Embedded - 417: I Don’t Know How My Brain Works

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Alexandra Covor spoke with us about engineering, making, drawing, school, and what it means to be an artist.  Alex’s projects are on GitHub and Hackster.io. Her electronics comics can be found as PikaComics on Instagram. The 2022 Open Hardware Summit named Alex as part of the Ada Lovelace Fellowship. Her favorite talk from the summit was Anuradha Reddy talking about Knotty (Naughty) Hardware. Alex works for Zalmotek, a design services firm in Bucharest. We talked about Waylay.io, including their smart pet feeder built on that platform. For example projects for Edge Impulse, they built a tools organizer that uses ML. Transcript

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. Today, let's see, hydroponics, circuit sculpture, LED tiara, tools for lighting photo shoots, AI, Embedded. Let's just say I have no idea what we're talking about, but I'm excited to talk to Alexandra Kovar. Hi, Alex. Welcome. Hi, Alicia. Hi, Chris.

Thanks for having me on your podcast. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at an electronics conference in Central Europe? Okay, so I'm Alexandra. I'm a maker, maybe also an an artist and soon to be an embedded engineer i have a bachelor's degree in electronics and i'm currently doing my master's degree in embedded systems and in my projects i love mixing art and electronics and my favorite projects to work on are anything involving LEDs, blinky lights, colorful lights, and really tiny microcontrollers. And also PCB design.

That's a lot. Thank you. Before we ask more about all of those, we want to ask you short questions. And we want short answers. This is called Lightning Round. Are you ready yes best place to visit if i go to bucharest um the village museum it's really interesting they brought houses from all of the places in romania and you can visit them and enter them is really

interactive that's why i love it favorite color to set a NeoPixel to? Purple. Favorite Maker magazine? The Magpie, maybe, because I'm featured in it. Hardware or software? Hardware. Do you have a microcontroller that's your current favorite thing to work with? I think it's the AT Tiny, any AT Tiny, because they are really small. Do you have a favorite fictional robot? The Butter Robot from Rick and Morty, or maybe BMO.

Or BMO because I like the color. Sorry, nobody's ever answered that one before. I thought so. Do you like to complete one project or start a dozen? Oh, start a dozen. Do you have a tip everyone should know? Yes. I sometimes buy components that catch my attention, even though I don't have a project in mind for them right away. Because later on, I might get inspired and I might want to build a project just because I have a component I like. This is exactly what I've been trying to tell Alicia for decades about musical instruments. Yes, I totally agree with that. And she just doesn't believe me, but this is good evidence.

Yes, you get me. In your introduction, you said maker and maybe also an artist. How do you decide when you're an artist? Do they give you an award? I have no idea. But for example, I know I can say I'm an engineer because I have like a diploma. But as an artist, I don't know. I don't have any proof for that. And I know there are people out there who are way cooler than me with because nobody ever says, okay, now you can call

yourself an artist. I've met people who are at the beginning of what they're doing and, and they claim the title and they're excited about it. And then like you, well, maybe, I mean, I do art sometimes. Do you think there will be something that makes you say, okay, now this is it? Maybe one day when my projects will be, I don't know, really well known, and then I would have the approval of many people. Maybe that would make me an artist.

How many people to take? I'm just giving you a hard time because this is something I struggle with too. And some other guests have struggled with. Oh, I don't want to call myself an artist when they have tons of artistic things they've put out there that are very good. And looking at your things, I feel the same way.

So it's a weird it's a weird thing to decide and unlike engineering like you said which comes with a diploma or some credential there isn't one for artists i mean you can get a degree in art but there's plenty of artists who don't have a degree in art so yeah absolutely so let's just say I don't have an answer for that now. That's fair. Do you have a favorite project that nobody really knows about? I think all of my projects are online, so everyone knows about them. But my favorite is the tiny violin.

Chris was playing with the tiny violin before we started. I mean, he was looking at the video. How big is the tiny violin? It's like three inches or two inches. I'm not really sure about American measuring

units, but it works. Something between that. Really tiny. When people complain for no reason, sometimes we pretend to play a tiny violin to go along with their complaints. Is that just a

US idiom, or is that why you have a tiny violin? It's not just a US idiom, but it's also not why I have a tiny violin? It's not just a US idiom, but it's also not why I have a tiny violin. But many people have told me it would be great to use it for that. I made it because I love violins and I also love really tiny tools, tiny instruments, anything tiny. Tiny microcontrollers. So I wanted to challenge myself to build a really tiny PCB. So violin it was.

