Embedded - 333: Project Purgatory

Episode Date: June 4, 2020

Bailey Steinfadt (@baileysteinfadt) spoke with us about the makerspaces, communities, following many paths, and misbehaving robots. Bailey works at Dojo Five and Stone Path Engineering.  Area 515 is a non-profit maker space in the Des Moines, Iowa area. They supported their local emergency services with over 6000 face shields. If you are looking for something to do with your 3d printer, look at One Shot Bias Tape Maker and the how to use it video. Bailey recommended the Makers On Tap podcast and grill mats for soldering. Elecia recommended the You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-Up Girls as a book she’s only picked up once in a bookstore years ago but has thought about as an excuse to pick up new skills.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White. I'm here with Christopher White, and our guest this week is Bailey Steinfutt. Hi, Bailey. Welcome. Hi. Nice to be here. Could you tell us about yourself? Yeah. I describe myself as a maker. I have been an engineer for about only 10 years now i worked at a seed company for the first eight and several different roles doing a wildly random assortment of things and lately have been working at dojo 5 um just got

hired on as product manager uh two ago. Started out just doing normal engineering stuff before that. And then the reason I describe myself as a maker is because I help run the local makerspace, Area 515. And that's kind of everything. My biggest hobby is collecting hobbies and the makerspace is probably a big part of that. And we've known each other for how long? Oh, man. More than 10. I don't know because I only graduated 10 years ago.

I came to San Francisco with my ex-husband and asked people on the sisters board if anybody wanted to meet up and you were the only one who answered. And so we went and had pizza. I remember being horrified because you had like an egg almost raw on top of your pizza. Oh, don't tell Christopher that. Oh my God. It was years ago. I'll be fine. I'm with you. Okay. So lightning round.

Are you ready? Sure. What are the best names for a beagle? Oh, I'm going to go with Ozzie because that's my parents' beagle's name. And they named him that because he's the driver on the crazy train. All right. What's the best name for a robot? Oh, there's no one best name. It depends on what he's doing.

Take a couple examples. Jeez. I mean, we had Beerbot and then we have Robbie the Rude Robot in our space. Robbie the Rude Robot. We need to hear about this. Okay. Now? Yes. Okay.

I had a Robbie Jr. Radio Sh shack robot that we found in a dumpster and most electronics were gone but the shell still looks pretty nice so we stuck a uh one of the chip uh computers in there that's oh yeah they're long gone and that actually ate itself. Now there's a raspberry pie in him. But if you get close to him and shake his hand or touch his head, or there's some other sensors that we've put that talk to him through MQTT, he'll say rude things to people around him. And now he's only mildly rude because I want to show him off. But they had an after dark version where he was incredibly rude. When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up probably everything i remember wanting to be an engineer who built bridges i wanted to be an astronaut uh everything i think i still want to be everything uh which sesame street character best represents you

oh we'll go with Grover. Maker, hacker, engineer, or teacher? I think I like maker the best. It describes a wider range of things you do. I do everything from baking to home renovation to book binding to electronics projects, laser cutting. So Maker just kind of encapsulates all of it. If you could teach a college course, what would you want to teach? I think I'd want making and tinkering

into your classroom and some of those engineering concepts without calling it big E engineering. And that was really fun to do. So if I was going to do a class, I'd probably do like that. Be a lot like the play class that Anne-Marie or Anne-Marie teaches up at St. Thomas. Do you have a tip everyone should know? Those grill mats that you can get that are like heat resistant. Those are amazing for soldering on, especially with class students, because you can tape them around the table and they have a good workspace and you're not going to cook anything on the table underneath it. And you can glue on them and the glue won't stick to them. They're awesome. Are those the same as Silpats, the baking thing? No, those are silicone. These are like the woven, I'll have to look up what the material is, but you can get them, they're called grill mats and you can get like at the hardware stores and

stuff like that, but you can get them like for a dollar a piece on Amazon and for a classroom, they're great. Cause like I said, nothing sticks to them and they're heat resistant. Neat. Yeah. All right. So let's get to longer questions. Area 515, it's a maker space. And there were rumors that you founded it?

