Embedded - 392: It Was C++ the Whole Time!

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Debra Ansell joined us to talk about making light up accessories, patenting ideas, and sharing projects. Debra’s project website is geekmomprojects.com, she’s @geekmomprojects on Twitter and Instagram. Her github repo uses the same ID: github.com/geekmomprojects/.  We talked about using coin cell batteries as switches. Many other accessories do this but one of our favorites was the Tiny Edge Lit Sphere. Debra’s company is brightwearables.com. She holds patents US10813428B1 and US11092329B2.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White, alongside Christopher White. You know that old saying, so easy your mom could do it? Well, let's take that one out of circulation as we talk to Debra Ansell of Geek Mom Projects. Hi, Debra. Welcome. Hi, Elysia. Hi, Debra. Welcome. Hi, Alicia. Hi, Christopher. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at Supercon? Sure. And I'm glad you added that because how I introduced myself varies very much in context. If we met at Supercon, I would just say, hi, I'm Debra.

I'm Geek Mom Projects online. and I like to make things with LEDs. And I'd probably stop there. And if we met at a technical conference? If we met at a technical conference, I would say I'm Debra Ansell. My company is Bright Wearables, and I manufacture LED wearable bags and backpacks that are aimed at engaging kids to learn to code. Those are pretty different identities. I look forward to speaking more about them. That's fine. You haven't even asked about what I'd say if we met at a PTA meeting. That's the least likely, so I'm good. That's true.

So before we ask more about those, we want to do lightning round. Are you ready? I am. What is your favorite fictional robot? Now, this launched an interesting discussion last night, knowing you would probably ask this. As to whether or not the replicants from Blade Runner count as robots. And we ultimately decided no. So I'm going to go with Baymax. But it was an interesting discussion. If you are going to a nice restaurant for like an anniversary dinner,

what is the correct light-up accessory? Oh, definitely a pendant. I have taken my Fibonacci pendant manufactured by Jason Kuhn of Evil Genius Labs and worn that at two restaurants. So it does work well as an accessory. How about to bring a hack? Oh, a bring a hack is it operates under the principle of more is better. So you just put on everything. I wear my LED jacket, definitely the LED shoes I just made. Pendant is probably too subtle for bring a hack. You add that in, but you really just go with the more is better theme. And I have a lot. So I put on everything I have and just go like a Christmas tree and enjoy it. What is your favorite Halloween candy?

Oh, wow. I guess Kit Kat, probably. But Frozen. Sorry. Frozen? Oh, yeah, you got to freeze the cheap candy bars. Yes. Favorite topic in physics? Oh, just the one I'm most curious to know about, string theory.

I don't know much about it, but the one that always catches my interest when I hear about string theory. Coffee, tea, or milk? Oh, coffee. Where is that one from? It's from Charlie Brown. Oh, okay. I don't know.

No, no, coffee, tea, or milk? I still want to know. She said coffee. Oh, okay. I said coffee. Absolutely coffee. Well, coffee with a lot of milk, though, to be fair. Oh, no, okay.

Lattes are a real thing for me. Coffee is kind of a vehicle for milk and sugar, really. They work well together. Complete one project or start a dozen? Only a dozen is really my answer there. Do you have a tip everyone should know? Yes, several. The one that's been most useful recently is one I got from Billy Rubin,

who said when you're storing your projects, especially if they're not finished, don't put items away by type. Put them away as kits so that when you pull it out again, you have all the parts there and don't have to go hunting for them. And that's been tremendously helpful because if you're in the middle of a dozen or so projects, you can put them away without worry that you're going to lose something or forget something. But then when you start the 13th project, you start stealing the little pieces from all of the others and you feel slightly guilty because you're, you know, stealing Robot X's arms. Yes, that's true. However, most of the parts I steal, I have, yeah, when I have a strip of surface mount parts, I'll cut it in half or something and put it in two boxes. But then you start to lose, yeah, it does break down. Sharing is caring. That's true. That's true. But it's still much better

than what used to happen, which was I would leave them out because I'd be afraid to separate the parts. And then they call to you, these unfinished projects, when you're supposed to be doing something else. And now they're quieter and more muffled in their little Tupperware containers and I can ignore them more easily. One more question. If you were teaching a course about embedded systems, what three topics should you definitely cover? Okay. So also knew this was coming and I'm a little bit embarrassed to let you know that I really didn't know what embedded systems were at all until I started listening to your podcast. I had no understanding of that. I thought it was some very technical, arcane, kind of specific technology.

And then I started to... It's just the opposite. It is. Well, then I realized that my wearables are embedded systems, all of them. And this is highly applicable. So again, not knowing really what the field fully entails, I can't tell you what I would teach, but I can tell you what I'd like to know. So the topics that I would find most personally useful are power management, because power is such a limiting factor in designing wearables. Bluetooth, because I have looked at it on and off and on and off for different projects. And while it's a little bit of a black box, I can use the APIs people have created, but I still don't understand them.