Well, I mean, that doesn't follow. I want something tiny. It's going to be a violin. She likes violins, and she wanted to make something that makes perfect sense. What does it have in it? It has an 80 tiny 10 or 13, I don't remember. Some LEDs, a buzzer, and a few passive components. It sounded awfully good for that to be sound to be just buzzer sound. There's no other

musical element to it? No. Okay. I didn't have space for anything else. And so you just PWM to the buzzer? Yeah. Cool. What was the challenge in making it so small? I'm not somebody who's successfully ever made a PCB, so I'm not familiar with what the challenges of a normal one are, but was it just fitting components and finding the least amount of components that would do what you wanted, or were there other issues? It's the same challenge in all tiny PCBs, I think. That's powering it. Because most batteries don't come in such small sizes, or if they do, they get drained really fast.

And I used the tiniest LiPo battery I could find. And the charging circuit, that it also fits in the violin. But that's a challenge in every project most of the tiny violin is a pc board i mean there's no container but how do you thread the The strings. I added some drills in the PCB design and I used some soldering wires that I cut and I just soldered them through those drills. It was, I don't know, it was an idea that came to my mind after I ordered the PCB. So it wasn't what I intended initially. It's so cute, though. And you have that it plays some songs. It's not just buzzing.

It actually seems to play songs so you can pretend to do the violin thing. Yes. I found a really cool library on GitHub which had lots of songs to choose from, so I chose my favorite ones from that library. It's much smaller than... Seeing the pictures of it by itself, you don't get really a sense of scale, but the intro to the youtube video

or the one of them shows you playing it it's pretty small i think it's like two inches not three yeah it's really cute okay but there is another project that i think has gotten a little bit more publicity for you the pico light That was the one that was in the magazine. Could you describe it? Yes, absolutely. So in my projects, I really like the part when I get to take pictures of the PCBs and I usually take macro pictures because all of my projects are tiny. So we have some studio lights, which are huge, that I use to change the color of the background or create some different shades of colors on the product. But I wanted something tinier to fit the size of my project.

So I made Picolite. It's also a team effort. So it's not just my project. It's a Zalmutech project, let's say. And it's a tiny studio light. It's adjustable, so you can change the intensity and the color of the light. It's a 4x4 matrix of NeoPixels. Yeah.

And you said it was a joint effort with Zalmotech. That's the company you work for? Yes, exactly. What made them decide that they were willing to be partners on this? Well, we take some time from our daily work to work on our personal projects because we think that's important for our company culture and we were talking about this we were discussing and we decided we have to do this so I designed the PCB then my friend Mihna decided to work on the software a bit as well and help me with the laser cutting part for the cover.

And yeah, that's how we decided we need to build it. Are you going to make a product out of it? We want to. We have to figure out whether anyone would actually buy it because we are excited about it and our friends are excited about it. But we don't know if we would have enough people to be interested in it. But maybe we will kickstart it. started. And then there's the question of do you sell it as a kit that people build or do you sell it as a product that has an interface that people can set what they want? Oh yeah, because I think that also changes the target market because if you want to sell it as a kit, it's maybe exciting for other makers like me.

But if I sell it assembled, it's probably exciting for photographers or people who don't care about the process of assembling it and just want to use the final product. Do you have any idea which way you'd like to go? No. Fair enough. Absolutely not. It has been used for photography as you started, but looking at it, I wanted to play with it for other things. Have you gotten to play with it for, I mean, do you ever just leave it on your desk running random LED patterns? That's exactly what I was about to say, yes.

That's why I made the rainbow mode as well, because I want to keep it on my desk. You need two of these for origami. I do, because the paper is often white and you can't quite see where the curves are. This would be really cool to be able to show the motion beyond the folding. Oh, that's such a cool use case. So let me know when the kits are ready. Well, you can build it yourself. There's a bomb right here and you can just order the PCB. Yeah, it's open source.

You put all of your projects open source, including PicoLite. It's on Hexter.io. Why? Because the open source community is the one which inspired me to do what I'm doing today. So I want to give back and do the same for others. And why keep it for myself? It's not like it's the best idea in the world and I need to keep it only for myself to not have everyone steal it. No, I think it's the best this way.

And maybe somebody else will take it and modify it, improve it. Why not? But making is a set of skills and certainly fun. But writing things up for other people can be tedious. Or do you find that fun too? It can be tedious, but depending on the project, it could also be fun. It's weird because for my work, I do the same things I do for my hobby.

