Embedded - 366: All the Wrong Tools

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Laurel Cummings (@justblamelaurel) teaches people how to build what is required with the material on hand. We talked with her about how to engineer survival solutions on-the-fly, often while performing disaster relief. Also: what could be made with chewing gum and paper clips. Laurel works at Building Momentum (buildmo.com). They are currently hiring. Laurel spoke at SuperCon 2019 about Austere Engineering.

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Elysia White, here with Christopher White. What can you do with some chewing gum, a paperclip, and a Ford F-150 alternator? Our guest this week is Laurel Cummings, who can help us figure it out. Hi, Laurel. Thanks for joining us. Hey, guys. Thank you so much for having me on. So could you tell us about yourself? Yeah. So my name is Laurel. I am a senior associate at Building Momentum, a startup outside of Alexandria, Virginia. My main day-to-day work is I lead our flagship training program called Innovation Boot Camp, which is like a five-day course that takes active duty military members through innovation and rapid problem

solving and creative problem solving and all of this stuff. And then when I'm moonlighting, I like to do humanitarian aid and disaster response. All right. I have many more questions about all of that, but first we want to do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask how and why. And are you sure? That's good to me. All right. What did you have for breakfast? Oh, nothing. Why did I ask that?

Because it was part of her talk that that was how she makes people comfortable. Oh, I see. I'm not sure it worked. Are you comfortable now? It is a very interesting position to have that turned on me. I will say I've never had it thrown back at myself, so that was fun. How many robots are in an army of robots? Approximately 16 to 20.

Very specific. What's the most important thing in your toolbox? Uh, probably a multimeter. I'm very fond of mine. What's the best item you found in a junk pile or other found location? A really nice set of bicycle gears that I then applied to a little tiny Barbie Jeep. I feel like we need to come back to that, but we'll come back to that. Have you seen the Green Flash?

No, I have not. Where would you like to sail to? My dream trip is to sail to this cluster of islands in the Atlantic called the Azores. Oh, yeah. I don't know if I'd come back from there. Do you have a tip everyone should know? You can't carry lockpicks on Japanese flights. Again, extremely specific.

And I suspect that you learned this the hard way. I'm still a little salty. Okay. Do you want to go back to any of those, Christopher, or should we just go on? Let's just go on because I think we're going to probably touch on a lot of that stuff so so you said building momentum does innovation courses for active duty military folks what what does that mean yeah so we um do a lot of different things because just like any startup right you do um as many things as you can get done. So our biggest program is the Innovation Bootcamp, which is a five-day training course that we do for people who are

actively in the armed forces. And so what that usually entails is that I am traveling to weird and wonderful places around the country and around the world during non-COVID times. And I show up with a bunch of tools like 3D printers and laser cutters and welders and robotics kits, Arduinos and CAD programs and all these things. And we take them through a five-day class where we show them how to use all of these and give them essentially conventional and non-conventional tools in their toolbox to solve the problems that they see in the field. I mean, do they have 3D printers available to them when you leave? Do they get to keep the tools or how does it continue in their day-to-day work? Yeah, that's a really good question. So, yeah, we leave them with 3D printers

and we give them all this stuff. We definitely kit them out before we send them on their way. It's kind of fun because whenever I come back to a place where I've trained before, I kind of feel like Santa Claus because I'm usually walking up

with like two Pelican cases full of like Arduinos and sensors and like all these fun goodies and weird filament rolls. And everyone's like, Laurel, you guys are back. Makes you feel a bit like a rock star. It's pretty fun. But yeah, they get to keep these tools and they do have access to them, both like stateside and overseas. We primarily work with the Marine Corps. And the Marine Corps is really into

innovation right now. Like they are like, how do we change, you know, what we've been doing for like the last 40, 50 years in a significant way? Because quite frankly, you know, defense doesn't look the same as it did 40 years ago. So how do we confront, you know, what's happening now? So they are given the support and we're kind of there to like both teach them how to do it and advocate for them to say, hey, yeah, when you give, you know, these people access to a 3D printer, they figure out solutions that take, you know, nine months for a contractor back overseas to figure out that costs, you know, $2 million. And they just figured out with a $200 printer and, you know, three weeks of time. Is it about teaching

them the skills or is it about giving them the permission to experiment and invent? It's definitely more the second than the first. When you're in the military, there's a really rigid structure and a really formal line of progression. So you don't really have the chance to mess around and try new solutions, try something, realize it doesn't work, try it again. So what we're getting to do is we're showing up and we're getting to disrupt that formal process and say, no, in these five days, you can mess up as many times as you want. It's a $20 board. It doesn't matter if you break it. It's going to be okay. And when you kind of give students that room and that permission to fail, that is the best teacher you're ever going to get. When you teach a course on how to be adaptable, where do you start?

What do you do, you know, hour two? Hour one is probably introductions and donuts. But what do you do first? When I'm teaching people to be adaptable, I think what I would do is I would give them all of the wrong tools. Like you say, hey, I want you to unscrew this screw. With a hammer. With a hammer, exactly.