And I guess my third question or my third topic is just, I still would like to have a blanket definition of what an embedded system really is because I'm still not sure I fully grasp the concept. Well, the last one's easy. An embedded system is anything that runs software that is not a computer. Oh. Now, defining that still is questionable. Like, is your phone a computer or an embedded system? Does it have to run software?

It does run software. Does it have to run software? It has a multi-processor. I was still back on the original definition. But, I mean, the person who has to write the driver for the hardware inside the phone definitely thinks it's an embedded system. But application developers may say this is just a computer. Yeah. But yeah, all of your wearables, those count. Totally. Yeah.

Well, so now I have to get your book. And that's actually in my Amazon cart. I only haven't pushed the button because of the dozen other projects sitting here staring at me. Understandable. which I will mention again, it's Classpert, Making Embedded Systems, and it's going live really soon, really, really soon. Debra, you started doing projects for your kids. That was how you got your moniker. How old were they when you started? Well, if you mean technical projects, because I've been making projects kind of since they were born. It's kind of what I do. But I threw just wild birthday parties where I actually designed all the activities. and I distinctly remember for my youngest son's like fifth birthday party and his older brother had just had a science party and he said, I want a science party, but I think the science guy is

scary, mom. Would you throw it for me? And I took that as a challenge. And I went online and I ordered, I can't remember the company, but these polymer make your own slime kits and all these fun things. And then decided we were all going to make baking soda and vinegar volcanoes because that's fun. But for those to work out, you need Play-Doh to build your volcano. And for 30 kids, it's like 30 pounds of Play-Doh and it's a lot and it can be expensive. I actually found a recipe and Yeah, that's just flour, water, and cornstarch? It's not cornstarch. What's that? I'm blanking on the name of it. It's a spice you buy. It's not cornstarch, but it's something similar. But yeah, but it's hard because you have to stir until it really solidifies really hard. And long story short is I made 30 pounds of Play-Doh and probably it took me a day.

And so I've thrown myself into projects of any kind since the kids were born. But by the way, the volcanoes worked out great. It was totally worth it. They loved it. And it was a lot of work. And it's salt and cream of tartar. Tartar. Thank you.

Cream of tartar was exactly what I was looking for. Yes, salt and cream of tartar. So it's very doable, but it takes a lot of muscle because by the end it really sets up. So, sorry, to get back to the technical projects. I had a tech background, but I'd studied science, but I'd never done anything with electronics or hardware until my middle son, who was a born engineer. Really, the kid you'd put in his room and give him a Lego set, and he would come out five hours later with something incredible built, and you just wouldn't hear a peep, decided he wanted to learn Lego Mindstorms. The gateway. It is.

It's wonderful. I can't recommend it enough for people who want to introduce their kids to robotics and building things and coding. So he got the Mindstorms, and somebody mentioned that there's a robotics league using these Mindstorms. And I asked around and couldn't find a team, but found some people who were interested. And since I had worked prior to retiring, when my old eldest was born as a software engineer, I thought, hey, I could coach this team. Why not? And it was, again, a lot of work, because these things tend to be, and fun. And the problem is, to be a good coach, your job is to really sit back and just make sure nothing untoward happens while the kids do all the discovery and learning. But I was jealous.

It looked like so much fun. And I had all these ideas. And, of course, you know, they weren't approaching things the way I would. And I spoke to somebody, I think it was a teacher at my son's school about that. And they knew a little bit more about robotics and coaching and had said, well, if you like Lego Mindstorms, you should really look into Arduino. And I'd never heard of it. And I went online. And I think I had the opportunity shortly after that to attend a kid's workshop, which used conductive thread um and sewable leds and that you can you can see that was really my first introduction to making with leds and you can see um from my blog that

it took right away so so i made you know that was my first taste of hey i can build things and it took off from there. I started to research online and read people's blogs and make the projects they made and start to riff off of those. And I think I've lost the original thread of the question at this point, but that really started me down this path that became self-propelling and self-motivating just to keep going. So now do you do it for them or is it your thing now? Oh, definitely my thing. In the beginning, it was aimed at them. And we did things, the goal was to do projects together. And a lot of it revolved around coaching various teams or

making activities for my kids' schools. And they liked the initial projects I made. One of my earlier projects was actually to build a Segway scooter, you know, self-balancing scooter. And they loved that. As they got older and my projects evolved more towards wearables, they're less interested. And I think now they view me with a sort of a bemused tolerance rather than full-on engagement every once in a while they say mom how come you don't blow up

things anymore and they like that so no it no it's definitely it's not it's not fully for me because I have a community of people who enjoy the same things I do, but it's not aimed at my kids, certainly. Speaking of the community, we spoke to Carrie Sundra of Alpenglow about you and blob building. You two are getting more and more projects together. How is that going? Oh, it's fantastic. She's great. And we did only really meet fairly recently, but we both come from a textile approach. She has a whole textile background. Her business is built

