Embedded - 325: Hasn’t Been R2D2'd

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

John Saunders (@NYCCNC) spoke with us about building a Johnny Five robot on his NYC CNC YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/saunixcomp).  You can find all of the Johnny Five build videos on a playlist or check out the NYC CNC page. As mentioned, Input Inc did a lot of the preliminary work. John recommends books: How to Win Friends and Influence People The E-Myth Revisited John is also the founder of Saunders Machine Works (they have a contact page). How Johnny Five got his name  

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alesia White. I am here with Christopher White. This week we are super excited to have Johnny Five on the show, the robot from Short Circuit. Wait, wait. My sources say it's John Saunders? Sorry to disappoint. Hi, John. Well, that's fine.

Welcome anyway. Thank you. I don't think we're going to be disappointed. Can you tell us about yourself? Sure. My name is John Saunders, and most folks know me probably from the NYC CNC YouTube channel. The nickel version of the story that I'm happy to go into further, if it's appropriate, is I love making stuff. I was trying to bring a product to market, I used to say about 10 years ago. It ends up it's now a few more years than that, but didn't know anything about machining and bought a small benchtop machine while I, at the time, was living in New York City, hence the YouTube name.

And absolutely fell in love with not just machining, but the whole process of CAD and CAM and product development and also the sort of entrepreneurship or business side of building a business around it. So fast forward today, we've got a shop in Zanesville, Ohio, which is where I grew up, and we get to do pretty cool stuff around mostly manufacturing and so forth. I've had quite a few stints along the way that I think might be a little bit more relevant to your audience of trying to play with the Raspberry Pi and Arduino project type things, which actually have been pretty instrumental in some of our products and things that we've developed, our shop. But that's the short version. And Johnny5, it does relate in here. Maybe I should let you explain? So we have this YouTube channel

and we've made videos. The self-imposed thing, when I started doing this full-time in 2014 or 2015, I told myself, I'm going to make a YouTube video every week. YouTube was popular then, but probably not quite as household ubiquitous as it is today. And it ends up that that really worked. That really helped grow our channel. Those were usually called the Wednesday Widget.

And what I realized about a year, year and a half ago was, well, let's kind of shift away from just doing a different project every week. So let's do this kind of long term build. And at this point, we had machines and resources and people where I thought maybe we could pull this off. And this was an absolute dream to me. And it's kind of one of those. There's no way we're going to do this, but we'll do it. And it's funny because when we started off, it was just going to be us. There's a key twist to that plot. And one of the guys who works with us named Ed, he's incredibly talented and frankly has done most of the work to date on Johnny Five. So Ed and I were both huge fans of

Short Circuit, hugely influential in our sort of passion for upbringing robotics. And what I thought was interesting was not only did I love Johnny Five, but everybody else loves Johnny Five, but he hasn't been R2-D2'd or some of the other really popular robots, cosplay type thing. And I thought, if we can really pull off a Johnny Five, that is amazing. And there's this rawness to Johnny Five. He's not quite as practical or even finessed as some other robots like WALL-E or R2-D2. So we said, let's do it. And so we just thought, well, how are we going to start? Well, start from the bottom up. And so I forget the exact timing detail, but we started talking about it. And it's kind of one of those things that's amazing about the world that we live in with the many positives of social media in this manufacturing community was on relatively

short order, we met the folks from Input Inc. And I got to give them a huge shout out. This is the story as I remember it. It's been about a year, year and a half ago. Basically, we had a call with them and they said, we've been working on this for a decade. They had access to one of the, I think there were something like 18 Johnny Five builds for Short Circuit. Not all of them were full robots. In fact, if you go and rewatch Short Circuit, you'll realize how Hollywood has played their tricks on you because so many of the scenes, for example, when he's leading forward in the Nova van to push the radio button, that's just an arm.

That's not a full J5 build, things like that. What? They lied to us shocking and uh so they had access to a la version of one of the set props and were able to build incredible uh drawings and then one of the members of that team is a full-blown professional cad designer so the architecture behind this cad model had full-blown professional CAD designer. So the architecture behind this CAD model had full-blown proper PLM architecture, build quality. The files are absolutely primo, which is almost unheard of in these sort of situations. And they sort of said, hey, you, it's kind of funny. They

actually said something that I really appreciated where they're like, you've proven that you're kind of a quote-unquote good member of this community. You know, you want to share this, pay it forward, get it done. Um, you know, we had three axis milling machines, fourth axis, even five axis. We had some sheet metal stuff. So, um, I'm not sure I realized, I mean, I knew it was going to be a big project. I don't know if I, it's almost impossible to digest how big it really was at the time. Um, but I can't say we did it in the past tense because we're not there yet. But we basically have all the parts done. We have, I mean, a handful left.