So, right? And then some people would go, well, how the heck am I supposed to do that? But if you hand them a hammer and some bubble gum and rubber bands, they just have at it, they're going to come up with something new. Now, is it the most efficient way? Probably not. But if you don't have a screwdriver, then you just don't have a screwdriver. And that's where a lot of this stuff, this is kind of where the bridging happens between the DOD training and the, excuse me, the Department of Defense training and the humanitarian aid and disaster response. Because it doesn't really matter if you're on a battlefield or in a natural disaster,

if you don't have a screwdriver, you don't have a screwdriver. Is part of it emptying your pockets? I mean, I can't be the only person who's played video games where the important thing is you just have to look in your pockets and something will work. Check inventory. Check inventory. Is that important? I mean, that sounds like what you're... Inventory is a huge part. Okay. Well, yeah, because first off, if we're going to keep with the video game analogy, which definitely works for me, the biggest thing is you can't go in the field over encumbered,

right? You can't pack everything. No bag of carry. Yeah, no bag of holding. God, I wish. If anyone's got one, let me know. But yeah, some of it is just seeing what you have with you. And when you're packing out for these things, like every time I've had to pack out for a natural disaster response, it is trying to predict the unpredictable problems you're going to see and decide what tools to take with you. And that is something that is a little bit of being versatile in your ability to use the stuff that you take with you. This is why I'm like a huge fan of an Arduino, right? Because it's not a single use tool.

You can make it as multipurpose as you want. And it's about making sure that you're you know, you're bringing stuff that's going to be useful. Is there like some maximally optimized set of tools that you've come up with? Like, is there a set of five things that if you have them, you can do most things you need to do? What is along in your toolbox with your towel yeah um a multi-tool always a cell phone because even if you don't have cell service it's still a flashlight it's still a calculator it's still a note taker it's still all these incredible things um yeah it does feel like the cell phone kind of ruins a lot of like macgyver episodes like

if they had cell phones in macgyver it's it's like, okay, this is over in two minutes. No, I think the cell phone actually helps because you can... That's what I mean. The cell phone is such like a tool that's really changed how we work in the last 20 years. But the crazy part to me is that it hasn't reached our education system, right? You're not really encouraged to, in like traditional school settings, you're not encouraged to, you know, pull out your phone and just type it in the calculator. You're not encouraged to Google something just to get a brief understanding of like, hey, am I going in the right direction or not? I'm sorry. I'm just gobsmacked by the idea that we aren't teaching phones in school.

I mean, all of the teenagers I have seen, which in the last year hasn't been many, but they're glued to their phones. Yeah, well, it actually kind of ties into one of the skills that I see as the most valuable, which is the ability to self-teach. The ability to say, okay, look, I need to figure out how to, you know, I just bought a house. I need to, you know, figure out how to put a sink in. What do you do? You go to YouTube, right? The first thing you do before you even go to the store, you're going to look up, how do I do this? You're going to watch some YouTube videos. You're going to read a couple of articles. And then you're going to start to get a little bit more informed.

And while you're going through the process, you're kind of checking on those resources again and again. And like teenagers do this with a lot of stuff. And yeah, we just, but we don't really have that translate at least into our college educations. That process is definitely not encouraged. Okay, so back to your toolbox. You have a multi-tool, like a Leatherman multi-tool? Mm-hmm. Okay.

And you have your cell phone. And I assume you have a multimeter because that was on your most important tool list. That is on my tool list, yeah. I would definitely always be going out with one of those. But between all of that, maybe some electrical tape or duct tape. That's probably about all I would ever fully expect to go with. But you mentioned Arduinos, which requires a laptop and power. Yeah. And Arduino is a great resource when you have that time, but like, you know,

when there is kind of sliding scales in terms of response, right? We went to North Carolina after Hurricane Florence hit in 2018. And we were there a couple of days afterwards and though that there was a lot of sustained damage what we did was we showed up with pretty much a full maker makerspace and a box truck and we were pretty much rolled up and we started helping out with problems using arduinos using sensors using wireless communication stuff to help some supply chain problems that was a great time in terms of we were able to have all of the kits that we needed we had all the parts we had electricity we had you know shelter all that and then we went to the bahamas after hurricane dorian hit in 2019 and that was the entire other end of the scale. There was no electricity for the most part,

very little running water. Finding food and shelter took up a significant part of every day. So we didn't really do any Arduino projects that time around. What we were doing was we were problem solving on the ground, helping people figure out what was going on with like their infrastructure, helping people just even put together temporary roofs for their houses. So an Arduino is kind of a luxury in those scenarios. One that I'm very fond of because we all like luxuries, but definitely not a necessity. We do all like luxuries and this disaster relief is it part of your job because yeah building momentum not only teaches the skills there you're also you know implementing them yeah well i think that it's um really important that in order to be, I think, an effective teacher, you need to be able to do what you're asking of your students. Has it changed what you teach sometimes?

