Embedded - 36: Drive the Boat with a Wii Mote

Episode Date: January 22, 2014

Elecia gushes about her favorite logic (and protocol) analyzer to Saleae co-founder Mark Garrison. They also discuss start-ups, manufacturing, and covering yourself with rum and pretending to be a pirate when harbor patrol arrives.  Saleae Logic 8 on Amazon (or from Saleae) Saleae Logic 16 on Amazon (or from Saleae) Space X reusable rocket video Saleae's blog talks about Mark and Joe's boat, start here The mooshimeter multimeter (as seen on Hackaday and Dragon Innovation)

Welcome to Making Abetted Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. Today I have Salier co-founder Mark Garrison on the show to talk about one of my favorite tools. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. Did I say it right? Salier? Yeah. And congratulations, because most people don't. We spent a lot of time trying to spell it right the first time, but we never really sort of got the point across, I think.

Well, I usually say Salie or maybe Salia if I'm feeling like there are extra letters I'm not saying. So if I fall back, correct me now that we've established it's Salier. And, you know, why don't we establish who are you other than co-founder? Okay. Well, my name is Mark Erickson. I'm originally from Arizona. I went to Arizona State University and studied electrical engineering. And I actually co-founded Salier with my brother long before we actually started making logic analyzers. Logic analyzers is actually about the, I think, the fourth or fifth product

we've tried to work on together. And then Joe's worked on a few other products on his own in between as well. We didn't start making Logic Analyzers until about 2008. It was more of a side project. I was still in college at the time, and Joe was working on an educational kids' toy. That's LeapFrog. Well, yeah, he was working on something on the side um and joe was working on a uh educational kids toy that's leap frog well yeah he was working on something on the side too leap frog um and it wasn't really educational just more of like a interactive kids toy um and uh we'd both used logic hand launchers

in the past and uh that was always a pain point because everything we've ever tried together was either somehow embedded related um and uh it's always been frustrating trying to debug embedded electronics without any sort of insight. And when we were working on stuff, especially when Joe was working on stuff, we never really had access to expensive tools. And there's really no, like even our university didn't really have logic analyzers, just had scopes. Oh, I had access to some of those expensive tools at HP and then at least once at LeapFrog when we rented the 32-channel logic analyzer.

And they were really hard to use. I mean, they took two days to set up. You took your capture and then you knew what the problem was. But you had to accept that it was going to take days and days to get it to the right, before the tool told you what it was you were looking at so you didn't miss much but yeah okay so you didn't have enough logic analysis you didn't you didn't have the super spiffy toys yeah um so um the eight channel logic our first product actually started out as a side project um and uh we were working on some

cross-platform software at the time time, I was not heavily involved. I was still based out of Arizona. I was on the phone with Joe every single day though and he launched that. He sold the first couple of units on eBay. We had a website launched at the time. We had no idea how to get customers. We did know people were looking mostly for like used logic analyzers

or there's a few other USB logic analyzers on the market. And people were basically looking on eBay for low cost options. In fact, you guys have probably both looked on eBay for old scopes and stuff like that, trying to get a good deal. And so we actually sold the first few units there. And then once we actually had like our first few customers, we took down the eBay ads and just started selling it direct on our website with Google AdWords. And then eventually we ended up talking to SparkFun and they picked us up as our first distributor. And that really validated the early sales of Logic. We had reviews.

It basically looked like an endorsement from SparkFun, which was absolutely fantastic for bringing a completely new product with a company with no name to the market. Well, and a very hard to pronounce one. Yeah. Fortunately, if you Google Logic Analyzer, we're in the top three results. That's great. I hadn't in that. That's wow. Well, if you Google Making Embedded Systems, I'm in the top one result, but that's kind of specific. Uh, and we've talked about the Celia logic on the show at least once, uh, maybe a couple of times we did an unboxing in an early episode where I got the Amazon package and then you all had to imagine what I was seeing, but how, so SparkFun, I can see would, I bet that's where Jen heard of it. Um, and Jen was the one who, who brought it to me, but now how do you find new customers? Um, that's actually

a great question because marketing has always been sort of, um, not as a priority as it should have been. Um, and, uh, but fortunately what we found out after he started selling his product, um, is that hobbyists and students, uh, people just working on stuff on the side, uh, just love it. And those are the same people who like to blog about things. They like to review products. Um, they like to talk about it with their friends. Um, and, uh, so there's a huge amount of, uh, chatter about us on the internet.

And so now, um, from what I've heard from our customers, the bulk of our sales are actually through word of mouth, people heard about it, they told their friends about it, or they were like, searching for how to solve I squared C problems. And maybe they found the tutorial where they actually used logic, which is just absolutely fantastic. And that's something larger companies don't really get because no one who's ever bought a $10,000, like Agilent logic analyzer has ever gone home and said, oh, I'm going to write a blog about this. I'm going to tell all my friends about how awesome it is and tell them to get one.

Instead, it's really a sales-driven market where you have sales guys actually directly cold call companies and stuff like that, and there's already agreements and stuff like that. Well, when you buy something for work in the $10,000 range, it's a tool. And it better be a good tool because that's expensive. But these are cheap enough that it's easy to fall in love with a tool that you use at home.