around yarn and knitting. And while that wasn't my background, I love to integrate LEDs into textiles and wearables. And we share a similar approach, which is that making should be fun. One of the reasons I do enjoy so much interacting with the maker community is they never ask why. If I were to explain to somebody, so we're having a Build-A-Blob workshop. I think a lot of people would ask why but you don't have to with makers and Carrie has the same approach of this is just cool we got to try this even if nobody else is going to want it it's just a really interesting idea what I like you know I think that nobody asks why in the maker community is why I sometimes don't feel about feel like I'm

part of that community because I do ask why I mean the blobs totally made sense to me they were adorable but there are a lot of times I'm like you did what and it took you how long you know you can just buy like six generations later, right? And so the not asking why is an important part because it's a sharing community. Yes, it is. Well, asking why can be a legitimate inquiry or it can feel very judgmental. And I think, you know, especially if you identify as a geek, you know, which is now a badge of honor, but it's fraught with all kinds of childhood trauma usually. You know, you're looking for acceptance. You're looking for people who just, you're looking to feel understood, I think.

And I completely understand making things for making sake and just trying something because for no other reason than I got to see how this turns out. I mean, that's a huge driver of a lot of my projects is I'm just really curious to know what it's going to look like. No idea if it's useful. No idea if there's any application whatsoever. I just need to know. How did you get into writing this down and having a blog? That was a conscious effort to be better at communicating my ideas. And it was initially motivated because that's how I learned. That's how I started. I got all my knowledge from reading mostly other people's project blogs because the mainstream instruction sites would have very conventional projects, but I was always really interested

in the quirky ones. So I really appreciated when people wrote down their methods and how they did it. So it just seemed like the thing to do. And if I was going to derive all this benefit from what other people had written down, I should be giving back too. How do you decide which of the dozen projects you started to write down versus put in a box? So I write them down when I think other people should know about them. And the priority goes to projects that can be made by non-technical adults. And I derive a lot of satisfaction from making technical concepts accessible in fun ways to people who might not have a technical background. So definitely if I come up with a project that a non-technical person can make, I'll want to

describe that in detail on my blog. Or if it can't be fully explained in a tweet, which is now my main form of documentation, sadly. I will try to elaborate more. But anything that I think somebody needs what I write down to make something they'd want to create, I'll write it down. But especially projects aimed at non-technical people, because I really, really think there's so many fun and creative ways to use technology in projects that appeal to everybody that I want, I think there's a real barrier

for people who say, yeah, I couldn't, I can't build anything with electronics. I've never done it. But you can if you try. It's not that hard. You just need the right setup, and I want to provide that. And then you can put embedded systems on your resume. I've got to be right back. I'm going to update mine right now. Yeah, it's true. You have a presence on your website, which makes sense, geekmomprojects.com. You also have a presence on Instructables. Yes. Do you still do the Instructables? No, I'll be honest about the instructables. I was mostly in it to try to win contests.

I think, honestly, I think pretty much everything I put on there was really with the idea of, I think I could enter in this contest. I mean, I think it's a great platform. Anything that spreads, you know, ideas on how to make things is wonderful. But I think mostly I gravitated towards that because like, maybe I could win something. Did you? Once.

It's harder than it looks. I mean, all of those sites, Instructables, Hackaday, Hackster, they all have contests. And it's a good way to motivate yourself if you're already close to doing what they want. And sometimes they have board giveaways and all of that. It is a good way to get started and to get a little bit of discipline about writing, but it's kind of better to have your own discipline.

Yes. Internal motivation is really nice and hard to come by, but yes. I have a question from Bailey, one of our listeners and past guests. Where did you first get the idea that switches should be stuff a coin cell in it? Oh, I love, I really like that question because while it seems so simple, and I believe that question is related to my LED edge lip pendants, where you turn it on and off by just pulling out the battery. And you can actually store it by inverting, reversing the coin cell battery and just putting it back in place. And it's a super simple solution that took a surprisingly long amount of time to come to. And I knew that the project actually started with, I've been experimenting with edge lighting acrylic, and I thought it would make a really nice wearable. And to make it into a pendant, you need a small form factor. So I had all the pieces in

place. I knew I needed acrylic. I needed an LED. I needed kind of a cover panel on both sides because to display edge lighting effectively, you really need to kind of hide the light source because it swamps, it saturates your eyes. You really just want to see the diffuse light. And what I ended up doing for that one is I think I cut out pieces that were about the size and shape of what I wanted. And I sat there holding them and physically manipulating them to see with a battery, how would these all fit together? And I still didn't get it. It was one of those things that I was playing with in my hands. And then I think I had an aha moment in the middle of the night where what I had been doing with my hands was suddenly kind of clear in my head as to how it would all work.