Oh, 100%. Yeah. Like, my background is in electrical engineering. So, obviously, I think that, like, our electricity lecture should be, you know, three hours long because you got to go through everything. And, you know, you should be talking about Kirchhoff's law and you should be going through, you know, how to solve for power consumption and things like that. And since I started working here, it definitely has changed my understanding of what comprehensive means, if that makes sense. I realized that, oh, in order to have a comprehensive understanding of electricity, you don't need to know Kirchhoff's laws. You don't need to be able to do nodal analysis and AC analysis and all that stuff.

That's not a necessity. So necessities are AC versus DC and 3.5 versus 5, or 3.3 volts versus 5 volts yeah even 3.3 versus 5 is like if i had five minutes to explain electricity for you i wouldn't even get to that right true um one of the most important things with participating in disaster relief is not becoming part of the problem or need to rescue yourself exactly yeah how do you avoid that? What do you pack? Yeah, so that is a big part of going in prepared. And so if I can't pack an Arduino, it's probably because I have to pack food and water. And being not part of the problem is making sure you're showing up with your own resources, that you've got shelter arranged, that you've got transportation, that you're not going to get stuck somewhere because you decided to, you know, try to go see what was happening somewhere that was just too dangerous for your abilities. And really the answer to that is preparation and experience. Between our full disaster response team, there is probably 15 years

of shared experience, 20 years at this point. No, probably more. So our two co-founders, Brad Halsey and Albert Vega, they have been doing this sort of stuff since the early 2000s. So they tend to be a really helpful source of like saying what is, what are the tactics you can take to make sure you're not part of the problem? How do you practice this on the fly engineering? That is a really, really good question. Because it's hard. It's hard to figure out how to like practice and prepare for austerity. My biggest suggestion is that doing things on a, doing projects on a really short timeline with none of the resources that you expect. So something we'll do occasionally is we'll do, I like to collect problems. That is like my weird hobby.

I just like have like a running list of problems that I see around my neighborhood, around my shop, around the world. And I like to save them for challenges to both myself and my team. So we will do like, we'll pick a challenge and we'll say, okay, we're not using anything from say the Raspberry pie wall. We're not going to use any of that. We have $200. We're going to go to Home Depot, see what we can buy

and put it together in six hours when that might be in actually like a two week long project. So if you kind of give yourself these like artificial constraints, it kind of helps you put yourself in that mindset of working with less material. I find that working on stuff with constraints is extremely helpful in kind of all sorts of fields. And out of what we're talking about with music, these days music technology, there's all kinds of gadgets and downloads and plugins and things you can apply to recording. And sometimes you have a pile of, you know, 50 things and you, but the best work is often when I say, okay, I'm only gonna use two of these things. Do you have a feeling that that's like a universal truth of some kind that, that sometimes having too many options makes people unable to solve problems?

Oh, I totally agree. And that's kind of a lot what building momentum teaches to any clientele. We also do corporate trainings and we work with everyone from six-year-old Girl Scouts teaching them how to weld to 70-year-old CEOs teaching them how to run a company. Every challenge that we ever give any lesson is always kind of built around the idea of not giving someone enough time to overthink it. And that is the fastest way to evoke creative thinking out of someone and creative problem solving. So when I'm teaching, you know, six-year-old Girl Scouts how to weld, obviously number one priority is going to be safety, but then you get to the challenge segment and you say, okay, you have 10 minutes. I need you to weld me a cup that's going to hold water. Okay, that's great.

But how do you overcome the thing that often happens with people that they freeze up when they know they have a time limit? So when people tend to freeze, what I like to do is I'll walk them through breaking that problem down. And this is what you do. Honestly, this is my process with any project. If it's overwhelming in scope, if it's that I feel like I don't have enough time, I'll just start looking at smaller and smaller elements of it that I can get through quickly. So, okay, I need to make a cup. Let me cut the bottom of it. Okay. Let me cut the sides. Okay. Now I need to put the sides to the bottom. Okay. Should I, and then, you know, you kind of step through it piece by piece. And so when I have a student that I see freeze up, I'm going to walk up to them and say, okay,

get a pen and paper if we have the time for that. And let's walk through this, right? Let's figure out what your steps are and let's break this kind of big mountain of a problem into these small bite-sized pieces. I mean, that's just good engineering advice. Yeah. Fast and cheap and good, those forces usually pull in different directions. Are you giving up on good entirely? No. I definitely don't think that we give up on good. I think what it is is that you can choose fast, cheap, or good. Good doesn't help when you need the answer right now.

You can definitely go through design processes. I work with industrial designers every day, and we have products that we take to a well-polished level. But especially in disaster response and on the battlefield and all those places, if you need this right now, it doesn't really matter if it is 3D printed or in a Ziploc baggie covered in duct tape. Waterproof is waterproof. And it doesn't matter how it looks, just that it works. Okay. And you said you do this, you teach Marines and active military personnel, but you also teach Girl Scouts. How is it different to teach folks in the armed forces rather than civilians or teenagers or kids? So when it comes to teaching, you know, all these different groups, I find that they're all a lot more similar than you might think at first.

Wait a minute. Did I just hear you say that the Marines are like Girl Scouts? Yes. Okay. Just wanted to make sure. Alternatively, the Girl Scouts are like Marines. So, you know, it goes both ways. Have you met Girl Scouts? I mean, they can be pretty serious. They're very persuasive.