It's easy to make it a pet that you like and you want to feed it I2C. Sweet. Just not RS-232 serial unless you have an adapter right because it's it's got voltage limitations yeah um so basically we designed the product the original logic supports um basically 2.5 3.3 and 5 volt logic uh has some basic over voltage protection so that um if you accidentally connect it to 24 volts it's not supposed to blow up but if you leave it plugged into 24 volts it will blow up and uh exactly how long that is i don't really know um but uh every time i hear somebody said oh yeah we were just recording our c32 serial directly with it nothing bad happened i'm just like whoo because otherwise

it has to be two problems but uh um logic 16 has much more advanced over voltage protection and so in general you could probably plug that into a signal that's 20 like plus minus 24 volts or higher and it'll just continue to operate normally um it will have some negative effects on sort of the uh the ground connection though and i could talk about that for all day so i should wrap that up okay so it's cheaper than other logic analyzers. What else makes it better? So the very first thing that, and you mentioned this a little bit too, that you sort of realize when you use a new piece of equipment, like a logic analyzer and oscilloscope is that it's really not obvious at all how it works. I remember trying to use a HP, like a 20 year old HP logic

analyzer at school, download the manual and read all the instructions, and then I realized that the school had lost the probe pods over a decade ago, and no one had ever used it since. But most of the time, if you're just trying to debug a little serial peripheral or something like that, you have to weigh guessing against the time it takes to get that tool, to set it up, to make sure it's functioning properly, and then configure it to find exactly what you're looking for. And then you have to ask yourself,

how easily can you actually understand those results? And all those things take time and effort, and so a lot of people skip it. And so what we really wanted to do to make it different from everything else was just to make it as easy as possible to use. And so when you open the software, there's really just like a button that says start. And there's just a couple of drop downs and there's some smaller buttons now too.

But it's not your traditional like, it's not just coded in buttons and knobs. And you click start and it's pretty obvious that what has happened is that you are looking at the eight channels that are connected to the product and this little window pops up and it says sampling, and so that implies that it's not a real-time display, and it's actually just recording for a specific period of time. And then, hopefully, it's obvious that you can actually navigate the display with the mouse, much the same way you would navigate an image in Photoshop,

or if you were editing audio, you could zoom in and zoom out and scroll around and the idea is or just like you would look on a web page you'd scroll up and you scroll down to sort of view it and you can zoom in and zoom out and sort of get an idea what's going on and then from there you can sort of zoom in and then when you move as soon as you move your mouse over something you're interested in it immediately takes measurements of that it tells you how far how wide the pulses are automatically calculates the the frequency. It has a few other modes. It can show you the relative error, the capture, and the duty cycle, stuff like that.

And that by itself is sort of fantastic because I think the very first problem people run into with their projects is it's not doing anything at all. And this tool lets you tell the difference between misconfigured I2C and non-existent I squared C. And I think non-existent I squared C is usually the first challenge people run into. And so unlike a voltmeter where you look at the voltage on a pin, in digital, it will either show up as mostly high or mostly low

if there's any activity. Otherwise, it will just be completely high or completely low. And it's just impossible to really tell what's going on. And then we have protocol analyzers. And the idea there is that you're about 60 seconds in now. You've clipped on the wire harness. You plugged it into your computer. You've hit start.

You have the data. Now you can add a protocol analyzer and you can immediately see the actual, assuming that the protocol is set up properly, that is. Which wasn't hard. I mean, yeah, the protocol analyzer, I was about to buy, well, let's say, in excess of $3,000 scope and then buy the $250, $350 protocol analyzers for each type of protocol.

Spy, I2C, Serial, all had separate additional little dings and and then i ended up and then jen said well why don't you just use this alia product and i was like okay what is it and it was amazing because they're all there even cans CAN's there. And you were saying about how it was intuitive. Well, you didn't say intuitive, but the interface is pretty intuitive. My hardest part with it has been sometimes I'm like, this doesn't do X. And the problem is that I haven't really thought, how would I do X if I could do X? And for example, how do you set up a trigger so that you don't just push

the button to start sampling or you push the button to start sampling it and then you don't really take data until you see a trigger. Well, it's got that feature, but it took me, probably took me three months to figure out where it was. I could have read the manual, but you've made it so that I don't need to. And that, that shoots both ways. It's, it can be tough, but yeah, it is overall really intuitive. And now I'm, I had a friend say, well, how do I record? I can't, I can only record the output of the lines. I can't record the output of the protocol analyzer. And I thought for a minute and I traveled through my windows and I said, well, you, you have to save under protocol analyzer instead of just saving it on the main window.

He was like, why didn't I think of that? You should have thought of how you would have done it if you had designed it. So, yeah, I think you succeed. And I guess I'm not going to gush like a fangirl anymore. Thanks for actually mentioning that. The exporting protocol results shows up in support about once a month or more often and we definitely need to do a better job

of sort of announcing that and then timing markers is actually a lot of people write in asking how do I place timing markers and there's links for T1 and T2 on the measurements panel but nobody expects to see links in a software, they expect to see links in a website and so it's stuff like that we want to make better.

