Embedded - 350: The State of the Empire Is Good

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

Ben Hencke (@ledmage, @im889) updated us on blinking lights and running a small hardware business. You can find the current PixelBlaze in the Electomage store on Tindie (tindie.com/stores/electromage/) or signup for a shiny new version on CrowdSupply. Ben’s personal site (bhencke.com) has lots of projects including a page devoted to the awesome Pixelblaze projects (including the BioTronEsis alien light sea creatures which someone who hosts this show hopes will be in her Christmas stocking). When Ben is making Pixelblaze, the brand is ElectroMage (electromage.com/) so you can see more about Pixelblaze there including the forum. We didn’t talk about TapGlo, the arcade ping pong table that Ben is also working on. Favorite solder paste: LOCTITE GC 10 paste (henkel-adhesives) About his favorite acronym, Ben says, “XMLHttpRequest is my favorite because it perfectly illustrates how we're (developers) bad at naming things and like to come up with arbitrary rules for things. The story about how XML is all caps and Html is camel case is just too perfect, and it's popular use rarely has anything to do with XML” Finally, There are 40 different flavors of Kit Kat. There are 12 flavors of candy corn, they all taste the same.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alesia White. I'm alongside Christopher White, and we are pleased to welcome Ben Henke back to the show. I suspect there will be some blinking lights, which you probably won't be able to see. Hey, Ben, how's it going? Pretty good. How you doing? Could you tell us about yourself as though we met at a random meetup at a small coffee shop for no reasons in the before times? That might have happened. Yeah, let's see. So I like to invent and tinker on things um i'm an engineer primarily software engineer and more recently an entrepreneur so i have a background primarily in software with like scalable web services architecture and things like that um previously worked at school messenger

built up this awesome notification system for schools, lots of servers, databases, and stuff like that. And more recently, I've been getting into electronics. It's always been a hobby. I always tinker around on RadioShack kits and stuff like that, and even took some EE courses when I was a kid, which is pretty cool. But switched primarily to that in 2016. So I've been kind of transitioning to that. And now I run a business making and selling fun gadgets.

And that's mostly what we're going to talk about, I think. But first lighting round. Are you ready? Yeah. Do you miss banana slugs? Yes, they're awesome. What's your favorite color of light? Oh.

You should have an answer for this. You really should. Okay, how about the shade that happens in a real natural rainbow just after violet that is really hard to see? Good answer. Favorite Halloween things could be costumes candy movies oh hmm or leave i haven't thought about that or you could hate halloween no i love halloween i'm totally drawing a blank there all right favorite candy uh candy corn no no no i know you're lying

all right we'll pass that one what's something that a lot of people are missing out on because they don't know about it oh my gosh i am failing lightning lightning round i have no idea okay Probably something I don't know, too. All right, let's bring it back to something simpler. Favorite animal? Cats. Best thing about the Pacific Northwest? Everything is green.

Yeah, I can imagine that would be nice. All the time. Yeah. Okay, so aside from lighting around, Pixel Blaze, that is one of the pieces of hardware that you make. And it was one of the first ones you started to sell. Could you describe what it is for somebody who's never seen one? Sure. So Pixel Blaze as a system is basically a way to live code cool stuff on LEDs. And so

physically, it's a little board with a wireless chip on it that connects up to digitally addressable LEDs. And then that serves up a web page that you connect to with your browser, either on a desktop computer or on your phone. And you can go in there and it'll store a bunch of patterns. You can kind of click on them to change things. But really, the kind of unique thing that Pixel Blaze does is it has an IDE built into that web page that you can go in and type in a bunch of code and it compiles it and runs it on the chip on the fly. So milliseconds after you're done typing something, if it's syntactically valid, your code's actually

running on the chip and you can see that effects live on your LEDs. So that's the cool part. And syntactically valid is you have a sort of language that's heavy on math. Mm-hmm. How else would you describe the language? So technically it's a subset of ES6, which is like a fancy term for JavaScript or new JavaScript.

So basically JavaScript, but it doesn't have any like the sort of things that you would consider JavaScript-y. So it's kind of closer to C and the things that it supports. So syntactically, think C. You know, you got like parentheses and curly braces and you can type a bunch of math and you can call functions and things like that. And so there's a little bit less syntax. So, you know, technically JavaScript, you don't have to have like semicolons and stuff like that. But, you know, for the most part, it's pretty much the same. But as long as you have, you know, like no missing curly braces or unbalanced parentheses or something like that um you're good to go

okay so what kind of leds you say it make it controls leds what what kinds of led what would i plug into the what would i buy to go along with this or what could i control uh like the vast video screen or a strip or yeah so this is more geared towards LED strips, the kinds of things that you have, like digitally addressable LEDs. So if you think of like a WS-2012 or NeoPixel or an APA-102, also known as DotStar. So those sorts of LEDs, often they come in strips.