Except, yeah, for my work, I do what the client wants. And for myself, I do really silly projects. Is silly a criteria? I don't know. They don't really have use cases except for the Picolite maybe. I teach a class on embedded systems and we just had the project day where people showed off their projects and it was really neat. But I was a little disheartened by one person

kind of apologizing for their fun project, something they'd done to amuse themselves when some of the other projects were bigger and had more societal impact. But I think silly is important. Do you actively think, okay, will this make me laugh? Or how do you figure out which project you're going to do next? That's a tough question. I don't really know. I may see something online that I'm interested in, not necessarily hardware related. I may just see how it was with the violin. I randomly got the idea of making it. Or for the picolite,

I actually had a problem in real life that I wanted to solve. But I don't know how my brain works when it comes to new projects, ideas. It's, yeah, I don't really know. When Chris asked, do you start a dozen projects or finish one? And you said start a dozen, which is very common. I tend to have a dozen know, a dozen ideas and we'll start a couple, but that process of having the ideas and getting down to which ones I'll actually work on and maybe which one I will finally finish. Is there something that helps you push through for the ones you do finish? I think for all of them, I'm first wondering what would be the process of making it? What would it involve cost-wise, time-wise?

Do I have the skills? Do I want to learn this skill? And there's probably a formula that combines all of these and it helps me decide which one I want to choose. So far I've chosen projects that involve things I want to learn from because I don't have that many projects. I've built a few, and those were my absolute first projects, and I put them online because I wanted to share the journey with everyone. But I mainly did them because I wanted to learn about microcontrollers or PCB design. So I think the skill I'm learning is the most important thing for me when choosing a project. You said your company does give you some time to work on these, but is it hard to work on these on similar sorts of technology during the day and then come home and work on the same things for

yourself? I wouldn't say so. Mainly because the use case is different, even though the technology is the same. If the use case is something that is fun for me, or I can also give it an artistic touch, a personal touch, then I would say that gives me enough motivation to make it. That's hard. I'm so happy for you, but I wish I had more of that. I spent part of my morning working on Python for origami and now I'm like, oh, I'm going to have to work tomorrow. I have to do Python too. I just don't always have the oomph to do both work and making things, technical making things. Is there something you do to keep yourself engaged or is the making of the things what keeps you engaged? I think it's the making of the things and also the fact that I can combine art in my projects. Because otherwise, I think I wouldn't have the energy.

That's why I don't do really serious projects. Because, yeah, if I do this during the day at work, I wouldn't have the energy to do it again after work. And I think writing them up, or when I have projects that I've written up, there's this sense of completion that I don't always get at work. I'm done with this finally. And that's probably why I'm having trouble with origami, because I'm at the stage of, this is never going to work, which, you know, I just have to keep working on it. Eventually it will. You were an Ada Lovelace fellow at the Open Hardware Summit. What was that? It's a really interesting opportunity and I have to thank my friend Senia for telling me, hey, should we apply to this

at some point? Because I didn't know about the opportunity until she told me about it. And I maybe wouldn't have trusted myself to apply to this, but she trusted me. So I filled out an application. I think it had like six questions. It wasn't really complicated. I wrote about my projects and my background. And I was really surprised when they chose me because I didn't expect that. I mean, you got to go to the conference, but I think tickets were free. So what does this get you? Yeah, indeed, tickets were free and it was sadly online this year, but it was meant to be a travel stipend, actually.

But since the conference was online this year they changed it to a personal development fund so I got to use the money from it to buy some really cool tools that I'm excited to use now what you get I got some Hakko soldering tools, the soldering station, a fume extractor, and a few miscellaneous tools. That sounds exactly right. It just is what I would want to use the money on, is the tools that make these things fun. Now having these tools, are you thinking about different projects? Do you have new ideas? I mean, I don't have different ideas than I did previously, but it's definitely much easier them because I also get inspired when I use these tools. There's a difference when you use

really professional tools. I feel like it also makes me feel like a real engineer because I have my own professional soldering tools. Sometimes real engineering is using duct tape and... Chewing gum. Chewing gum in the field when you don't have anything else. Did you have a favorite open source hardware talk this year?

Oh, yeah. Anu was talking about how yarn is hardware. And she was talking about her different knitting and electronics projects. And you should really check that one out. I actually reached out to her after the talk and we are friends now. We are discussing different ideas about wearables and electronics find a link to that talk and make sure it's in the show notes absolutely i will give the link i want to go back to what you said about picking projects based on the skills you want to learn um what sort of skills?