And we've got about maybe the bottom third of him is assembled. We haven't started assembling the rest simply because there's a rhyme or reason to how we have to put those parts together. And we want to also document some of that on video. But I can say with confidence that we're very close. And this is seven feet tall, right? I mean, this is not the little dog robot from Dr. Ho. This is a serious industrial scale robot to the point of it was a concern the there's a couple of things that the uh inputting folks did have to change simply

because the way that certain electromechanical components are made these days are different than in 1986 so you just it's not a matter of pride you just can't get them with servo motors or hydraulics and so forth and so they changed the uh i actually love this they changed uh or or somehow changed the drive mechanism of the two tank drives there's so many fun trivia facts here first off do you know what johnny fives's tank treads are made from? I mean, it looks like tank treads. They're stripy and they go around. Stripy. Couldn't be further from the truth.

What is awesome is we actually own the exact tank treads. And you, in fact, could also own the exact tank treads today. They are a food-grade conveyor belt material. Oh, wow. And they come in a strip that's about an inch and a half longer on each side, so maybe three inches longer. And so we luckily have a laser, so we just lasered them down to that profile and correct sizing. But that was one of the first things that we actually started working on. In fact, that's what it was. We started building the fixturing to machine each one of these links,

which would have been a huge amount of effort. And that's when somebody hopped in and sort of started saying, hey, nope, those are actually an off-the-shelf component. You just have to modify them. And then we do 3D print pads that are the black insert piece. But what's cool is those are actually alternating between a rubberized print material and a hard one, which gives them better traction control on varied surfaces. So as you're doing this, this sounds like a really difficult process, you know, a real industrial process to make a movie prop. What did the movie folks do? Do you have any uh insight into the history of how the actual props were made there were 18 yeah i know there were eight there were a lot but that sounds like it was an even bigger project back in 1985 was it um so what what were

they doing did they have a massive was this a giant company that they contracted out to, to build us a real robot? What I can say is it's absolutely amazing. Maybe not for them because this is what they do, but I mean, from an outsider's perspective, absolutely amazing. They built these in a number of months. Now, there's one key difference is that they had a budget. We're kind of doing this on like just, I don't want to say the side because he's certainly had more attention than that, but, um, we're not for all intents and purposes, we're not making any money doing this. So, uh, it's not our business. Um, and, but the

big difference is also, uh, they had, they had no CNC machines. They had all manual machines. Now, a ton of things that were machining or going kind of over the top with like for instance there's some inside um motor covers to that would have covered the original tank drives those would have been uh vacuum formed which a lot of johnny five was actually vacuum formed uh which is a classic hollywood cheat technique uh we're actually machining it so in fact ours will probably be the most robust build ever do Do you think that the Hollywood one actually worked or do you think it was almost all puppeteering? What's the difference between those two? I mean, was one of them alive? I hate to break it to you.

Oh no, no, no, no. Was it servo-driven radio control or was it mostly... Was it wires? Yeah. I mean, puppets, wires and sticks. Sorry, excuse me. No, no, they were absolutely radio controlled. Yeah. It wasn't alive.

Really? Oh my God. But he had emotions. So actually, this is a trivia question I would love if any of your audience can help us out. We've been trying to figure out what was the Nova laboratories set or building because obviously that was probably just a real, I don't think they green screen that. There's too many scenes of them driving up. So it's probably just a corporate building somewhere, but I'd love to know what that was. I had that same question when we watched it this week. I was thinking, oh, that looks very familiar.

It really looked familiar. Reused location sort of way. It felt like aerospace in LA or Lockheed Martin in Mountain View. Generic government building. Right. With a kind of modern style. But no, a number of them had actual electromechanical controls. My understanding, though, is that he was incredibly weak.

So while it would be awesome to think that he could take a 30-odd-six and bend the barrel in half, he actually could only lift about the equivalent weight of a can of Coke. But that's actually a good thing because he had to be pretty heavy. And I mean, every time I'm next to a big industrial robotic arm, I'm like, okay, where's the tape I need to stand behind? Because I don't want to be hurt by that. So it's kind of good, except it still was big enough to move itself. So it was still big enough to hurt people. Yeah, I don't know how much the set robot weighed. I do remember reading that Ally Sheedy was just exhausted on the dancing scenes in her house when they kind of got a romantic because there was a safety issue and it was just an exhausting scene. The problem we have is, and we changed this gearing, but the original proposed gearing mechanism was such that this 300 to 400-pound robot would have gone upwards of 20 miles an hour. Yes. Well, yeah, because he was on the road for a while, and he was, yeah. Okay, but how fast is yours going to go?

I don't actually remember the final outcome of that, but even seven miles an hour, I don't know how to handle this because I want to use him as a tool to inspire kids. So if there's a chance to have it go to a school or a parade or a science museum, I think that's really cool. And I don't want him to be behind a piece of glass. I want them to be able to, to the extent it's safe, interact or do stuff. And you can't have a 300 pound robot run over a kid's foot. So we've got to figure that out. Are you going to put the laser on? Great question, of which the only answer is yes. Unfortunately, I don't think your laser will remotely blow things up like that laser did.

