Embedded - 503: The Tiniest Laptops

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Emily Lovell spoke with us about teaching how to contribute to open source, including her own experience creating the LilyTiny as a Master’s student and researching the impact as a PhD student.  The LilyTiny work was done in conjunction with Leah Buechley (Embedded episode 382). See the paper The LilyTiny: A Case Study in Expanding Access to Electronic Textiles or watch the video. UCSC Open Source Program Office (note this is different from the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) that we spoke about with Carl Maltzahn (Episode 285). Emily recommended the curriculum from TeachingOpenSource.org.  Emily’s other life is at EP Custom Pickups and Aberdeen Guitars. She spoke on a lutherie panel at NAMM. Transcript  Mouser’s Empowering Innovation Together hub dives into all sorts of topics like renewable energy, energy-efficient systems, and sustainable design. Whether you’re looking for the latest in clean tech trends or just need some inspiration, you’ll find articles, videos, and podcasts all geared toward engineers who want to make a difference. Head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and check out their clean tech content.

Welcome to embedded. I am Alicia White alongside Christopher White. Our guest this week is Dr. Emily Lovell and we're going to talk about open source software for as long as we can before we shift the conversation over to guitars. Hi, Emily. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at a University California Santa Cruz, that's UCSC, programming night? What's a programming night? Sure. Yeah, what's a programming night?

One of these meetups where you get together and introduce yourself around a table. Okay. Sure, I would say, you know, hi, I'm Emily. I care a lot about who's participating in tech and the sorts of think is like the punk rock of software engineering. And right now I get to do that full time. So I'm currently the associate director of the open source program office at UC Santa Cruz, where we are figuring out what our campuses need from us in terms of support. And I in particular get to spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage students in open source software contribution. Cool.

Problems that I always have with open source is how do you get paid? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're still figuring that out too. But yeah, that's an interesting one. We are going to do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And are you ready?

Yeah, let's go. You skipped the whole thing about our part of that. It's not asked a lot. Well, no, the other part, I was thinking about saying she can only use one word answers, but I figured I would see how verbose she was before I limited it. Beecher Forest. Oh, Beecher Forest. Ugh, Forest.

Name of your dog. Daphne. Have you, okay, I'm just seeing some of these for the first time. Have you ever purchased a deli slicer for a computer science class? Yes. If you could be expert in one instrument, what would it be? Drums. I like that answer. If you could choose a new instrument to learn, what would it be?

Drums. Favorite guitar tuning? Open E? Okay, this is misspelled in a hilarious way, but I'm not going to pronounce the misspelling. Single coil or humbucker? Single coil. Wow, that really was misspelled. Complete one project or start a dozen?

In theory, complete one project. In practice, start a dozen. In theory, complete one project in practice, start a dozen. You're at a college, but if you could teach a college course of your choice, what would it be? Like a computational craft course, which I have taught, but I think it'd be fun to do again. Favorite fictional robot? Baymax. Okay, lightning round is over, but I need you to follow up on two of those lightning

round questions. First, I need to know what's going on with the deli slicer. That was the reason for the one word answer, was that nobody would find out what was going on with the deli slicer. Well, I'll delete this whole section and the listeners won't know, but I will know. Okay. I would love to know how you knew to ask me that question. But yeah, when I was an undergrad working with my—who later became an undergrad advisor, then grad advisor, and now my boss, I did a project. I think it was called like the Visible Fruit Project that was based on a project called the Visible Human Project where we sliced fruit extremely thinly, took lots of

pictures of it, and then used it to do visualization of three-dimensional objects. Volumetric visualization. Oh, very cool. Okay. Do I get to know how you found that information? The person who introduced us, Kathleen Toot, gave me a few questions that I might share with you. There are a few more in here too. Okay.

I love it. I'm impressed that she remembers. Wow. Cool. And I know we said we were going to make the whole show about guitar, but since you mentioned that you're really excited about drums, the whole show is now going to be about drums. Right. We're just going to cut the open source part and do guitar and drums. Are you a drummer? Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. Yeah, we should talk about that. I'm sitting in his studio and I am literally surrounded by drums. You're literally sitting on

my drum stool. I am. Wow. I just turned 40 last week and I've wanted to play the drums since I was a teenager. So for my 40th birthday, I went and rented a rehearsal studio and played for the first time. Awesome. And I got super excited about it. So that's really cool that you're a drummer. A very exciting instrument. He also plays guitar and bass.