And we have a whole plan for that. In fact, there's about 14 pages of stuff we want to make better in the software. And there's a couple things we're working on right now. Well, how big is Cine? So my brother and I are the founders. And then we have two software developers, a hardware engineer, a sales and marketing guy, and an office manager. In addition to them, we have three people who actually help us do final assembly and shipping of the product out of our office. And that's mostly automated testing, bolting the fully assembled circuit board into the metal case, packaging it up, and then shipping it.

So it's not big. No, not at all. board into the metal case, packaging it up, and then shipping it. So it's not big. No, not at all. And you use the logic analyzers you build to do more development on other things or on more logic analyzers? Yeah, so that's actually two questions. So we definitely use it to debug the products we're working on right now. So we are working on some new products. And unfortunately, they're more capable and higher end than our existing products.

And so it's sort of frustrating. It's like, I wish we had this future product so we could use it to debug the current future product. But we, so on that end, we are working on, we're about to ship the, in fact, we've already ordered it, the first production prototype, of which we had pre-production prototypes that are not form factor, but this is the first form factor production prototype. It's going to come back in about two weeks. And based on its evaluation,

it will really determine the launch date of the new products. I'm not going to tell you guys what it is. You're going to give us a hint? Is it an oscilloscope? Is it an oscilloscope? Come on. Is it an oscilloscope? Please?

I'm not going to tell you. But let's see. What can I say? Yeah, it's well behind schedule. We wanted to release this thing of May of last year now, unfortunately. But in my defense, Logic 16 was over a year late as well um well then that's just the product manager's fault and you didn't mention one of them so yeah that's because they don't have a product manager just kidding um but uh i'm really excited about it and i think our customers are going to be really excited about it

um it's uh what i can tell you is is maybe it's not what people are expecting from us I'm really excited about it, and I think our customers are going to be really excited about it. What I can tell you is maybe it's not what people are expecting from us. In many ways, it is. If you just sort of like, okay, build low-speed logic analyzers now, what would they build next? Either faster logic analyzers or scopes. And so we're not getting out of that market, but it's going to be a new product, something that you wouldn't really compare anywhere else in the market. And I think people are going to find it incredibly useful.

My producer wants me to ask, is it a smartwatch? Because damn, everybody's making a smartwatch. No, it's not a smartwatch. Although we'd probably make a lot more money off of a smartwatch. But we'll be definitely used to design smartwatches so i get i get uh sort of like be at least one or two uh degrees away from that uh and have you considered a tablet app for the current for the logic 16 or logic 8 so uh

something we get asked a lot um and uh let's just say we have had that in the division for a while. And to sort of give you a little bit of feedback about why we can't support tablets with the current products is, first of all, you can't support Apple products without being in the Made for iPod program, which we're a member of. Isn't that just to pay your bucks and get your sticker? Well, actually, they require the use of a crypto chip inside of your product, which cannot be added to the existing products. The second thing is that although tablets are fairly powerful, from the user application side, you have very limited resources available.

You can't allocate that much memory. You can't process very quickly. You can't really control the environment. You can't write to disk very limited resources available. You can't allocate that much memory. You can't process very quickly. You can't really control the environment. You can't write to disk very quickly, unfortunately. And so the current products all operate in streaming mode, and they operate near the limit of the USB 2.0 bandwidth. Yeah, I have the Osceum oscilloscope for my iPad, and it's spiffy for what it is,

but it's not an oscilloscope replacement. Yeah, so unfortunately, in order to build an uncompromised, compelling product, you need to do an enormous amount of work in the hardware. Think about all the things that the software is doing right now. It's recording and processing and rendering the data. Unfortunately, you can do all three of those in the tablet, and there's some really, really recent developments on the Apple side that actually open that up a lot more.

But unfortunately, if you want to do those as well as we're doing now and better in order to support higher-end products, you'd probably want to do that in hardware, which is basically the existing hardware is incredibly simple, and in order to do that in hardware, you would need a complete, you basically need a computer on the device. Yeah, you definitely need like a Cortex-M3 level

of processing out there to deal with everything, maybe even higher. And you said you had one hardware engineer and three or four software engineers. So yeah, you can't put it all in hardware yet. You don't need more hardware engineers. Our vision for the products we're going to be releasing now will be sort of the fund, the goal, the vision.

And so we think that after this revision, the revision afterwards will sort of be the flagship that we've like, that sort of like will define Celia, I think. Wow. Well, good luck. Thanks. We'll need a lot of it. I'm sure you don't want to tell me what it is because you'd be cool. You could tell me. Is it a nisalscope? After the show. We'll need a lot of it. Are you sure you don't want to tell me what it is? Because it'd be cool. You could tell me. Is it a nisalscope?

After the show. I'll tell you after the show. On your website, it said you got here because you wanted to build the Iron Man suit. How's that going? Well, it's almost done, but we just can't get the landing part to work. I have a friend. We had a nice lunch conversation where we talked about a controlled descent management system and it involved rockets.

