 30 years, 30 plus years now. It started out as a memory company and now it is number one in SRAM memory, number one in USB and our programmable system on chip, which is what I'm mainly involved in, in the educational market, because it's a great tool for education of engineers on embedded systems. I have a whole bunch more questions about that.

But before we get there, how long have you been with Cypress? About seven and a half years, since 2006. And did you start in the same capacity? Were you always involved with their outreach and education? I was actually recruited from another local company, Xilinx, to start their university program at Cypress. And I had previously managed the university program at Xilinx. Okay, so you've been doing this for a while. Yes. Why do the technology companies want to get into universities? Well, I mean, there's a business reason, and that is to train future customers. You might be aware,

what you learn in school is what you're going to use, perhaps, in industry when you're asked to build something. You want to use something you know how to use. You want to be successful. You don't want to try something that's totally new to you on a project that you have a deadline on. Particularly for the new engineers who are getting to choose their processors. Yes, and sometimes, you know, as a junior engineer, you're not really designing a chip. You're maybe designing a test bed or something for a chip. Or a manufacturing station. Yes, something like that. And so you get to choose, you know, your boss doesn't really

care what you use as long as it works. Yeah, that's understandable. And Apple, certainly in the elementary schools, they were, they put them all in when I was in elementary school and everybody said, why? And then the same reasoning because in the future, it didn't really seem like it was going to work out for them. But now I have a Mac and those of us who went to school then, many of us have Macs. Well, I mean, every major technology company has some sort of university outreach program, whether it's Motorola or Texas Instruments, Xilinx, Altera, Cypress, Arm. So they all do this to one extent or another.

Oh, absolutely. What effects has Cypress seen? Well, I mean, we've seen lots of really cool projects coming out from universities, mainly in robotics, a lot of senior projects, things with wireless. And it's just great to see what students can do with this technology because sometimes they do what we think is impossible because they don't know it's impossible. That's cool. Has there been design changes due to supporting the not quite an engineer audience? I mean, does it trickle, does it go both ways? Well, I mean, I take what Cypress creates

to train customers, in other words, working engineers on the technology and I modify it depending on the class. So mechanical engineers are more interested in encoders and interrupt and control loops, whereas electrical engineers are more, you know, maybe interested in an analog signal chain. So I have to modify this stuff depending on the audience. Do you do much of the instruction yourself? As far as universities go, probably all of it, other than, you know, professors who are using it in their classes. So I do these workshops. I just did two in the last week, one at this field program technology conference, and I did another one for our distributor in Taiwan. And in the last month, I've done two at San Jose State, one at UC San Diego, one at UCLA.

So pretty busy. So how does this work? You talk to a professor and they say, yes, you can have my class for a week or is this a semester long thing? This is a workshop, but we can talk about a semester long course that I'm developing a little later. But these workshops are typically four hours. Usually they're sponsored by the student chapter of the IEEE and I call them pizza and PSOC workshops. And they come for the pizza, they stay for the PSoC, and it works out rather well. And the IEEE students are really enthusiastic and great about it, and they really get the technology pretty quickly.

And do they walk away with a dev kit? Yes, they do. When we met at the Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, we had already spoken. I think I'd written something for EE Times and we agreed to meet up and you immediately handed over a dev kit. I loved that. That is how I like to meet people. So listeners who work for companies that have eval kits, please do take note. You get lots of points for just handing one over. So what is this kit?

It's the PSAC 4 Pioneer Kit. And this is one of the ones the students would get. This is the one that I've been using most of this year since it came out in March. And what it features is not only our PSoC 4 programmable system on chip technology that has programmable digital, programmable analog, and an ARM Cortex-M0 processor, but it also has Arduino-compatible headers. So you can go to RadioShack, Amazon.com, Adafruit, SparkFun, get any Arduino header and plug it in.