A little guitar. A little guitar. But he has a nice guitar. Anyway, so I hear you make guitars. I do. A little guitar. A little guitar. But he has a nice guitar. Anyway, so I hear you make guitars. I do. Aberdeen, is that what the name of your guitar company? Yeah, Aberdeen Guitars.

We make vintage-inspired steel string American acoustic guitars. Okay, but you're also going to be a professor at UCSC. Yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I just accepted an adjunct assistant professor appointment at UCSC where I'll get to continue doing the work, the programmatic work I've been doing at the open source program office. But you also make guitars.

I do. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Is that monetizing your hobby? And if so, which one is your hobby? Hmm. Ooh, that's a really good question. I like that. But no, it doesn't feel like a hobby. Yeah, I think I mean, they both feel like work. Like, they do both feel like real jobs. But I think it's fun to get to work in two different areas,

because whenever one area I feel stuck or frustrated or projects aren't moving, there's always something else to go pour myself into. So I feel like they actually kind of feed each other, having these two areas that I get paid to do work. I understand that, yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. do work. I understand that, yeah. I want to take a break from today's conversation and mention a resource for those of you interested

in the future of a clean technology. Mouser Electronics, sponsor of today's show, has an empowering innovation together hub where they dive into all sorts of topics like renewable energy, energy efficient systems, and sustainable design. Whether you're looking for the latest in clean tech trends or just need some inspiration, you'll find articles, videos, and podcasts all geared towards engineers who want to make a difference. Head over to mouser.com slash empowering dash innovation and check out their clean tech content.

Now back to the show. Okay, so before I ask you how you got into guitars. This is an engineering show. I'm making fun of us. You worked on Lily Tiny, which is not the lily pad, but something smaller, tinier than the lily pad, Lily Tiny. How did you get started on that? Yeah, so I worked with Leah Beakley, was my first graduate advisor in the

HiloTech research group. Yeah, I saw it. That's so cool. I just saw her recently. So I was in her first cohort of graduate students for the HiloTech research group. And she had been working so much of her doctorate work was on the LilyPad Arduino toolkit, which if, you know, for anyone listening who's not familiar, that's a sewable set of Arduino microcontrollers that use conductive thread instead of wires to connect and can be sewn into anything textile based. So when I joined the group, Leah already had that body of work going, and I was really

interested in broadening participation in computing, like who is making stuff and who feels supported and like they can be creative and I had grown up sewing. My grandmother was a seamstress and so I grew up working a lot with my hands doing all kinds of craft work and sort of started playing with a lily pad Arduino toolkit like I guess sort of started playing with the Lillipad Arduino toolkit, like I guess sort of after college. And so when I started working with Leah, I was like really interested in like combining

sort of education and all of the work that she was doing, a lot of which was already an education. But I was really interested in like, I guess exploring parts of it that she hadn't gotten to yet or that I was really interested in like, I guess, exploring parts of it that she hadn't gotten to yet or that I was excited by. And one of those things was, I guess, you know, thinking about equity and broadening participation was thinking about like all the people that I wish could like play with the LilyPad toolkit and like experience that like joy and creativity and computing.

But like maybe their school didn't have the resources or their teacher didn't know anything about circuits. So yeah, that's kind of how the Lilly Tiny project came to be, was Leah and I were brainstorming together. She had ideas, and I had ideas about sort of increasing access to that sort of tinkering. And then the Lilly Tiny was sort of increasing access to that sort of tinkering. And then the Lily Tiny was sort of like my master's thesis work, which was sort of making a solo microcontroller that is pre-programmed

and way cheaper to produce, because it's just an at tiny microcontroller, like breakout board basically. But then also developing like an approachable curriculum that teachers could use with it who didn't have to know anything about circuits. So I'm not a hardware person, so I also like learned a lot in the process of putting that together but I had had a lot of teaching experience at that point that I think informed that work. So it's pre-programmed to flicker lights? What is it pre-programmed to do? Yeah, so it comes pre-programmed,

like, with basically an assortment of light patterns. So in a lot of the work we did teaching with LilyPad, the toolkit as it existed at the time, there was, like, either we would teach workshops where participants might sew LEDs onto a bracelet or something, like lights and a battery, and the lights were always on, or you took out the battery and they were off. Or the other sort of type of workshop might be teaching people how to write Arduino code to make interactive stuff.