The organizational level I've seen from Girl Scouts is just impressive. No. So, I think the commonality of all of these groups though, and the best teaching advice I can give anybody is when you're working with people, just, just be honest with them, right? You don't have to pretend that you know something if you don't, you don't have to pretend to say, oh no, this is all part of the plan. I meant for your regulator to break just like that. Just, I think if you're honest with any group that you're teaching, it kind of puts you on their side as opposed to on the opposite side of the classroom, if that makes some sense. It sounds like you encourage them to fail and not this fail fast that is the corporate thing, but just,

okay, it's broken. We can fix that. Yeah, that is definitely part of it because, well, for example, we taught a class a couple of years ago to a group of explosive ordinance disposal military members. I imagine those folks don't just hack things together very often. You would be surprised. One of them worked for me for a long time, so. Oh, and he did hack things together, didn't he? He was a fairly serious developer, but there were some hacks. Well, so the reason why we were training them is because they usually have this really expensive

robot, right? You've seen the explosive ordnance robots that, you know, they send them out there and they go dismantle whatever is sitting in a field and it's meant to, you know, reduce risk. But these robots are really expensive, like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if you make a mistake with one and it gets damaged or blown up or destroyed or something, it is a lot of paperwork. And we found that people were actually avoiding using those robots because of the mountain of paperwork on the back end should something go wrong. And because they weren't involved in the development and the building of those robots, they were not able to repair them themselves. So if one broke, it would be, you know, six months before the technician from the company could be out to repair it.

So we took two weeks and taught them how to build their own robot going from probably a like $90,000 price tag to $2,000. It took four days to fabricate, program, and operate. And at the end of it, you it, they have this whole new toolbox available to themselves that isn't hidden behind red tape. Do you do a lot of reverse engineering? Do you talk to them about, okay, let's just open this up and see what's inside and we can use the internals? Yeah, I do a little bit of reverse engineering from from that perspective but the most that i tend to do is more so a um okay i need a fan and i see an ac unit over there i'm gonna is it trash it is great i'm gonna open it up i'm gonna go take apart this fan i'm gonna steal it from here

and i'm gonna go slap it on my 3d printer to keep the air flowing. You know, that's kind of more my flavor of reverse engineering. Okay. 2020 was a weird year with COVID, which as you mentioned, but we didn't lack for disasters. It did bring a new difficulty to disaster relief and aid. Did you go anywhere? No. So yeah, with COVID, what we ended up doing is we pivoted to helping our local community. So we're based just outside of Washington, D.C. on the East Coast. And we pivoted to making as close to N95 quality masks as we could. We did unit runs of like 10,000 in our shop with our, you know, 20 staff and vacuum formers and laser cutters and all these things. We did UVC robots and UVC cleaning devices. We were one of the first groups to kind of figure

out how to interrupt the UVC bulb supply chain and like pretty much what you need to buy in order to build your own DIY UVC sanitization device. And so that was just about a year ago this time that we were buying water purification systems and taking the bulbs out and smashing them together with industrial lighting ballasts, just trying to see if something would work and testing to see if that would be effective against the COVID-19 virus. Okay. So I usually ask for listener questions, but I didn't want to this week. Instead, I was thinking about this cooking show that I used to listen to where the host was given three to five things a person actually had in their fridge and had to make a recipe adding only a couple extra things. Do you see where I'm going with this? Mm-hmm.

Okay. So I'm going to give you three to five things, and you can choose up to three things from your currently existing space where you are. The goal is to make something useful. The cat cannot be used. Oh, shoot. Okay, from Brad, we have a broken Arduino Uno, 7,000 feet of very old Cat 3 cable, and an unopened box of TSA seized items bought at a surplus auction.

And yes, I know what's inside that box. Okay. See, the thing that intrigues me out of that list right off the bat is the Cat5 cable. Or should it be Cat3? Cat3, but yes. Uh-huh. Still. What would you do with that um so something i'm starting to think about using right now

is um we made uh this device called a field phone once um so let me give you some backstory because essentially using all that stuff and if i can find myself an RJ11 connector, which I do think I have in my closet from this old project, I can make a field phone. In World War II, there was a lot of foxhole-based fighting. And the thing was that we didn't have super great wireless communications yet so the thing that they did is that they ran uh slash wire which is essentially steel wire um two two strands that are two cables i should say that are wrapped together and you could run this slash wire from foxhole to foxhole and you would have a phone at the end of each one of these that you could pick up and talk to everyone on that network. So it's like tin cans on a string between two houses. A little more sophisticated. Yeah, not much more sophisticated, but yeah, it's exactly that. So I'm thinking with the stuff that

you have, and if I grab the RJ11 connector and like an old landline phone that has a phone jack, I can build that system with as many outputs as I want, which can be really helpful, say, if you're working on two different sides of a house, right, in a disaster, you're trying to salvage something and you don't have any wireless communication, use that. Say for some reason, you know, you don't want to make a wireless signal, you don't want to have any sort signal. You don't want to have any sort of wireless signature in the area. That is also a great way that you can communicate. Okay. You didn't ask what was in the TSA box, but it has a mini Leatherman, pepper spray, a set of lock picks, and a hand ax that looks like it was created before humanity mastered agriculture.