You still have to program the PSoC to control the Arduino shield. Sorry, I said header, I meant shield. Get any Arduino shield, plug it in. You're going to have to write some firmware and things in the PSoC to control the shield, so you can't just take an Arduino sketch. No, but you still get the hardware. The hardware becomes more like Lego blocks and you can get a Wi-Fi module or an IMU unit.

Exactly. Even video units. And you don't have to worry about, did I build the hardware correctly? Is that why it's not working? If it's not working, it's because you didn't do the program correctly because, you know,

Adafruit typically sells hardware that works. Exactly. I don't actually use Cypress a lot. My world is mostly microcontrollers. The box is Cortex M0, so that part's very familiar. Is it pretty much the same as an eval board that I might get from Embed or Philips? Yes, except whereas an Embed will have probably a PWM or something

and maybe an ADC or a DAC, it's going to be on a specific pin and it's always going to be there. Whereas with PSoC, the reason it's programmable is because you can move the PWMs around on different pins. You can move the analog components, op amps and comparators around if you want to. Of course, in an analog world, some pins work better than others. And that's clearly detailed in our literature, which pins you want to use, but technically you can use any pin. Practically, there's certain pins you want to use. But, you know, the thing is, is if you need two PWMs,

you might have to go back and get a different chip. With here, you just, with the PSoC, all you do is go back to the software and add a PWM. So, I mean, this sounds kind of like it's chip design and software at the same time. Well, firmware. Because what you do is you build your hardware graphically by dragging library components onto a schematic palette,

wire them up, and then you go to your main.c and you write some C code, or you can use assembly, to write firmware that controls that hardware. Or maybe that analyzes data that's coming in through that hardware, depending on what you're doing. But when you say hardware, I think hardware external to the chip.

But you're saying hardware internal to the chip, like the PWM line is what you would control. Actual op amps, comparators, PWMs, counters, timers. I2C channels. Right. All that's inside the PSoC. So if you're familiar with FPGAs, field programmable gate arrays, at least on the digital side, it's very similar in the fact

that you can do any digital function you want. There's different performance areas, and of course FPGAs have a lot more gates than this has. But there is also a CPLD in it, isn't there? Well, that's the FPGA part. If you know what a CPLD is, and people don't use them so much anymore, since FPGAs have kind of taken over the programmable digital world, but it's more like a CPLD than an FPGA, but it's something in the middle. It's not,

it's not a CPLD or an FPGA. It's kind of, you can use lookup tables, which are from FPGAs, but it's also non-volatile, uh, like a CPLD. So. I have to admit, um, CPLDs and FPGAs, those are the mystery components the electrical engineers don't usually let me play with. Um, and so I always have this idea that a CPLDs and FPGAs, those are the mystery components the electrical engineers don't usually let me play with. And so I always have this idea that a CPLD is just kind of a small FPGA. Am I totally off base? No, I mean, they're both programmable logic devices. So the PLD is programmable logic device.

C is for complex. So if you go back to the first programmable types of components that engineers did, they actually just programmed memory with a lookup table. So if you put a 1 on this pin and a 1 on this pin, you got a 1 out that pin, and it was an AND gate, but it really was just writing to registers in the memory. And that's really kind of the way it still is, but it's specialized memory. And so a PLD is a certain type of architecture that typically has a routing array kind of in the middle of the actual silicon chip and everything is around that routing array. And an FPGA has the routing in between. It's got a bunch of little blocks and the routing goes all in between those little blocks.

And the reason FPGAs are more popular now is because at about 512 logic blocks, a CPLD uses way too much power, and the die gets way too big, and an FPGA is just much more scalable in terms of getting 50 million gates. If you had a 50 million gate CPLD, you'd probably need to be next to a PG&E plant to power it.

You mentioned that you put it together with schematic capture. It looks like hardware. And when I opened the program and it did it, it looked like schematic capture. Right. Does that go down to Verilog or something like that? You can use Verilog to program the digital blocks, but not the analog blocks.