SpaceX is working on that. Their next launch to the International Space Station, they're going to attempt a vertical landing back on the pad, which I'm incredibly excited about. I watched a test from Vandenberg late last year. Unbelievably beautiful. They failed to restart the engines the second time. Actually, they did relight the engines successfully,

but they failed to stabilize the rocket on reentry, so the first stage broke up. But that data, combined with the data from their grasshopper tests, Elon is now confident they will be able to successfully re-enter the first stage and land it on the legs. Yeah, they're bringing that up. I mean, that isn't falling behind schedule. That was supposed to be later. Oh, I like watching SpaceX.

Oh, me too. It's one of those things that you just really, really want. I wish they weren't in downtown LA. I wish they were here. I would seriously consider it. Tesla's here. Yes. Yes, really want. I wish they weren't in downtown LA. I wish they were here. I would seriously consider it. Tesla's here. Yes, yes, they are. Seriously considered that one too. So you weren't even out of school before you got to Logic, which means that you were working on the previous products while you were in school. Yeah. Um, so let's see. Um, so my, my biggest involvement began, I think in the summer of 2009, I think so. And then I was out, so I was out in San Francisco for the end of summer 2009. And then the next winter break and all the next summer break and then the next winter break after that I stayed and that was halfway through my

senior year of college and so my last semester senior year I had to take my second semester of the senior design project and I had two online classes and so I only showed that class one day in person and then I flew back about twice a month once or twice a month for weekends to work with my team. And I came back for the senior design demonstration day, which we won. And we launched Logic 16 on our graduation day. So I didn't go back for graduation. Instead, we sold a whole bunch of Logic 16s. It was a lot of fun.

My priorities completely changed halfway through college before it's like i'm gonna get amazing i'm gonna focus really hard on getting good grades um and then it after i've had a summer and a winter in the san francisco the only thing i was just like just checking sales and like working and just like school doesn't matter anymore i'm not really sure why i'm still here um we need we need to get back, um, to work on new products and the software. And so, uh, I just absolutely loved living out here and I'd like, it's just a fantastic experience. I did graduate. Um, and I said, there's a, I think of my diploma somewhere at work. I don't really know where, but, um, but your degree was in engineering and you and your brother's degree is in engineering,

right? Right. Uh, yeah, we both did our undergrads in electrical engineering at Arizona state. And then Joe actually went on to get an MBA. Um, let's see, he was still in Arizona. So I think I was around 2005 ish. Um, and I did not get an MBA. And so he gets the CEO title because he's got the extra piece of paper? Well, no, it's because Logix was really sort of originally his product. And I've always been involved, but before that, the stuff we'd worked on,

we'd worked on together from the very beginning. And I didn't become full-time involved in logic until 2000 about like i mean it was like within like nine months of launching the product but uh um so he started it yeah exactly you you're early founder but he gets to say he started. Yeah, exactly. And did he or did you, after you initially started it, do any of the incubators or VC money? Has this all been bootstrapped out of trying to make it work? So the Salia is completely founded with credit cards. Intentionally?

Yes. So we're both from Arizona. And the sad truth is we didn't really know anything about the Bay Area. We didn't know anything about incubator programs, which are amazing. We didn't know anything about how to find angel investment or venture capital. And Kickstarter didn't exist then. Exactly. You would have been a great Kickstarter.

Yeah, we look at Kickstarter all the time. We're definitely planning on using that platform in the future or something similar. But it's just absolutely amazing what it's done for tech hobbyists and basically the small tech startups, hardware startups, completely exist because of operations like Kickstarter. And people are getting more and more excited about it on blogs. More and more people are learning this stuff on their own and getting together and actually meeting up and sharing their projects.

And it's just absolutely amazing how much has changed since the 90s in that regard. Well, and Kickstarter lets you dip your toe in. If your idea doesn't make the amount, then something's wrong. And maybe it's your marketing's wrong or your idea's great. Maybe your idea's not so good but it lets you not sink your life savings in absolutely it's a product validation is absolutely is very important most of the time people launch their products at least before kickstarter without having any idea if people would want it or not and kickstarter allows you to

discover sort of at least it gives you a really good chance to find out what the market thinks of your product before you even spend the money. And if they like it, they give you all the money you need to spend. And I think that's just, that's one of the biggest pieces to the problem. And then there's the actual,

like how do we get a prototype and then how do we take a prototype from, you know, it works on my desk with a bunch of wires attached to it to something we actually mass reduce and sell that works 100 percent um and i think there's a big distance between those two exactly and that's uh that's all the distance really uh joe used to say that the prototypes are always the easy part although what we're working on right now it's a lot more complicated than anything we've done so far but um yeah we uh we sort of figured that out all on our own um but there's a lot more complicated than anything we've done so far. But yeah, we sort of figured that out all on our own.

But there's a lot of people out there that help now. Manufacturing has become much, much more accessible for people at low quantities with much lower tooling costs, better insight, more feedback. Manufacturing is something I probably want to talk about at some point because we've gone through quite a bit of different manufacturers with our products with varied experiences. Where do you do your manufacturing?