It will not. It will not. But it could. There's some YouTube folks out there that do some pretty banana stuff with lasers. So we may have a couple different weapons packs for him, including the toolbox for the more placid scenes. How are you controlling the robot, or is this mainly a manufacturing, machining,

and electronics puzzle to you? So we, in fact, I was kicking myself for not asking Ed before we got on the call tonight. There's a pretty well-built-out kit that folks have used for the WALL-E builds that we're just going to use and implement, which should offer plenty of IO and control. We haven't gotten down to the details of that yet. He does have motors in him already, and we are absolutely going to be doing

the neck mechanisms. We've got all the hobby servos for the eyelids, for the head tilt, for the arms. So it will get there. We're working on that next. I'm going to link to that so that we have that. Yeah, we can throw in the description. I'll get it to you after that. Perfect. And then you said you want to take it to parades or on top of children's feet. Not on top of children's feet.

No, you didn't. Only the bad kids. Why? I mean, this is a lot of work. Why are you doing it? Why wouldn't I mean, that's, that's what it was. I mean, to me. Um, so I always hesitate to talk about myself because that's not, it's not good. But the one relevant one relevant thing is uh here would be there's a wonderful museum in columbus ohio called cosi center of science and industry and they did what they do a traveling show for schools and in second grade they brought their robot to our school and i was fortunate enough to be the kid that they picked i think it was not a secret even then my teacher knew that i loved robots and i got to go up on stage with this robot and like just little moments like that that really just are amazing and awesome and so again it's that chance that um if one student or kid or person or anybody can see this

and somehow correlate that to when I see Johnny Five as an inspirational tool I think this this sort of a robot or project could teach you there's opportunities in everything from engineering to project management to manufacturing to machining to CAD to CAM to hydraulics to electronics to embedded design. I mean, there are two dozen careers in just the skill sets that go into something like this. And I don't care if you don't want to do that, but you need as a student, you need to know, uh, that those things are real options in life, especially if they get you excited. Is that why you do your YouTube channel as well? Yeah, for sure. Well, I did it from a practical standpoint. I was trying to learn

machining, but, um, it wasn't, there wasn't YouTube. Wasn't YouTube when I started that back in 2007, it was more of a, you know, I always joke. I'm like, I'm so glad I didn't start that on real player, but, uh, yeah, it's a way to share it, to pay it forward, to try to, to figure out how to make stuff. Um, most people know us because of machining, but it was actually the confluence of the original kind of makerspace in Brooklyn, which was called NYC Resistor. I was not a member, but I went to classes there. That combined with the original Arduino, combined with my first hobby CNC machine, this is what I wanted. Like the fact that I could come up with an idea for something, I could machine or print some of these parts, and I could then use an Arduino.

I had been previously trying to use the Lego Mindstorms kit because I could never get my hands underneath the Parallax Basic stuff. It just was too complicated or foreign to me. But so Arduino was just a godsend. This was amazing. That was heaven to me. What did you, did you, did you go to school for engineering? Nope. I went to school for entrepreneurship. All right. That makes sense given how many businesses you have, but you, you fell into makerspace and and Arduino, and what made it click? What made you say, oh, yeah, this, this is what I want to do? It just did. The only other memory I had was the Sony studio in New York City used to have a museum, then they had a robot in it as well.

And so I saw that just after graduating college, and I just thought, these things are so cool. I want, yeah, anything I can do that is more that. And those sort of automation robots are much more similar to, say, a CNC machine, where you've got coordination movement systems. You've got sort of the PLc nature of how you're having to control move through a system like i just i i love that stuff i guess i don't really understand that there are other people who don't love that stuff does that make sense yes that totally makes sense what do you mean you don't want to listen to me babble about embedded systems right um okay so arduino and then did you get into the other boards did you go deeper into software or did you Impedded systems. Right. Okay, so Arduino.

And then did you get into the other boards? Did you go deeper into software? Or did you say, you know, this is fine, but really it's a lot more fun to program the CMC machines and build things? Yeah, the latter is probably true. I moved into RPi a little. Arduino code just always was easier for me to, to plow through, but obviously there was so much more you could do with Python. Um, I think the furthest I got was I built an automated dog treat machine where I, I mean, I say wrote, I mean, really just scouring through the internet to find Python scripts and kind of

merge them together, but you could email my dog. It would activate a screw that would pull treats out of a hopper, drop them down under the ground. And then as soon as it saw him, it would take a picture with a webcam and it would respond with a live webcam snap, like through a 640 by 480 picture of the dog eating the treats back to you being the person who, once you emailed him, that was the trigger to release the treats and i google shut that account down because within the first within the first 48 hours it sent like 2700 emails and they're like sir you're running a spam farm and and your dog ate 2700 treats he was quite upset that it had been run dry.