And the lockpicks do look familiar. Oh, man. Oh, man. Salt in the wound. Okay, well, let's keep adding on. Maybe I could build something else. All right. Mace, lockpicks, axe. What was the first thing? A mini Leatherman. Mini Leatherman. I feel like you could build a bridge with some of that thousands of feet of Cat 3. That would also be a really good one. Or at least a zipline.

It's very old. I mean, I guess if you were going to build a zipline, I would want to braid it somehow. Yeah. Well, what I'm thinking about right now is I don't know if Mace can do this, but I know that when you have particulates that you are aerosolizing, like say non-dairy creamer, non-dairy creamer, super flammable. So if you shoot a bunch of it into the air and then you have a spark, it's going to turn into a big fireball. Don't try this at home.

So what I'm thinking for my bonus round is if I can create a short while deploying the mace, I'll weave like the cat three cable into like a little like one of those like bandoliers things, right? You know, the ones that you like you swing over your head and then you can launch a rock into the air. Yeah. And if I can ignite the mace can, I can turn that into a signal flare. Oh, yeah. That's what we were all thinking, a signal flare. Okay. Well, let's move on from that one.

I think you could have used the hand axe and not made it a signal flare. Wow. Okay. This one actually was from Christopher. Oh, you're going to do this one? Yeah. So different location, different requirements. This time you have an HO scale model train engine, a speak and spell, and a bucket of KFC extra crispy chicken. What's a speak and spell?

What's a speak and spell? So in the early 80s, it was an educational toy. It looked like a big calculator. But it had letters instead of numbers. It had letters instead of numbers, and you could type things. And it was one of the first speech-to-text things that you could buy that was inexpensive for kids. And so it would say a word, and you were supposed to spell it on the keypad. So it had a little LCD display, actually LED display back then,

speaker, and enough hardware electronics to do a keypad and speech to text. Okay. Then I think what I would do is I would hand out the chicken, get everybody fed, and then I would take the bucket, poke a hole in the bottom of it, and put the speak and spell speaker right against that so it amplifies nicely. And then you've got yourself a megaphone. That's pretty good. Okay. Um, having done that, you are now, you are in the same location and you've been given from Svek a paperclip, a new stick of gum in wrapper, peppermint flavor, and a leather jacket. Oh, come on. Is there anything you can add to your megaphone? I just gotta say, this feels like my own custom, like, text adventure, and I'm loving it.

You can pass on that. I don't know why Svek was quite that mean with his choice of paperclip. No, no, no. You know, I think if I chewed up the bubble gum, I could make a better seal on the speaker. Yeah, yeah. I mean... Her level of resourcefulness is extremely impressive. Yes, but I'm still a little worried because she didn't say that one of the best tools to have in your toolbox when you go anywhere is a food bar. Because of all the things that can happen, being hungry is one of the worst things to make for creativity.

That is fair. That's what the chicken is for well i mean you gave her chicken but yeah i will say one of the things that is always in my bag um when i go anywhere is instant coffee both for myself and like people around me because like honestly, honestly, in these situations, you see, um, a lot of people who have just lost everything. Right. And a lot of people who this is the worst day of their lives. Um, and there is a lot of human comfort and just be able to have a warm cup of coffee. Okay. I don't know if we're going to come back to any more of these, but before we do, did you develop this kind of skill, or were you the kind of person who, as a kid, was always piecing things together? Did you have to learn this, or was always the person who would take apart my friend's toys and like break them by accident. So I had to fix them. So that was, I think, a little bit of the root of that. And my experience in engineering school is that it taught me a lot of the technical know-how, but it did not encourage any of the creative and the resourcefulness. Like all of my skillset when it comes to 3D printing

and fabrication and learning to pull bike gears off of things to make better Barbie Jeeps kind of came from outside the classroom. And with my current job, that was only taught more. Actually, a little bit of a struggle I had when I first started was unlearning the rigidity and formality of my technical background. Did you go to Building Momentum shortly after school, or have you done a more traditional engineering job? I worked at a couple different places over internships while I was in school.

I kind of took a nonlinear path through my academics. So it was kind of a weirder time for me. I worked at a place like a few months before I started building momentum. But essentially, yeah, the most majority of my career since leaving school has been with them. So if somebody wanted to be able to do this sort of engineering as a career, you called it a steer engineering, is that right? Yeah. Okay.