Sometimes they're on strings. So those are really popular around holiday time. There are matrix panel arrangements, but typically they don't get up into the video wall, like LED video wall sort of scale of things. So these are internet LEDs, or more likely internet strings of LEDs. Yeah. What are some of the things people have been using them for oh gosh tons and tons of stuff and actually i've been collecting all that stuff for some reason recently but there's lots of really cool stuff so people have made

you know you can do like home integration type stuff home automation type integrations because it's an internet of things thing but typically people will do this in like an art piece or like costumes or for like cars or motorcycles and things like that. So, I mean, one of my favorite piece, I think, is actually an upcycled old like 70s style like standing lamp. And so it's got these like black fins kind of come out of the center. And it almost kind of looks like a warp core or something. and this person ran these led strips up and down between all these fins with some diffusion and then made it uh sound reactive and so it's just really really cool

looking um let's see there's uh another artist that um does all kinds of really cool like uh molds with like clear resins and things and so he'll mold like cactuses or other interesting structures and kind of create like these sea creatures and then lights those up with LEDs. And then, you know, sometimes a combination of LEDs and like projection mapping creates some really cool effects. That sounds really cool. We're going to need links for pictures.

Oh yeah, for sure. When we talked to you a few years ago, wow, it's about three years ago now, you had put this up on Tindy, the first version of Pixelblaze, and had made a few, maybe several sales. What is the state of your empire today? The state of the empire is good um yeah so i mean last time we talked i was like if i remember correctly i was like hand soldering these and trying to figure out how to better hand solder them um and then working with um with bob at a small batch assembly to to get some of those made. And so I did,

and it was awesome. And I think I made something like almost 700 that way, and then those sold, and I needed more. And I ended up actually buying a pick and place machine to build them myself. And so I've been building them myself since. And it's been just sort of scaling up since then. So sorry, that's the, how I made all the boards, but yeah, so it's been selling really good. And I've added a number of like add-ons and things still all going through Tindy. It's been like popping up on their popular products page quite a bit, which is always really, really nice to see. People seem to really, really enjoy it. So there's like tons of awesome reviews, which is, it's just awesome to see that people really like the thing. So yeah, it's going really well. And now kind of getting into sort of

the next phase and how to kind of take it to the next level and the next version. Well, when I met you, and I think maybe even when we talked last, you had a software contract job that you did for most of your day. And this was a side gig. Is that still true? So I have been transitioning sort of away from that to more of this. So it's been doing good enough that I think, you know, it's time to try to make a go of this. So this year I decided, you know, like January 1st, I'm going to switch. So I didn't renew my contract and dived into it. Like, let's try to make a real business out of this,

have this be the full-time gig. Um, but yeah, so it's, it's been an exciting year. Sort of terrifying. So you made that decision right before things got weird. Um, Yeah. If, if I had known, Well, would you have made a different decision or, or? You know, that's hard to say. I mean, uh pretty early on i knew you know this is going to significantly impact sales because a lot of the things that you would use cool blinking leds for just aren't happening um or happening a lot less you know or because of economic reasons people are scaling back their hobbies

or projects and things like that so i knew this year was going to be tough um but fortunately it's kind of holding you know solid enough that you know if things went back to normal i think this would be um looking pretty good that sort of makes sense to me because while people aren't going out to have fun with leds some of us have more time at home that we are doing things with. And so I could see having more time to play with the LEDs and to build things, even if I don't get to show them off. Okay, so you got a pick-and-place machine. And when you got one, I was just like, are you kidding? You're going to get your own pick-and-place machine?

What kind did you get? And was it really a good idea? Yeah. So I was looking for ways to get this manufactured. And really, there's a bunch of different variables that go into trying to get a board made. There's a lot of stuff that you have to know. You know, everything from like how you, you know, design like the pad layout and things like that and how paste is going to work and stencils and how that reflows and all that kind of fun stuff. And I don't really have any firsthand knowledge of this other than doing it by hand.

And of course, anytime you do all this stuff through machines, it's, you know, totally different. There's a different set of sort of design for manufacturing criteria that you would end up using. And I wanted to know a little bit more about that, but I also wanted a quicker and better turnaround. So, you know, even with, you know, somebody that's pretty responsive, I was still looking at something around a month-ish, right? So, like, I go from idea to from idea to getting a batch of PCBs and ordering all the parts and getting that to somebody. And then it's about a month until I have the actual boards. And I wanted to speed up the turnaround time

so I could have ideas and get them out there more quickly. So I found this article by Nate, the founder of SparkFun, about how he got this little desktop pick-and-place and was using that for prototyping. I was like, are you kidding me? This guy has crazy amounts of equipment at his disposal when he's buying this cheap desktop pick-and-place machine. What's this all about? So it turns out this thing is just pretty handy for just taking a file, throwing it on the thing, and then getting it to run. So for his purposes, it was working out great.

