Embedded - 324: I’ll Let You Name Your Baby

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

Adam Wolf (@adamwwolf) of Wayne and Layne (www.wayneandlayne.com) spoke with us about making kits, museum exhibit engineering, working on KiCad, and extraterrestrial art philosophy. Adam has a personal blog on www.feelslikeburning.com/blog/ as well as a website adamwolf.org. Adam co-wrote Make: Lego and Arduino Projects If you want to know how to contribute to KiCad libraries, check out their instruction page: kicad-pcb.org/libraries/contribute/ We also mentioned: Evil Mad Scientist’s Guide to Improving Open Source Hardware Visual Diffs KiCad Automation Tools: tools to autogenerate KiCad artifacts when committing to git Kivy: open source Python library for making displays Cedux: application framework OKGo Upside Down and Inside Out video and Art in Space project

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White. I'm here with Christopher White, and our guest this week is Adam Wolfe. We're going to talk about kits and projects and, gosh, I'm not even sure, but I'm sure it will be fun. Hi, Adam. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, everybody. Hi. Could you tell us about yourself? Sure. I'm Adam Wolfe. I am an electronics engineer. I graduated with a computer engineering degree, worked at a large engineering company for a few years, and then went into design services. So I did a lot of projects for other companies in a company that basically acted like a contractor.

So a lot of times we would help projects wrap up for like when places would get stuck. Other times we would help start projects and other times we'd work throughout the whole project and then in the middle of all that i said you know i want to do some engineering outside of the job so i a friend of mine and i we started this thing called the wayne and lane about 10 years ago where we just worked on microcontroller projects for a while and then we found one that a lot of our friends are like, that's pretty sweet. I would buy one.

So we made some and we became like a company and went from there. So outside of that, the company made a bunch of kits. We still sell kits. We do a lot of contracting for museum exhibits and interactive installations. We do the hardware and programming and interactive design, for lack of an easier word, I guess. And then to fill the gaps there, we really like this program called KiCad or KiCad, which I will slip and call it KiCad a lot. But it's KiCad, and we help work on KiCad. So we package it for macOS.

We've added some features. We help fix bugs, things like that. All right. I forgot to say in the beginning we're going to be talking about KiCad, KiCad. Now I'm really self-conscious about it. But before we get started with that, lightning round. Are you ready? Yes, I am.

Werewolves or vampires? Werewolves. Have you ever licked a 9-volt battery? Oh, yeah. Favorite component? LED. Surface mount or through hole? Surface mount.

Most frustrating Lego brick? Anything that's only in one or two kits. Favorite fictional robot? Baymax. If you could teach a college course, what would you want to teach? If it's one that exists, what would you want to teach? If it's one that exists, I'd say introduction to microcontrollers. If it's not that, how about one on how to take notes or to have a knowledge base of your own?

Do you have a tip everyone should know? Sure. Write down all the things you're interested in and all the projects that you can think of, and you'll be really surprised by how often you'll see things that relate to them and how easy it is then to make everything you do in engineering satisfy two or three of the things you'd like to do. Okay. I like write down your ideas. Maybe we'll talk some more about that. Yeah. One more short question. Why is recording a podcast a dad thing to do? A dad thing to do. I refer to your tweet in which you. Yeah. Well, so to me, I guess I wouldn't say it's exclusively dads, but dads definitely record podcasts. Like it's not only dads that record podcasts, but dads, it'd be like, like, I think having a podcast about your smoker is a pretty dad thing to do.

Like smoking meat or, right? Like, I think that's pretty dad, right? Like we could talk craft brews and how to smoke mean at home. think that's pretty dad. Right. Like we could talk craft brews and in how to smoke mean at home. Like that's that's that's pretty dad. Right. OK. Let me ask you about Wayne and Lane. Are you Wayne or Lane. We went to high school together. We went to college together. And it was sometime we had known each other for maybe 10 years before we realized our middle names rhymed. So now the InfoSec people out there are probably like, oh, my gosh. Yeah, so I'm Adam Wayne Wolf, and he's Matthew Lane. And so I am the Wayne of Wayne and Lane, and he is the Lane of Wayne and Lane.

But what's kind of nice is that when we were, like, earlier on, like, there'd be times that I'd have to make a call up to, like, a supplier or a person would call me about, like, an invoice or something like that. And, like, they'd call, and I'd be like, you know, this is Adam speaking. And they'd be like, well, you know, I'm just wondering about payment terms on this. And I'd be like, well, I can ask my boss, but I'm not really sure. And so if it was Adam Wolf Engineering, it's real hard for me to answer the phone as Adam Wolf and say, oh, yeah, I'm not really sure. I'll have to ask the boss. But as Wayne and Lane, it's like, oh, me, Adam, you know, I could be anybody. You are your own employees.