Yes. Our bingo would really appreciate that. But that's amazing. You think about the history of mankind, the history of humanity. I love this stuff, but I'm not the best at it. If I can do it, other folks can do it if you want to do this. Here I am at the time, just one man shop some basic equipment i've designed this thing in cat i'm machine these parts frankly printing it would be way easier and quite adequate for this project and then i use this raspberry pi board some io a webcam that i already had usb like this is amazing it really. But you say one machine. What was the first one? The first machine was

called a Teg. And I had it in a one bedroom apartment in New York, literally next to the pillow of my bed. And now you have a much larger shop. I believe in your videos, I saw a water jet, a laser jet, or sorry, laser cutter, all kinds of milling tools. It was, I don't remember if it was your shop or the shop that I led to after that, that had a neat folding system for sheet metal. What do you have now? What are your favorite tools? Oh and what are your favorite tools? Oh, what are my favorite tools? So we have a number of Tormach machines. That's the machines I had when I moved to the suburbs, which was a huge step up from the hobby tag machine I had next to my bed. So those have always had a soft spot for me simply because

kind of who I am. I always wanted to support the folks that wanted to sort of make something from nothing. So from a, and this may get off topic for your audience, so I'll keep it short, but there is no on topic for this audience. Don't worry about it. Fair enough. I am a sort of a rare type of entrepreneur where I don't really enjoy taking too much risk. And that's not always a good thing, to be honest with you. But at the time when I was doing this, I didn't think it was in any way responsible to borrow money because what the heck am I doing? I don't know what I'm doing. I can't prove to my spouse or parents or anybody else that I have any business doing this. In fact,

some of the, there's one engineer that we had hired when we were trying to develop this product who, and he was a good guy and I actually still speak with him to this day, but he in no uncertain term said, John, you can't just go buy a CNC machine. Like that's not something you people do. You have to go through apprenticeships and trade schools or companies and training and learning. And I know he meant well, but you had sort of asked me if there's overarching themes to this. And part of it is I wasn't worried at all about him being right because I was going to figure this out. I just did. And that's become a pretty common thing now with how much since, say, 2008 to now, how much insourcing there's been, how much passion there's been for this kind of renaissance of making and much more access to tools and so forth. But my point there was I was never a big believer in borrowing money, both when you don't have any business doing it because you don't know what you're getting into. But also, just debt's not always a good

thing. That can be a pretty bad thing. So Tormach, to me, made sense because you can work a second job. You can hustle, save your money, and get one of those machines versus the step up to the machines that we now also have and use that are often called Haas machines because that's a prolific brand in the US. But any vertical machine center, which is going to weigh 5,000 to 20,000 pounds and may cost $50,000 to $100,000. They're incredible. I love them. But anyway, we have Tormach machines. We have some of the Haas machines. We have three and four-axis machines. We also just last year got our first five-axis machine, which is absolutely amazing. And then the other new machine that I've been playing a lot with lately is a lathe, but it's not just a normal lathe, which if someone is not familiar with a lathe, this would be the sort of thing that you would use to make an object like a baseball bat. We don't really work in wood.

We mostly work in metal. But anything that's round, it has shapes that are still round, like a spindle of a staircase banister. Again, that's a wood object, but lathes are great because they can turn round things. That's also their weakness or their shortcoming. Modern lathes like this one, though, are pretty unique because it's a dual spindle lathe. So it has a spindle on the left and on the right, and the machine itself can actually transfer the part from the left to the right. And on your turret, not only do you have traditional turning tools that turn round objects, but on our machine in particular, six of those turret pockets actually hold milling tools so i can mill shapes any size i want i

can tap holes i can mill pockets and intricate shapes on a lathe doing work on both sides of the part it's like just absolutely amazing i'm trying to visualize what kinds of things you could machine on that that obviously it can do a lot more than a standard lathe but so what's an example of remembering college when i had to make a screwdriver yeah um and then so there was a you had to lay out the handle yeah and then you had to switch it and then mill out the grooves in the handle okay and those were two we actually had separate rooms for that because the plastic was in the wood room um so that kind of thing, that could be one example. A common thing would be, let's say you want to make a really customized screw or fastener for whatever reason.

Maybe it needs to have a gasket for an O-ring. Maybe it needs to have a clearance hole for a wire. Maybe it needs a bleed valve. Maybe just for decoration. You could turn the screw, cut the threads, and then you could come in with a tool, an anvil, and you could cut, say, a custom Torx pattern or a custom hex pattern or put a design in there. You could engrave around it. You could put a lock wire hole through the side of it, anything like that. Okay. Okay, so I want all of these tools, and I always do. And when we got married, we actually thought we were disappointing the other one when we went and registered for tools. Hilarious. We have a 3D printer and we have a basic wood shop. No lathe.