So right now, Logic and Logic 16 are both, the circuit boards are assembled. We actually have the circuit boards made in Asia, but the final assembly is done at Lima Electronics, which is in san francisco and uh they're a really large company they're primarily based out of asia but they have some circuit board assembly lines in san francisco which is really cool and um we deal directly with avnet now um which is amazing uh we uh they're a distributor of parts and tools. Yes. Kind of like Digi-Key, but different. Yeah, so if you might imagine, Digi-Key actually does not have any real price discounts. If you look at their biggest price cuts, that's really like if you got no price cut from the manufacturer.

And so as soon as you want to actually do real production, I would definitely recommend avoiding Digi-Key. Digi-Key is where you go for prototype parts or very very low volume production runs when you don't have the time to meet with avnet or you're not not running a large enough run if you're only doing like you know a dozen or a hundred units um but the moment you want to do any kind of scaled manufacturing you want to definitely talk to a company like Avnet or Aero. I think there's another one too. Future. Exactly.

And so you can negotiate prices on the actual parts, and they have a huge number of partners. They have bond and inventory programs where you don't pay for parts up front. You can get net 30 terms on after it ships to your assembly house, and then they have assembly partners, and then you can get really good uh terms with them so you could actually only pay for it after your finished product shows up at your office if you schedule things right which is absolutely just just fantastic by comparison to digi key where he swiped your credit card and in some part has a

14 week lead time on it so you're not like, it's just a massive cash flow gap. And it's really cool because they actually, they're very well-connected field applications engineers. They can help get you the support that you need. Avanetis. Yes. Yeah. And so we've talked to all of our new products are FPGA-based, just like Logic 16. So we have two different field applications engineers.

These Xilinx have helped a lot. We have an applications engineer from Cypress who makes, they make USB application specific microprocessors, which we've been using since day one. And so it's just really nice to actually, it's nice to actually have feedback on this stuff. When we designed Logic and Logic 16, we just sort of like did it in a black box without support. But then you started working with Avnet

and you started getting good at support. Yeah, it's a weird experience. I won't contact them unless I don't think I can solve it in the time it would take for them to get back to me. Oh, yeah. Which is on most things. But sometimes they can be really, really helpful, especially if other customers

have had the same problems and they know how to address things that would otherwise take us a long time to figure out. Because they have seen it before and they have heard about this sort of thing happening. And so they just have to look back in their email. Exactly. And the best part is it's all free. Kind of free. Yeah. Kind of of free nothing's really that free oh there's the one last thing i wanted to say was uh we also want to offer much lower cost products logic sells for 149 we really wanted to sell it at 99 but unfortunately there's just not enough space in the margin to sort of sustain the company and in the future though we we actually are working on like a really low cost, reduced capabilities,

but at the same time, like something that I think every student, every single hobbyist could easily get for the price of an Arduino. And on top of that... Price of an Arduino?

On top of that, we actually want to release an Arduino software, just like firmware for the Arduino that turns any extra Arduino you have into a very low-speed 4-channel logic analyzer that you can use with our software. And we've actually started working on that too.

And so we would integrate a really simple serial port reader in our software, and it would record data. I mean, it would be less than 100 kilohertz because of serial bandwidth restrictions. But it lets people know who you are and it it gets you a better name into the hobbyist and open source community because those people are fairly rabid with their fan fan bases and it it it gets people familiar with your software and then you, yeah, oh, that's a great idea. You really get in good with the people who are going to be your customers. Maybe not today because now they've got something to solve today's problem, but they'll remember.

I think, wow, I want one. Tell me when the Arduino's ready because I do want one. Not that I need it. So what projects have you heard that have used the logic? I mean, do you get stories of, yeah, I used it to build SpaceX? So SpaceX helps a couple.

So does Tesla. But we, like, it's quite a number of different people. And I do most of our technical support. And so for a few hours every day. and so i get to hear all these stories and it's just really amazing to hear what people are using it for um but there's companies from the smallest companies you can ever imagine to the biggest companies google has over 50 of these things apple's got a whole bunch of them um because pretty much all the electronics no matter how advanced or how basic

will always include some kind of low speed digital circuitry. It could be like, oh, a little EEPROM needs to talk to a little microcontroller or something like that. And so let me think of some good examples. Wow, my mind completely blanked out there. Well, do you have any personal projects? Actually, Pebble. The smartwatch. Yeah, so we interviewed Eric on day two of their Kickstarter campaign

because they used Logic to debug Pebble. Let's see. At around the same time, we were doing video interviews with a few of our other customers, Lark, which makes a wearable sleep monitor. I'm sure Fitbit has them but I don't know if I've talked to them or not I couldn't possibly comment but

maybe I'd have to go double check but let's see who else uses them I talked to somebody, actually I know a few people from NVIDIA that use them there that's usually on low speed buses obviously we're not debugging PCI Express Gen 2 or Gen 3 yet. But just kidding.

We'll never do that. But let's see. We're going to need SCSI protocols now. Yeah, I hope not. I don't want to invent any new chips. But let's see. Somebody thought Valve was using it on Oculus Rift. No, no. I don't think to invent any new chips. But let's see. Somebody thought Valve was using it on Oculus Rift. No, no.