And there's a whole, if you look in the Read Me or the Help pull-down menu, there's a bunch of documentation, and one of those is Verilog Manual. So it kind of tells you what you can do and what you can't do. You can develop your own components. We have over 60 components in our library and we come out with a service pack every eight weeks. And the components were like I squared C and PWM and op amps and URs and capacitive sensing and ADCs and DACs and some filters, quadrature encoders.

And you use those because it's software than, or it's faster than trying to implement them in software. I mean, I could make a PWM in software. It would be horrifically slow. Right. But this gives me the opportunity to do it in, at the chip level with gates and things go faster. Right.

Yeah. So that's exactly the whole reason for programmable logic. All right. This show is totally going to expose my fake ability to talk about hardware. But the development environment in general seems to be hardware engineer centric. Definitely there's more visual and wires connecting and less typing of the words. And I'm very much just give me a compiler and let me type at it. Is that because this is more directed towards hardware engineers? Oh, that's a really good question because you're exactly correct in that it is much more hardware oriented. And I think that has to do with

who originally, you know, designed the software package more than who it's directed at, because we are working on future versions of the software that will be more textual based. So right now, the way it is, is on the hardware side, you build the hardware, but then you still are writing C code to control that hardware. We're looking at versions that would be, you know, much more script-based, so that maybe if you don't like schematics, you don't have to use the schematic. But we're not quite there yet in terms of when we're ready to release that. Tables. I hope tables as much as scripts. I do okay with tables. I remember working with one of the FPGA vendors,

oh, maybe a decade ago. They had a dev kit and they let me have it in exchange for doing a little write-up on how they could have software engineers use it. I'm not going to mention names because what I wrote was burn it all down and start over. Because software engineers just have a different outlook on how to go about solving a problem.

And graphics and wires are not how I personally think. But it was kind of neat. So going back to your tool and forgetting the poor FPGA people who I just really want to rant about right now, there is a compiler under there. It's a Kyle compiler, right? Well, if you're using this device, which has any... There's two devices, PSAC 4 and PSAC 5,

that have ARM Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M3, respectively, and they use the GNU CodeSorcery compiler. Oh, cool. And the Kyle compiler is used for PSAC 3, which is an 8051-based. Well, when I downloaded the tools for the Pioneer kit, it asked me if it was okay to do a Kyle thing. Right. Well, you don't have to register that because you'll never use...

Well, if you want to use PSoC 3, you do register that. It's free, but they're just counting heads. Okay. But it would stop working in like 30 days if you didn't register it. But with this PSoC 4, you don't need the Kyle at all. So you don't have to register. I do like using the GNU stuff. It makes me happier.

Yes. And so programmable system on a chip is, the programmable part is about programming, not for the chip, but programming the chip. Well, yeah, it's the fact that this is the only device I know of that has programmable analog. So, you know, an FPGA, there's lots of programmable digital, and now a lot of FPGAs have an ARM processor inside as well,

but they don't really have programmable analog, which is not to say that they're not working on it. I don't know that they are or they aren't, but the point is right now, today, this is the only chip that has all three. What do you mean by programmable analog? I kind of glossed over that and thought, oh, you must mean an ADC. Well, the PSOC-5 device and other members of this family, which are yet to be released, have programmable analog blocks that are basically op-amps

surrounded by switch capacitors networks. So a switch capacitor is basically a clocked switch turned on and off. And it's a pretty easy derivation to take the integral of capacitance with respect to frequency and time and get to Ohm's law. It's about five steps. So a capacitor switch capacitor can look like a resistor. And if it's on all the time, of course, it looks like a capacitor. So that's how you get the RC networks around the op amp. And by, by controlling those capacitors, that's what we mean by programmable. Cause you can make, you know, you know integrators diff amps op amps with programmable gain up to 50 and and various other things uh that um you know you can't