Just pick a couple example projects, like the PicoLite. What did you learn with that, or what did you set out to learn with that? Well, first of all, PCB design, then some microcontroller programming, CircuitPython, because I haven't used it before. That's a good set. That's a good set. That's a great set. You also draw a comic called Pika Comics in which you have little Zener diodes having a party and rabbits doing logic gates and tic-tac-toe LEDs. These are very cute.

What made you start these? Thank you for saying they are cute. I'm glad you like them. I started the comics during college because during some courses, during some lectures, I got bored and my brain needed something creative to do in order to be able to continue to pay attention to the really difficult concepts. So I came up with Pika Comics, which explains complex ideas in a fun way, in a visual way. It was mainly for myself, but I decided to share it online because maybe it would help some other

people too. My dream is to one day write a book in that style about electronics with doodles? I think doodling is very important. It helps me understand things, but showing off doodles like you are doing, I mean, this motor with a horse in it and a carrot. A zero-ohm resistor is very funny. It's a zero-ohm resistor, and he holds a sign saying, I stand for nothing. These are very good. Thank you. I'm really glad somebody understands my jokes and laughs at them.

It's all we all want is somebody to laugh at us in their appropriate time. Yes. But not the not appropriate times. Okay, so for work, what do you do for work? In short, I'm a product manager at Zalmotech. We are an IoT development company from Bucharest, Romania. And we build proof-of-concept projects for different clients. And my work is so varied that I couldn't define exactly what I do because each project is really different.

But that's why I love it because it's fun and it doesn't get me bored. One of our clients is Waylay. If you check out my Hexer account, we have a series of tutorials. They are an IoT platform from Belgium. And they reached out to us and they told us they want to do some tutorials with us, some use cases to showcase the functionalities of their platform. And it was really fun because we got to choose the themes we wanted to work on. So we did a pet feeder, for example.

That was really fun. Also taking pictures of it was really fun. Besides Weiley, we also are now collaborating with Edge Impulse and I'm really excited about this one. They just started publishing some of our tutorials, so you should check those out. Edge Impulse is the company that does machine learning on microcontrollers. Yes. What kind of projects do you have for that? One of the projects that's already out is a workplace organizer using the NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit. And it uses machine learning and the Edge Impulse platform to identify whether tools are placed at their designed place after the end of a

work shift. So it helps keeping your workplace clean. So you're telling me there would be a giant alarm with red lights when somebody steals my tweezers? No, we don't have that functionality yet. But if you think it would be useful, we could implement that. It's just the tweezers. The rest of the tools I can replace.

Oh, I get you. I really love my tweezers. Maybe a tweezer dispenser would be a good... Oh, yeah. So with Waylay and Edge Impulse, do they come to you and say, we want you to build demos to show off our products, and then you get to choose what things might best show off machine learning or automation? Yes, that's exactly how it works.

There are so many crazy ideas I have for both. And then we can combine them and have machine learning and automation. We have one project. And silly LED things. Oh, go ahead. One project. No, sorry. Sorry for interrupting. I just wanted to say that we have one project that combines both Waylay and Edge Impulse. Can you tell us about it?

I don't remember which one was it. Okay. One of the projects you have listed on your GitHub page, we've been talking about how making it fun, making it silly is part of what makes projects after work more appealing, but you have at least one serious project on your GitHub page, automated hydroponic system. Does that have to do with work or is that just you? No, it doesn't have to do with work, but it was my thesis project, so it had to be complicated or more serious. However, it's still a passion project and I

really had fun building it. Can you tell us what it does? And how many strawberries you've gotten to eat from it? I think about 10 strawberries. That's better than our, better than our backyard so far. And after that, I managed to kill them, but I didn't put that in the documentation. My project works perfectly. Of course it does.

You just need to change the marketing. It's a strawberry eradicator. Yeah, exactly. But on a serious note, it's a hydroponic system for growing strawberries. Grafana and InfluxDB. It also uses PID for automatic pH control. I have some pH adjusting liquid that I insert into the system to decrease or increase the pH because strawberries need a certain value for the pH. It also uses image recognition to tell you whether you have strawberries or not in the system. And I also used image recognition to identify if the leaves have any illness. So if they turn brown or anything like that. Do you actually have a function called strawberry detection system? No.