And so I think that we were grappling with, how do you get people from one to the next? How do you start introducing computational ideas or computational thinking or having a conversation about what is a microcontroller without having to require the programming yet. So I think there's still like, like we didn't, we didn't solve that problem. Like we didn't like totally bridge that gap, but it was sort of a baby step that could come that could be like more advanced than just connecting lights to a battery, but didn't

require programming yet, if that makes sense. Sure. I mean, you connect lights to a battery and someone now understands that batteries provide energy and if you connect things this way and only this way, things will light up. And so you get some creativity there, but it's just a light staying on. There's more joy to it when light is doing things. Yeah, and I think like we like programmed it. It's a simple program, but that different pins that you would connect to would sort of have different light patterns. And so the hope there was that you could like start to have these conversations about a microcontroller as a tiny computer. And this tiny computer, somebody else already put this program on it so that this pin makes

a heartbeat pattern and this pin makes a fade on and off pattern. And if you want, you can use both. And it also introduces more room for not really error, but unexpected outcomes. When you just have more options and you're teaching people how to do all this for the first time, often at the K-12 level, more things can happen differently than you expect, which is always a learning opportunity, I think. If you're like, oh, my friend next to me, like their thing is doing something different than my thing.

And you're like, great, let's talk about it. I like this idea of there being space before you have to program it yourself to understand that things can be programmed. How much do the lily pads cost? Do you know how much do they cost then? Yeah, thank you for modifying that question. The market, I'm sure, has changed.

At the time, I would say to buy a Lilypad Arduino, which was the programmable microcontroller, might be like $20 or $25. And then once you started adding on the Lilyly pad LEDs, those might be another couple dollars or more per, maybe two or three dollars per, sewable LED. And so part of my work was the Lily Tiny, advocating for that to be lower price points. So that eventually was like $5 with like price breaks if you bought in quantity. And then also documenting as part of the curriculum, like how you could order like just LEDs, like regular through hole LEDs and modify them to make them sewable. So that was all stuff

that like I learned from Leah, but being able to sort of collate and document it in a way that like teachers could like go on DigiKey and like not have to know anything about DigiKey except like I need a hundred of this part number. That's it, right? So that kind of thing was part of it too. And what was your curriculum? What were your curriculum's objectives? A lot of it was about sparking joy and confidence, I would say. So it wasn't super technically advanced. By the end of it, if you did all the activities in it, someone might know how to make a basic circuit or connect a basic circuit to the Lily Tiny. But a lot of it was really like wanting to support people having like well scaffolded like first experiences with hardware

in a craft context. And so my master's thesis really focused on like the idea of self-efficacy and like helping people develop this self-confidence or this concept of, I'm capable of being successful at this. And that comes from a lot of different boring academic stuff that I wrote about in my thesis. But it comes from having somebody role model what that looks like and having actual successful experiences, which means that you're getting that sort of difficulty calibrated to the learner and stuff like that. So it was broader than just like learn how to make a circuit,

I guess was the hope at least. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. You don't teach kids to color because we need coloring books filled in. You teach kids to color because it's a fun way to teach them fine motor control skills. To the Crayola mines, kids. Yeah, so true. Yeah. So how does this e-textile work influence what you're doing now with open source and universities?

That was totally one of Kathleen's questions. She did such a good job. It was sort of like, I mean, this is how we all, I guess, experience life. It was sort of a wandering next one thing at a time. I was doing this work at MIT, and Leah ultimately left MIT, and our research group dissolved. And at that point, I also had, like, a lot of stuff going on with my health at that point in my life.

And so I ended up back at UC Santa Cruz because I knew that I had a really supportive advisor here. But I was in a different departmental context. You know, like, the MIT Media Lab is, like, perfect really supportive advisor here. But I was in a different departmental context. The MIT Media Lab is perfect for that extremely interdisciplinary fringe provocative work. And I landed back in a computer science department. So I still remained a little engaged in that space,

but ended up exploring more, like, OK, are the some threads of that that were really interesting? And you know, the Arduino microcontroller is open source. So I'd had a lot of like exposure to open source hardware. And like, the reason I could even like make the Lily Tiny, well, I knew Leah, but, but if I hadn't like known Leah, right, the reason they could make the Lily tiny. Well, I knew Leah, but but if I hadn't like known Leah, right, the reason they could make the Lily tiny is because I went and I pulled like existing board layout files and looked at those and then just like made one that was same size and style. So I think that sort of exposed me to things that open source makes possible.