And I really aligned with, you know, sort of that use case. I ended up getting the same thing. And so it's a charm high. It's got like some model numbers. It says 36 VA. So it's got vision and 36 or 30 something feeders, basically. Two nozzles. It's not like a high-end machine, but it's got vision. So it's good enough for most things. What does the vision allow it to do? Like differentiate parts or look for markers on the

board to put things or magic something? Right, right. Yeah, so I guess I should back up a little bit. So in the desktop pick and place world, like on the super cheap low end, like you'll get stuff that's basically like the 3D printer mechanics, but with like a nozzle that like suctions up little parts out of tape and stuff. Okay. But it's just basically running based on coordinates that you program in so it's kind of blind so if it like picks something up wrong which happens like all the time it

doesn't know about it and it might just sort of like place it wrong right all right and or when like you first set the thing up you have to make sure that it's like coordinates are exactly right and stuff like that so the vision really helps out with that so they have a down camera and an up camera so the down camera lets you sort of like move the head around make sure that it's going to place stuff in the right spots or pick things up from the right spots and they have a down camera and an up camera. So the down camera lets you sort of like move the head around, make sure that it's going to place stuff in the right spots or pick things up from the right spots. And they have an up camera, which lets it look at the bottom of the component after it's picked it up,

make sure that the translation is correct, and also that the rotation is correct and sort of correct for any of that kind of stuff when it goes to place it. Okay. So you made your hardware soldering into a software problem i mean it went from from soldering everything by hand to programming a machine it sounds like yeah well you know and i mean programming it's like it's not i'm not really writing code or anything i'm just like telling it you know coordinates and stuff, right? But yeah, it's more like a machine operator job at that point.

It's actually, it's really close to babysitting a very picky 3D printer. That makes sense. Okay, so you have a pick and place machine, and you've built some, you made the initial Pixel Blades, you made a couple of others, you made some other boards, but things are changing now. You're going to version 3. Why? And what is version 3? How is it different? Yeah, so version 2 is based on the ESP8266, which is a pretty awesome chip in terms of just value and just what it can do and the specs for the price. But the ESP32, which is sort of the next line in that series of chips, is out, has been out for a while.

And it was time to bump that up to the next version. And so the ESP32 has two cores, actually, which is pretty cool from a microprocessor standpoint. And both of them are faster than the original in the 8266. It's got gobs more RAM, which is really, really helpful because things get pretty tight. And a bunch of additional peripherals and stuff. So really, it's about cranking out LEDs faster so you can have higher frame rates, more GPIO so you can interface with more sensors or buttons or switches or turn external things on and off in the sort of general scripting sense, and just an overall faster user experience. Okay. What are you doing differently with it?

I mean, that's what EspressF would say. Yeah. There's the specs. sorry, on the V3 and the V2 are pretty similar. So, you know, today, actually, they're coming off of the same code base. There's some additional usability enhancements and things on the V3. But from a hardware perspective, my goal was actually to make them as compatible as possible. So there's a number of add-on boards, sensor boards, output expanders, and things like that. And I wanted those to be compatible with the V3. So the V3 is actually the same form factor as the V2 and has the same sort of layout for where all the connectors and headers and things are.

And the software itself is very similar. So the same kind of pattern language and all that kind of stuff. It just runs a lot faster, has more memories. You can do more complex things. You can run more LEDs at the same frames per second or the same LEDs at higher frames per second. And it unlocks all kinds of potential for the future. So it has the memory to continue to

add and expand features where on the 8266, I'm basically pushing the limits in every dimension on that chip. I didn't really like the 8266. I know a lot of people out there are going, what? $4 Wi-Fi? It's amazing. It was amazing, but it was also kind of clunky. Or at least it felt clunky to me having worked on actual

Wi-Fi products. I haven't tried the ESP32. Do you like it? I have a feeling that you would probably have the same experience. Well, it's good to know. Yeah. I wouldn't say that it's less clunky or that the SDK is world better or anything like that,

but it certainly is just a ton of hardware for a very low price. And so really it's that sort of price point that I'm going for. Is it still cheap? Yeah. Good. I mean, it seems like the absolute sweet spot for the kind of product you're making. Was there anything else you looked at for V3 and said, okay, is there something else out there that's not an ESP?

So I have considered using an ARM chip for the main processing engine that all of your patterns and stuff run on. And the reason that I might go down that route is because ARM's instruction set architecture is very well documented and it's all pretty well known and works very well. And there's tons and tons of chips with all kinds of different performances that I could potentially choose from there and kind of unlock that from the processor that just happens to be running the Wi-Fi stack. But then I'm looking at running a Wi-Fi chip alongside an ARM chip and then dealing with all the complexities of having two different code bases communicate with each other

and all that kind of fun stuff. So it may happen at some point in the future, but for right now this was sort of like the perfect combination of fast enough, has enough memory, and also does Wi-Fi. But it has two CPUs, and you still have that problem of them communicating with each other, don't you? Mm-hmm. Does it allocate one for Wi-Fi and the other one is for application, or do you get to control both? Yeah, so by default, it schedules all of the system stuff.

So they have in their SDK a whole bunch of things that's handling the Wi-Fi things, right? And they need CPU time, and that's all running on one core. And then by default, your stuff runs on the other core. But you can schedule new tasks to run on either core and so the system core is you know not used 100 of the time there's tons and tons of um you know free cycles there that you can uh that you can borrow for stuff dangerously you can borrow for stuff dangerously well i wouldn't say it's like dangerous like you're not to crash anything by using it. But you will definitely get preempted by something that's more important. And is this FreeRTOS? What are you running on the chip?

Yeah, so Espressif took FreeRTOS and hacked multi-core support into it, is my understanding. So it has FreeRTOS APIs plus a couple of extra things. Yay? I'm sure it's fine. How is writing firmware for it? Is it like, oh yeah, I worked with the old chip, the new one, it's pretty much the same, just better? Or is it learning a whole new system? That's a great question.