Definitely. Virtual employees. What was the first kit that got you into selling things? Sure. So we made a tactile metronome or tap tempo metronome. So this is basically a PIC16 piezo element it has a display i think three seven segments some npns on their battery holder and uh it was pretty nice because you'd tap the piezo and it would pick up the rhythm that you were tapping into it and then it would play that that back to you so if you like

you wanted to tap say like the like the shave and a haircut into it three times it would keep playing that back to you out through the out through the piezo element and so that would be uh audible not uh tapping you you're tapping it that's the tactile part not exactly so like the like the person who made it would be tapping it with a pencil or their fingertip or something like that and then it would it would start up and start uh chirping at you and uh and then it i think it even had two buttons up and down to change the speed to change the tempo of it but uh actually interestingly enough uh i believe we changed the name to tap tempo metronome because we actually got uh some legal uh hassle over it being a tactile metronome because it sounds like a famous type of equipment

line from germany i don't super want to go into exactly who it was or anything, but, but yeah. So then we, we, after an expensive back and forth, we're like, how about we just rename it? Like, oh sure. That's okay. What are your later, what are your current kits? Sure. So we've got a pretty big handful of kits we actually have only retired one or two products but we've got a suite of lego uh kits so these are things that so uh lego mindstorms has had a few incarnations. They had a bright yellow one.

They had their NXT, which was their version two. They now have EV3. And then they even have this like WeDo type thing, which is kind of analogous. But around the time of NXT, a friend of mine came to me and Matthew and said, we should write a book where we,. Everybody loves Lego and everybody loves Arduino, so let's smash them together and make a book. John has written, I don't even know how many books, 20 books maybe, something like that. He said, I've got the book side and you guys can work on the projects and we can have this awesome thing together.

So we spent over a year, not necessarily reverse engineering because almost all of the Lego stuff was open, but it wasn't necessarily fully documented and there weren't really hardly any example projects. So we created some interface hardware between Lego and Arduino, and then made maybe eight projects in a book with like step-by-steps. And we had intros to Arduino

in there and things like that. So at this point we have a Bricktronics shield. So that's what we called our product line here was Bricktronics. So we had a Brickatronics shield that plugs into an Arduino Uno that controls some of the Lego inputs and their motors. And then we had one for the Mega that has more outputs. It's just got more pins on it, basically. And then we have one that just controls motors and it just has like a a driver and then a few pins and that can just plug into anything uh outside of the bertronic stuff we have these blinky kits that i think are possibly one of my like i think it's the favorite kit we've made of mine so these are standard like it's either like a pov style wave the leds in front of your face and see

like a design or a word or a charlie plexed a display of leds it's i think eight by seven but what what we like like our little twist here is that to change those instead of hooking it up to your computer and programming them or into an Arduino and programming it through there, you hold it up to your computer monitor or your phone, and we have a little JavaScript application that blinks a pair of squares on the screen, black and white. And then through there, we have a clock and data, and we have encoded the data through that in the kit.

And then that updates the flash. And then when it reboots, you've got your name is in there or something like that. So that part isn't anything we invented. That's been around since the 70s i think was the earliest case we found it there was that timex watch that had it the bbc would even broadcast uh things overnight for people to like tape a photo resistor up on the like on the bottom of their tv and transmit programs in it in the 80s here i was thinking oh yeah i remember electric imp doing that but that was not the 80s yeah exactly so electric imp had it for like provisioning i think for their one

something like that and and but i mean it's been around since the late 70s or early 80s i think but for us so at that time we were doing a lot of support for uh camps for schools like stem camps and STEM activities and things like that. And the biggest problem we had there was that they were often happening in the summertime when the staff was quite bare bones. And anything that we had that needed driver support was going to be a problem because almost all these labs were Windows labs. And this was Windows 7 era or earlier, where every device demanded its own driver in Windows. And so in terms of just client support, it's like, sure, they can plug it into a Mac or Linux box and it'll just work. But we needed something that would work for kids, basically, without any IT support.

And then the other piece is that parents were always very paranoid of, well, my kid just made this and they learned how to solder 18 minutes ago. I don't want them plugging it into our computer. So this is a way to isolate it so that that way there's no way they can break their computer no matter how bad of a soldering job they do for their first time and so for us like in an educational standpoint it was this huge winner and do you still sell it we do we do we still sell them on a regular basis so wayne and lane has kind of pivoted uh away from making new kits um for a variety of reasons. But all our old stuff still sells. We still make it. They'll be out of stock a little bit more often than they were in the past.

But yeah, we still sell our Blinky kits. We took the same exact through-hole kit and turned them into I Can Solder SMT kind of trainee badges a few years ago. And those, they do well as well. But this is a sideline. This isn't your full-time business. Well, kind of. So it started out completely as a hobby thing for me and a friend, like basically to play with outside of work. And then we started a business nominally, but that was – it was something that we spent spent more and more time on it. But at the same point, it was completely a side thing up until I did leave my full-time job in July. And now I fill my time with a variety of contract engineering things. And it's really nice to have this at this point to fill that spot and to grow the business and to make it into something that, I mean, I think I'm fairly optimistic that it's only going to be a side thing for a small bit longer.