do another devices i mean the op amp is the op amp and and and that's what it is can i make it an rc filter so that i can condition a signal before i put it to an ad channel yes adc channel oh yes definitely then I'm getting it. That's neat. And then the other op amps, you can get all the pins external. So basically, you know, you're not limited to the RC networks inside the chip. You can put RC stuff outside if you want to. Oh, yeah, and I suspect that if I had the parts

and if I was filling up the chip, that would be what I would do. So on the analog side, I would say, and this is based on my FPGA background, there's two different types of programmable. Well, there's programmable analog and configurable analog. Programmable is those switch capacitors that you can build a bunch of different things without changing the hardware at all. And configurable is like, you know, the ADC where you can change the sampling rate on the fly or something so you can configure, you can change parameters while it's running. Okay, and you have both. Yes. What other material do you provide with the kit for the students?

Well, I mean, the software's free, so you've got to have the software with the kit for the students? Well, I mean, the software's free, so you've got to have the software with the kit. At the workshops, I provide, you know, basically about four hours of presentation material that talks about the architecture. We do somewhere between three and four labs. So the idea of the workshop is just for the students to find out, what is this chip?

What's in it? Let's go through the software several times so i know how it works the design flow and if they walk out of the workshop you know confident that they can go and and do a design on their own and it's a successful workshop what are the projects you have them do well we start out with the hello world of embedded system design, which is Blink-a-Light. Blink-a-Light, yeah. Then we use some PWMs to dim a light. That does seem like the second, I mean, that's hello and then how are you. Yes, and then we use the capacitive sensing.

So capacitive sensing is a very big application for this chip. It's in a lot of cell phones and other things. And so we do some capacitive sensing and we also have another piece of software that comes along with the package called Bridge Control Panel. And that's, you can graphically actually see how the capacitance is changing as you move your finger across the capacitive sensor. And then finally we do an analog design where we create a signal generator and drive the chip. So we create a signal generator in the PSoC and then drive it through the PSoC,

and then you can see the output. If you have a scope, you can actually see a change from sine to triangle to square wave. Neat. So when the students leave, what are the neat projects they're doing with them? Well, there's all kinds of senior projects that they've done. Like I mentioned, some students did an XP, so they made a wireless version of this using some little XP boards.

A lot of robotics. So we donate these kits to the FIRST Robotics competition. And that's FIRST all in caps. That's the NASA-sponsored robotics competition. FIRST.org. It's NASA among others. It's 3,000 high schools, high school teams. So high schools, high schoolers are able to use this as well.

I was going to ask you if you do outreach for younger students. So I guess that answers that. Do you do much else for the younger students? Well, we're just starting this. My son's a senior at Willow Glen High School here in San Jose, and I'm going to do a workshop or some sort of seminar for his physics class next semester based on PSoC. And of all things, while I was in Japan, a professor told me how he went and introduced PSOC to a bunch of high schools in Mongolia. Uh, wow. And he built his own kit that he, that, that he's, he's selling them and, uh, they're very happy with it. And part

of it, part of it is an oscilloscope. So he actually built an oscilloscope using our device, you know, very, not a high performance, you know, oscilloscope, but good enough to teach you the fundamentals of, of how things work and being able to look at your circuits and seeing what the signals are. Sure. I suspect you could build a small oscilloscope with this. Yes, you can. A little display. That's one of my demos. I have a touchscreen Arduino shield and it's an oscilloscope, a voltage meter, and an electronic etch-a-sketch. Very nice. Do you do any of the open source? I mean, is that sort of thing online somewhere?