What is the best hobby thing I can do if I want to build small metal things? The best machine? Yeah. Yeah. So the answer is Tormach. Okay. So the answer is Tormach. And I say that we've had a long history with him at this point, and it's been positive across almost all fronts. I almost, in a weird way, I almost wish Tormach had more competition because competition ultimately drives innovation. And they have some competition, but Tormach has really stood out in that crowd um there's some other um DIY level machines

or smaller machines um Shapeoko makes a good product but not not not super useful for true metal work and I have some listener questions that are somewhat along the same lines um Exploding Lemur wanted to know your thoughts about software tools for design and manufacturing going cloud-hosted and subscription-based. Do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing? I'm guessing that question is in regards to Autodesk's Fusion 360. Yes, of course. Yeah, so look, go make parts. go be happy, go do what you want to do. There's some, some crazy conspiracy theories about this. I don't believe them. Um, in auto,

so auto-disk doesn't even have access to your data. Um, there's been no real bait switch. Um, they have changed their pricing a bit. i will readily admit that it's still an absolutely incredible offering um which is kind of one of those okay if you don't so you don't like it your next best option is still something that costs thousands upon thousands of dollars um i actually don't really care about the cloud pre-fusion we used solidworks or similar and we just had all of our files sitting on a dropbox so i actually kind of chuckled like the cloud is just somebody else's computer you know big deal um we don't really find the collaboration they're super useful um so it's just a tool i'm i use it i use it every day it works

generally quite well autodesk catches some flack sometimes because frankly how much they've done in a good way if folks maybe don't care but remember six or ten years ago it was very much a decision about oh boy what am I going to use and if I use this software my friend doesn't know it because he uses this software if I want to share a file with somebody else they use that software for better or worse everyone just uses fusion now like when we have interns come in or interview or new hires, most of the time now they're just like, yeah, we use Fusion. Of course. That's a good thing for me. Yes. It does give a common denominator.

Are you guys aware of other drawbacks or things that, what are the sensitive hot buttons in your world? I think the problem is that we have KiCad, the electronic schematic capture tool, and that is totally open source and free. And people like it a lot, and it's had some major improvements. And it's being used in professional spaces, and everybody's looking around going, well, why don't we have that for a real CAD program? On the software side, I mean, we've always had open tools, GCC and stuff.

And so the maker market is like, well, where's my open source tool? Forgetting that this is a really hard problem that fusion solves yeah well in fusion is uh for all intents and purposes still quote-unquote free to the true to true hobbyists they've made a little bit harder but um and you may end up with some versions of open source cad uh the other things that fusion does though like cam are um you know there's something is free because there's some reason that it is beneficial to this sort of society but um i always believe in sustainability not in the not in the green sense but sustainability that it's okay if things cost money because you you know the same thing with fusion none of us want

fusion to fail uh because we like it it's good things it's okay to make money it's okay for that to have a revenue side to it in fact it should yeah otherwise it doesn't get improved right so back to videos speaking of making money um did you start doing them you said said you started doing them as a pay it forward. But there is also an element of you're showing off your work. Was it ever a matter of getting your name out there and advertising for your company? with YouTube and had put out, I would think dozens, if not hundreds of videos, YouTube didn't even have a partner program. And I didn't even have a company. I was just doing this because I wanted to share it and do it. You didn't have a CNC company? No. So in 2007, I had a machine, but we had no services to offer. I mean, I literally had a, actually moved into a second apartment in New York just to have a little bit more space.

But I had a day job. You can't, you know, it wasn't a business in that sense at all. And so you started doing the videos and then did the business. So we were trying to bring a product to market. and that product was a manufactured item where we had hired an engineer who had hired his machine shops and welding shops and injection molders and so forth and the majority of the work was involved machine components and that's when I thought hey I've got to figure out what this machining thing is like I need to understand this a little bit better if we're going to succeed so that's why more so than anything else, I latched on to

the CNC side. And so that was quote unquote, the company that we were trying to work on, but that was really tangential to the, like I bought the machine not to make the product, but simply to try to sound like, like not an idiot. Like the, the, the engineer or the machine shop that they hire would be like, what kind of tolerance do you need on this part? And I would answer like a carpenter, like, well, could you do one 32nd? Sorry. No, I would answer. Yeah. I don't know about this much and then hold your fingers up. Yeah. Um, and so I think that's, um, you, you kind of, I think that's – you kind of I think – you I thought found it maybe irony or interesting that I went to school for entrepreneurship. And part of the reason was I knew I really couldn't learn that elsewhere. Like I thought it would be beneficial to do that.

The sort of like trade elements of this stuff, I was like I can probably figure out how and what I need to learn there. But a big part of entrepreneurship is that sense of being scrappy, of going and getting smart enough to know what you're going to be good at, but then also know, okay, I am not interested in this or I'm not good at it or it's inappropriate for me to be handling it, but I still need to know enough to interview somebody or to hire somebody or to keep the project on track and that sort of a thing. And that's, to me, a big part of what I very much love doing. And then you have this channel now and you have this product that didn't, may have taken off, didn't take it off, but now you have a MachineWorks. Yeah. So your current business with all of those really cool machines came out of the YouTube channel. Yeah, absolutely.

I've always tried to make sure we were very, I would say, modest and tasteful. So if you go watch our videos, they're about the passion and sharing and learning and paying it forward and what we've learned. So we will mention or soft mention things like we offer training classes, we make fixture plates, we make a Modvise system. And I honestly probably should do a little bit more because, again, there's nothing wrong with profit. There's nothing wrong with profit. There's nothing wrong with sell hit a product, but, um, I just, we've had some, um, some humbling offers from folks to shill my product, do this, do that. Um, you know, all that. And like, I like, I like being an influencer before it became a dirty word. Like I like being an influencer because I wanted to do something.