But you said you pivoted from kits to... To something else. Sure. Sure. Mysterious. So yeah. So one of the things is that as we were writing the book, another friend of mine was like, hey, I got it a little bit over my head in a contract. And it's got some Arduino in it. And I understand that you really know Arduino stuff. And I'm like, well, sure, I can make an Arduino do things. And so I got involved in making museum exhibits. And so I work with an outfit here. So Wayne and Lane, me and Matthew, we work on probably 30 exhibits a year. And so what that means is like we'll meet with the clients and like we're part of the fabricator team and we help them take their dream vision of what experiences they want children or the museum attendees to come away with. And we talk about what technology enables and what options there are and we have scope to narrow down to and the budget and the timeline and at the end of it

it travels around the world often as part of an exhibit on any number of things. What is the hardest part of doing museum exhibits? Is it making them durable? So one thing that's kind of nice is I'm only peripherally involved in the durability piece. So I mean, I would say from the grand scheme of things, totally. I mean, this stuff, they're only making one or two of them. And they're going to have the, you know, like they're going to be beat up on by kids and adults who aren't really trying to be gentle, uh, for years and years and years with almost no maintenance. So I, like I'd say that's a pretty big piece. And like, like i mean a few of the problems i mean are pretty basic like right now i'm working on a project that uh is it has you take the place of

a a poop scooper at a zoo and so there's these balls and you're scooping these poop balls into a bin and there's kind of like a basketball game type thing involved right so as the balls go in it'll have like a like a 20 second countdown and then it's like how many poop balls are you able to throw into there uh and so this is part of a larger exhibit talking about about this animal and caring for the animal and all these things. But this small part that I'm working on is a basketball game with fake poop. And the problem we're struggling or we had struggled with there was basically how do we count these balls without making the balls lock up? So we have to make a tube or a tunnel where these balls come through and then end up back in the bottom.

They can't get stuck because we don't want anybody going back in there. But at the same point, we need to count these balls. So for that one, we actually ended up with beam break like ir ir beam break but i mean we also went through like piezo element on like a sounding board so like as the balls hit we would count from the ball hits or i'm like the early ones we had tried for this one were in like the part where we have it in like a tube we can just have a beam break there for the tube and that'll be easy but the problem is every time you like ever like every time these things go like into a large area into a small area like the balls will bind up without some sort of like vibration there it's kind of like a grain bin or anything else like that that's a real mechanical problem more than it really is

it really is it's a it's it's it's problem. And yet at the same point, all the pieces you have to do with it have to last in the field for a long time. I mean, it's not like we're in room temperature. It does have downtime almost every night if it needs to be repaired. It's not space here. But at the same point, it's also not just electronics in your home either. Do the museums tend to come up with these ideas or vague ideas and come to you guys? We had an idea for a poop scooper. What do you think? You know, it's kind of an interesting industry. I don't want to speak too broadly about the whole industry, but a lot of times museums, there's almost like a two-step process where they will dream up a vision and make kind of elaborate artwork and make pretty in-depth plans. And then once those plans are done, they say, well, which ones of these are actually physically possible?

Which every time I encounter that process, I always get confused as to why they're not designing for manufacturing at the beginning. But at the same point, they're only making one of these or two of these. So it's not quite the same pressure as like electronics. This sounds really fun. And you, how did you get into it? I mean, is there a job that is museum thingy creator? Yeah. Like, I mean, you're completely right.

It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of me making sure to stay on top of rapid prototyping, electronics. I mean, I've worked with a fair amount of jobs where I have PCBs and I'm laying out stuff myself and working on projects or Psalms and things like that. And in this world, it's much more, you're going to throw some Arduinos together or some, or some teensies together or some other boards. And yeah, so I guess in terms of like jobs and how do you get these, a lot of larger museums create exhibits for travel. So a lot of museums make more money renting their museum exhibits out

than they do through any other piece. Yeah. So it's really interesting to me, but a lot of the larger museums have a fabrication team, and they find IP, and they get it licensed, and then they work on it, and they make this awesome thing. They throw their name behind it, and then it goes around the country for a few years, and then when it's done, it'll end up in that museum. What exhibit have you worked on that was your favorite? My favorite exhibit. Absolute favorite. We don't want your second favorite.

So my first museum exhibit that I ever worked on is probably my favorite because it got me into this. It got me a network. But it was a exhibit called powering the city and so if you've ever seen the community episode uh where they were all on the like kfc themed space bus it was kind of like that so this Sorry, we watched that pretty recently. Yeah, so when I saw that episode, I was like, this feels exactly like an exhibit that I worked on. So I worked on this project called Powering the City.

It was fairly large. It was probably 10 feet long, and it needed a team of kids to get through the project. But it was basically a simulation of like one or two days in this like any town fake town. So it had like a sun in the background, a mechanical sun that moved throughout the day. And it had a thermometer, like a physical thermometer that moved up and down to show how hot it was. It had like a fan that would blow to show you like how windy it was. And all of those were showing kind of the demands of the day. And then there was a power demand curve that was related to those things. So basically in the morning, eight o'clock, everyone would wake up and they'd'd start their hair dryers and their toasters, and there'd be this power demand spike.