I don't think that all works together. But Valve doesn't do Oculus Rift. Valve did the prototype for CastAR. No, but Valve has amazing support for Oculus Rift in all of their games. Oh. And so they were working on it. They're very interested in it. I don't know if you've noticed like they have a it's official valve support

It's not community hacked together If you just put it in like dash VR and the beta version of all the half-life based games You immediately get oculus rift support, which is really cool. Um, I talked to one of their developers over the phone It's really fun Really fun. I remember I was doing this on the weekend at the office and the ups guy walked in and i forgot i was in the office completely by that point but uh let's see you have any problems with the sickness with the oculus rift uh when it's calibrated properly it was okay um and then when i tried recalibrating it for half life it didn't work as well and i

got sick after about 30 minutes um that's not bad. 30 minutes of being immersed is not too bad. But I have their demo tuned up really, really well, and I've been in that for like an hour. And that's just walking around a room, like a little yard, and it's just so amazing. It's still very cool, yeah. And let's see. The internet says that Fitbit can never find their Saley logic.

Oh, well, maybe we should make it bigger. Yes, it is black, and then it lives in a black case. And yeah, it does tend to... It hides. My desk here is a nice wood color, but my desk at work is black. And if it wasn't attached to the brightly colored wires, I'd be lost. Yeah. I remember, I think you might have mentioned this too, a surprise when they open the package

and they can't find the device. And that actually happens quite a bit when you're like, I didn't think I got it. And I found this little device and I was like, this can't be it. It's like the size of a matchbox um but uh and products are gonna get slightly larger just because they need to fit more stuff or a larger connector but um that's something i always liked about it yeah it's it is well and i think i was talking about the get treating it like a pet part of it is that it is an adorable little package it's got its little multi- it is that it is an adorable little package. It's got its little multicolored hair and it's just this little weensy thing

with the USB plug. It's got high levels of cuteness. Thanks. So who did the industrial design? So that was Joe and I. It was heavily based off of the Mac Mini, which... Yeah, it's got some styling there.

The new Mac mini looks an enormous amount like logic 16 and so does the apple tv i'd just like to say for the record that logic was released before the apple tv or the new form factor of the mac mini and apple already had over 10 of the units by the time those products were released i'm not implying anything but uh let's see um it's also the uh i don't remember the the uh ipod shuffle that only had didn't have the first one it didn't have a usb port the bottom of logic is based off of the docking station for that because i had a little rubberized piece on the bottom um let's see the wire harness color code and the gray wire ground situation is a common question the wires are colored based on the resistor color code chart where black is zero and so um we decided to use

a gray wire for ground and a little heat shrink label on there that says ground but we still people still complain i still understand ground yes but uh and then the clips are based on easy hook clips um but uh and then the original packaging used to sell this thing back in the day in a case logic um like hard drive case and we had custom cases made we recently switched custom cases and in between we had to sell them in case logic cases again but uh and then the software is heavily inspired from stuff like uh logic studio which is ironically named uh as an apple product for editing music yeah my producer's over there playing with it right now oh excellent um but uh and we looked at a bunch of other software too but it does look like audio editing software.

I have used some of that, not for this, but for products that deal with audio. And it does have some things reminiscent of that. I can see the lineage. Well, I mean, I've already kind of gushed and said that I like this product. So I'm not going to continue that. Which means that I'm kind of out of questions. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about? How much time do we have? Not too much. Okay. So you asked a couple times and I forgot to answer about side projects. One thing I've learned is one side project at a time. Um, but we are working on a sailboat right now. Uh, so you've heard of companies like Lockheed Martin have their skunk works division where they

work on their most advanced technology. Uh, Salier has a, um, a 30 year old sailboat and that that's our skunk works. Um, and basically, uh, cause my brother and I both love sailing. Uh, we've taken sailing classes and, and, uh classes in the San Francisco Bay. We bought a sailboat a little over a year ago, and we pulled the gasoline engine out of it. We replaced it with an electric motor. We bought an off-the-shelf speed controller for it. However, everything else is completely custom.

So we have a custom pack of lithium-ion, lithium-iron phosphates. We designed circuit boards to do individual cell monitoring and individual battery management across the entire thing. The system is solar charged. We have 750 RGB LEDs on the boat

that are all individually addressable just for fun. We have an individual board that controls the motor controller and we actually had the whole thing controlled off of a laptop. We just added Wiimote support, so you can now drive the boat with the Wiimote. And that's just the speed. We're actually adding directional control, too.

We've interfaced a laptop that'll autopilot on the sailboat. And so over the next couple of weekends, we'll be trialing actually steering the boat with the wemote and uh pretty soon it'll pretty much be autonomous uh which well not no i'm not going to say that it's never going to be autonomous um this is a weekend only project so just on the only one project this sounds like about 15 that you're disguising as the boat. Yes. So I remember having this conversation with Joe about a year ago saying like, we can't let this thing flow out of a portion. We need to keep it as simple as humanly possible.