I was going to machine. I made it work. You should do this as well. Not because I just, just such a thing to me now. I totally get that. And yet it is important because you do have to make money in order to support the projects,

like your video channel where you get to share your enthusiasm. Sure. And so we do. We do our training classes and then we sell our Saunders Machine Works products. Okay. You know, we forgot to do the lightning round. Should we do that now

or should we wait till the very end? Is this where Johnny Five comes alive? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I can work with that. So actually, Johnny Five. And well, before Johnny Five, tell me about the TIE Fighter Challenge.

So the TIE Fighter Challenge is awesome because in some respects, I had nothing to do with it, which is actually a huge step for, uh, being a, uh, micro business that's grown to a proper, very, very, very small business. That's such a management win. Like it happened, it worked and I didn't have to do anything other than tell people to do it. Yeah, no, really. So, um, if anyone's interested in, in business or learning, uh, there's two books I will recommend

passionately, and it's all I care about. Everything else, I'm very reticent to mention, you should go read this book. But How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie was absolutely fundamental to my kind of adulthood and thinking. And then The E-Myth Revisited. And The E-Myth Revisited talks a lot about the difference between I like to bake and I want to run a bakery. Those are very different things. Yes. You know, that's actually really good. It's hard for me sometimes to explain to people. I like to, I enjoy writing, but I don't want to be a writer. Right. Pun intended. Okay. So we have those books. So in the TIE fighter challenge, Julie, who is our full-time video editor, videographer extraordinaire, she said, John,

there's been more people who want to be in on these collaborations. We turned Johnny five into a collaboration in the sort of second half of his build. Um, what do you think if I throw out some interest to see if folks would want to do a build on, and she threw out like three or four topics, like, Julie, you're asking me this, you already have answered your question, go do it. Go see what people think.

Like, you go run with this, awesome. And the interest, I forget what the other project options were, but TIE Fighter was by far the biggest. And within, I kid you not, within eight hours, we had people sending in videos, including like green screen, chroma keyed, lightsaber backgrounds, Darth Vader helmets within hours. And I thought, Oh my God, this is incredible. Uh, and, and I'm just kind of witnessing this as a, witnessing, witnessing this as a bystander. And so, uh, all I can say is this is awesome. This is amazing.

People get to learn, push themselves, share their trade, share it with others. Yes. Well, we should take a step back. What was the challenge? Just build a TIE fighter? Correct. There was no, um, again, we don't, I'm always hesitant. Like I don't, there didn't want to make it about an incentive that would change your passion. Like do this cause you want to do it. Um,

that may not be practical for everybody. Uh, but we set up, uh, what we agreed to do, the kind of win would be, we would, uh, include the video footage of you making it on our YouTube channel. So we put together these compilation videos, which, um, it feels weird to say this, but some say this, but for many people in this world, that's a really cool thing. They get to have their project or build shown on our channel. And so we limited it to the first, I think Julie did the first 30 submissions, and you had to send in a video of what you were doing or who you were as a threshold to meet that criteria, just to make sure it wasn't vaporware or you existed or could really put out a video. And we had a couple of people have to back out because of practical obligations or conflicts. But I think we still

had a number of people come through with, if you've seen the build, I mean, everything from small micro-sized TIE fighters that were made on these amazing you know electrical discharge you know edm machines all the way up to a tie fighter that you could almost sit in don't tell him that he's gonna go find the machine and the video and then he's gonna want the whole thing and then we're gonna be buying i it. No, I just want the TIE fighter. I don't need to make it. Making videos is hard. I mean, having people send in their videos, I can, I mean, yes, that makes sense. This is a physical object.

It's hard to convey that without a video. But, I mean, we do a podcast, and editing is so much easier without pictures. It's still hard enough. Yeah. Yeah, there's an interesting element, though, because it's not really about, like, it's interesting. There's some YouTube channels that have phenomenal videography and lighting and editing, for sure. But a lot of times it's about the content.

It's about the personalities, the people, the project, what you're doing. You don't necessarily need excellent editing. Okay. Well well how long does it take you to put together or how long when you started in those first few years of trying to put one out every week how long did it take you to put a video together i just did it i don't think i've ever done a retake in my life that's pretty cool that's a skill yeah yeah you just do it well in the beginning i didn't care because yeah i mean mean, not that I'm somebody now, but I was certainly nobody then.

So you're not conscious of it. And there was no competition. There's a lot of competition now in a lot of these spaces, right? You want to go start up a new electronics blog or video channel. You've got a lot of big players out there. But no, just do it. Cool. Okay, so back to Johnny Five.

Last January, January 2019, you had a goal of starting Johnny Five and doing it in a year. And it's been a year. Yep. And you're not quite done. We're not quite done because it changed. It went from you building it to everybody building it. Yeah, sort of. So again,

part of the, and look, we didn't meet our own goal. You can call me out on it. I didn't mean to. No, no, no,

not you. I mean, I mean like the collective audience, internet, et cetera. Um, there was a, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it was a lofty goal, but goals. It's actually funny. There's a really interesting conversation about how goals are terrible things because people focus on goals. And really what you need to do is you can set up a goal, but then throw the goal away because all you need to do is focus on the implementation, the execution, the steps that will get you between now and that goal. Does that make sense?