Then the day would go, and that would kind of flatten out. But then the day would get hotter and hotter and hotter, and everyone would need their air conditioning on, and then the power would go up higher. there was like a hydroelectric dam and the kids could change. After the water had filled in the dam, the kids could turn the switch and the switch would then make the water flow down and then it make fake electricity. And there was like a wind farm that they could turn on. And there was this, a coal plant and a few other things, but there, there were five ways that people could make electricity. And the whole point of the thing

was that if you didn't match that demand curve, like the lights in the houses would go on the fritz or like the business, the place that was like the fat, like the, like the factory would spin out of control, things like that. But it was absolutely insane to see going with all, like, I mean, it's a lot for kids to do. There's a lot of things going on, but everything's moving, everything's twisting, it's blowing in your face. There's all these dials and switches. It was quite awesome. It's a really big face. There's all these dials and switches. It was quite awesome. That's a really big physical space too, right? It's not talking about like a board with some things on it.

This is a whole room, right? Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, it was like a standard eight foot by four foot table built up was the actual exhibit. And then people kind of walk up to it. I mean, it was an impressive sight to see. And that one's your favorite. I don't want to say what's your least favorite, but that does sound really grand and lots of things,

and yet not a whole huge amount of moving parts. So you can do a lot with electronics there. Definitely. Are there ones that you... Actually i mean let me switch i don't want to talk about what are your least favorites are that's silly no well i mean it's okay i like like i think there's interesting things there um what about the ones that you've said no maybe physics won't allow us to do that this year. Sure. Sure. So one of the things that's interesting in this world is that the designers and the people creating the exhibits will often want the exhibit to be real.

So now that sounds silly to say. No, no. You were saying the turbine and it would fake generate electricity. And my immediate response was, well, why don't you have it actually generate electricity? That's exactly it. So a lot of times we're asked to do things completely for real. Like we want to generate the power to turn this thing on and like a lot of times we say okay sure let's do a bench test even though we you know in our heads we're like well we're gonna write that

off but we do a bench test and we're like okay so now pedal this bike and we're gonna put you know 150 watt load on it that you want or the 200 watt load okay pedal this bike and they're like oh no kid's gonna be able to do that we're like yep that's exactly true so a lot of this is like you have to have them jump on a plate because they're very good at jumping oh they are they totally are smash this button as hard as you can exactly um in terms of kind of least interesting pieces, things like that, it's an and we've done a bajillion projects that aren't electricity themed. But one that is in my mind is we did this power grid where they wanted the actual power lines in this fake power grid to conduct all the electricity for the project. And at some point, it's like, this is a safety issue. Can we make them be buttons or magnets or something instead? And that works pretty well. And that actually brings me to another really important part that I want to make sure that I have clear to everybody. So I work with a fabricator team

that this is their job is to make safe exhibits for kids. It's really easy to make things that are really dangerous. It's really easy to say, I'm an adult and I don't realize that kids are going to break this off and put it in their mouth and swallow this thing. So for instance, we did, and even with this team, so I work with this team here in Minneapolis that they've been doing this for 25 years. And they're a team of like 20 people. But even with that, you'll still find things that slip us up. So like we had worked on a project where it it was like we were feeding these birds so it was a project for were they real birds i gotta know they were not real birds they were these

really awesomely machined like enameled birds that had mouths and necks that could extend so like the little baby birds were in there in there and they would chirp and they would open their mouths and chirp and extend their head and chirp. As you got closer, they would extend their head. And you have these little balls that you'd put in their mouth, like to be like food, that you're a mama bird. And there was like a little glove you'd put your hand in that was like a fake bird. And you would then like spit up these balls

in the bird right and a lot of balls being proxy for noticing this yes they you know it's so funny like i've worked on so many different projects but right now all i can think of is power grids and and things exactly but i guess that's why they end up in exhibits. Like the fact that I can remember them now 10 years later, it's like, well, the kids who went through that exhibit, they sure remember fake puking into the baby bird's mouth. But anyway, so we made these elaborate metal birds. We had everything like through choke tubes in order to make sure everything was good. But what we hadn't accounted for is that kids were going to put their hands down the birds' mouths and they got their hands stuck in the mouths. Now, like there wasn't

anybody who got hurt in this, but this is something where I would not have noticed this as an electronics engineer. And I would have shipped this thing something where i would not have noticed this as an electronics engineer and i would have i would have shipped this thing out it would have been out there and there'd be some kids stuck to their elbow in this metal bird as they're trying to figure out how to get out of it so if you're into like like anybody at home it's awesome to make exhibit stuff it's awesome to teach uh but also be careful and think of what the most stubborn person who really wants to do an unsafe thing will do with the museum exhibit. There was some of that when I was doing children's toys too. I remember one toy, it had a big plastic page you turned in order to switch modes.