And then we decided to roll our own battery management solution. And it all went downhill from there. But in fact, we took the thing out last Saturday night, I think. After updating some code that controls the motor speed controller. Specifically, we added a watchdog to it so that if it loses comp with the laptop for over five seconds, it kills the motor. Well, now we have this background thread that's pinging the motor,

and that crashes software randomly. So we were halfway out of the marina at about 10 o'clock at night, and the boat software crashes, the boat stops and so and we restart the software but it immediately crashes again so you have to drop the anger and it turns out the watchdog code we added to the boat motor controller pcb actually crashed the boat motor like the firmware and so we had to restart the motor controller pcb and then the rest of the software and actually had to make code changes on the boat, on this little network. It was a nightmare. But we got the stuff fixed in about 15 minutes

and motored back. It was a nightmare, and yet you sound completely amused by it. Our excuse was we were going to say, people, we lost the keys or something like that. You got halfway out of the harbor, and then you lost the keys. It's not creative.

There is a point in which you take the bottle of rum that's for emergencies and you just douse yourself with it in hopes that that explains everything. Say R a few times and yeah, we're a pirate. Yeah, there you go. So individually controlled RGBs. That one's not... What processors are you using here it's a great question

because uh so rgb leds are on a lot of different things and uh people have arduino control and people have some other stuff but the problem is those things are actually kind of bandwidth intensive and so we like to brute force things so the very first thing we did actually is a little known um a feature of logic it actually operates in output mode if you use our SDK. And so we actually originally drove the strip with the output mode of Logic, and we just generated the waveform in the software. But there are some limitations on what you can do in output mode,

and it wasn't really ideal. Plus, you have to drive at about 5 volts TTL instead of 3.3. And so that barely worked. So we decided, well, let's build a board for it. But most microcontrollers like MSP430s aren't really fast enough to do anything at that kind of bandwidth, and it's like 60 kilobytes per second or something

to actually drive a whole array at 30 hertz. And so we actually put programmable logic. Go back a second. So are these individually addressable LEDs that are I2C devices? No, they use this single one-wire protocol. I don't think it has a name. The one-wire LED.

Yeah, and they're all in a chain. It's very common. You can buy the strip on anywhere, Adafruit, etc. But it's not synchronous serial. It's actually a different pulse width, SQL 1 and 0. I forgot what that's called.

But you have to drive it fairly fast. It's like 800 kilohertz in order to drive it. And so we actually wrote a VHDL code for a CPLD, and we connected that to your standard FTDI, like USB to serial adapter. And we just streamed it at one megabit from the PC. And so I wrote this, it's actually ridiculous, polymorphic LED, like you can add layers

like you would add in Photoshop. Each one is animated independently and it has different, it actually converts color spaces to do different types of RGB, RGBA blending. And so, and the idea there is that we would have one animation that would just be the lights for the boat there's mandatory navigation lights and then we could add n animations on top of that and they would interact properly and so no matter what the animation tried to do the lights at the end of the boat would always be navigation but then they

would alpha fade into the animation on the sides and then we don't do anything small. And that code still has bugs in it. But what I enjoy the most about side projects is you don't have to be production. Like everything we do with our desktop software has to be like bug free. It needs to be like production ready and it needs to be just works completely.

And where everything on the boat is just sort of like just has to work most of the time and when it breaks we'll fix it yeah yeah well i mean that's that's the fun of personal projects is just accepting that they're never going to be perfect and that's okay because you're learning something and you're having a good time and and having fun maybe with other people. So you do work with, you work for your brother, Joe. How is Christmas around your house? So we went back for Christmas for all six hours, uh, in Arizona. Uh, we flew in, flew out the same day. Um, and it is a little short, but, uh, like we, we both work a lot. Joe works more than me. Um, but, uh, um um it's pretty good i see joe all day like 10 hours a day and uh and we work really really well together um he basically uh works with our hardware guy

um to do mostly he works more on the simulation and design side of the hardware where i actually run the entire software team um and so uh they're working on finishing up changes to, we're launching more than one product. I won't say have any, one or more products, sorry. We're launching one or more products. And so. I'd tell you, but I'd have to kill you. Right.

But so they're working on that. And then we're working on the core support for those new products, as well as the the minimum feature requirements um minimum viable product basically um and so we work pretty well together and i oh i also do all of the firmware and uh gate code for the new products so um that's a lot of, it's a medium to small amount of C, but an enormous amount of VHDL. It's just, if we had any idea how big this product was,

I could talk about VHDL for days now, but it's all about trying to get the smallest FPGA, the lowest cost FPGA you can get, that you can get your design to fit in. And I always assumed that a design would be so small it would fit in any FPGA, but lowest cost FPGA you can get that you can get your design to fit in. I always assumed that a design that would be so small would fit in any FPGA, but then we ran out of space, and so it's been a struggle to get everything to fit in there at the same time.