And then once I was back at UCSC as a grad student, I just happenstance, someone asked me to help mentor open source software contribution workshop with students at CSU Monterey Bay. And I went and just saw like, oh, like this is, this is so empowering for students to be

like actually contributing to real software projects. And yeah, getting to see a lot of that community values in that. And then a postdoc, it was just luck and good timing that this loan foundation had given UCSC funding for open source program office work, and that funded a postdoc that came to be when I was finishing my doctorate. I want to open some California snobbery here.

UCSC, any of the UC colleges are usually considered a little more prestigious than the Cal State, which is the California State University at Monterey or Fullerton or a whole bunch of them. SJSU where I went. Was SJSU Cal State? Okay. And so there's UCSC helping Cal State Monterey is a, it's a prestigious thing. Like the Monterey folks got to come to Cal State, got to go to hang out with their... Email Alicia when you have complaints about this line of... I'm sorry.

I just thought, I thought that people in Ghana might want to know how the California school systems rank, okay? Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's interesting context to call out. I would say the UC systems are really known for being research universities and the CSU schools are really known for being teaching institutions. Thank you. That's such a much better way to put it than what I meant.

No, I mean, you're... UCs give PhDs, CSU goes up to Masters. Yeah, but there is like, like you're absolutely right that there is like a feeling of affluence, prestige, or like hierarchy. Snudiness. Yeah, snudiness. Yeah, maybe that's it. I don't know. Okay, so in that vein, you have been very outspoken and very proactive about bringing people who don't normally get into tech, at least a little bit into tech, to

show them what it can be. Can you give examples of how people can do that? Or how you've done it that maybe other people can make their own version for? Yeah, I think there's so many people who all have like a thousand approaches to doing this at work, which I think is what makes it really interesting. But I think something that's really important to me and yeah, has just grown out of my own experiences, is like the importance of going and finding out like, what do people even like want to do with technology?

Like, because I think, I think things are getting better. But I think tech has gone through periods of like, the people with the resources saying like, this is how they think that everybody should be using technology or like, oh, we want more women in tech and they should be doing this. And then like, as a woman in tech, I'm like, what? Like, no. So I think that with all the students that I've been fortunate to work with,

what's been really most exciting to me is seeing what excites them and what feels relevant to them, and then thinking, OK, how can I offer them tools towards that end? And that is gonna look super different for different types of students. I taught in rural Kentucky for a while, and my students there were just demographically completely different than my students at UC Santa Cruz

or the HBCU students that I work with. So I think just like being humble and listening to what people are interested in and what they want to do is really important. So in Kentucky, this was Beria College? Beria, mhm. And the internet says it's the first integrated college in the south and it doesn't charge tuition. Yeah. How did you end up there? And can you compare it to being in Santa Cruz? Hmm. Yeah, so I ended up teaching at Berea through open source work.

Open source has become this thread through everything for me. But I had met a lot of really awesome faculty who were teaching open source and had a lot of experience with that around the time that I first became curious about that as a grad student, like after having that one experience I mentioned at CSUMB. And so it was actually through that circle of professional development that I met some faculty at Berea College and it started out as they needed a visiting instructor. But I ended up leaving my PhD in the middle of the PhD at Santa Cruz and going and living in Kentucky and the visiting position turned into a tenure track position.

I was still ABD, meaning that I hadn't finished my dissertation yet. Oh, but dissertation. It's what PhD students have when they don't actually have the PhD. Exactly. So I was ABD. And so I got like, I sort of did everything out of order.

But yeah, I mean, I ended up having that opportunity through my open source circle of faculty at the time, but then took it, you know, in part because it seemed like a really unique place to teach because you get to do really like high impact work with students from really different, like just really different life experience than me. So yeah, so then yeah, everything you read on the internet is correct. Berea has an endowment that helps, you know, pay for everything and students who go there also work, it's a work college, so all the students work on campus.