And there was some question of whether somebody would put their hand down, turn the page, and then slam it down on their own hand. And it was just like, okay, yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't think you'd do that twice. That's a life lesson. It's educational. And so you write the software for these using Arduinos and off-the-shelf boards. Is that because you're only making one of them, or is there some desire for them to be field programmable? So 10 years ago, there was no desire for field programmability. Like 10 years

ago, if they broke down, they would mail and like it back to us if it was something small, or we would fly out to wherever to go update some program. Year after year, that's more and more going away, where nearly every museum has a person who can wrangle Arduinos. I mean, they might not be in-depth programmers. They might not have degrees in computer engineering, but they certainly are able to take a program and flash it on. So that's part of it. Another part is this stuff is pretty quick turn, surprisingly quick turn. It's pretty low volume in terms of units. I mean, like the amount of money people are spending on that one of a few standard things isn't just completely fine.

I mean, that is exactly what I think off-the-shelf boards should be used for. You don't want to make a custom board unless you have to. And you shouldn't have to if you have a big space. And you don't want to make just one custom board. That makes it really expensive. Well, exactly. And I mean, in terms of electronics, these things have a lot of weird demands as a whole project. But in terms of the electronics like we're taking human scale io we are in a big old box we have no size constraints we are not battery powered we

we're not life it like it's not like it will hurt anyone if it crashes or stops working so it's like i mean it's it's it's's, it's exactly that. It's exactly the right time for an off the shelf Arduino thing. Plus in terms of, um, kind of ethics, like I have no desire to make a product that no one else can ever modify for no reason. Like if, if there's a person, you know, 10 years down the line who wants to modify this exhibit or five years down the line and and they've got the source code to it there's no reason why i should have like a one-off thing that well you know it scratched my itch to make this one board that had one more analog input than than the standard arduino did so yeah i guess you won't be able to have any support for that it's it's kind of like

engineering for after it leaves you as an engineer a little bit do you provide enough documentation that somebody else can take it over or is it really just come back to you when it when it happens i mean it it depends um the particular outfit that I, like the fabricator outfit that I work with has a pretty good warranty. They warranty their products for a period of time. But at the same point, we mail out all the source for anything that anybody requests. Okay, so the poop basketball. Yep. Can you send me the source for that so we normally only mail it to the customers um but at the same point uh one of the things we're kind of doing is we're trying to productize a few of the more common desires so like for instance so that one right there, the like poop basketball is going to be a Raspberry Pi driven thing

because they want, the client wants fancy graphics on a screen. So the scoreboard will be very fancy. So that'll be a Raspberry Pi. And then we do almost all of our Raspberry Pi interactives and touchscreen interactives in a framework called Kivi, which is a Python multi-touch framework. It's a little bit like Qt, if you folks have worked with Qt. It has a thing like the QML feature where it's kind of property-based. It isn a little bit like Qt, if you folks have worked with Qt. It has a thing like the QML feature where it's kind of property-based. It isn't the whole program. It also has the Python

half. But at the same point, the QML style piece is just a lifesaver for fast prototyping like this. It's a pretty awesome style of programming. Yeah, that's the thing that apple's moving to actually with with their apps is a descriptive uh ui language i use that with qt and i agree i found it really kind of liberating yeah it like it feels a little bit like like react or redux it like it's a little bit of this like property based piece where it's like, I've got the idea of this property, and when I change it, there's handlers, and the handlers will just do their job. called C-DUX or a framework called C-DUX, which is like a C++ or C Redux style piece that kind of provided that for just C and C++, which I thought was really slick. How do you know it's called Kiwi and not Kyvie? I don't.

So I'm going to be completely honest with the KiCad stuff. I call it KiCad. That's what I call it. That's, I feel horrible about it because I'm just wrong. Like I'm just incorrect. Who is in charge of deciding? Jerome Key. So the first author of KiCad, he says it it's key CAD. And so I say, okay,

I'll let you name your baby. That's, that's a legend. I'll allow it. But at the same point, I looked at it 10 years ago and I, or 11 years ago. And I said,

yeah, I want to use CAD CAD. It's better than, I think I said Gita at the time. I, I don't remember. But'm but uh but yeah the like high cad is anyway sorry about that no no i i it's gonna if that is how it's supposed to be said it's going to take me about five years before i get it right well the closed source competitor I did want to talk about key cat though.

Yeah. You contribute to it. I do a user first, or was this always a software project? So I think it was 2000, late 2008, early 2009. I had graduated from college and wanted to make some PCB stuff.

I didn't have access to Orcad, nor did I want it at the time. And I said, okay, so I need something that's free. And I'm still big into Linux. I was really big into Linux then. And I said, okay, so I need a Linux-compatible PCB schematics tool, of which there were two. One was Gita or Jada. I'm not sure. I'm not a user of it, so I don't really know how to say it. And even if I was a user, I wouldn't know how to say it.