Rumors, yeah. We had a journalist come to an Arduino class we were teaching. And he was asking questions just about who we were in advance of mini maker fair. And somehow he twisted everything into I had personally founded it, but I wasn't even there for the initial filing for our 501c3. I am one of the original board members though. So I've been there for over eight years seven or eight yeah way too long i think i'm the longest serving board member we have everything there um from laser cutting 3d printing electronics textiles automotive with a lift woodworking and metalworking shops and cnc routers so we have a huge range of stuff

and uh we have everything from like kids and we do classes with 4-h um all the way up to a bunch of retired guys who come in and help teach and help around the space and it's a really open community-based one which i really like every maker space is a little different and yeah ours is a huge variety of people. It's kind of awesome. And it's only like 40 bucks a month. Yeah, yeah. 40 bucks a month and you get access to all the tools.

Some of the tools that have lots of consumables have a yearly fee, but it's only like another 20 bucks a year for any one of those. So it's pretty affordable. How do you make sure people know how to use the tools? We have trainers. So when you show up, we try to get you trained on your first area within your first week. I know some spaces do classes where you have to wait around for the laser class, but we'll just schedule one-on-one training for everything. And that gets you your safety instructions so you know how to use it safely without hurting yourself or the machine. And then after that, it's really open just, hey, I want to learn how to do this new thing on this

tool, or I want to use another tool or do a specific technique. And usually there's somebody there to help you through it, or if nobody knows, help you experiment. And you said it's a 501c, which in the United states means it's a non-profit yeah uh which means we go grant hunting which is probably my least favorite part of running the place um writing for grants is definitely a skill that one has to have and engineers don't exactly have that and so it doesn't uh it doesn't run entirely based on subscriptions? We keep the lights on with the subscriptions. So all of our recurring expenses, we can keep going as we are with our current membership.

But when we want to buy big new tools or upgrade something, or we want to hire an electrician to upgrade the service to the building, those are the things we need money for. Okay. But you didn't found it. Who founded it and how did they, how did they decide not to make a profit from it? We started going and meeting at a local coffee shop called Smokey Row. They were just posting on Meetup and they had a Google groups and just saying like, this would be a cool idea. And then nobody, everybody realized that nobody wanted to

be the business owner and like have to make this their job. And we also noticed that several of the other makerspaces around the country, the best run ones were nonprofits. So that's the direction we decided to go. So you were in on the founding? I came in like four or five meetings after they started their meeting at the coffee shop. Then I disappeared for a while until they got a building, their first building, which is an old school. The first room they had is like half the size of a basketball court. And that was everything they had, including all of the storage, the two workbenches, the laser. It was not a comfortable place to work, but it was a building. So it was a good start. But yeah, that was about time I came back and started being a board member.

I think by Silicon Valley rules, that makes you the founder. It's usually how the stories work. And we had planned to chat about two months ago, but life got in the way for both of us. And part of it was to do with the Area 515 makerspace for you. Yeah, since the whole world's taking a sick day for the last two months, we were making shields. So we had one of our members, Ryan, had posted, hey, we have a lot of tools and skills. What can we do to help out? And we decided that the 3D printing of the face shields was the best thing we could do because we don't have a ton of printers at the space,

but a ton of members have printers. So it's something we could safely do from home for most people and then deliver them to the space. Well, then people kept piling on and it kept getting bigger. And we had people loan us printers. The local school district started printing since they didn't have students in school. They could, the teachers were going in and printing, um, local university, Drake, um, all dug in and, um, it became this bigger thing. And we ended up being a central repository for parts and then having volunteer days to assemble the shields to send out to emergency services.

We had a sign up for people across the state. If they were first responders of any kind, firefighters, emergency EMTs, ERs, whatever, they can request them. When it kind of got bigger than we knew what to deal with, we got the AEA, which is the Area Education Association. I don't know if that's something other states have, but it's a support organization for the public schools. And they have drivers that drive materials out to schools, usually all year long. But since schools were in session, they gave us their drivers and they drove parts to us and completed shields to the facilities that had ordered them, which was awesome. And then we got tied in with Polk County Emergency Services and Iowa Homeland Security to help distribute within Polk County effectively.

New BoCo in Cedar Rapids was also doing this, as well as HeartSmart products here in town. So we started making a statewide network and talking to each other to distribute a little better. So that was, it got big really fast and really awesome. We had a lot of people step up and help both printing, giving us parts, coming and assembling, delivering the whole works. And then GreenGate 3D and CME CNC are 3D printing companies. And GreenGate gave us, just for the price of shipping, the plastic clear fronts. They gave us 4,000 of those. And then CME CNC, I don't even remember how many of the top headband parts that they injection molded at one point and started sending those out around the country. And we got a few thousand of those

too. We have a small 3D printer and we couldn't figure out how to make it useful to anyone. Were most of the people you were working with, did they have the big pressure printers? Yeah, most people had those. Enders, we had a couple of Rostocks, the tall CME CNC ones printing at R Space. The littler printers, we ended up asking people to print for those were the ties that you can stick on the back of your head to make your mask more comfortable, so it's not around your ears all the time and bias tape makers to sew masks. Now we found a file and I can give you that file later. If people are interested, it's one that our sewing expert really liked because you could hold it straight up to your sewing machine and just feed it straight through the bias tape maker into your sewing machine without any ironing.