What should they do? How do you become you? Well, first off, anyone can reach out to me. I'm happy to talk about that, but I think it's one of those things where, um, you find people who, uh, who are like-minded about this. Um, when I first met building momentum, I wasn't working for them at all. Um, I was working actually at a place across the street and I really liked everything that

they were talking about and doing. And so I was, I kind of just kept showing up until one day I was like, at a place across the street and I really liked everything that they were talking about and doing. And so I kind of just kept showing up until one day I was like, oh, can I have a job? And they went, sure. So I'm not saying that that is what you have to do, but it certainly helps to surround yourself with the people who are interested in doing that similar work. And what I'm more specifically, though, surround yourself with people of different backgrounds. Because most of my coworkers aren't people with engineering backgrounds. Most of them are theater majors and photography majors and people who started their own furniture companies and industrial designers and chemistry majors. And it's this crazy mishmash of backgrounds and people that when we are able to all work collaboratively and together, it improves everyone. So this definitely is like a skill set that you learn and get comfortable with. And that is through practice and experience and working with people that you wouldn't normally work with. Having an engineering degree and working with folks who don't, but to build things,

do you ever go, wait, wait, no, I understand that your idea is good, but we don't want to burn down the house? Usually they're saying that to me. No, it's actually really helpful because it makes everyone it went when when everyone's not so caught up in like technical jargon and and you know acronyms and everything like that it makes you slow down and articulate your idea better so say i have an idea for a robot i will have to tell it to you know four different people, none of whom, you know, have a degree in electrical engineering, none of whom have my same background or experience,

but they all understand what a robot does. So I have to learn to break down the technical side of it. And we all have that same skill set of like figuring out how to say like really technical stuff at a baseline understanding, which goes into like, again, why we are all instructors and trainers and why that makes us good at our job. That makes sense. I remember an experiment that you can do with kids is to be a robot and have them tell you how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And when they forget to tell you to get a knife for the peanut butter, you just stick your hand in. And it's hilarious for the whole family, but mostly for me.

Yeah, that is actually a theater exercise. One of my coworkers taught me as well. Yep. When you spoke at Hackaday Supercon, when we still got to meet people in person, 2019, I think, you were hoping to find people to help in disaster relief efforts. Are you still looking? What skills are you looking for and how can people participate? Yeah.

So something that I started putting together then that, again, with everything that happened in 2020 has been a little waylaid, is I want to put together a disaster response network. So I'm looking for people who are willing to essentially join like a Slack or a Discord channel or some sort of group chat, where when me and my team deploy to some sort of disaster response, we can't bring everyone of every background with us. Honestly, the more people that you bring to those scenarios,

the higher the chance that you're going to become part of the problem like what you were talking about earlier. So what I want to do is I want to create pretty much like this web collection of people who say someone's like, hey, I know like a lot about, you know, standing up GSM networks and like how to hop on, you know, whatever is available. And someone else is like, hey, I'm a plumber. I can help with anything like this. Hey,

I have refrigeration and expertise. I want to get a group collection of these people together who, when we deploy to these scenarios, they're willing to be on call and say, I'm like, hey, I'm talking to someone, there's a mother with a newborn and she needs a way to keep breast milk cold. So, you know, for her child. Does anyone know how I can like jerry-rig this refrigerator to run off of a battery or whatever? And I can reach out to this group and kind of the same way that like,

if you remember in The Martian, how JPL did all of the same stuff that Mark Watney was doing on Mars? Yes. Yes. I think something like that, a collection of people who are working just as hard at home to help us in the field would be incredible. It would be. And it doesn't seem like that would be a hard network to set up. It'd be kind of a fun Discord or Slack

because you could, you know, occasionally every weekend have a, okay, I have these things and I have this problem. Let's mentally figure this out. Yeah. And it would allow people to participate in disaster relief without the danger to them and the hardships. Yeah, I really like that, actually, the idea of doing weekend challenges.

That would be really interesting because, again, the idea of doing weekend challenges. That would be really interesting. Because again, I'm collecting all these problems that we see. That if you just have 48 hours, you can almost do a hackathon style thing. Yeah. And the people on the other end of the Slack can either participate and work along or they can just give advice. Okay. One more adventure in engineering. You said you have a collection of problems. What are one or two of the problems? One problem that we are sort of tackling right now is we keep having, so one of the disasters that we respond to the most is hurricanes. I grew up on the East Coast near Hampton Roads, Virginia, and so I have gone through a couple hurricanes as a kid, and they're not fun.

And one of the biggest problems is evacuation. There are a lot of times when places, say like North Carolina, get hit by a hurricane, and it's not the actual initial flooding that is the huge risk. Everyone understands that when there's a hurricane happening, you shouldn't be outside. It's actually a couple of days after when all the water that has been dumped there by the hurricane system starts coming down from the mountains and poses a bridge washout and road washout risk something we're working like we would i would love to like kind of come up with a fully mechanical solution to is a bridge washout sensor that like if you know someone's trying to evacuate say from like the outer banks we can attach that to a bridge before the hurricane hits. And if the water

levels are too high or too fast or some sort of like whatever the risk level is, it stops people from driving over the bridge. But you want to do this mostly mechanically. Yeah, electricity is hard in those scenarios. And batteries don't last that long. And they're usually needed for stuff like, you know, defibrillators and lights and phone chargers and stuff. Sorry, I'm totally sitting here solving the problem with tiny batteries and like short range wireless and three year long lifespans. You don't need any of that. So that's the engineer in you. That's the part that you like, right? It's so instinctive. And there is definitely a time and a place for those

types of solutions, but that's never going to be the thing that you're going to do on the ground. And the reason why I kind of want to start tackling these problems before the disaster hits is because if you can pack out a full solution instead of just like all of the tools, that frees you up to answer that problem and go find another one. What's another one of your problems? Sorry. Oh, tell me about your problems. Strangely phrased. so one of the biggest problems that i've seen a lot um that is actually starting to get some

attention because of covet 19 is uh keeping things cold so um medication um like most commonly like insulin or things like breast milk or um vaccines vaccines it's kind of where this has come in in a disaster those kind of all just go out the window. So not only, you know, do you not have your house? Do you not have running water? Do you not have electricity? But you don't even have the medication that you need for your life. And the people don't have a way to get it to you without it getting warm.