So then there was KiCad or KiCad. And I installed them both and played around with KiCad first and said, if this isn't going to work for me, I'll switch to the other one. And KiCad worked for me. So I said, okay. So we did all of our Wayne and Lane PCBs with it. And it was maybe six months later that we said, we need to add some features to this. This is pretty good, but we need to add some things. So I think the first thing that we added, and maybe the only one I can really remember right now, is the hotkey for making a label. So like to label a wire or a net, there was no hotkey for it. So we looked at what keys were available and L was available. So we said, let's add this in.

So me and Matthew added that one afternoon. After we'd gotten back from a Maker Faire, we said, hey, we have a few hours to burn. Let's add this feature. We added it. We emailed it up. And a few hours later, it was in KiCad. And from then on, we were kind of hooked how much I mean how much have you done with it is this you did it once and it was cool or or are you ongoing or

yeah um so my time contributing to KiCad ebbs and flows as time is available. I've got two kids. I've got contracting. I've got a career and things like that. So it's not a full-time job for me at all. At the same point, it was about 2014 or 2015 where I took over or resumed the Mac builds, so to make Mac builds. And that's been my primary focus since then. So for about the past five years or six years, I've been working on the Mac builds. So this means we've got two servers here at Wayne and Lane that just build

it every night. They build it for a variety of platforms and a variety of ways for macOS. Every time a new version comes out, we have to repackage and figure out what new tweaks there are. Every new piece of software that gets integrated into KiCad, so the fact that there's a Spice tool in or it works with a spice tool it works with a few different types of 3d inputs and outputs it's got a renderer it's got uh it's got python scripting

so for each one of those pieces um like like i wouldn't say we're the only people but we're probably the primary people who get that in a redistributable format uh so that you can then download it off the internet and it makes a pretty little installer piece where you drag the application into your applications folder and that's been our primary focus and i'd say we probably spend five hours a month or more on it, which is not nothing, but at the same point, it's also purely volunteer for us. I asked on the embedded Slack if people had questions for you, and it turned out people have a lot of questions about key cat i don't know if you're the right person to ask though uh so i've got a list of questions here and the ones

that i saw i think i can answer some of them if we want to go kind of maybe maybe lightning round style is there an officially blessed key cad tutorial There's a guide for how to get started, but it's not a step-by-step tutorial. I would recommend, if you like video stuff, Chris Gamble has his tutorials. They're called... Getting to Blinky. Exactly. So go to Google, type that in, and he updates them periodically, and I would start there. I've gone through that. It's quite good.

I too have gotten to Blinky. Nice. Carl says he has some parts for a current project, and what does Ki key cad need for them to be good enough to go into the library and is he even allowed to submit parts when he doesn't work for the manufacturer so i'll go in reverse order he is allowed um if you go to the KiCad website and click contributing, there's an option for parts or something like that. And if you click there, it kind of walks you through what you need. Basically, there's a repository on GitHub that you make PRs to. There is a style guide called KLC, which I think stands for KiCad Library Convention.

And you'll need to follow those in order for it to get accepted, I think with an asterisk. I think there are cases where you don't have to follow them all the time. But at the same point, the librarians there will kind of walk you through what you need to do to get your stuff accepted. How does this whole project stay organized? I mean, it's pretty big. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. So there's a project lead. The project lead right now is Wayne, not associated with Wayne and Lane, but he's an awesome guy. And his name actually is Wayne. He is the project lead, and he helps steer project direction. There is a core developer team of maybe 10 people at this point. I am not a member of the core developer team. And they meet periodically to set roadmaps and to

break down work. CERN has some employees that I'm not sure 100% of their current status. I don't want to talk too much to it, but they have been involved. They did a lot of work and advanced a lot of things like the interactive router that got amazingly better in the past few years was primarily the efforts of the CERN team as much as I don't want to even say which other things were because I know it was a massive amount of work that they've that they've helped with um and they are in the process of i'm not sure exactly the technicalities but basically creating like a foundation or like a an organizing group beyond just some people who spend time together in email. So there's this new organization, I think it's KeyPro, which is run by Seth, one of the core developers, I believe. And actually, Wayne now works for KeyPro, and they provide professional support for key cad so they have a subscription model where you pay per month if you're a company that that needs key cad if there's an option to pay them and then they

have a wish list of features that if you want to vote on like you get get a vote in exchange for this, they support. It seems like a pretty cool thing. Yeah. And it's always been a very good way for open source projects to sustain themselves is to provide professional support at cost. Certainly. Yeah. And I mean, there are people who run their businesses using KiCad.

Like, there are times where I'm just astonished because 10 years ago, it worked for what I was doing, but it was not at the quality that it is today. Like, I'd use it at home, but I wouldn't have said like,

hey, work, we should use this here. But today, I mean, it's pretty great. Do you have recommendations for using KiCad with source control? I would say yes, use source control. That's a good thing to use for your projects. In terms of how to use it with KiC CAD, I mean, the files will work. You can check the files in.