Inside joke. So, I mean, it's been challenging for various reasons but if you're coming from just running on a single CPU like most of the microcontroller stuff I had ever done previously you start to run into multi-threaded kind of

issues and you need more semaphores to keep track of who owns what and that sort of thing which is sort of something that you deal with a lot more when you're dealing with large distributed web services and stuff like that, but now on a microcontroller. So there's things like keeping track of which CPU your task is running on, the fact that there are even multiple tasks

that could be running concurrently. You run into things with threads and race conditions. So if one thread is trying to do something or modify some memory in another, thread is doing something else. If they don't happen in the order that you think they might happen in, you can get into weird states. You need to guard against those with semaphores

and things like that, or just how you design your code. There's resource contention and things like that that you have to keep in mind. So you can't have everything just talk to the spy port all at the same time, for example. And there's different ways that you would design and architect how you lay out your things so that you're deleg of delegating responsibility to things as opposed to just having everything sort of try to talk to those directly and more about you know sending messages through queues and things like that it sounds like actually a pretty great platform to learn all that stuff on and you'd have to i mean it's not like you could there's a lot of

things you could avoid yeah but once you have wireless, you have some form of asynchronous communication. And once you have that, then you really have to start figuring out the race conditions and the ordering problems. Yeah. that's kind of new, but the rest of it, the rest of writing for the ESP chips is pretty similar or did they just scrap the old API and you have a whole new one? Oh yeah, it's a different SDK for sure. So those are night and day difference. Okay, so that's the chip. What about the board? What else is new?

You said you wanted to keep it the same, but it's a new board. What else would I be getting on my new board? New. New. Yeah. Version 3. Yeah. So funny story.

V2 Plus is actually V3, but backported to the old chip so i actually started on this design um a while ago and it wasn't ready yet but i i needed to make more boards so i carried back carried forward or backwards one of the two um all the awesome stuff yeah sideways all pretty much all the awesome stuff so i added a a couple extra things. So, for example, reverse polarity protection, you know, because people would plug stuff in backwards and try their Pixel Blaze and all their programs were, of course, on the chip. What? You've seen things, plugging things in backwards. Yeah. I've done that.

Yeah, so that's a nice feature, right? So, you know, it just kind of doesn't work, but at least it's not, you know, smoking. So there's that. There's high voltage protection. So, you know, oftentimes people, like, plug this into, like, a 12-volt LED system. And so on the old version, I had just a 5- to 3-volt regulator, which maxes at 6, so it would let the magic smoke out. So now there's a higher regulator. It'll go into thermal shutdown,

but that's a cheap way to give people some protection if they do hook up 12 volts. There's a button, which was surprisingly lacking on the original version of Pixel Blaze. You had to add your own to switch patterns in setup mode. But really, the difference you get between V2 Plus and V3, there's just a ton of I.O. that are available on the underside. So you get tons of ADCs, so lots of analog inputs.

There's a touch controller, so you can quickly and easily add touch buttons and things like that. A bunch of digital I.O. that you can use for things. But otherwise, it's exactly the same form factor, just basically a brain swap. I like the additional I.O. because that's always been something

that I have wanted for the Pixel Blitz, is to be able to do more, having it be smart on its own, not needing me to tell it what to do, but to look at what's around it and do whatever it says that's around it, like temperature or even music. Before, if I wanted to have sound activated lighting, I had to have something that that board that does all the audio analysis, a jack so you can plug in external audio if you don't want to use the mic, an accelerometer and a light sensor and a couple of additional analog inputs. So you can do sound directly with that.

But yeah, so now you have tons more audio inputs. You can connect that to all kinds of different analog sensors and things like that. Oh, I didn't even know about that. That's cool. And there is one more thing with V3. Just one more thing. There's a new form factor. So the V3 standard is just like the V2 Plus like almost identical board layout everything there is a

picoform factor that is incredibly tiny like it's it's thinner or about as thin as led strips themselves and something like 33 i have to go look that up millimeters long so it's like really really tiny and is your board really really tiny too The V3 standard's just under 35 by 40 millimeters, including the antenna and stuff like that. And the Pico's 11 millimeters by 33 and a third. So it's super tiny. And that includes the antenna and button and everything. So Pico. P-I-C-O? Mm-hmm. Okay. Ah, Pico. P-I-C-O?

Mm-hmm. Okay. Ah, dialects. I would have said Pico, but... Pico, Pico. Is it Pico? Don't know. I don't know.

I'm staying with Pico, but I'm okay with Pico. I just wanted to make sure it was the same thing. Okay. One thousandth of a nano. I'm going to have to get... That's probably right. I'm going to have to get...

I'm going to have to get a shirt like the KiCad KiCad. Yes, exactly. Although, now that I think about that, Pyco is easier. The other one, representing that, no. What?

It'll come to you. It'll be okay. It'll come to you. All right. Okay. But these aren't on your Tindy. These aren't on... CrowdSupply, right? This is coming through CrowdSupply. Yeah.