And then I ran down, I think, the next day and tried it. And I'm like, yes, this is going to work. And it's going to hold. And it's completely doable. I had experimented prior to that with switches and wires and soldering wires to switches without a circuit board is really difficult to get them to hold. So it was a long process to arrive at a simple solution and it was such a satisfying solution when I got to it. They look like little hand grenades where the coin cell is the part you take out, except then that would turn off the light instead of turning it on. Yes, that's the most recent iteration of projects where you kind of insert the coin cell to create an edge-lit project. At that point, I'd already figured out kind of the put in the

battery, remove it as a switch. Prior to that, I had some LED pendant switch. So that idea first came to me with LED pendants. And then I used it subsequently in a number of different projects. So you had the little hand grenades. Although that was another old project that I put away for a very long time. That had sat in a box for a year because I'd made it and it never looked quite right. And then because I'd used, I wanted to create diffusion through what it is. It does look like a little hand grenade, but it was supposed to be a sphere. I wanted to make a sphere you could assemble. Hand grenade was not the goal. And I wanted to create as uniform a diffuse effect as possible. But the edge lit acrylic is always much brighter at the edges and it didn't look quite right. And then,

honestly, it was like a year, year and a half later when I'm experimenting with translucent acrylic, suddenly that project popped back up into my head. I'm like, huh, I wonder how that would look. And I ran back and pulled it out and was really happy with it finally. So you just never know. Well, with those, you have a crossbar and it goes tightly together to hold the battery. But for some of your other pendants, it isn't a battery holder that makes it all work. How do you, how does the coin cell switch work? Oh, it, well, in the pendants, you have to design a way for the battery to stay in place while being worn.

And, yeah, that was a lot of trial and error. Once I figured out that the coin cell was going in between two outer kind of sandwich layers, this is actually, there's several design ideas prior to this, but I'll start with the one that describes the pendants, the edgelit pendants. So it was an evolution. I knew that the battery needed to be held in place securely. And I knew part of it needed to be poking out because you needed to be able to remove it. Obviously, I suppose you need to be able to change the battery. I guess that's another issue with embedded systems is how you get, if you need to swap something out, how you do it. And that was just literally, that was where having a laser cutter in my house was enormously helpful for rapid prototyping because getting the final design

to the point where I was really happy that the battery was held securely, it was easy to place in and out, it was aesthetically appealing, it could be made with a minimal number of parts. There were dozens and dozens of iterations of that. And if I hadn't had a laser cutter in my house, it wouldn't have really been practical. So getting a laser cutter actually really opened up a lot of creative possibilities for me. Because the ability to rapidly prototype through dozens of ideas really works well with my design philosophy, which is a lot less, oh, sit down and plan it all out, then let's just keep trying things and changing them slightly until it works. I'm looking at these and I'm super interested in them because it's one of the things that when I

think about doing light up origami, I'm like, okay, I can do the copper tape. I can do some interesting things with moving parts and copper tape touching. But the battery is always a problem. Always. And then the switch. It's a good idea to have them be the same. Yes, it is. Actually, if you're looking for other ideas, Sherlyn, and I don't know her last name,

recently posted a gorgeous ring where she incorporated, again, the battery holder was an integral part of the design. And those have been some of my other experiments too, is to how to integrate. Because if you look at a battery holder, it's just contacts held together in a convenient form, anything can be a contact. You don't need these specially designed battery holders. You don't need copper tape. On a related project, I did an experiment where I used dollhouse hinges

as conductive elements to link PCBs together. Anything that conducts can be a contact, can be a wire. So I'm sure you could find, you know, you could do all sorts of interesting things, I'm sure, with using like copper sheet as part of your origami, maybe. I don't do origami. I do. Oh, do you? Okay. And there are weird types of paper that have conductive stripes put into them for physics experiments, and they fold pretty nicely.

I haven't gotten them to do anything, but it's very idea generating. Yeah, that sounds like it has potential. I love seeing unconventional ideas integrated into kind of conventional concepts, like take a PCB and use a dollhouse hinge as a conductive element, or origami as a structure for electronics. Sounds really, really cool. I'm not going down that rabbit hole. This is a note to myself. Do not go down that rabbit hole. I don't have time. Well, if you do, don't do it the way I did it because I did not choose the right branch of origami to make it easy. And I agree that rapid prototyping sure makes a difference. I don't have

a laser printer. I got a Cricut and it scores the paper for me so that I don't have to, well, when I do curved origami, you have to score it. But anyway, being able to try 15 billion snails before I got a pattern I liked really helped. It absolutely does. I actually started with a Cricut because laser cutters are expensive. And I wondered if I could do a lot of my prototyping with that. And it worked pretty well for a lot of my wearables items because I do a lot with fabric. And I still use it because you can't laser cut pleather or vinyl. So it's useful for those kind of enclosures. But it wasn't enough. And then a year later, I got a laser cutter. But yeah, actually, it's very useful. I actually had access to a laser cutter prior to getting one at my makerspace, but it was a 20, 30-minute drive. And if you come home and get a new idea, you have to wait. That's just not appealing.