Yes. Well, I mean, I really believe in open source and I just got done with a project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is in Troy, New York. A little cold up there. Um, and they took a PSoC five and put it on a board similar in shape to the Raspberry Pi. And they also put a Raspberry Pi native connector on it. So now you can, uh, the Raspberry Pi by itself is a, you know, a computer, but it doesn't really interface with the physical world. No, it's, it's, I, I always

thought I wanted Raspberry Pi to be Arduino heavy, I guess, you know, the super Arduino, but instead it's more the tiny, tiny computer I wish I had in college because then if I lit it on fire, it doesn't matter. Yes. I only say that because I lit a board on fire today. Hmm. Some days. So it's very similar to this board. It's just a little longer for the Raspberry Pi, but it also has Arduino compatible headers on it, like the PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit does. So, and what RPI is going to do with this next month is start a Kickstarter project to see if there's interest in the board. And if it's funded, then they have enough money to build them. And what it will do is it will

help them fund future senior projects. And I suspect it will teach some seniors about how to do manufacturing, which will be a brutal lesson, but really cool. I'm going to help. I'm going to help them with that because I don't want them to fall on their face. And we know all about manufacturing. Assuming the project gets funded, we'll guide them through the manufacturing phase so the people who fund the project will

get their boards. Well, send me the link when the project link goes up and I'll be sure and tweet it. It's not a Raspberry Pi, though. I mean, it's underpowered. Your Pioneer is smaller than the Raspberry Pi processor. Well, yeah, and the Raspberry Pi

is, what, an A9 or Broadcom, whatever is in there. So that's the high end of the ARM range, and Cortex is meant for lower performance embedded systems. For wearables and battery power things. So what we're doing is connecting this to the Raspberry Pi.

Okay. So you control it with the Raspberry Pi. I thought you were replacing it. Like you're replacing the Arduino with this to some extent. Yeah. Yeah, because this is Arduino on steroids. But the Raspberry Pi is, is what it is. And it's a, it's a great 4A transform spectrum analyzer. And they controlled it through the Raspberry Pi using Python.

And then also, if you search around, there's all kinds of online open source GUIs for oscilloscope-type projects that plug into your computer. And so the Raspberry Pi was being used, um, with, I think the Syscomp, uh, GUI for oscilloscope and voltage. And, uh, so they were actually, signal generator was on the PSoC, but they were actually, um, using the Raspberry Pi to display the results. That makes sense. Cause the Raspberry Pi is great for doing video stuff. Yeah, and they literally plugged the HDMI into a projector and just showed it on the wall.

That's a pretty neat project. I wish I had done that at school. How do people join your workshops? Well, typically I am at either academic conferences, and then if we do a workshop that's advertised, then the attendees will sign up and show up. Do students go to those? Yes, if they have papers. Oh, I guess I did present something. If they have papers to present, they have to go,

or the paper is not accepted. That's one of the rules usually. So yeah, so I do a lot of that because that way I can hit a lot of schools in one location, and then I go to, you know, basically focus area is the top 100 engineering schools in a given region, in the U.S., in India, in China. But only actual universities and academic conferences. Have you considered partnering with Udacity or Khan Academy or any of those? Not yet. Again, that's part of, part of

what my, um, dissertation is going to be, is going to be involving a kit like this and online classes. And once I get that done as a study and collect the data and things, then that's maybe the next step. Once I've, once I've proven that it works and that people, that it's effective as an educational tool. Do you get a PhD in educational technology? It's actually an EDD, which is the same thing, but in education. Yeah. An educational tech, specializing in educational technology. And what do you want to be when you grow up? I don't know.

This will be like my fourth degree. So we'll see. What else do you have to do? Well, I have an associate's degree in electronic engineering technology. I have a bachelor's of science in engineering. I have an MBA and then this will be, uh, number four. And I got a high school diploma too. So. Why get a PhD? Um, you know, that's a very good question because I was kind of getting discouraged because I, as you know, I travel quite a bit and it's very hard to find a program. So it's gotta be online. And, um, at university of New Hampshire, I was talking to the,