So V3 is launching through CrowdSupply. Whereas before, I would just make a couple of boards and throw it up on my store and see how they do and maybe make more. This time around, I'm going through CrowdSupply. What is CrowdSupply? So CrowdSupply is a crowdfunding site for hardware projects. And so you can kind of think of it like Kickstarter in terms of, you know, people go on there and they say, hey, this looks like a really cool project. I'm going to back it. So like I say, I want one of these boards for X dollars.

And here's my money and ship it to me whenever it's ready. Except CrowdSupply is like way more responsible. So they go through this whole process. They make sure that, first of all, that you have like a good product, that it's unique and interesting in the world. And also they go through this very rigorous vetting process that I'm in the middle of right now, where they make sure that you actually can make this thing, you know, send us your prototypes, not just like a photograph of it, right? Let's make sure this thing works, document how you're going to manufacture this thing, and all that kind of stuff to make sure that, you know, you actually will be able to ship and deliver on that campaign.

So it's totally awesome for that. Even before I was going through them for this, you know, I've used them, you know, to back interesting projects and things in the past. Oh, I thought they actually helped you build the board. This is just about getting the funding. Mm-hmm. Okay. And it's more vetted than Kickstarter. But you already know what you're doing. Did you think going with Kickstarter would get you less likely to be funded?

Or did you just like the idea of going through somebody who has more, I don't want to say responsibility, but a better track record? Yeah, I suppose there's a couple of different reasons there. So one is I've sort of known about CrowdSupp um, sort of known about crowd supply and I think they're just a, an awesome group of people. Um, and actually last year they had, um, a convention down in Portland, um, teardown and it was just super amazing. I got to like meet a bunch of the crowd supply folks. They're just awesome people. Um, and, uh, you know, uh, an acquaintance of mine, um, who I knew through pixel blades ended up working there, which was also another awesome reason. And sort of one of the things that sort of like put it over, pushed it over the line, I guess, right?

But really, I think the crowd supply crowd, the kind of people that would go for this sort of thing. I mean, if you go on their website and you go look around stuff, you're buying, you know, circuit boards. Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, they might be hardware projects and like cases and things,

but it's not like, it's, it's a different kind of scene than, than Kickstarter. Cool. Kickstarter's got everything, right? Music and projects and. Restaurants.

Restaurants and. Yeah. Robots that don't work. Some robots that do, probably. And also, the other big thing is that CrowdSupply is more involved with the project. And they're more committed to helping it succeed. Whereas Kickstarter is sort of the marketing and making sure that you can even build this thing. And all that kind of stuff is just sort of left up to you, right?

And you haven't yet shipped, started your campaign. What is the next step in CrowdSupply? Yeah. So as we record this, it's in a sort of pre-launch phase. So there's a page that you can go on and put in your email address and subscribe for updates and stuff. So when it does go live, you'll know immediately. And then once it does go live, then you can see, you know, I want one of these and one of these and sort of add a couple of things and back them and add them to your cart. And then the campaign will run for a period of time. And then at the end of the

campaign, assuming it's successfully funded, I guess they collect all the money, write me a check, I build them, and then ship them to CrowdSupply, who then is doing the fulfillment. Oh, that's kind of nice. Fulfillment's such a pain. Yeah. Okay. So we're hoping to put this show up on November 5th, which is currently your target Yeah. it will last? So that's still, we're still trying to iron out the details for that just because of the timing around the holidays and, you know, things like that. But the original timeline was four weeks, four to six weeks. So from the fifth to four to six weeks out from there, it would be active. Okay. And then do they give you a limited time to build it?

So, so yeah, I mean, that's part of the's part of the process is you say, okay, well, here's the different kinds of things that I'm going to offer in the campaign. And I'm going to make them in batches of, let's say, 500 or 100 or whatever it ends up being. And it takes this long. Here's my lead time for these things. And so it depends on the popularity of the campaign. So it might be that, well, you know, I've got, you know, enough to ship everything out in the first one, or maybe the first batch of orders goes at a certain date, and then, you know, the next batch is, you know, two weeks out from that, or so on and so forth. Are you able to limit it? Yeah. Okay, so if you get 100,000 orders,

you don't collapse. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if that happened, you know, it might orders, you don't collapse. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if that happened, you know, it might be, you know, with the current, you know, timeline and manufacturing capability, it might, you know, push the final ship date for the late backers to like sometime way in the future. But yeah, if you need to, for whatever reason, like let's say you had something that was, and I don't, but let's say you had something that, you know, required a lot of like hand assembly time or something like that.

You know, you could say, I don't want but let's say you had something that required a lot of hand assembly time or something like that. You could say, I don't want to have more than 100 of these in the campaign or anything. Okay. And do you know how much it's going to cost or how many backers you need? So that's kind of interesting. So the price is looking like, through some changes that are happening right now with CrowdSupply, it looks like the price is going to be sort of closer to what I will end up ultimately selling it for, which is awesome. So the current price target, and I don't know if I should say this because it's not finalized. Give us a range. Okay.

Around $35. Okay. So not that different from your V2 version. Mm-hmm. Pretty good. Does more. It does more. And, I mean, somebody might be able to get an ESP32 for cheaper because, as we noted, it's not that much more expensive than the originals. But you have more on the board.