You have a company, Bright Wearables. Is this an offshoot of your Geek Mom projects or is it totally separate? It is separate because Geek Mom projects is purely for the love of making and sharing my ideas. And Bright Wearables is a company. Ideally, it would make money, though I don't seem to have prioritized that a great deal in the process. Bright Wearables grew out of a project, actually a couple of projects I made around the same time. I came up, I'm always generating new ideas. And at one point about four or five years ago, I came up with really kind of three ideas that I thought, oh, wow, these are going to make good products. These are something you could actually sell and do and generate. Because most of I make is just fun and and kind of silly but

you know nobody would you might make it but it would be silly to kind of buy it um it's you want to do it for the experience but I came up with ideas I'm like this is designable this is producible and you know maybe it's something I want to pursue um so I decided to explore how one goes about, you know, manufacturing and producing and selling a product. And it was, you know, that was a project in of itself. It was kind of the project of starting a business because I had no experience with that whatsoever and wanted to see what that was like. And the goal was ultimately to kind of produce and sell a product, though it turns out I'm much more interested in the producing the product than selling the product aspect of the business. Yes, I understand.

I actually listened to an earlier podcast where you expressed so vehemently what I think, which is I hate marketing. Marketing is awful. It's terrible. To convince people they need something when you're not sure they do, what's the point of that? Selling it and pointing out the wonderful aspects of a product are something I can do because I have no chill.

If I love something, I'm just going to effuse and wax rhapsodic about it. And that's just me. But I'm also, if I look at you and say, nah, you probably don't need that, I'll just tell you. So that's not good for marketing. And so back to where Bright Wearables came from.

So it was a really interesting experience learning how one gets things manufactured. And it was my entree into designing PCBs because I'd seen them, but they seemed like a really big barrier to entry to designing and producing your PCBs. But then I became motivated to do it, to create this product. And it was great because I've used PCBs in a lot of my recent projects. And it's a wonderful tool to have in your toolbox.

How did you pick it up? Oh, well, so it wasn't, I'm still not, I don't think I'm good at it. I'm not comfortable with it, but what I, I needed PCBs for this product I'm designing. So Bright Wearables product is a system of bags and backpacks with an embedded, I'm going to use this term now, with an embedded PCB with LEDs on it that connect to a microcontroller. And the system is designed in such a way that the PCB affixes using removable connectors, snaps in this case, to the inside of a compartment in the bag with perforations such that the LEDs illuminate through the perforations. And you can see the light outside the bag with perforations such that the LEDs illuminate through the perforations and you can see the light outside the bag, but the electronics are hidden. But it's modular because it snaps in place. So you can take the PCB out and put it in a different bag. So you could have,

you know, you could have a day bag or an evening bag with the same electronic system, or you could swap out a different PCB if you wanted one that was controlled by a micro bit and then one that was controlled by a different controller, you could do that. So it's a modular system. And obviously a key component of this was the PCBs. And I bought a lot of accessory boards. I decided to start the project built around the micro bit microcontroller and I'd purchased PCBs, you know, for the accessory boards for the micro bits. And so I knew they were makeable and I knew people made them. So I came up with an idea and I started, I reached out and I found somebody who could design it for me. And again, this is where my impatience, I guess, after what seemed to be far too much of a delay, I'm like, all right,

I got to learn how to do this. And I just jumped in and I took their design and I'm like, I've got to be able to figure this out and picked up Eagle, read the SparkFun series of articles on Eagle, and just started working on it. And it was scary. But it helped that PCB manufacturing is so cheap, especially if you're not doing assembly. It's so ridiculously cheap. It's incredible to me. And there was a key thought or key idea that somebody told me when I said, you know, I have a lot of trepidation about designing and ordering circuit boards. It feels very mysterious. And they said, you know, even if you've been doing it for a while, sometimes you order a batch and they come back good for nothing other than coasters. And I said, and it struck me that, you know, somebody who who been doing this for a while, it's okay to make mistakes. You screw up a batch, so what? You got a bunch of really funky shaped coasters.

So with that kind of, okay, there's nothing really bad to lose here attitude, I went, as is again my usual design process, trial and error and learned a lot from it. And these are even circular with holes in the middle. So yeah, I would like to point out. So yeah, I was about a year and a half into my experiences with the eagle until before I realized they actually have cylindrical coordinates. I was like, I spent so much time with a calculator and trigonometry. And once I realized that, it was a real head-to-head moment.

What drew you to the micro bit? It's an interesting little platform, and we've heard of it before, but it doesn't come up that much, it seems like. And it's a little old. Well, yeah, so is Arduino. Well, very. Well, Arduino, I guess, has many, it keeps reinventing itself. Yeah, it's, yeah. But Microbit I got into because I do a lot with education and tech education and teaching kids to code. And in fact, the whole product idea itself grew out of what I was trying at the time and never successfully did, create as a workshop idea

for kids I was teaching. I use microbit to introduce elementary school students to coding. I volunteer with a local educational nonprofit that brings science to underserved elementary school students. And I worked with them to design an introduction to coding curriculum. It's only about three weeks out of their year-long curriculum. And the microbit is a wonderful tool for this. And I think Helen Lee summed it up best for me. She helped me understand why it's such a good tool, which is because while there are many other microcontrollers out there,