um, head of the education, um, advanced degree department. And I was saying, well, you know, I'm still going to do what I'm going to do, but maybe I just won't worry about getting a degree. And he was like, Oh no, those three letters after your name really give you give weight to your words. So the reason is, is because people respect it, I guess. And if I, um, have that and when, when delivering a paper or whatever, there, there's a little more, uh, weight to the paper, I guess. All right. So what classes have you taken for this degree or are you mostly just thesis? I'm just finishing a class on research. The last two classes were research classes. So I actually have the concept paper, as they call it, due Monday. And then I get a little break, but I started this in February. So I've taken research classes,

things on education, general education topics and things, things of that nature. I minored in theories of learning, which was cognitive psychology and some of these education classes. Although most of mine were elementary school kids and I got to play in a preschool for a little while. Are you doing much cognitive psych or is it more education? Here's how you build a curriculum. It's both because it's three years of classes and then a dissertation. And so part of it is that the research for the dissertation is some of the classes, actually. But there's been classes on cognitive, how do people learn, and things of that nature. And then there's other classes on using technology in education, things of that nature.

So I haven't gotten to those classes yet, some of the more fun stuff. And you've already got an idea for a thesis? Well, yeah, I had the idea before I decided to do this, otherwise. And this is testing the efficacy of teaching with... Well, it's... So we have to step back and talk about the Internet of Things for a second. Oh, right, right, the Internet of Things. I hate that phrase. I'm sorry. It has nothing to do with you.

You can call it the Internet of Everything or the Internet of Stuff. That's Cisco's. Atmel's decided it's connectivity. Okay. Well, or the web of objects. The woo. Yeah, the woo-woo. That was in my paper. Woo cubed. Woo, woo, woo. That was the paper I delivered at that TAIL conference. But anyhow, depending on who you talk to or what data you read, there's going to be anywhere between 50 billion and 1 trillion Internet of Things nodes between 2020 and 2030.

And to be clear, this counts my Fitbit, the scale that hooks to the internet. It counts all the RFID things in the local store that you can't shoplift. My library has been very good about changing over to RFID. The car, we had

electric imp on and that is you have this little tiny chip, and it connects to anything else you want. You can connect it to your oven. You can connect it to your Pioneer kit. Right. So the point is, my assertion is that there are a lot of engineers

that are going to have to be educated on Internet of Things type nodes to both create them, maintain them, you know, what happens if they break? How do you fix them? And the only way to do that is online. There's no way you can train that many engineers in classrooms in a shorter period of time, between now and 2020, say. Because that's not a whole too far away, really. We're already at 2014.

It's really not that far away. And there's already over 10 billion nodes as we speak. So my assertion is that by having something like this Pioneer Kit in front of them, wherever they are, in their bedroom, in their living room, or in a classroom, and even if the lecture's online, they're going to learn better, more effectively because they're going to learn by doing, they'll actually have the hardware sitting in front of them. So that's kind of the basis of my dissertation, that having the hardware

and actually being able to use it is more effective than just doing some virtual simulation kind of kind of things yeah i would i would completely agree with that and particularly because with the internet of things you usually have at least two things you're dealing with right you can't i mean just having one thing and have it going go to your computer is okay things get way more interesting when you have two or three or five. So the basic class I'm developing will either use Raspberry Pi or your phone, your smartphone, whether it's an, or an iPod Touch,

anything with Bluetooth. So the students will learn about PSOC. They'll learn about the Internet of Things. They'll learn how to do, how to write an app on their phone or iPod that uses Bluetooth. And they'll be able to, you know, the capstone is develop some sort of Internet of Things type project that uses PSOC and you control it from your phone. And then the Internet part is because the phone is connected to the internet. So is the PSoC a data gatherer or possibly an actuator?

Yes. One of these things that you can turn your coffee pot on from 100 miles away. It's both. I mean, that's what it's sensing and controlling is probably what it does best. Exactly. So, so, and the fact that it's programmable, it can turn your coffee pot on on one clock cycle and it can, you know, turn your lights on on another clock cycle.