And it's just like, oh, oops, we accidentally deleted the filters, so now it fits, or we lose resolution someplace else. And so it's gone through quite a few iterations. Logic 16, we actually outsourced the FPGA development, but it was also dramatically simpler from what we're doing now. Are you glad you outsourced it,

or do you kind of wish it was yours? Well, I actually started working on FPGA code before Logic 16, but I'm really glad we outsourced it because when we launched Logic 16, we were two people. And we were both in it completely full time. And Logic 16,

we thought we were going to launch it the summer before we did. And like everything you could imagine went wrong from assembly, automated test. I mean, it was like, I remember the last couple of months we were just fighting against like signal integrity issues

and crosstalk and stuff like that. Things that we didn't really think we would see because logic operates at right, has a bandwidth of about six megahertz. And we just pushed it at the 25 megahertz and it was just insane what kind of problems we started having because of that. Overvoltage protection turned out to be difficult. Getting the FPGA to operate with a five volt input was a real pain um because it doesn't actually have real esd clamps it has some sort of different form of esd protection which actually locks up the input if if it ever experiences a spike over like 3.4 volts or something and that was a nightmare um tuning the inputs and then getting it to work in production

we did a production run of 200 with our manufacturers who were in Asia at the time. They put every single one of them together wrong. It was a nightmare. That's why you go to the factory and spend three months in China trying to get it sorted. Yeah, I wish we did not have time for, but

we got everything straightened out and now we have manufacturing back in the US. It's a lot easier to do that. Yeah. Okay, so one almost last question. Other than the tools that you make, what are your favorite tools to work with? Oh, that's a great question. So a lot of times people ask us, like, what do you guys recommend for oscilloscopes?

Or voltmeters. Okay, so we have a couple of times people ask us, what do you guys recommend for oscilloscopes? Or voltmeters. Okay, so we have a couple of flukes. We have one fluke from forever ago, and then we have one we bought recently from Fry's Electronics. And I absolutely love them. But we've talked about building a new voltmeter forever because there's so many things wrong with voltmeters. You can't, like, everything about a voltmeter is hard to use.

You can't record anything with it. You can't really see the screen all the time um you're holding these probes you have a whole bunch of different types of probes and maybe they're not all compatible um but uh and then there's all like it's just well i just want to know what's going on if i can't something just tell like i don't want to do any work and so um i think there's a lot of laziness yes and then there's iphones and ipads and i'd love to see in fact i met a guy who's working on something called the um mushi meter at a meetup like a couple nights ago which uh he's crowdfunding right now and it is a bluetooth low energy voltmeter with two channels, and it works with your iPhone,

and it has capable of doing burst mode high-speed recording or longer-term lower-speed recording, and it can do voltage and current at the same time. It can do all sorts of power factor-related stuff. It's very high resolution, and from what I've seen, it looks really good. It's just like I love to see stuff in that area. And I think there's so much more you can do.

But I also could talk about how scary the voltmeter market is. Good luck competing with Fluke. I think that's why no one does it. There's no profit there. Fluke, I think, has probably got really good margins on everything they sell. And there's no way that voltmeter costs them even close to $100 to make. No, but at Fry's, if you bought it for a hundred dollars fries took 30 um probably another 30 for test and i mean it probably cost them 30 bucks and they're making 10 well i hope it's a little

better than that but you're probably right um i wonder who how they sell the bulk of their voltmeters obviously fries isn't selling like a million a year so we'll make yeah you're probably right um i wonder who how they sell the bulk of their voltmeters obviously fries isn't selling like a million a year so we'll make yeah they're probably not no no it's through the same people who sell the oscilloscopes and the the logic analyzers it's not necessarily direct but it's through these distributors that never call you back if you only have a company of two people and yeah you know who you are. Yeah. That's always fun. Do you have recommendations for oscilloscopes?

So we have a, well, actually, I don't have a regular scope. I have a regular signal generator right now. And I've, like, there's really nothing, there's no USB scopes in the market that I think are good. You know, yet. But, and we have, like, I bought this Agilent scope from one of my friends you got an unbelievably sweet deal on it but that's like a four giga sample scope um what i the one thing i want to get across is that your tools really do matter how much time you spend with your tools uh like the quality of the tools how efficient they are is incredibly important

that's sort of the business proposition of logic really. And so what I can really recommend is like the moment you can buy, like when you start your own, but you start your own thing. Sure. You're using that scope you were borrowing and, or got for free that's like 40 years old. But yeah, when you, when you can buy the scope you need, definitely get the scope you need. And the same thing, same thing with your tools um yeah i don't i don't buy the the really crummy screwdrivers because i like a screwdriver that has the right it's the right tool for the job and the small ones for the small

screws and the big ones for when i need to pry open something oh and tweezers i think they're the number one tool for electrical engineers get Get yourself some really nice, they're not expensive. You can get some really, really nice, super sharp tweezers. We've actually... I have two pairs, one that I give to other people for those people who are willing to use tweezers as pliers or pry bars, which I've seen, which I've done. Okay, I have crappy tweezers and good tweezers

so yes, I agree. Really good tweezers are so worth the money but buy a crappy pair too just in case. Loan those out. Alright, so we're out of time. Are there any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Yeah, just keep, just check out Salier in about two, three months.

All right. I look forward to hearing what that is, and I hope that I need more probes for it of a different sort. My guest has been Mark Garrison, co-founder of Salier, makers of a really nifty, tiny and inexpensive logic analyzer. Thank you for being on the show. Oh,

thank you for having me. Uh, please keep making neat stuff. Thanks. And that's true for you listeners as well. Thank you for listening and keep making neat stuff. I'd also like to thank Christopher White for producing this podcast, making us sound good.

To that end, my final thought this week is from Christopher Walken, Mr. More Cowbell himself. He says, I'm not much of an analyzer. Okay, so that may have been out of context. So what?