You have the power, and maybe I should be letting you do this. Ben, why would people pay more than the minimum price for the ESP32? That's a great question. software and to a large extent support. So when you get the Pixel Blaze firmware, there's a whole lot of software on top of that ESP32 chip that is serving up that web page that has a full IDE, the easy-to-use interface that lets you set up Wi-Fi, that lets you go in and pick patterns and even control things about those patterns with easy-to-use user interface controls, the whole editor that lets you live compile code and run that on the chip live.

And so there's all that software, really, that's on top of that base chip. And that's primarily what the cost is around Pixel Place, is supporting that software venture. In addition to that, I really strive for excellent customer support. So oftentimes you can just go on the forums and ask a question. And sometimes people beat me to the answer, but a lot of times I'm on there answering all your questions, making sure that you've got all the information that you need.

I'm trying to give you pointers into where you could learn more about coding. If you're a novice coder or haven't been coding in a long time, often I'm asked, how do I get into doing this sort of thing? Or if you have a particular question, if you have an install, things like that. So I try to spend quite a bit of time just helping folks get done whatever they're trying to do with Pixel Place. Wow, that makes it seem really cheap right um what is the worst part of owning your own business support oh sorry that was kind of a leading question wasn't it no the support's actually the support's great um i i mean my customers are absolutely uh wonderful to work with uh but i would have to say all the worst thing about owning a business

is all that business stuff oh my gosh it's terrible payroll taxes and and and accounting or something else oh yeah and and then yeah with okay so in July, I hired an employee to help out with all the fulfillment. It gets harder. And trained him how to run the machines and stuff. So he's actually doing all the boards and stuff for me. Great guy. But, oh, my gosh, the business complications. Just in a number of forms that you have to fill out and all these things that you have to do and the taxes and the payroll and then getting health insurance health insurance health insurance alone

so all the business stuff that's like that is definitely not the fun part support is so much fun compared to anything else uh having to do with around the business. It sounds like you still do a fair amount of software development, but you used to do it. That used to be mostly all you did. Do you ever miss the easy days of just pushing compile over and over again? Right? Hey, compile, go get a cup of coffee. No, that wasn't then.

So I would say not really. I mean, go get a cup of coffee. No, that wasn't then. So I would say not really. I mean, this is a lot of fun. But what I do miss, and which I don't even know if it exists anymore, is hanging out in an office and talking to people and going to lunch and brainstorming stuff on a whiteboard with a bunch of people and that sort of thing I definitely miss. But from what I hear, that doesn't happen really. Well, not right now. Yeah. So I guess I'm not doing too bad, right? I know that actually going ahead with the business was a little scary.

What do you wish you had known then that you know now? So there's a, I would say the, the business structure that I, um, ended up with is way over complicated. Um, and so I, I have a, a tax guy and he said, Hey, you know, you're doing all this consulting stuff. You should form, um, an escort and, uh, and do that. And then you can do all these tax things, and it's advantageous for reasons, even though you're going to be paying a whole ton in my fees to file the corporate. And so, of course, I listened. And here I am. I have an S-corp. But of course, I was in California at that point in time. And you can't move corporations, I guess. They have to be gobbled up by other corporations. But you can operate as a foreign entity. So I have a California corporation operating as a foreign entity in Washington and in Portland for insurance reasons. And with, you know, like resellers permits and stuff, and it's

just like way more complicated than I think it has to be. So I would say, you know, as simple as possible on the business structure side of things, I would definitely do that differently. I guess the other thing that's a little bit more interesting and useful is paste, right? So like solder paste. There's this, it's Loctite. It's put out by.

You wrote it down somewhere where I saw. Loctite's GC10 paste Henkel adhesives? Yes. Okay. I'm sorry. I just read that. I have no idea what it means. So could you... Yeah. So when I make circuit boards, I have a stencil and some printed circuit boards. And basically, you have a jig where you put the PCB down, and then you slap the stencil on top of that. And it's got all these little holes, and paste needs to go in those holes, right? So you squeegee that on there, and then all of a sudden, all the pads that should have solder have solder. And then you put it in the pick and place machine.

It puts all the little components. They stick to the paste. You put it in the oven. And all of a sudden, you have a circuit board. Except stuff goes wrong all the time. You know, like the machine might put a component very slightly off. And most of the time, solder paste is supposed to just sort of like automatically fix that right so um you know part of the the component is touching the pad um the surface tension of the solder is going to like pull it you know right into place um anyway and the the paste that i had been using um i'm sure

is totally fine in certain applications just wasn't doing that quite as much or the way it should and so i would have like components have components that were off a little bit. And it's not that that doesn't happen, but it just wasn't fixing things that I thought it should be fixing. I was getting some bridging and stuff like that. Anyway, so paste is

kind of like Flux, right? Conversations, you'll find people that have lots and lots of advice on flux. This is the sort of the same kind of thing. So I switched pastes and this thing has like an crazy, awesome like shelf life. Um, so you can, you don't have to refrigerate it. You could just leave it out. Um, and it's not going to go bad. Um, you can actually stencil a board and leave it for like a day or two or something crazy and it's not going to dry out. And like all of my bridges went away.