They do everything from like, you know, greet you when you come into the Dean's office for an appointment, to you know, run the library, and yeah, teaching assistants, and then they don't pay tuition. So it's a really, really unique place to teach. When you say teaching open source and faculty in open source, is that I'm going to create my first project online and not put in copyright? Or is that teaching folks how to contribute to big open source projects? And I know there's a spectrum in there. Yeah, usually in the work that I'm doing, it's like when I talk about teaching open source,

usually it's people who are teaching students how to contribute to open source projects. And those might be like instructor led projects. So there are faculty who like manage their own open source project that's predominantly student contributors. In my own work, usually I'm supporting students contributing to projects that are in the wild, so external facing open

source projects. And then another facet of that work is people who are the first one, which is teaching people how to make their own open source projects. So here at UCSC, we do a lot more of that in the open source program office through like supporting research software development. But teaching-wise, usually it's teaching people to contribute to open source.

Because I have a whole bunch of personal repositories of varying quality. Yeah. And they're all open source. Because I have a whole bunch of personal repositories of varying quality. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And they're all open source. Yeah. But I wouldn't really wish them upon anyone. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Except my book repository. That one has some good stuff. Yeah. But I mean, contributing to open source, you just, I mean, the first thing you do is you read their README, you fix their typos, you write a PR for the fixed README, and then six months later they don't accept it because you didn't put your comments in correctly.

I mean, that's how open source works, right? Sometimes. Yeah, I mean, when I work with students, a lot of the work is figuring out, where are you going to put your time? And so some open source is paid. A lot of open source is not paid. So some of the work I do with students

is helping them screen projects like screen projects for like, how are these people talking to one another? Are people responding when people submit pull requests? Are they having respectful conversation about issues? Those kinds of things so that they, we reduce the chances of pouring time into something where it's sort of just going to go into a black hole. And do the students, you said there were some instructor-led projects, but for the other ones, do they just wander around looking for an interesting project like a Docity or Linux?

I wouldn't recommend Linux as a starting point. No particular reason, no experience there, but just I wouldn't recommend a start to Linux, no. Or do you have a list of like, these are some pretty friendly ones, why don't you get started in this list of 25 to find one you like? Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. I, different people do this different ways. Like everyone who teaches open source does it differently. For me, I tend to like do a little bit of both. I let students, I say like, okay, why don't you go find, go search around and find something related to your interests. if you're into photography or this or you know AI and they might come back with ideas and then we go and we sort of look into Whether those communities would seem welcoming based on that some of the criteria I mentioned

however, I do also maintain sort of like a Informal shortlist of projects that either I've worked in or I've had students work in or I know faculty who've had students work in that I can guide students to or like maybe I know a maintainer there or I've met a maintainer at a conference who said, please send me students. So it's a little bit of a mishmash,

but there is one interesting body of work is that the folks, the folks who drew me into teaching open source, they especially encourage students to work in humanitarian open source projects in part because they have found anecdotally, they're doing deeper research but anecdotally have found those to be places where people tend to be kinder and more welcoming and supportive of new contributors. What, you mean people who are out to do nice things are often nice people? Right.

That's a shocker. Yeah. That's like the time I came down heavily in favor of children reading. Yeah, right. Okay, nobody needed that soap box, but still, okay. So changing subjects a bit to get a little bit more concrete. There was recently an event called Slugfest. And I know that the banana slug is UCSC's mascot.

And having had banana slugs in our yard, I can see why because once the banana slug is the size of a bus, a school bus, it can take over whatever you want. So there you stupid little sparrows at Stanford. Sorry, what was I saying? Oh, did any banana slugs attend slugfest? Cardinals. Oh, I see. I see.

You were purposely insulting the... Okay, got it. Sorry. I mean, actually, the tree is their mascot, but this does not go there. Okay. I don't know. Yeah. What's up with that? Yeah, we did have, I mean, if we're talking about banana slugs being students, yes, we

had many in attendance. However, your question does make me wish that some real banana slugs would come because they would have the tiniest laptops. So I would actually really like to see that and like how do they type? I don't know, but I would love to find out. So maybe we'll try that next time. Yeah. I mean, you could capture a few just to...

No, come on. You're not gonna... I guess you could do like some papercraft little origami. Origami little laptops and an ATtiny to make the thing blink occasionally. Yeah. All right, you've sold me. Okay, sorry, open source slugfest. No slugs were harmed.