I mean, you can, because you can reprogram it to do different things. Exactly. On the fly. But this one doesn't have Bluetooth yet. Not yet, but you can go, you can go get a, well, I can't talk about that. But you can go, you can go to Amazon.com and get an Arduino Bluetooth shield

and plug it right in there, which is what I'm going to be doing over the holidays. Actually, I already have the shield. So I'm going to do my initial development over the upcoming holiday here so I can get a jump start because I plan on doing a pilot class this summer, hopefully. And as you talk about education, it sounds like you are interested in doing some of the massively online education forums because you need to reach all of these people.

How are you going to balance being able to talk to all of these, I mean, sometimes 100,000 people take these classes. And making a kit that is inexpensive enough that, I mean, this kit's $25 and you gave it to me for free. And that is awesome and I'm happy. But $25 for me is not, I mean, it's not a week's worth of food. And some of the areas where these classes are becoming so important, that is a week's, a month's worth of food. And some of the areas where these classes are becoming so important, that is a week's, a month's worth of food. Well, that's true. And there are groups that will fund this type of thing.

Well, not obviously, but I'm going to start in the United States because it is affordable. Yeah. And just to proof of concept, but you can imagine in rural Africa or India. Mongolia. Or Mongolia. As long as there's an internet connection or internet signal, you'll be able to access these classes. And so the hope is that there will be some foundations who step in and if they want to support this, then the kits will be either subsidized or free to those students. Well, and it does still help Cypress.

I mean, probably Cypress already subsidizes this kit and maybe they would subsidize it more for different areas. Well, I mean, we do donate these kits to schools. We will sell them to them also if they want to give us money. But part of my program is donating to the USFirst.org for their contest and also many schools. If somebody wants to talk to you about getting donations or subsidized purchases.

Is there a good way to reach you? Yeah, the email alias for the Cypress University Alliance is cua, Cypress University Alliance, at cypress.com. So that goes to me and a few other people. So depending on which part of the world you are in, you should get a pretty quick response. And then the same thing with our website, cypress.com slash CUA, which explains the program and has contact information.

Great. I think we're about out of time. Is there anything? Really, that went by very fast. This time we didn't even have alcohol to make it go faster is there anything else you'd like to cover any thoughts you'd like to leave us with

well once again thank you for allowing me the opportunity to do this podcast that's very cool oh thank you so much for coming and the other thing is that you know the thing is not just am I an employee of Cypress doing my job, but the idea is to democratize education a little more and make it available to as many people as possible. I am a huge fan of that idea.

I think Wikipedia has already changed the world because you used to have to pay for information and now information wants to be free. Well, that's true. You just got to be careful and make sure the information is good information. Yes, yes. And with the more curated sites like Udacity and Khan Academy,

you do get better information. I'm a fan of Udacity because I came this close to teaching a class that had hardware and we were going to put it together and people were going to buy a kit. And I still think I should, but other things get in the way. Yes, yes, it does. It does. So I'm very fortunate that I, I'm getting paid, um, to do what I love to do. I am impressed you are getting a PhD. Uh, it's, it's a lot of work for, especially for somebody who travels.

Well, it's keeps me busy on airplanes that way. Best of luck with that. Thank you. I appreciate it. And happy holidays. Oh, yes. Happy holidays. I think this show goes up on Christmas, so it'll be our Christmas present. Excellent. My guest has been Patrick Kane of the Cypress University Alliance. I hope you've enjoyed listening to us talk about education technology and the Internet of Things. If you have comments or questions, hit the contact link on embedded.fm. You got his email address. I probably won't put that in the link, but in the show notes.

But if you hit that contact link, I will definitely connect you. And if you're listening, it's cua at cypress.com. If you go to Cypress and just search for their University Alliance, you'll find it. Thank you for listening. And thanks to Christopher White for producing the podcast. As always, doing a great job. This week's very slightly relevant close has more to do with my ongoing ire at the Internet of Things than with education, although it sounds like maybe Patrick's going to help me with this one. It's from Douglas Adams.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.