One of the big problems that I've seen that I honestly have not started even starting to tackle is how do you keep stuff cold for a long time without power it's a little bit more complex than just the yeti cooler yeah yeah i mean some areas you leave it outside but not necessarily hurricane areas because those do those are usually warmer and there's some value to digging a hole and putting things in it because things underground do stay cooler, but that's not cold enough for these things. Yeah. So my thought's always been some sort of like, again, I don't really know much about thermodynamics. I've done, again, some Googling, but some sort of like reverse heat sink.

A Peltier. You want a Peltier. What is that? It's like a reverse heat sink that you put in electricity, and on one side there's cold, and on one side there's hot. And yeah, a Peltier. I'm going to have to write that down. They take power, but that's it they do take power though yeah yeah but if that can just be like a car battery yep that's a little

more realistic they even have a car little car refrigerator coolers yes that's how they make them with the awesome see and it's stuff like that that like honestly again experience becomes this information that informs what we pack out. That was something I would definitely next response throw in my bag, right? Maybe only buy one or two, but one or two, you know, solves one or two problems. Well, the good things about them is they can be used as heaters as well. So if you need to boil water and make something cold. You do have to do some mechanical because, like you said, there's hot

on one side and cold on the other, so you have to do some airflow to make the two separate. It's not Maxwell's demon. There you go. Okay. Well, now I was going to ask her to like... I have more questions before we...

Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. So, you had mentioned that Arduinos are like top of the list for things you bring. What sort of things have you done with them? Like what's your number one kind of, okay, I need an Arduino for this sort of thing? So they are really great for sensorization. It tends to be what we use them for. When we went down to North Carolina after Hurricane Lejeune,

sorry, after Hurricane Florence, we went to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. We built essentially generator tank fuel sensors because we found out Hurricane Florence did a weird thing where it stalled out

for three days it's actually really similar to what happened with dorian um and so it was three days long of just wind and rain and flooding and you know all of this ruckus and during those three days all of the power went out and these emergency generators on the base down there kicked on. But the problem is, is that they all needed to be checked for their fuel level at least twice a day. And so it was some like poor 19-year-old kid's job to like march out there in the middle of a hurricane and check all of these fuel levels. And the thing is, is that they all, like most of them had broken fuel gauges. So he's using a dipstick to check it in the middle of a hurricane while it's raining and pouring.

And, you know, it's his day job. And it's just awful. And so we heard about that problem set and we used an Arduino with a little like bobber arm attached to a potentiometer. The Potentiometer, we had to go to a retro TV store that was about 40 minutes away and buy out every potentiometer that they had because they used them for refurbing like TV knobs. So we took all of those, we took them to

a machine shop and tapped them and then we made these bobber arms. And we essentially were able to make wireless fuel gauges. So it didn't really answer the problem from the previous hurricanes since it already passed. But for the next one, they had those and they actually installed them. And you had lights on them too, which seemed like a much, much better solution than a dipstick. Yeah. When it's dark, it is hard to see a dipstick. And actually the interesting thing about the lights is that we originally made it pretty much, there was an LED ring around the top and a portion of it would light up green to represent however much fuel was left and the remainder would be red we showed it to the base's colonel and he was like hey actually most of my marines

here are red green colorblind and we're like oh well okay so we just switched from red green to red blue um but we were doing this over the course of like, we were iterating every like 12 hours, essentially. And it's only when you have those dialogues and you're working kind of that quickly, um, that you're able to make, you know, that much of an adjustment that quickly really. Cause because I designed it, I knew that changing from, you know, green to blue, was it going to be a big deal. But when you're working on the ground with the people who have the problems, who know what's going on, who are local, who live there, who know that place, and you're taking their feedback in,

you're able to make it much more usable in a lot faster of a turnaround. I mean, again, once again, that's good engineering advice. Whether it's a 12-hour schedule or a shorter one, A longer one. Sorry, don't do shorter ones. Shorter ones seem like bad ideas. Yeah, no, again, yeah, a lot of it is like, a lot of it, like once you hear it out loud, it's like, oh yeah, that's common sense.