It doesn't necessarily make sense to merge a file that's a design file for an ECAD tool. So if you're using Git or something like that and you want to do a merge, you probably want to take a whole file rather than merge an individual piece. Evil Mad Science did a nice article a few years ago about how to do things on check-in where it will make a graphic of your PCB or your schematic. And then the human eye and the human brain is able to say, oh, here's what changed quite easily. There are some tools like that for KiCad. Jesse, the Keyboardio guy, he wrote a suite of tools called KiCad Tools on GitHub. I think I sent you folks the link.

And that is a nice tool to throw in your pipeline if you have like a ci tool set up because it can do things like generate a bomb for every like a bomb file on check-in it can do things like create pdfs of your schematic on check-in it can do a variety of things like that are most of the files that get checked in as part of a project sort of text metadata, or are there binaries that you have to do special things to make sure Git doesn't, you know, the binary blob problem? Sure. So all of the files for KiCad, all of your project files are all text-based, but they are not necessarily super intended to be human readable.

Like a bunch of coordinates is text-based. At the same point, it's not really like something I can just open up and see like, oh, that's a resistor image or something like that. So those questions were from Tanak. SPE requests, I believe, a way to diff the designs. And says there's a company that does that, cadlab.io or something? Yeah. So I haven't heard of this CadLab.

I think it's a great idea. I think, I mean, I would like to see it at GitHub and GitLab, and I would like to see those first-party kind of tools. I mean, when I upload a Jupyter notebook, I get to see that in GitHub. I would like to see when I upload a KiCad schematic, I would like to see it as a schematic. Yeah, me too. And the idea of adding PDFs as you check in is just really, really nice. Yeah.

It's not that I don't have it installed. It's just that loading it takes longer than loading a PDF. Well, exactly. And like, if you're going to email this to a CM somewhere, you're not going to email them a key CAD file and say, you know, open this up, and hopefully it's the same thing. I mean, I wouldn't send like I'd send them the files. But at the same point, I also want to send them just something they can print and check as well. One of the things that you talked about, you talked about earlier was that you love talking about engineering yeah why why that sounds accusatory why i mean why really why no i mean i don't mean it that way i just yeah yeah why why um so i guess there's a lot of different angles for why I like to talk about engineering.

One is I think that the I this, like, I feel like there's people who are like 10 years old and say, yep, I'm an engineer and have this like thing. They were like this. It's like when you see the animals in the Antarctic or whatever, just veer off and they're like, oh, they've got a mission. They know what they're doing. And I feel like they can be very scary to other people who are probably super awesome engineers, but just don't have this innate drive from middle school to be an engineer. And it can be really scary. And so I think just having more people literally talk about engineering to non-engineers, I think, is really important. Beyond having everybody realize that engineering is a thing and here's how we do engineering, I think it's fun. I think it's fun to talk with other engineers to say, you know, what's a tip that you would suggest to everybody?

Or I ran into this problem or I've done all these projects, but I keep having this problem when I invoice. Like that's not necessarily engineering. But at the same point, if I never got paid for engineering, I would have to do much less of it. So there's all those kind of like the accoutrements outside of engineering that kind of come with it that help me do more of it. And it's like when I talk about that project and what happened on that project and why it didn't go the way that you thought it went. And now when I get into a place like that that's a little bit analogous, I'll have this non-failure-induced experience that I can draw from. Thank you for describing why we do the show. That was nice. Do you have any advice for people who want to get into working with museums? ask at a museum. So one, oh my God, really? Ask them. So they, it, it may not be a paid opportunity, but at the same point, a lot of times, if you're privileged enough to be able to take an unpaid opportunity, it can lead to paid opportunities or it can lead to experience that then drives your

next opportunity that is paid. I understand that that's assuming privilege and that that isn't something that's open to everybody. Other possibilities are to just work on museum-y like projects on your own. So if you need, I mean, a lot of the problems in terms of the electronics of a museum exhibit, a lot of them are not very complicated. A lot of times the actual electronics part isn't very tricky. So maybe, I mean, if you have an example of a project that could be a museum project and you did it on your own, that sure shows a lot of gumption and a lot of movement. I don't want to sound like a boomer saying walk around to every place with

10 copies of your resume and walk around and hand it in. It feels a little out of touch. But at the same point, there are a lot of museums out there. I think in the United States, there are as many museums as there are Starbuckses. I read that a few years ago. So there's a lot of museums out there, and they're all interested in more content. So that's the direct opportunity. The next would be just to look for museum fabricators. Like behind every nice museum that exhibit that lasts is a group of people who made that museum exhibit. So sometimes that's in the museum.