It's sad because sometimes writing functions like that is just so much fun. You have to wonder if somebody coming along after you will realize just what a genius title that was. Oh, yeah. I should have thought of that. The strawberries. First, Grafana. I'm unfamiliar with it, but you have a picture in here that makes it look pretty interesting. What does it do? It's for visualizing all sorts of metrics. I think SpaceX also uses it, which I think is really cool.

So I wanted to use it as well. And I combined it with InfluxDB because I also needed a database to store the metrics. And so the strawberry growth goes to some online cloud thing. Which cloud provider did you use? It was InfluxDB and it was stored on the server we have at work. They made a playground area for me to be able to do this.

So I don't destroy anything. Okay, and then you point Grafana to that and it makes all kinds of pretty pictures. Yes, exactly. Okay. So many of my clients aren't really sure about which cloud provider they want or if they do want to work on AWS or Azure or Google Cloud instead of doing something on their own servers. So it's interesting to hear about different possibilities there.

Yeah, I get that. But I didn't have that much data, so it wasn't such a big issue for me to use the server we have at work. When did you leave school? So I'm still in school. I'm finishing my master's degree right now. But two years ago, I finished my bachelor's degree, which is four years long here where I live because it's an engineering degree.

And yeah, two years for my master's degree, which I'm currently finishing. So you mentioned it early on the show that it was a master's degree in embedded systems. Is that right? Yeah, exactly.

That's really interesting to me because when I, every time we ask this question, I feel like I'm getting super old, but when we were in school, there was no no such thing there were no degrees in embedded systems there was computer science there's electrical engineering and you could kind of mix and match classes and hope for the best um but it's interesting for me to hear that there's a graduate degree in embedded systems what what do you what's your coursework look like what is what is it um how's it structured uh so i have to mention that it's a new course i think it's like three years old so yes you have

a point um and i really enjoyed it because i studied a lot of things that are actually useful right now for work from FPGAs, digital circuit design, parallel programming, CUDA. What else? That's a lot. That's a broad, broad curriculum, actually. Yeah. I'm actually surprised. Okay. actually yeah i'm actually surprised okay um anything related to optimizing the code parallelizing the code openmp um intel intel vector instructions many things really

is it more hardware or software? More software. What was hardware related was just the digital design course. What sort of platforms? You mentioned CUDA and OpenMP and things. Those sound like those are things that you would work on that have a lot of horsepower. Yeah. So like GPUs? this is big embedded yeah gpus and fpgas and we also had a course on microcontrollers how much machine learning is there in your coursework i had one course related to machine learning and the focus was on making a project that would be

light enough to run on an embedded system. Was that before or after you started working with Edge Impulse? It was before. Yeah, throw you into the deep end. What do you want your career to look like? So I'm not really the kind of person who plans a lot. So maybe I don't have an answer for that. But I would like to be able to call myself both an engineer and an artist.

Because when I was a kid, at some point I wanted to be an artist, but I didn't do that because everybody was telling me that, no, you can't make money out of that. You'll end up hungry. So I want to do both just to prove kid me that it's possible and I can have fun doing both.

You're going to have to decide how to give yourself the artist title then. Is it when you sell a sculpture, when you have a thousand Twitter followers? I mean, what is the... Second was a terrible criteria. Yes, yes. Very terrible criteria. Maybe Instagram followers. Yeah.

Yeah. How do you... That's so hard and it would be interesting... Maybe Instagram followers. Yeah. Yeah. That's so hard, and it would be interesting. I think it's when she's on a podcast as a guest talking about her work. Oh, well, then that's easy. We can check that right off. So I'm an artist. Thank you.

Title bestowed. I don't think we're actually in charge of that but we can we can claim to be uh when i was at fitbit we had a team in bucharest and uh it was a fairly large team and i worked with them on a number of projects within the company and i don't know if they're still connected after the google acquisition or not but i was surprised as an american that there was a big tech scene in romania and i just wondered if you could describe what the tech scene is like there. So I think we have a lot of interest in sciences and technology in general. I was actually talking to a friend about this. It turns out Romania is one of the countries in Europe with the highest employment of women in technology which I find really cool I'm proud of that but yeah we focus a lot on technology and it's you you have to study something science related

it's it's a really common thing here. And actually, because you've mentioned working with the Fitbit team, one of my professors at this master's degree had a startup called VectorWatch, which was wearable, very similar to Fitbit. And they got acquired at some point by Fitbit and then Google. So it's very possible that you two work together, which I find really cool. It's very possible. Yeah, that was the team, was the Vector team.