But common sense doesn't always match up to what we practice. And when you start reducing the timeline and reducing the resources that you have for these projects, usually the first things that go out the window is things like communication, right? Because you're like, I just got to be heads down, solve this as quickly as possible. And you forget to consult with the client, who in this case is someone experiencing a disaster, or you forget to talk to your teammates or anything like that. Makes sense. Do you have advice for people who maybe haven't thought about disaster preparedness at all? Like, I was following a bunch of people during the Texas ice storm and cold snap

where they lost power and water and everything, basically. And people were just not aware of some stuff like their refrigerator would go and they wouldn't think to move things outside where it was eight degrees um is there is there a way to get better at just kind of okay these are the things i need to survive if like all utilities are gone for a week yeah so from like an overarching perspective, I would recommend that everybody sign up for FEMA's alerts. If you're in the States, FEMA will text you any localized disaster alerts. So you kind of get a heads up because being caught unprepared is usually the biggest problem in all these scenarios. You know, with things like hurricanes and stuff,

you usually have a heads up with snowstorm. You have a little bit less of a heads up, but you do have some. Tornado, you know, you got maybe 20 minutes, maybe an hour. So being informed is always going to be probably your best tool you'll ever have. Secondly, there are a lot of resources online about things that you should keep around you. I would always recommend keeping a lot of batteries, anything that's battery-powered or crank-powered. A radio is always a good option. Portable phone chargers, because again, a phone is a great tool, even if you don't have cell signal. Keeping it charged so you can stay in touch with your loved ones and your neighbors and everybody is always a big deal. Almost every disaster I've been to, one of the best things we've done is bring solar power and set up pretty much community phone charging stations so people

can get in touch with their loved ones. That was a big deal in the Bahamas and it was a big deal for a student that we helped out that was in Florida after a hurricane came through last September. There's also CERT, which is the Community Emergency Response Team, which is something that most communities have. And you can sign up to take some classes and then be on call. You do have to keep it up and all that. But if you're thinking about your community and disaster preparedness, they go through, I think it was 40 hours of things like,

who do you call and where do you go if you want to be a volunteer? And when do you enter a house versus when do you decide an earthquake might make it fall down any second? Yeah, those kinds of certifications. Again, a lot of those are available through FEMA online. So you don't even have to go be in a classroom, which is important in the context of our society right now. And they're almost all free. So I've definitely taken a couple myself. I don't think I have the full 40 hours quite yet, but having an understanding, even if you're planning on just, you're like, what do I do just to help myself and my loved ones? It's good to have an understanding of how your community, locally, statewide, nationally,

how at all those levels things will respond, just because you know how to not be part of the problem. That's a big part of it too. Okay, you are in a hurricane zone. You have a reel of 600 tantalum, 100 microfarad capacitors in a digi-key box packed with their jammy paper. A pair of old roller skates. A $10 RC car from Walmart from the toy section. And a 7.7 millimeter metal electrical... No, sorry. Electrical pencil?

Metal mechanical drafting pencil. Okay. I'm thinking that my base is going to be the RC car. I think on the front, I'm going to take some of that. I'm going to, again, using my multi-tool. Can I still, do I still have the multi-tool? You get three things that you have near you. Yes. Wonderful. Then with my multi-tool, I'm going to cut up the digi-key box. I'm going to make a little phone stand. I'm going to get one of my teammates to FaceTime my phone, and we're going to put it on the front of the RC car. I'm going to tape the pencil to the front as well.

So I have a little push button, and I'll be able to drive that into, say, a building that I don't know the condition of and look to see if there are people in there, look to see if I can see any structural issues that would prevent me from going in. So that way I can have someone scout it before I go in. I might lose my phone, but that's a couple hundred dollars. Maybe pack multiple phones.

Honestly, I do actually tend to go with burner phones and things like that, like cheap smartphones or even just like regular SIM card ones because they are useful in a lot of different scenarios. Oh, hey, that reminds me. What do you take to program your Arduinos? A collection of laptops, ruggedized laptops? I usually just take either my work laptop or I have a personal Surface Pro 3 that is old, but it gets the job done. Because usually I'm also, I usually pack out a small 3D printer as well, depending on kind of conditions. And so I'll usually need to do a little bit of CAD work as well. I hear building momentum is hiring.

Yes. So we have a lot of positions that are open right now, the majority of which are with our training team. So I'm looking for more people to go with me to these weird and wonderful places, both during disasters and not during disasters. And A, teach people all of these skill sets, teach them this rapid problem solving, this creative mindset, this austere engineering kind of work. And also we're looking for people to join our R&D team. So we have those all listed at our website at buildmo.com. There will be a link in the show notes. Awesome. Thank you.

Laurel, this has been wonderful. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Yeah, I think that I think we all have the capacity to do what I do. I don't think that this is anything that you have to have a piece of paper that qualifies you for. I don't think it's anything that you have to go through years and tens of thousands of dollars worth of training to be good at. I think it's about a tenacity and a willingness to break your own mindset. And that's kind of what we are out to teach. That's what we're out to do. And that is, I think, something that's going to impact the world in a lot of really interesting ways in the next couple of years.

Our guest has been Laurel Cummings, Senior Associate of Training at Building Momentum. Thanks, Laurel. Thank you, Senior Associate of Training at Building Momentum. Thanks, Laurel. Thank you, guys. Have a great day. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded FM. Quote this week is from actually our guest, Laurel. At the end of the day, we are still humans, which in a disaster situation is good to remember.