But those are good to do on a littler printer. And so what was your role in this? I was mostly helping with logistics because everybody was just kind of doing their own thing. And so getting it all tied together, we had one guy just working on getting orders organized and like where finished parts were going to go. I was organizing volunteer days. So making sure all the parts were there so that when people showed up, they'd have enough to assemble and not feel like they were showing up to do nothing. We got a place called Barnum Factory, which is an artist collective just down the road from us. They have a bigger room that they do events in. And so they gave us the room for free so that

we could spread out a little more while people were assembling to social distance so that was really nice of them so just getting that set up and getting all the volunteers in organizing those days and a lot of people helped with that too but then yeah mostly logistics and just hand assembly I did a lot of assembly your goal was to build 800 shields how much did you end up making we made over 6 000 and we don't have an exact number because um uh we ended up having three different assembly locations i don't think the numbers get tallied up right but uh again to make sure everybody was safe and not crowding too close together we spread out the assembly um and also uh people are softies and we'd get sad emails about like oh i need one right now i don't have anything i don't know what i'm gonna

do and like somebody to sneak them a shield so like daycare owners and yeah like little clinics and stuff like that it was i mean we try everybody, but yeah, that made it hard to count exactly how we made, but it was definitely over 6,000. And you stopped. Yeah, we ramped down. We did a final day. And then as we got a few more parts in from people, after our last volunteer days, some of our members took stuff home to assemble and keep sending out. But the reason we stopped is some local companies were doing production to sell these at low cost, but it was just enough to keep their employees from getting laid off. And so that seemed important to us. We filled the gap in the supply chain, but we were never meant to replace

the supply chain. So once the supply chain picked up, it was time to hand it off. That seems so hard. And it all seems hard between jumping in when everybody is kind of just holding on and then deciding, okay, we've done it. We need to stop. Those both seem like very difficult decisions. Did you stop and say, wait a minute minute this isn't good for me at any point uh we knew we were getting burnt out that's for sure um because we were going in it was almost a full-time job for a couple of weeks there for a few of us and we just knew we couldn't keep it up forever um when we decided to stop is one when we heard that those other companies were trying to

keep their employees employed and two at the point where we were going to keep their employees employed. And two, at the point where we were going to have to order more parts and we just decided, well, it doesn't make sense to order more because we don't have the bandwidth, the supply chain's picking up. It's, I mean, we want to keep helping, but it's definitely, this is a good place to stop. And like I said, we got a few more parts in slowly trickling in from, uh, donors. So, um, we had, we had some of our members take those home and finish off like a trickling in case there was a few more requests. What were some of the biggest challenges of ramping something like that up? Uh, quality control. When you have a distributed manufacturing, it's really hard to

know if the parts you're getting are good. So you guys have a 3D printer, so you know your print can bend. It can have all the hairy bits on it. And some of them have little bumps. So we were sitting there and taking razor blades and sandpaper and things to these shield headbands so that they weren't pointy on your head and comfortable still. That was a challenge. Knowing when your parts were going to come in, like all the logistics stuff. We didn't have a supply chain set up.

We just kind of said, let's go. So getting that together and then getting the elastic, everybody was buying elastic. So it was really hard to find it. And actually, Phil and Embedded Artistry, of all people, helped us find a supplier for elastic right last minute. And we tried really hard to get non-latex, but the only thing you could buy was latex. The supplier we found was reserving all of the latex-free stuff for big manufacturers. You said it was a full-time job for weeks, but it's not your professional job. Oh, no. No, no. Feels that way sometimes. I mean, Makerspace in general feels that way, but no. My full-time job is doing embedded systems development for Doja 5.