Other times they contract out. Other times they're kind of tied to like event-based businesses. So they're the same type of people that might run a corporate retreat or something like that. And I mean, it's a niche piece of engineering because oftentimes they're not looking for the engineer who writes Linux kernel drivers and they're not looking for the person who can bang together some STM32 like things in DMA and things like that. And so a lot of times they have an approach from the other angle. So they get these people who have taught themselves enough Arduino to be

able to do what they're doing. So if you come at it from the other angle, I think you'll be pretty successful. I have been so far. So I want to ask you about one more project that I saw on one of your blogs. There's something about art in space. Yes, art in space. Art in space was an awesome opportunity. So in November of this year, I was contacted by a friend of mine who runs the Playful Learning Lab at St. Thomas, which is a college here in Minneapolis, or in St. Paul, actually. And her lab had worked with the band OK Go to have this contest for kids to submit ideas for art in space. So art projects that could only be done in space. So like the tie into this, I believe was one of their recent music videos

that was filmed, like the Vomit Comet in free fall time. So they had this contest, they had two winners, and then the undergraduate team in the Playful Learning Lab worked with the kids to create a version of their art in space idea. And then once that was finished, they were going to go up to uh the new shepherd uh rocket i guess uh which was part of blue origin which was uh out of seattle i believe and so it was in at that point it gets launched into space it's not orbital but it's in space for the launch is like 11 minutes, I think, or 12 minutes. They're in freefall, I believe, for about three minutes or something like that. And then it comes back down and lands, and then the payloads are retrieved. So they ran into a kind of classic engineering conundrum, which is we have a fixed amount of time,

we have a deadline, and we have these projects, and these projects are kind of complicated, and we need some help. So she called me in to help out, and I spent a very intense week where I basically dropped everything and spent long days, longer than I've ever worked since undergrad, I think, and then helped them make these art in space projects. So one of them was a space guitar. So this space guitar was, like, the idea here was that one of the payloads would make sound. And then the other thing is that it would have, like, a paint splatter. So the paint would be up in space, and then it'd be in free fall, and then it would hit the walls and make this fun paint splatter. So like I was only brought in at the very end of this project. And so I don't know a lot of the details. But by the time I had gotten in, that paint splatter had been turned into like neon dye.

So it looked almost like someone had like shredded open like an inkjet printer piece or laser toner. So it's like laser toner type dye. And so we get there and here's the idea and they have it all. And it was a week of kind of like Apollo 13 style, throw everything on the table. Here what we have and we need to get down to 500 grams exactly or less per and we started out pounds over and by the end of the week we were able to get everything within space or within weight and in their payload boxes and everything programmed and i think we were like a total of like 40 grams under between the two different payloads. And we had like an hour to spare

before the last deadline for FedEx. You said the guitar one. What was the other payload? Yeah, so the other payload was, the idea was that there were magnets suspended in the like so these payloads were pretty small they were like four inches by four inches by eight inches or so which is kind of like a standard nano lab spec for these things um and so the other one had magnets suspended in the middle. And at one end, there were these magnetic particles of a variety of sizes from like beads down to pretty small beads to ones kind of the size of a pea, I guess. And so for that one, what would happen is there were two fans, one at each end, kind of aimed at each other to make a spiral of air inside of this thing. And then at one end cap, there were chambers.

And then as the payload hit freefall, we get a signal from the rocket that then the program reads. Then the program opens up these pods one at a time, and then they all kind of go into the air, and it makes this magnetic display that can only really happen in freefall. Do these have cameras? I mean, how do you know if it worked sure so they they started with cameras and uh but they weighed too much they started with cameras but basically through the uh extremes of the design process. They, the cameras were one of the things that got removed. Um, this is one of the parts where, uh, I guess I, like, I won't say regrets, but if, if I would

have changed anything or, or had an extra week or something like that, I really would have liked to get the footage. But, uh, at the same point, when I thought about it, I'm like, that almost makes it more art, right? Like the whole point of this thing is not like we're not collecting any data for science. This is purely we as a species have evolved enough capacity that we can afford, that we can send children's art dreams into space for the sole purpose of being kids' art in space. And I'm like, that's pretty awesome. And so then we have this device that we sent up into space that has this space guitar with solenoids striking strings, and it's got this neon paint toner that's out, and it's got this whirlingab that had these balls in it and a proximity detector. And when those balls went in, that would seed the random number generator.

And then it took that and combined it with the telemetry in from the rocket. So we can definitively say that what played up in space will never, ever be played here on earth just because we can't reproduce that same seed so to me they should could they have cameras yeah were they going to have cameras yeah does sometimes engineering projects not end up exactly like you want sure is it more art for this to be played for an audience of literally nobody. Sure. Sure. Yeah. It's a space philosophy project. Exactly. Okay.

I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I can, I can see, I can see what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, surely you've had a project where at the end of it, you're like,

Hmm, that's a design decision that I wish I wouldn't have made. But now that I've made it, yeah, I can live with it. It makes sense. I've had many bugs that were secretly features or features that were secretly bugs. Well, Adam, I really enjoyed speaking with you and hearing about your projects makes me want to go talk to some museums. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I do.

I would like to say wash your hands, stay two meters away from strangers, and stay safe. All right. That is very timely information. Our guest has been Adam Wolfe of Wayne & Lane, Senior Engineer. Thanks, Adam. Thank you. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to our wonderful patrons for Adam's mic.

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