No slugs were harmed. Well, what is it though? Yeah, so open source slugfestugfest is going to leave you hanging. This is an event we have. One of the things that our office thinks about is community and thinking about what does an open source program office do or should do. One of the things that has been fruitful for us

is bringing people together who are already doing open source work or want to be doing open source work. So the Open Source Slugfest is a spring event. This was our second year that my colleague and our executive director, Stephanie Lege, spearheads, which is meant to bring together like our on-campus people who are interested in already doing open source. So it was kind of like a collection of short,

like lightning talks and intros about like just cool projects people are doing. And then the people who came were a mix of like undergrads, undergraduate students, faculty, it was sort of a whole spread. And then everyone just, you know, gets together, eats falafel, and talks about open source. Did you have a good time? Yeah, yeah, I love, I love these events, because I love talking to people about open source. Did you have a good time? Yeah, yeah, I love I love these events because I love talking to people about open source. So like my favorite thing is when like a student like walks by and they're like, what is this event? And you know, and then you get to say, well, do you know what open source is? And they're like, no. And then you sort of lead them on the like, oh, well, do you think you use open source? And they're shocked to find out I do, you know, and then to find out that they can contribute to it.

So I really love getting to have those first, those early conversations is really fun for me. So it's funny because we've been steeped in it so long. The idea that somebody doesn't know what open source is. Right. How can you not know? Yeah. Yeah. There's Bang Bang Con that How can you not know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's Bang Bang Con that was at UCSC a few times. I think it's no longer being held. Right. Is it similar to that? Or I guess it's a lot shorter. Slugfest is only one night, not a whole weekend. Yeah. That's a good question.

I only got to go once to Bang BingCon, and I loved it. It was so much fun. But I would say, yeah, our events so far, like that, yeah, the Open Source Slack Fest is just an evening, so it's like really more of like a catalyst type event to get people like meeting new people and thinking about how they might get more involved or connect with someone new. But we do have some longer events. So we have a fall event that sometimes has been a full day symposium event that's more like talks and panels with both people on campus and industry collaborators and foundation collaborators. And we also just hosted our first UC Open event, which was like a University of California

wide open source conference. And that just happened this spring for the first time. That was super exciting. We're expanding open source program office work to several additional UC campuses. And this was the first chance that we got together to do something, you know, as a multi-campus team. But, yeah, so different, but different vibe, I would say, than like Bang Bang Con, although we do some student events that are, that feel a bit more like that. There's a certain chaos to the Bang Bang Con.

Yeah. That's really fun. Yeah. So, Open Source Program Office, that you've mentioned Office, and that's the full name of it. Is that different from Carlos Maltzon's Center for Research in Open Source Software, the CROSS thing? The OSPO kind of grew out of Carlos's work.

So, yeah, the Center for Research on Open Source Software across had been around for maybe like 10 years or something. That was Carlos's research center. And that had been supporting a lot of different research-centric open source work. And I came on right as the OSPO started, so I can't speak as thoroughly to that as Carlos. I know you've had him on the show. He's like, could really speak in depth about his vision for that.

But that was supporting a lot of like graduate student and faculty research and open source. And that also included things like incubator fellowships that funded some graduate students and postdocs. And then the OSPO grew out of that because he and Stephanie Lege had been doing a lot of work that started to look like related, but like a little different, a little more programmatic, like, you know, how does it fit? And that sort of dovetailed with the time when academic OSPOs are starting to become

a thing, like the Sloan Foundation has funded several of them, including ours. And so it kind of like, yeah, so the OSPO kind of grew out of that work and allows just like a broader scope of things like student events and conferences and things that are like related, but not quite what a research center does.

So they're both So they both still exist and just sort of reach different sort of goals. Cool. Okay. Here in Santa Cruz, we have Santa Cruz Guitar. Company. Santa Cruz Guitar Company, yes. And that's led by Richard Hoover. Mm-hmm. guitar company, yes, and that's led by Richard Hoover.

And he has a big idea about open source guitars and telling people the secrets to making his extremely expensive and super awesome guitars. He does, yes. This is my transition now we go to guitars. Tell us everything. It was a good transition. Don't waste it. Tell us everything is It was a good transition. Don't waste it. It was a great transition.