Totally. Yeah. I've always agreed with that. I mean, goals are important, but they're not, I don't, you shouldn't feel bad when you miss a milestone. Yeah. But they, I personally need to have milestones to do anything, but. But plans, once they meet reality are are just plans they're not reality is it say it again plans when they meet reality it become just plans they're ephemeral and they plans are not reality they are separate things yes yes absolutely you've got to go do it and so we did it we made a lot of parts. We probably, just to be honest, we got a little bit burned out or just kind of, wow, this is a lot of work and, you know, not as much fun.

It's a seven-foot robot with track wheels. Yeah, there's like three. It depends on what you count as a part because obviously a purchased fastener does not really count as a part but there's still something like two to four thousand parts on him yeah that's a lot yeah and so what's awesome is we got this just amazing surge of of second wind uh we had had some uh what do i say higher profile folks like with really exquisite capabilities or interest um want to make a couple parts and we said, well, sure, absolutely. And that's when we kind of then realized,

wait a minute here. Um, part of the, doing that project egress bill for this Smithsonian was collaborations are freaking awesome, like super, super awesome. And so we kind of had a huddle,

uh, and actually there was a huge amount of work itself that went into setting this up to be a collaboration because, uh, we then had to turn ourselves into, it's kind of like you like to bake, but you don't want to own a bakery. Well, you can't just take 600 parts and decide to turn them into a collaboration. You have to have your own system on how you distribute, track, follow up, support, et cetera, that whole infrastructure. But we did it. I mean, it becomes a huge logistics problem. Yes, it does.

And so you become program managers of it instead of the builders and program managers, which once you add other people, it becomes a lot more complex. I mean, that whole, what are the tolerances? If you're doing it yourself, the tolerances are whatever you need to make it work. If you're sending it to someone else, you don't want to say, oh, I tried it. It didn't work. Could you take it back and fix it? Right.

You need the numbers. You do. And we've already learned, you know, we haven't done all the final build. We've already seen, okay, we'll have to tweak a couple of things. But luckily, that should be well within our wheelhouse um and i just i have to give an absolute shout out and credit to everybody who built parts for it because um by and large everybody came through with amazing build quality there was very little um just you, everybody went overboard. And it's just absolutely amazing.

Really heartwarming. It's amazing what a community will do when they're excited. Yeah. It's Johnny Five. We're making him alive. How are you going to do the eyes? Oh, so super cool. One of the guys on Input Inc. had a couple of the original,

it's a certain camera brand that's now defunct, but we have the same ones they use. So they're iris out of an old film camera lens. And we already machined the face down, which you end up manipulating them a little bit, but they'll be really cool. And the eyes will actually extend out. Like when he sees Ali Sheedy naked in the bathtub, yep, we'll have that.

The eyebrows are more impressive to me. Ours are titanium sheet metal that have been waterjet cut. They're so cool. In the movie, he picks up a wrench with the eyebrows was that was that it looked like it was actually done do you know if that was actually done i agreed that it looks like it was done but again if you re-watch it when he's in the back of the van um totally different mechanism they actually used the so you probably have seen these in your world they're the little uh nine volt hobby servos that you know have no power yeah um that's that's what will control uh the radio the eyebrows the

let's see what else actually controls the eye opening closing there's a there's like 27 hobby servos on j5 so to to actually run this thing and make it seem like it's alive, it's going to take how many operators or just pre-programmed sequences? Yeah, probably. Some of the R2 guys have just done pre-programmed sequences. We'll have a traditional controller for his forward movement. My thought, and I have not done the detailed work on this, but if you, again, this is what gets me so excited. If you look at like the sort of spark fun, Adafruit's of the ability to take breakout boards with the, oh, what are they called? Not ISM, but the accelerometer sensors.

I am used. Thank you. I mean, unbelievable. So why can't we build a jacket so that we can walk up to a young individual and say, you want to control J5's arms and fingers? Just put the jacket on. I once did an exoskeleton sort of robotic-assisted walking device. And in order to demo it, we no i've never known we went to toys r us and we got a was it three foot high yeah hard shelled uh uh darth vader darth vader mannequin and then we censored it up and when we moved darth vader the the leg motors moved to the same angle as the knee and all of the motors we had. So, yeah, yeah, the jacket would be awesome. If you don't do a jacket, consider it.

Did it work? Oh, yeah, it totally worked. Oh, awesome. Well, our boss was really mad that we used Darth Vader. Why? Total lack of sense of humor. It wasn't good to show the VC

people. Got it. That's too bad. We offered to make one out of Barbie, which was our other option at Toys R Us. But that apparently wasn't good either. Oh my god. Yeah.