they all do a variety of things. The microbit is designed for education, and that's what they do. That's its whole focus, and that's what they do, and they've done it very well. Like Raspberry Pi came out, actually, I think, with an educational mission, but they do so many other things too, that it's a wonderful tool for many, many things, but the microbit's good for education. So that's how I got into microbit and into using it. And the idea behind this was I was using the

microbit with kids. I've always liked wearables. And I tried to come up with a project where they could lace together a bag that would hold the microbit and they could walk around with this light-up bag. And that was doable. Then I started to think, you know, this is kind of a fun bag to have it walk around with this light-up bag. And it's also a coding project that's not robotics. Girls like this. Because I, you know, having come through, you know, many years of science education and, you know, realizing things would be very different if there were more women in my classes along the way, in my experiences, in my early job experiences along the way. Really, really would like to find a way to get more girls

into coding. So the microbit being educational friendly and having an enormous educational ecosystem built around it was a really ideal choice. It's appealing to girls. So the idea was not to sell this product to get everybody out wearing LED bags. And while that's wonderful, that's great, I really wanted people to learn to code their own bags. And people, especially people who had never been, you know, never understood why they might want to code. I'm like, this could appeal to people who say, I don't, why would I need coding? I don't want to do robotics. Although the difficulty, you know, that occurred to me recently is that what you're doing is creating a product with the goal of trying to entice people to want to do something that they

don't necessarily want to do in the first place, which makes it harder to sell. But really, in my ideal world, the goal of this product would be to engage girls in wanting to learn to code. And that's why it's built around microbit. It's one of those, I saw one, I want one, and now I want to customize it. And so I have to learn to code. I've never really had to learn to code before. You'd never had to learn to do board layout. Once you want something enough, you start breaking down the barriers to get there. That's exactly right. That is exactly the goal. Though, it's funny because there's two approaches to this product. One is, yeah, it's a light-up wearable and it's fun. And you can buy lots of light-up

wearables that aren't customizable with code. And the other approach is it's an educational system. And it's a harder sell as an educational system because you are trying to induce people to want to do something hard and to motivate them. I shouldn't say it's hard, but to want to do something they perceive as hard. And how do you sell that? Because when I present it to adults, when I say you can customize it with code and everybody says coding, do I have to code? It's an interesting dilemma. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is why, even though I don't love the Arduino Uno, I still kind of love the Arduino Uno because it made it so that embedded systems didn't even have that name and coding in C++ was suddenly not C++, so therefore it wasn't scary, even though it was C++ the whole time. It's C++ without object orientation. It's worse than that. No, no. When you type in LED and then the LED name, that's a class. If you go into that funk, if you go and look at the header, it's a class. It's, if you have a sensor, there's often inheritance. It's C++. It's a neat little system. I totally agree with you. And by the way, you may not like it. It's interesting. It is the reason I'm where I am because I don't understand. I still struggle with tool chains and non-Arduino

systems are still pretty intimidating to me, but you want to make things accessible and that's how you draw people in. And I was honestly without Arduino, I might not, I'd still be, you know, making big vats of Play-Doh, I think. Well, that's why I do love Arduino. My beef with it is more when we go into professional designs, it's very expensive for what it is. And the build system is not a good professional build system. But for bringing people into technology, that thing's miraculous. Completely agree. Yes, I do understand it. But I'm not approaching it really from a professional standpoint. So yeah, I just see the miraculous side. You got patents around your bright wearables bags and modularity.

What were those about? Yeah, I did. Well, first of all, let me say that a little background. My father was an aeronautical engineer who made his living off of one of his inventions, which, you know, and so, and if you hadn't been able to patent that, it was a patent. So I just kind of assumed patents are things you do when you build a career around them. I think growing up that seemed natural. And what ended up happening when I came up with the idea for Bright Wearables, I actually came up with three kind of product ideas at the same time.

The Bright Wearables bags and backpacks was the one that seemed like something I could produce and build into a product as a solo entrepreneur. The other ones were a little more complicated. But I wanted to talk to people about it and I was afraid. I wanted to ask people for advice. And there's a lot of hubris with my assumption that this is such a great idea that everybody's going to want to steal it. And it feels a bit... But at the same time,

it is the kind of product that you could have a company manufacturer. And without intellectual property rights, there's no value to a company. So that was in the back of my mind that maybe if this is a really good idea, a big company might want to do something like this. And it's novel enough. And it would allow me, getting a patent would allow me to get over the fear of just talking about it with anybody. I would feel much more comfortable. So, yeah, I started the process. And again, you know, patents didn't seem so, I didn't understand the nitty gritty of the process, but patents seemed

like something just ordinary people had because, you know, my dad had them. And I went down, so I went to speak to a patent attorney to briefly, to find out how the process worked and to see if these ideas were patentable because there are certain criteria and a product has to meet to be patentable, novel, useful, and a few other things. And he looked at my ideas and said, yeah, you could try this. And then he recommended, he said, but if you're going to do it yourself, I would never have been able to, it was worth paying him for the consultation. And then I would never have been able to afford his rates to patent something kind of for my own purposes. He said, you don't need a patent attorney. You can use a patent agent who can do everything a patent attorney can do but give you legal advice, essentially.