And Doja 5 is a services provider. Yep. Yep. We do consulting and contracting for embedded systems programming and firmware. We'll do a little bit of a hardware designer review as well. And then what I just got hired to do full-time is be a product manager, our CEO, Joe, he is hoping to provide an automated build system specifically designed for embedded systems. So there's plenty of like Jenkins and all those out there, but we saw a need for this internally. And so we wanted to build it and then offer it out to others to make their automated build systems work better for them as well. And you mentioned working for a seed company,

which doesn't sound like something an embedded software or embedded engineer would. I mean, the seeds kind of function on their own. There's no firmware update for them. No, that's for sure. What did you do? I actually interviewed there as a practice interview out of college. I was like, yeah, whatever. I can do this.

It'll be good to practice interviewing. And by the time I left the interview, I was like, I got to work for this company. They have a lot of data, a lot of tracking and inventory and stuff to do. I actually did iOS app development is my first job there, which was random. Uh, I graduated about the time that, um, iPads became a thing, like a product you could buy. So, uh, we did a data collection app that they could take out into the fields because a research field is not one they plant like a big lawn and you know everything's the same every like 17 foot square is different corn

and so you actually take data on each little square of the field and they make research decisions based on that um then i actually got back into embedded systems, doing some inventory tracking stuff for one of the research stations in Hawaii. I did not get to go to Hawaii, um, for more than a week. So I didn't get to move there or anything, but yeah. And then I moved over and to the engineering department and worked on a data collection on combines. So again, the same like 17-foot chunks of field.

You drive a combine that far forward, stop, hit the button to collect the data, drive another 17-foot forward, stop, hit button, collect data. And then the work I did was to measure all the measurements that the researchers wanted off of that corn as it went through the combine. So I did PLC work on that one?

So I've been all over the place in my career. And you did robots? You specifically said not to ask about if you've ever used a robot as a form of locomotion. Yes. My last position at Pioneer was at the greenhouse and we had a soil moving robot. So it was a Ross based platform. Robot operating system. Yep. Yep. It was a oversized skateboard looking thing and it just begged to be ridden.

But yeah, if Ron, the safety manager is ever listening, I was totally never riding it ever. Never did that. Totally did that. But yeah, it was carried over a thousand pounds of soil from the soil mixer because they had a very specific mix of inputs they wanted for the growing medium for the plants in the greenhouse over to where they actually got to plant the pots. So up till then, they were having somebody drive a forklift through the area or pushing the carts by hand. So the robot was designed to just carry it automatically and more safely.

And then one bad thing, I found out that the hardware manufacturer, I had an error happen on the incline going down into one of the greenhouses and I restarted the robot. Sure. I mean, that's the first thing you do. You power it back, power it off and back on again. That's what you do when it goes bad. Yeah, but they made their brakes active high. So when I restarted it, it was a 500 pound robot with a thousand pounds of soil on it rolling out of control so i was like doing the fred flintstone thing like holding onto the back of it and digging my heels and trying to stop this robot from going down the hill why why why Why did they do that? That's safety 101.

Yep. That's when I learned that the brakes were active high. So, yep. Fail unsafe. Yeah. Yep. And then... That was a fun day.

Okay, so that's Pioneer. And then after that, you started your own consulting business? Yeah. Pioneer got merged into DuPont and Dow, and then they spun off into Corteva. And in that whole mess, my position got eliminated and I was laid off. And I had some advance warning. And through makerspace contacts, actually, I got enough leads to keep myself self-employed for over a year. That was awesome. So, yeah, I worked on DMX controllers at a car wash for lighting systems.

So I made it look like Vegas in there. It was awesome. I had a guy wanting to do a weed pulling robot for agriculture. And he wanted to know like what did he need to know to keep working on that. So I did some consulting on that. And then I did a lot of work for a safety wearables company. So they make systems for like factories to give these safety wearables to detect slip, strips, and falls, and environmental hazards for their employees. And so I did a lot of firmware help with them.

But at the same time, you're doing Makerspace, or you also teach classes for people learning to program too, right? Yeah, that's part of the Makerspace. So I've done mostly Arduino classes um that's a more fun way to learn how to program because you get to see all the blinking and moving and everything um and yeah that could be anywhere uh from kids from 10 i've had people up to 74 take the class i taught it at a conference last year so that's the only time I knew that everybody knew how to program already and just need to learn the hardware

otherwise I could not assume that anybody knew anything when they showed up and it's strange how many times people come to a programming class and do not bring their computer why would they? I was told to be provided so I always had a couple extra or if or if they brought their computer, they'd forget their power brick and it would die halfway through the class.