So yeah, that stuff's magic. And I would say the other thing is air filters. And this is probably something I should have been better at even when I was just doing hobby stuff, which is, you know, if you're soldering, with like wire solder, there's like smoke that comes out. And if it's rosin solder it's it's an irritant but it's not super bad but if you're working with pastes it's kind of on the nastier side of things um so you definitely want to have some sort of like air filter system so

if i were the past self telling what you know or if i was me telling my past self what i should be doing i would say just you know go out there and out there. And it's crazy, like, the grower industry has, like, a whole bunch of, like, really cheap air filters that you can buy from. They work great for this. Yeah. And I remember you made a fairly persuasive, to me, argument about unleaded solder. Mm-hmm. And people argued with you yeah that's been it's it's contentious people really like their leaded solder and that's fine if they want to keep using it um but yeah i did write an article on this and it was basically around debunking a myth that I've heard a lot of times, and that's around unleaded solders being worse for you somehow, which is totally not true. And primarily the reason that was stated that unleaded solders are worse for you is because they have more or worse chemicals or flux or something in them. them um and then that would cause worse air vapors and that touching lead all day is actually not

that bad for you which is you know not not where i stand on things that's the primary means of getting it into your body yeah yeah it sounds like the electric car people say electric cars are actually worse for the environment yeah so i did a bunch of research on on safety data material safety data sheets um trying to figure out what was actually going on here, tried to like find all the research I could. And a lot of times, and especially in the solder that I just happen to have on my desk that I use every day, they have like exactly the same flux formulation for leaded and unleaded. And the safety data sheet is exactly the same, except it has nothing more on the smoke things, except it has all this extra crazy gnarly stuff about lead,

which you don't want to have, basically. If you handle it properly, you're not going to expose yourself to it. But in a hobby context, telling people that they should use leaded solder instead of unleaded, because it has better health implications, I think is just wrong. Because in a hobby context, you know, you're holding it in your hands, you're probably not wearing gloves, you know, you know, a lot of people might be like eating or drinking shortly thereafter, you know, you'd have to go wash your hands and stuff like that to really be safe. And then sometimes, you know, like, like thing I happen to use is these like brass sponges to clean your soldering iron tip. And those things basically just turn your solder into dust, right? So if you like drop that thing or you like pull it out to like change it out, you're just like

spraying, you know, tons and tons of like leaded solder dust everywhere. So in general, I think it's better to use unleaded. Of course, there are still fumes, and it is very likely that there's either more flux in those solders, even if they're the same formulations, same chemicals. They're not using gnarlier chemicals. So there's more smoke, but those are kind of more classified on the minor irritants as opposed to will give you reproductive harm sort of levels of things. And if you go back to getting a good air filter with a nice carbon insert, that's not as big a deal. Yeah. So either way, use air filters, you know, get ventilation because you don't want to be breathing that. Let's see. What other projects have you been working on?

I mean, it sounds like it's enough, but I know you had been, the MIDI keyboard that we saw, the Cynthia, was fantastic. Is there anything else you're using your own products for or ideas you've started? Yeah. So one of the beautiful secrets of taking a hobby and turning it into a business is now you can have more hobbies. Is that right? So since last time we talked, there's a bunch of fun projects. So yeah, the Synthia keyboard, I did the version 3 of that as well. And so I went to all capacitive touch, whereas before it was kind of clickety-clackety on V2,

and on V1 it was like arcade buttons. And I wanted capacitive touch because it's basically impossible to wear out. You can really just kind of bang on the thing and it's not going to do anything. If you spill some water, just clean it off, whatever. So I ended up designing this 12-key capacitive touch keyboard.

It works with this pretty thick I think it's like 5 or 6 millimeter thick acrylic on top of the sensor. So your fingers pretty far away with, uh, leds running along the backside to illuminate the acrylic. And it looks, they're just absolutely gorgeous. And I've, I'll put some links in there and the notes. Um, and then I started like really geeking out about, um, like capacitive touch and actually got it to the point where I can detect acceleration

for a MIDI keyboard. So you can press it softly or press it hard and get a stronger note. By running the capacitance on the sensor really, really fast and detecting the rate at which your finger smushed into the surface. That's cool. Where that sort of like flattened out and you stopped increasing the capacitance. Anyway, so I threw that together and actually got some help from Alicia to try to figure out how to debug.

Because when you have two of these things next to each other, the way the capacitive sensing stuff works is it throws out a charge on the plate. And of course, that could interfere with stuff that's next to it. So as soon as you had multiple keyboards next to each other, they had to do this stuff at the same time where they would start to give bad readings on adjacent keys and stuff. So that was super awesome. Got multiple of those working. And then installed one of these things in the Museum of Discovery in Santa Cruz, which is a children's museum. Neat. And it ran for like a year with kids just banging away at this thing. Just totally going nuts.

And they loved it. It was awesome. Yeah. How cool. It was awesome. Yeah. How cool. Let's see. You told me to ask you about Halloween LED decoration tips. I have a really, really cheap, easy one. So you take like a coin cell, like one of the three volt, like a CR2032.