And he recommended someone who'd actually done work with LED wearables before. So I started working with her, and it was a lot of back and forth. And, you know, again, knowing I probably wouldn't make or very likely wouldn't make my money back, I tried to do it with as little expense as possible. And it's an expensive process. But I ended up, for example, bringing the cost down. First of all, using a patent agent was great. She was fantastic. She's very helpful.

And I didn't have to worry about, you know, 10-minute increments of billing and things like that. And I got some patent drawings done and got them back and they needed minor changes. And then I realized like, wait, I'm okay with CAD. I know Inkscape. So I ended up doing the patent, except for the first batch, all the technical drawings myself, which was a lot of time, but it saved a lot on costs. And then, yeah, and it was really just really exciting when the patent came through to feel like I have a patent, I've invented something, I'm recognized as an inventor. Did you get your first notice in the mail as one of those people who, you know, you get the mail, it's not even, the patent office doesn't send you anything. It's

some random company who wants to sell you like a plaque or something? Oh, I have so, all of my mail is for, everything is for patent displays. People who can, people who can bring my idea to market. Yes. I get a lot of that. But no, the actual patent itself, no, actually, cause went to my, my patent agent actually had everything mailed to her and sent it to me. So she, no, I I didn't have that surprise moment in the mail. But I did recently get my second patent, and she mailed it to me. And opening that package up was actually really pretty exciting. It's funny that for you, because your dad had patents, that was like an, oh, sure, of course. I don't know how to do it, but it won't be hard.

Where, because you hadn't had anybody who did electrical engineering, making a board was intimidating. I would think that for the most people, those would be the opposite. Because making a patent, it's a lot of work. You know, it's funny that you say that. You're absolutely right. But I knew it was doable because I'd seen it done. And I knew people made PCBs, but nobody I knew and regularly interacted with. It did seem like this. And it all seemed to be people with electrical engineering backgrounds and, you know, all sorts of technical knowledge. I'm not, I don't have a hardware background, you know, all kind of self-taught. So, but you're right. It is funny, that approach. I still, yeah, knowing what I know now, it's not trivial to get a patent, but I just kind of assumed it's something one does because that's

how I grew up. Yeah. You said you don't have a doubly background. You do have a bachelor degree in something with software and a master's degree in physics? Actually, I have a bachelor's in physics and applied mathematics. Applied mathematics. That's how I got to CS. Yes. No, and the thing is, once you're a physics major,

the extra number of courses you need to take to get the applied math degree is really only a few, which is why it's honestly why the applied math is in there in the first place. It's because it was easy, relatively easy, a lot of gain for not much extra effort. And I did take a year of CS in college, and this is part of why I'm driven to want to engage girls in coding. I took a year of CS and left with a feeling that I'm not good at this. In retrospect, I was really thinking about it because the first semester, and this was way back when, right? Just at the beginning of PC season.

You didn't do your coding on your Mac. You went into the computer lab. And the first semester was Lisp. It was an introduction to CS with Lisp. Yeah, I swear to God. Didn't they do that to us? That was one of the first CS courses. Yeah, we did Lisp as one of the first ones.

I didn't either. I somehow skipped that. Recursion and parentheses. And I actually did okay in that one. So many parentheses. Yes, yes, I mean, right? And we didn't have the automatic parentheses generator closers at that point, right? So yeah, debugging was, and I was actually okay at that. And then the next semester was C, and it was hard, and everybody seemed so much better at it. And now in retrospect, I think I can go back and say Lisp was new to all of us at the time, but a lot of the kids came in with knowledge of C because they'd done it at home.

And it wasn't that I was bad at it. I just didn't have the experience they did. But at that point, I kind of gave up on really working in coding. But yeah, I got my degree in physics and did some research and not having a really clear direction of what I wanted to do with it, but still really liking physics, decided, yeah, physics is cool. Let's go to grad school. And I did and ended up doing doing my research in radio astronomy and spent basically two years curve fitting with Fortran and a book of numerical recipes at my side. That sounds like lots of fun. Was it on a vax? Just tell me it was on a vax and I'll be happy. I honestly can't remember. I don't think so,

no. But yes, you'd set up your program and your data set and you'd come in next morning hoping you hadn't screwed anything up to see the results. And that was, yeah, there's a reason I left a PhD program with my master's. That was part of it. I'm sorry, I'm commiserating very, I can relate to this experience. He also has a degree, a master's degree in physics. With similar experiences of computational research, yes. Really? Oh, that's fascinating. So did you leave? I had planned to get a PhD as well, but I hadn't taken any physics. Well, I had taken physics in undergraduate, but I had mostly done very poorly. So I went to a local university and I was just going to get a master's degree and then parlay

that into a PhD somewhere else, start a PhD program somewhere else. But once I'd done enough, I enjoyed it greatly, but I did decide that PhD was not for me and I finished the master's degree and that was it. Because you were already a software engineer and all of the physics PhDs we knew were software engineers. I knew a lot of physics PhDs and astrophysics