And so, yeah, can't assume they have anything when they show up. Those are always fun because people always have huge, like crazy ideas by the time the class is over, what they're going to build. And it's just fun to watch people learn as they go through it. You said that you got some of the jobs from the makerspace. But overall, how was the transition from being in a pretty big company, I mean, a reasonable-sized company, to being on your own? Sudden, that's for sure. Not too bad, though. It was kind of nice to take a break from being somewhere full-time a lot of my

gigs did not take up a full-time position so i got to focus on the makerspace a little bit i also have a fixer upper house so it was nice to go work on a little bit of that um but yeah it was um more than enough work to keep me busy for a year. And it was just a nice break from being at the same company for eight years. I mean, you mentioned many different projects, which you don't always get at a big company. Yeah, true. That was part of it, too. Like, I did like the fact that at Pioneer, I got to keep learning new stuff. So the fact I still got to do that as a contractor was also pretty nice.

So you do many different things. Should we have asked you, do you start a dozen or finish one? Only a dozen? There's more than a dozen. I have a closet called Project Purgatory. What does a project have to do to get put into purgatory? Be less shiny than the newer project? Yes. Ours just get left out. And then we don't go to that part of the house anymore. Yeah. Until there's a great purge.

So it sounds like you like to learn to do new things. I mean, you've done a lot of different things. I was programming PLC, ROS, those are all very professional things. And then all of the makerspace. Did you have a class in school about using your hands to actually make things? no not really it was uh mostly computer engineering i did an embedded focused track within the computer engineering department i actually started in electrical engineering and then switched over because i liked the embedded classes um so i mean they did a good job of teaching us how to build firmware and uh do a lot of the practical things you'd have to do at your job, but no, not so much the hands-on soldering stuff together or doing any mechanical design. And I'm definitely not a mechanical engineer in any way, shape, or form. That's always one of the hardest things for me. I know in my head what I want it to look like, but I don't know how to do the mechanical parts.

I made a tea box for my mom for Mother's Day this year. My sister and I did that on the laser cutter. And we built it four times before it actually opened and closed appropriately. What's a tea box? It's just a little laser cut box with three different sections to put her different tea packets into. Yep. Just stick in the cupboard and look nice. I was on the letter T and it didn't make any sense. It's in the shape of a T. Okay. This makes more sense. How do you learn how to do all of that? I mean, this is just a lot of stuff. How do you learn all this stuff i pretty much never stop reading

which is sometimes a curse because you know going to sleep is kind of a nice thing um also part of being at the makerspace means i can surround myself with other people who know different things than me i love learning just as much and are happy to share so it's a good environment and good crowd of people to be with if you do like to learn stuff because you can constantly learn from each other. How do you know when you've crossed the line between doing it for fun and ready to put it on your resume? Wow, that one's a hard one because since I did work for the same company for eight years, um, I didn't really have to work on my resume too much, but I guess, um, when people were ready to pay me for it, that was part of it.

Um, I don't think I'd ever put like book binding or, uh, something like that onto my resume, but, um, yeah, getting some of those projects afterwards as a contractor, just anything that I had done before that somebody seemed willing to pay me for seemed like excellent resume fodder. That's usually my line. I'm a professional whatever the second somebody pays me. Yeah. That's how I became a professional iOS developer, even though I knew nothing about iOS development the instant I transitioned to that team. It doesn't matter. I can't do it. I'm a professional by definition, right?

I think most of my career has been, here's a thing we need. Learn how to build it. Yes. Yes. That's very typical, especially the experience with working for a services company and the kinds of things you've done. It's very similar to startups to me where you're just kind of, oh, yeah, we're hiring you to do software. Come and join us. And then you show up and like, yeah, the computers are over there.

We haven't plugged them in yet. They also don't have an operating system. We don't have any servers. So if you could get on that, that'd be great. It's like, oh, okay, this is I do everything. Oh, I better start learning very quickly. Yeah. It's always nice when you show up and a company doesn't have version control.

They don't know what it is. And you're like, okay. Do I start them on Git or something simpler? Version control backups. When I arrived at a company, they had a couple of Dells with hard drives with all of their important intellectual property on them. No backups, no nothing. I'm like, okay, guys. So first thing first, this is the entire company here, right?

Yes. Okay. Maybe we want to protect it. I don't know. It's under somebody's desk, you know, where they can drop coffee on it or kick it. Man, when I showed up at Pioneer on my my first day they did not have a mac for me for the first three weeks even though i was an ios developer so that was interesting yeah that's not yeah when i showed up to cisco large one of the largest companies in the world they didn't have

a computer for me for a month nice Nice to know that's normal then. A lot of sitting at a blank desk reading printouts. Yeah, that's something that doesn't happen at a startup. If you don't have a computer and you need one, fine, let's go get one. Here, let's go to Costco. I remember let's go to Costco being the solution for a lot of things. You don't have to wait for purchasing to figure it out. Yeah. Do you think the skills you've learned as a maker translate well into your professional life?