And you can get just a couple of bare LEDs, the ones with leads, and you can actually run those straight off of those coin cells. And so this is kind of what people would make with throwies, where you can tape that together along with a magnet and throw it on a metal surface far away. Yeah, exactly. Impossible to take down.

Sorry. But if you get two LEDs, you can make cool little creepy eyes on this coin cell, like two little glowy LED eyes, and then hide them all on your bushes and stuff, and it's awesome. Cool. That's actually a good idea, because we're having a Halloween no-contact scavenger hunt trick-or-treating party. Party is a strong word. Party is a strong word given the few people who are coming. We'll be waving through windows.

Yes. So it would be kind of fun to have more things to put out. We've got a pack of Sierra 2032s. And I have my secret stash of LEDs. I think I even have some candle ones from EMSL. Okay, so now you've got me totally distracted.

Now I want to go play with the Halloween stuff. But I also wanted to ask you about some other things that Pixel Plays has been used for. You mentioned the alien sea creatures, which I'm going to need a sample of. What's this about a liquid LED bucket? It's their whole

bucket? Yeah. So, Roger Regulus on Twitter actually did this really awesome project with the Pixel Blaze, and he got one of the early V3 pre-production units. And he took the accelerometer on the sensor board and used it to detect sort of the vector of gravity

and then project that onto basically like a helix wrapped around like a cylinder of an an led strip right so that it's basically um covering all the outside is like one continuous strip map that in and three-dimensional coordinates and then rotates sort of the plane that's visible based on the vector of gravity from the accelerometer and so what happens is you take this bucket and on the bottom it's like filled with you know like a gradient of color and then kind of uh goes to to black on like some you know on some line and if you tip it and rotate it it looks like there's glowing liquid liquid floating around in this bucket it's awesome huh all right i need to see that visually but Glowflow. It's really cool.

So at the top of the show, you mentioned that your career history was as a software person, and then you started doing electronics as a hobby, and then in 2016, you started doing Pixel Blaze and learning more. I don't think we've ever really talked to you about how you learned electronics past that time. You said you took some EE classes, but was there a lot of self-education during the course of building Pixel Blaze and stuff? Were there any resources that you found really useful? Yeah. When I had taken some EE classes, I was talking about when I was a kid and still monkeying around with RadioShack hits and stuff like that.

But yeah, so more recently, it's really just sort of like a skill that I picked up through being self-taught, and it's how to teach myself stuff and really just getting books and resources and blogs. And actually, your Slack has been incredibly helpful. You guys have tons of really awesome folks there that are just more than willing to share amazing information um and a lot of it's just experimenting trying different stuff reading things trying to understand you know going going to those first principles and just trying to um pick apart how things work and how they're put together um and the relationship of how things interact and then going from that and then trying stuff, experimenting and sort of building upon some of the theoretical with more practical knowledge.

Cool. Yeah, no, that's always... The path that seems to work best for people is to try to do something, even if you don't know how to do it, and then learn the pieces you need as you go. They say failure is a great teacher, although I never really think of that as failure. I think of it more as building something as a good motivator. That's true, too. Yeah.

Well, I know that you were a little disappointed in your lightning round. Oh, we're going to do this? No, I'm just going to fold them back in as if it was... Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. We'll just make it a cohesive lightning round. I think it should be two parts. Oh, okay.

Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah. All right. Double lightning round. Double lightning round. Okay, okay. Exit lightning round.

Okay. Complete one project. Okay, okay. Exit lightning round. Okay. Complete one project or start a dozen. I'd definitely start a dozen. Favorite fictional robot? Depends on how much news I've read. I could go all the way from Johnny Five to Cyberdyne Systems Model 101. Sorry. If you could teach a college course, what would it be?

That would be how to teach yourself anything by reading and beating your head against a brick wall. I don't know about that. Perseverance 101. There you go. How to teach yourself anything by reading books and trying stuff. Pay for an acronym or initialism. There you go. How to teach yourself anything by reading books and trying stuff. Pay for an acronym or initialism.

Okay, so XML HGP request. That is the wrong answer. You have a tip everyone should know. No. Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Be excellent to each other. Party on, dudes. Sorry. Party on, dudes.

Sorry. Thank you, Bill and Ted. Our guest has been Ben Henke, wizard, CEO of Many Hats, and creator of the Pixel Blaze. You can order version 2 Plus and its extension boards on Tindy right now, or you can get the shiny new V3 on CrowdSupply sometime very soon. The links will be in the show notes.

Thank you, Ben. Thank you for having me. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting, and thank you all for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now a quote to leave you with from an author. I don't like in a book.

I hate it. Great. This sounds good. I'm excited. Like a running blaze on a plane, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker. That's from Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness.

One more chance on the candy question. Almond Joy for me, by the way. Butterfinger. All right. What's yours? Butterfinger's up there, but they get stuck in your teeth, and I don't really appreciate that. They taste good, but the maintenance afterward is high. You have to be dedicated, really.

I really like Kit Kats, but the chocolate quality is not good, but they're still Kit Kats. But I think I have to go with the score bars. Do you remember score bars? Those are like 90% hard toffee. Talk about getting it in your teeth. Yeah, but you freeze them. You freeze them. Then they're glass and toffee?

You eat them in the summer and they're real good. All right, bye everyone. 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.