Hybrid. Half Darth, half half barbie yeah that totally worked oh man um so yeah you should totally do that or or consider uh making a an animatronic doll that you you modify what the doll is doing and the robot mirrors it do you think that's more fun if you're i'm trying to think of like tom hanks in the movie big now like what's more jack it would be more fun a jacket would totally be more fun but then you have the issue of size and i don't know there's no reason you can't do both i mean as long as it's you doing it not me controlling something with fixed angles and stuff is a little easier than right right what's your translation on the jacket reverse kinematics of a jacket and stuff yeah yeah that's fair because you do

you need to have the imu's at all the joints all the joints you can control and all the joints you need to sense and so you're looking at probably eight. And that isn't going to get you rotational. I mean, I guess you could do a magnetometer too. And the concern with eight IMUs is the control unit? Because certainly the cost of eight IMUs is nothing big. Just integrating it together and then communicating that amount of data over, I assume, wireless. Yeah.

At 10 hertz, it wouldn't be bad. At 100 hertz, which would be really smooth, it would probably be a bit bad. Okay. Well, we will figure it out. If you want to talk about IMUs, I am totally the person. I love IMUs. I'm making a note right now. No, but we'll figure something out.

I want that feeling of a connection. And the doll isn't a bad thing, but boy, maybe you just do the hands then instead of the whole arms or upper torso. Or maybe you just do the head. You want to feel like you're connecting with him. you're one with him, you're doing it. You know what I mean? You want that spark of joy. Oh my God, I can do this. Right.

And that I can do this, I can control it, so often leads to the, I want to know more. I want to know how more to control it. And that is how we suck the little kids into engineering. Yeah. I found that feeling the first time I controlled a motor to do what I wanted. And it was like, oh, software can change the world. That's more fun than just having software change like files on a computer. Right.

Right. Amazing, right? The interaction with the physical world, with sensors and light sensors and motors and outputs. Amazing. Yeah. We're on the same page here. Cool. Let's do lightning round.

Okay. If you're ready for that, this is where we ask you short questions so we get to know you. Okay. And we want short answers, and if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask why. Okay. Christopher, you ready? Yes. I'm just not used to doing this at the end.

All right. Favorite fictional robot other than Johnny Five? WALL-E. This is trivia. What other movies were filmed in the same Oregon town as Short Circuit? Do not know. The Goonies and Kindergarten Cop. Oh, I actually did know Kindergarten Cop. Oh, man. Hashtag fail.

Disassemble. Yes or no? No. What song does Johnny Five take his name from? I'm not sure if this is a trick question or I'm overthinking it, but El De... You have it. Actually, here's a reverse trivia. Go watch the YouTube video of that music video. There are scenes from Short Circuit that never made it into the movie. All right, we'll add that to the show notes.

Who's Johnny by L. DeBarge. Why are we spending so much time on deep learning when we could just let robots get struck by lightning? It's all part of the simulations plan. This one is from listener Adam. Does a computer- controlled embroidery machine count as a cnc machine yes yeah of course it does complete one project or start a dozen yes tip you think everyone should know take pride in your work well i think that the last question you have for us is not a short one, but do you have

any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Go do it. Go learn that skill set. Go embrace the fact that we literally, you know, we're recording this on a pretty strange day for the first time in many generations. My state was put on a lockdown. That's a weird feeling. Certainly the health and safety of a lot of folks in the world and the United States is on everyone's mind.

The world may be a different – will be a different place, but we still live in an amazing country and an amazing time in the history of mankind with the resources at our fingertips to go learn the Arduino IDE environment, to go get a 3D printer, to go make stuff, to go put stuff together, to go apply that trade, to go learn that skill set. That is an absolute amazing opportunity. And so don't hesitate to go act on that desire and go learn stuff. Enjoy yourself while you do it. But when I say take pride in your work to your last question, it's something I say not because I've mastered it, but because I have to constantly remind myself, if I'm writing an email, reread that email. Can I write it better? Am I saying too much? Should I fix it? Not that I have to be perfect on grammar every time. If I'm making a part, did I make a mistake? Well, should I make it better? It is the only reason I'm not making it better because I don't want to incur the additional cost of another piece of material.

That's usually not the right decision. It feels like it's a difficult decision that moment of time, but the next morning, every time I've remade that part, I've always felt like that was the right decision to do. So when I say take pride in your work, that's what I mean. That seems like great advice. Our guest has been John Saunders, owner of NYC CNC, the YouTube channel, and Saunders Machine Works. You can find his YouTube channel by searching NYC CNC. Of course, we'll have a link for that and other things in the show notes. Thanks, John. Hey, thank you for having me on.

I very much appreciate it. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Mohit for answering. Johnny Five was his favorite fictional robot. And thank you to Warren for pointing me in the direction of John. And to our Patreon listener Slack group for questions. And of course, thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now a thought to leave you

with. I found John Saunders video channel to be extremely soothing. You start out with a block of metal and at the end, there's something somebody wants. And it's just really nice. And so I want to encourage you not only to look at his channel, but all of the soothing channels you can find right now. 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.