Definitely in some ways. A lot of the electronics projects that I've built, like I built myself a little time cube, which it just, you tilt it to a different side. It gets the accelerometer and then send stuff up to harvest to start and stop my timers. But stuff like that has definitely been transferable. I always figure that's professional development. But then like, you know, figuring out how to talk to people about what you're doing and how to document what you're doing so somebody else can build it. And those kinds of things. Those are also been really helpful from the maker stuff. Is there anything from the experience of building the face shields that has

helped you or will help you? Yeah. The resource management. That's definitely one. Knowing that over-communicating is usually not over-communicating. If you think you're over-communicating, usually not over-communicating. If you think you're over-communicating, you're actually probably about right. Yeah. I talked to one of your coworkers and he said that you have good insights

about working with other engineers, especially those that are tricky to work with. I can only assume he's talking about himself. Is this Adam Wolfe? Yes, it is. I love working with Adam. No, he's pretty good to work with. Do you have any advice for working with engineers that are perhaps on the trickier to work with

side? Again, try to keep that over communication. So everybody knows what they are. Um, some of the tricky people I've worked with always thought that they knew better than everybody else. And so trying to keep them feeling like, yes, you're an expert. Um, but you also need to make sure other people have input. Oh yeah. Um, trying to keep people engaged and feeling like their input is still important in the way they feel it's important, but not letting them just run over the entire team. And I do better at that when they're running over my junior devs than I do when they're running over me, because I'm like, whatever, I'll just do my thing anyway, no matter what you say. But it's easier to protect the juniors than it is to bother to fight for yourself. Yeah, that's true. My greenhouse job, though, there weren't many

other engineers. That one, I was the engineer on staff for the science department. So learning how to work with all the scientists and scientists definitely have their way of doing things and their opinion of how things should or shouldn't be. And so I think that was good practice for having peers that thought a lot like scientists. What other good robot stories do you have? Don't use magnets for navigation. They work really well if you're like in a hospital where you can keep the degree, like your thermal load pretty consistent in your floor. But magnets actually change how strong they are when they change temperature.

And so if you're in a greenhouse that that's not really an insulated place. In Iowa, that can mean you are like negative 10 all the way up to 120 in that greenhouse, sometimes hotter than that. And so if you're trying to detect how strong a magnet is for your navigation, that's going to change wildly, not only throughout the day, but throughout the year.

So our robot got lost a lot until we moved to SLAM. You mentioned Iowa and Area 515, the makerspace name is about the area you live in, right? Yep, the area code. How, I mean, that's not a place people think of as heavy engineering areas. Nope, they call it the insurance capital of the world. I thought that was Hartford. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe they're trying to steal the title. But yeah, there's a lot of insurance and banking companies here, Wells Fargo, Nationwide, all that.

And then agriculture john deere uh pioneer corteva now um monsanto's got a branch here but yeah there's there's a surprisingly large number of very small companies doing things so it's not quite as dense as like silicon valley or austin or b Boston, but they're here. And we're not that far away from Kansas City and Minneapolis either, where there's a lot of medical device. Well, I mean, agriculture seems like this hidden giant industry that there's a lot of embedded development and all kinds of development associated with it, right?

I mean, people don't think about it, but you went to a seed company. Yeah. There was a lot of work to do there. So I feel like, you know, people get lost in the traditional companies and things that exist, but don't necessarily look outside the big names for jobs. True. And if you had told me even a week before I'd done my interview with Pioneer that I was going to work in ag, I would have laughed.

Because, yeah, you think of like going out in the field in the summer and detasseling not doing tech work um but like john deere last year went to uh um ces and brought their self-driving tractors and they've had self-driving tractors since the 80s what was so cool about them this year? I think they wanted to blast out the fact that they are a tech company. Like that was the message that we do like good technology here. That's such an odd way to go about it. Yep. I remember many years ago, I found this book that was like Girl Scout badges for adults. And it was a book of all these things you should try. Writing stories or learning to weld. And it was like a thousand things. Do you have that book?