Yeah, yeah. So your question got me really excited. And I don't think many people are aware of open hardware and the idea of hackerspace or makerspace. That's not really common here. But technology is. So I'm hoping maybe in the future we will become more aware of open hardware and the power of the community.

So it's more of a professional engineering kind of culture. Yeah. Yeah, and there were more women on the team, in the Romanian team, than there were on some of the teams in the United States. So that was a nice thing to see. Some of the teams? A lot of the teams. It wasn't always like that. No. There's one more project I want to ask you about. I have a deep fondness for llamas,

but you have an alpaca dev board. Why? I mean, have you ever met an alpaca? I thought the question was going to be, what's the difference between an alpaca and a llama? That's a harder question than most people think. And there are some pretty major differences. And if you have to choose one to pet, pet the alpaca. And if you have to choose one to protect the flock, choose the llama. Anyway, please, Alex, go ahead. So, no, I haven't got the chance to pet any alpaca, but I'm hoping to in the future.

And my first PCB badge was an alpaca badge with a color-changing LED as a tail. And everybody loved it. I'm happy about that. So I wanted to make a dev world with it so people could actually play with it and personalize it. So I used the same design for the Alpaca badge. And then 80tiny85 because it was one of my favorite microcontrollers at that time. And in addition to the rainbow tail, it now has glowing cheeks as well.

Very important. Yes. But also I love both alpacas and llamas. I think it's important to mention that both are cute so all of your projects have what i think of as really interestingly designed pcps um with cool shapes and stuff and as someone who has tried to make pcps a few times and kind of given up um how did you learn to do that and what tools do you use? Do you have any advice for this three questions? So three questions. How did you learn to do it? What tools do you use?

And do you have advice for people like me who kind of want to do it, but keep getting tripped up? So I'm self-taught. I learned most of it by asking people different questions when I got stuck or by Googling it. And I used EagleCAD when I started, but now I'm using KiCad because it's open source. And it's also pretty easy to do design seed it. And also advice for anyone who would want to try to do this, just reach out to people who do it and ask them questions if you get stuck. And also, adding the design to the PCB is not that difficult. I would say the circuit itself is more challenging. Yes.

And if you have the chance to make a pretty project, why not do it? Don't make a plain rectangular shape. At least do rounded corners. Speaking of rounded corners, looking at the alpaca, you don't have straight lines between components. because i don't like them how do you how do you get something to not do straight lines i mean i'm just i have no idea how you do that in eagle or a key cat uh in eagle you could draw directly rounded lines. It had an option for that. And I think the new KiCad also has this option,

but I'm not sure because I just switched to KiCad. But they also have a plugin for that. I think it's online somewhere on GitHub. So many, many options to do this. I like the swirly lines. You said this was a badge. What makes it a badge? For the alpaca badge, so not the dev board, I added some pads on some exposed copper pads and I just soldered some hooks to it so you could use like anything conductive thread whatever you want to use to put it on your clothes and was there where did you wear it to? I put it on my backpack because it's also useful as a light. When people talk about badge development,

I usually think about conferences, but people do use them for other things. Do you have any ideas for badges for conferences? I haven't really thought of that because I feel like these conferences are so far away from me that I never thought of attending one. But now that I got the fellowship and I was actually thinking of attending the summit, the Open Hardware Summit, I'm thinking maybe I should also go to a conference. So maybe I should start thinking of a design. There are many European conferences. I don't know about the Romanian scene, but I'm pretty sure we're going to get an email about it. So I will forward that along to you.

Well, I'm glad you chose alpacas and that you have introduced us to more swirly lights as well as, you know, rounded corners. I didn't even know you could do that. The alpaca is just so cloud and fluffy like. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Yes, I think I would like to say thank you to the open source community because I wouldn't have been here if I hadn't met so many friendly people

who helped me with my projects and who also pushed me to do things I'm not comfortable with, like talking about myself in a podcast or applying for the fellowship. I think it's an awesome community. I think that you will be successful. You've been a great guest on this podcast and you did get the fellowship. So I look forward to seeing more from you. Our guest has been Alexandra Kovora,

Embedded Systems Engineer and Product Manager at ZalmoTech and a recipient of the Open Hardware Summit's Ada Lovelace Fellowship. Thanks, Alex. Thank you so much. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Senya for connecting me with Alex. And of course, thank you for listening. You can always contact us at showandembedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded FM. And now a quote to leave you with. From Nadia Komenici.

Enjoy the journey and try to get better every day. And don't lose the passion and love for what you do.