PhDs. I was interested in astrophysics and I knew two or three astrophysics PhDs and all of them were just software engineers at various companies. I was like in astrophysics, and I knew two or three astrophysics PhDs, and all of them were just software engineers at various companies. I was like, oh, maybe there's a sign. That's really smart. You know, the ones I knew, because the ones I went on to get degrees, a lot of them ended up the theorists working in the financial markets. And I'm sure somebody I personally know predicated the whole market crash. Convinced of it.

But the thing about physicists is most people who are drawn to physics are generalists. And the nature of science research is to spend a lot of time and effort boring in on a very small, very focal part of a very large and interesting topic.

But the work itself isn't interesting. So I think it's a common path for people who like physics. I think that kind of realization that, yeah, the concepts are cool, but the work is less so. That's an interesting insight. It never occurred to me until you said that just now. That's great. Because I enjoyed all the classes. I enjoyed learning all this stuff. It was all fascinating. But when I got to the research portion for my master's thesis, which I didn't end up finishing, I ended up doing the oral exam option because I just bailed on the thesis. But the thesis idea was, you know, it was an interesting topic. It was a formation of, I think, how planets form in circumsolar disks and stuff. But what it boiled down to was trying to figure out a way to solve this one

differential equation. Oh, just months and months of, well, that didn't work and that didn't work. And, you know, it was a big nonlinear thing.

And just, it was, you know, like you said, just focusing on this little tiny, tiny, tiny part that has greater meaning but after two months of doing it you're like i can't do this right there's more to life but that's oh

my god that's such sorry that's so similar to what i did because when you ask what i studied my research was on star forming regions giant clouds of gas and dust which sounds fantastic but but the work the work itself was literally setting three transition levels from a single molecule and basically fitting gaussians to like, you know, very sparse data sets, you know, with a book of numerical recipes. And your advisor's like, just do it. It's a paper. And you're like, but it's dumb. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly right. Yeah. I completely understand that feeling. So yeah, it's a good education to have, but you really have to be devoted to want to do the work.

I know at Cornell, there's a professor who I think, they talk about this guy with awe and respect, but I say this with a bit of horror that he spent, you know, his whole life is adding digits to some integral, like to integrating some, some fundamental constant. Like the first digit took like two years and the next one took four and the next one's going to take 12. And that terrifies me. So yeah, it's a different world. Are you going to Emoticon? I am speaking at Emoticon, which is very exciting for me because I'm working on getting over my fear of public speaking.

But it's a topic I'm going to be really interested in. And I understand you're a keynote speaker there, so congratulations. Thank you. So yeah, I am. Yeah. I wrote up a proposal on a topic I'm interested in and I'm looking and I put a lot of work in the proposal and I said, wow. And, and they, they accepted and said, that's great. We're really looking forward to your talk. And then I reread my proposal and said, yeah, that is really interesting. I'm looking forward to this talk too. I'm like, Oh, now I better write it. I mean, that's good. You're excited about it, but bad that you realized, oh, I have a lot of work to do. That is exactly where I'm at. I feel I'm listening to your

travails with getting ready for your massive online course. And I feel, yeah, I feel like I'm going through a similar process to you. Fortunately, the one very, very smart thing I did in this proposal was I explicitly said that this talk is going to be about things I've learned from my successes and my failures in creating modular PCB systems. And it's legitimately true. I've learned a ton from my failures, so I don't, but it allows me a lot of room for, yeah, yeah, this went wrong and here's what I learned versus, you know, making everything perfect and, you know, happy ending to everything that I present. And do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, my philosophy is, you know, you're not going to learn unless you try something. Even if you think it won't work out, you're going to learn from that failure. So you might as well try it just to see what happens. That's gotten me a lot of places and usually places I didn't expect to go, but you always learn something, and learning really should be the end goal of anything I think you undertake. Our guest has been Debra Ansell of Geek Mom Projects and Bright Wearables. You can find the links for those by searching for them or in the show notes. You can also find the link to my Classpert course and to Remotecon, which is Hackaday's conference. It is November 19th and 20th of 2021, and it's free.

So you can check out Debra's talk and my talk and Jeremy Fielding's talk. Lots of other people's talks. Yes, I should stop listing them that way. I'm not talking. Just in case anyone was wondering. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Bailey and Kerry for questions. And thank you for listening.

You can always contact us at show at Embedded FM or hit the contact link unembedded.fm. Now a quote to leave you with from Admiral Grace Hopper. There sat that beautiful big machine whose sole job was to copy things and do addition. Why not make a computer do it? That's why I sat down and wrote the first compiler. It was very stupid. What I did was watch myself put together a program and make the compiler do what I did.