Because it kind of sounds like you've earned most of the badges. I kind of want that book. I don't know what that book is. Welding is one I still need to earn though. Someday. I mean, that's one of the best things about a makerspace is that you might actually get to there. Yeah, we have welders. So and we have people who can teach that, which is kind of awesome. Do you try to learn all of the things, or do you go in with a project? I usually try to learn things based on the projects I want to build, because just going in and saying, well, I want to learn how to use the drill press doesn't really do much for me. Because, like, okay, whatever. Like, I know what it does, but if I can't use it right now, it's not really relevant for me. Cause like, okay, whatever. Like I know what it does, but if I can't use it right now, that's not really relevant to, um, for me. So it helps to pick it up and stick with me.

If I have a project in mind now, I have a long list of projects I'd like to get to like a never ending list. So, um, eventually I'd like to learn them all, but, um, yeah, I try to stick with the ones I can actually work on right now. So someday I'll get back into the woodshop and actually learn some of those tools. But I think the lift, like the automotive lift, I have a pickup. I don't think I'm ever going to want to lift that pickup by myself on the lift. That just sounds too scary for me. Well, I mean, one of the great things about a makerspace is you don't always have to do it by yourself yeah no no that's pretty unusual for makerspaces having the automotive stuff right i mean that's pretty cool yeah somebody's pet idea or did it was it a consensus thing like we should

do this it was luck from the building we got to move into. The previous tenant had been a custom auto, like racing auto parts manufacturer. So they had two lifts in there and they took one with them when they moved out and left the other. So our landlord technically owns the lift, but yeah, we have full use of it and you rent it by the day and it's really cheap if you're a member. The book is called You Can Do It, the Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-Up Girls. Nice. So I know you are a listener of the show. We've talked about it. And you are also part of our Embedded Slack Patreon widget.

Why? Why can i not anyway thank you to you for providing your microphone um but um you are pretty active on these things does it give you any benefit yeah um i'm learning a lot from the slack even if i don't respond to something, I read almost all of it. And so it's interesting to see the problems people are having. I haven't been part of the book club yet, but hopefully soon. Yes, I may join the book club now that they're done with my book, but that was just too terrifying. It was a good one to start with though. Um, but then, uh, last year, actually, when I was starting to do the consulting stuff, Anders was on there saying like, I got this awesome internship

with this really cool company. And, um, but he's really trying to like get people into the, you know, embedded stuff and, uh, really flexible schedules and stuff. And I was like, you need to tell me more about this and maybe introduce me and so he introduced me to joe schneider who runs dojo5 and i did an interview and came on as a consultant for the first two or three months and then he somehow convinced me to be an employee i think insurance had to do with that but yeah so i got my job because the embedded fm slack which was pretty awesome and then two weeks ago he called me up and was like by the way i need a product manager and i'd like it to be you and so i started on full-time two mondays ago what a weird time that i mean now is when everybody's being laid off and you get a job and that's pretty cool. I am surprised at how many people are still hiring.

True. But it is harder to get consulting jobs right now too, because everybody's trying to not spend any cash. Or like I had been doing for the car wash company, what I'd been working on was trade show booths. So some of the line systems for the trade show booth. And so nobody's going to trade shows. I've lost a lot of work that way too, because there's just nobody asking to build that stuff anymore. Yeah.

Some of our projects that we didn't expect to be affected are affected because of things like, well, we can't travel and test it. And so we're going to go on a starvation diet until we can get to where the things are that can be tested. And yet, in the beginning, I was like, oh, well, you know, this doesn't matter. We'll just keep going. It's been really weird. I guess that sums up a lot. Yeah, it really is like the world's been on a sick day. Let's see.

I asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, and you said you still weren't sure. Do you have any concrete goals? Do you have any plans? Do you have the five-year plan laid out? Hey, I used to do that. I don't anymore, but I used to. The Mitch Hedberg joke of celebrating the five-year anniversary of you asking me this question. No, I mean, I've just always wanted to learn new stuff, keep learning new stuff, be a better engineer. Um, I keep, you know, growing my skills in any department. Um, I'm hoping my home renovations are done in five years because I'm doing most of them myself. So, cause I can't turn down a project, but yeah, I think I still want to be a little bit of everything when i grow up whenever i decide to grow up i think sometimes learning new skills just helps whatever it is in your brain that learns it doesn't have to be a good and useful new skill it just has to be learning yeah all right i don't know if that made any sense i mean even like like um i

also do some crochet which is really awesome to keep my hands busy um because i don't sit still well um but even that like i know how to crochet but there's always a new skill you can learn like there's always an extra thing like a new stitch a new style of thing to make and it's the same with engineering too there's there's always something new to learn. Like you could be the best at what you do and you're still going to have something more to learn. And that's the awesome part. Uh, I want to go back to the makerspace for a second, because we've been associated with makerspaces in the past. We worked with a local one called tech shop that people may have heard of because it kind of was one of the bigger commercial ones and they got really big really fast and then cratered really

equally fast um and it seems like some makerspaces really struggle like they'll they'll have a good a good initial year or so and then sort of fall away. Have you done anything differently? What do you think has made you successful? I think because we did grow slowly. We started small. We didn't even have a building until we knew we had enough members to pay for a space. We didn't move to new buildings until it became painful to stay. we've always tried to stay within our means and respond to the community. It always seems like tech shop or other ones that start from the top down, like they have a business model or somebody's vision for what it should be.

Those seem to go south faster than ones that say, we're here for the community. What does the community want? What are they using the space for? And being able to switch that as you move forward. And it was always super expensive. I remember tech shop memberships were a lot. Like they think it was... And then you had to take classes that were a lot and difficult to schedule. Right. If you wanted to use a piece of equipment, it was a couple hundred bucks to get qualified. And yet you're doing it for $40. That surprises me. Where was the money going? Yeah.

I guess, I mean, a lot of that was Silicon Valley, so it was going to rent, but they had places in other places. Yeah. I think they were charging like $2 a minute to use the water jet cutter there. That sounds about right. Yeah. a minute. Yeah, a good podcast to listen to if you want more makerspace information is Makers on Tap. And they're out of Peoria. And they're a lot like us where they're very community-based. They're pretty small.

They're growing slowly. Still all volunteer. So that's part of it too we don't need salaries to pay we probably should get somebody and start paying them to do some of this soon but but yeah we'd have a lot of um overhead that's just not there because we're all volunteer what are some of the most interesting projects that have come out of your makerspace? Early on, they did the Power Wheels racing. And I don't know if Power Wheels racing is like when they take those Barbie cars and little like Jeeps, like G.I. Joe Jeeps that the kids ride around in their driveway and they turn them into race cars um well the year that they competed or the team here competed they got theirs going over 40 miles an hour with a forklift boom motor

and then milwaukee i think had another insanely fast one but after that year they changed the rules so you can't build stuff that crazy and still compete anymore it seems very very dangerous yes i never got on it they kept offering i'm like i don't i don't need to drive that i mean it's like go karts with even less support yeah even less protection there's no roll cage there's no seat belts wow yeah um i mean we also uh pretty good so like uh classes for with we partnered with 4-h because um we're like we don't know how to market to parents that we have classes so now we we partner with 4-H and the 4-H people come and help us run the classes. So that's really good. So we've done like stained glass and leatherworking and soldering.

And we're trying to get a woodworking one together, but we're still organizing that since the shop's still being put together. But yeah, I'm trying to think of what else we've built there's a lot but as a volunteer organization do you have the problems a volunteer organization often have with everybody having an opinion and feeling that it's a democracy yes um things go slower because it has to be kind of agreed on um there's a concept of duocracy is the person who's doing it has to be kind of agreed on. There's a concept of duocracy is the person who's doing it has more say than anyone else, which can turn toxic, too, because then you get like a couple of people who have the time and energy and resources to be there more often kind of taking over or getting burnt out after a while and leaving and then get to figure out who's going to do it. Um, and also the, if it's everybody's job to clean, it's nobody's job to clean.

Yeah. I'm familiar with that in all sorts of ways. Okay. So what is the best part about working with the volunteers at Area 515? Probably the variety of backgrounds people come from. So we started with a lot of engineers and programmers, you know, who got antsy and wanted to do stuff with their hands and build things. But ever since then, we've gotten teachers and artists and students from middle school on up, retired postal workers, woodworkers, like car experts.

It's just a really cool group of people who come from a, you know, wide range of experiences and yeah, learning from them and figuring out how to do things better and seeing how people can come together, even though they don't have much shared experience, is kind of cool. Well, I should let you get back to either making or renovations or crocheting or work. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I think just keep learning whether it's at work or in your hobbies or other parts of your life just keep learning sounds like good advice

I guess has been Bailey Steinfett Embedded Engineer and Product Manager at Dojo5 thanks Bailey thank you thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to our Patreon supporters for Bailey's mic. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or at the contact link on embedded.fm.

And now a quote to leave you with from Douglas Adams. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I needed to be. 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.