It's a lovely transition. Tell us everything is a difficult interview question. Oh, okay. How did you get into making guitars? Yeah, I had, let's see. So during the pandemic, my best friend started building hand-won pickups for electric guitars, which are like the things that go under the strings on electric guitar that translate the string movement into sound.

And so we had actually been building pickups together for about two years, and then he started working full-time in Lutherie doing repair work and restoration work and built his first acoustic guitar. And yeah, I sort of got pulled into it like through him, you know, it started out as like, Oh, like, it'd be really helpful if somebody could like hold some stuff sometimes when I need to like glue it together. And, you know, like, could you just come and like hold this thing and, and then, you know, once I was sort of there, we... And then you bought him a C-clamp?

It's different. Yeah, and then like once I was there, it was just like, oh, we work really well together. And, you know, I've worked a lot with my hands, I've done some woodworking before, and love building stuff. So yeah, we just started kind of playing around with it and found that we like, you know, really love building guitars together. So then he'd already done an apprenticeship, then I went and sort of sought out my own apprenticeship experiences in guitar building and then brought those back to the work that we do together. So where do you get apprenticeships in this? And how much do they cost? And how long do they take? And are they super fun? They sound fun.

And when can I start? Yes. Are you hiring? They're super fun. Sorry. We are not hiring. I wish. Yeah, well, for him, his apprenticeship was like working.

He works at Selwyn Music. He's now that he like runs the repair shop there. But he learned from the original owner of Selvyn Music. This is so exciting because he needs to talk to her for the care person. I'm sorry, this is totally out of bed, but I have like three bases that I need to get fixed. I keep meaning to go over to Selvyn and I keep not doing it. It's been like a year. Oh, Patrick's the best. He will set you up with whatever you need. He'll solve your problems. Totally. Yeah. So, yeah. So my friend Patrick like runs the repair shop there now, but he,

you know, I think like Luther is so cool because there's so much generational knowledge and like with a lot of hand craft or things like that. I think this is true. But yeah, so he learned sort of that was his path was sort of working that job and learning from somebody with years of experience. And then for me, I did two things. I went and paid to go spend a month in somebody else's shop doing like my own acoustic build start to finish with them. And gosh, I don't remember how much it costs. It was maybe like, yeah, maybe like four or $5,000. It was like a chunk of money. Some people go to school, there's like three schools you can go to, like, I at this stage in my

life couldn't really swing that. But sounds fun. And then I also did a fellowship, there's a group called women in Lutherie, that is like a Facebook group with other online presence and they run some time, some years, a fellowship program. So I got to go work with like this amazing boutique electric guitar builder in Tennessee. And I spent like, yeah, I guess like 10 days or two weeks with her last year, getting to like use a pin router and like all this really cool stuff that I don't get to do and the acoustic work

that I've already done. So yeah, so that was all in that like, people are just volunteering, you know, like I had to pay to go visit her and she's donating her time, but that was a really cool experience too. And how I don't know how to phrase this without sounding like a complete jerk. It's not my intention. Why do people buy your acoustic guitars instead of give me a guitar brand? Like a Martin.

Like a Martin. Yeah. That was the whole question. Why yours instead of Martin's? Other than, you know, handcrafted and people can get what they want. Pretty big thing that people want. Yeah. Except for the things that people probably want.

So I don't know because I'm not like our buyers, but I can speculate why, like I, I'm drawn to things like what we do. I think like there's, you can buy an instrument that's like a really well-made instrument. That's like a machined instrument. Like lots of people are making like a beautiful CNC, you know CNC assisted or belt instruments that sound great, look great. I think that a lot of people who buy handcrafted instruments really value that a human has made or a few humans have made

this thing that becomes a part of their creative work. And so I kind of take pride on the fact that, like, everything that we build is unique. Like, we have not built two guitars that are the same, and even if we tried to, like, they wouldn't sound the same. Like, wood, all wood is different. It's an organic material. Um, and the way things come together are different.

You know, one of my friends says, like, when people, you know, when people complain about wood, he'll be like, go talk to the tree. Like you have a problem with how the guitar is coming together, like take it up with the tree. Like it's just, you know, there's a lot that's just different every time you build an instrument. So I think it's really cool to have this object that can breathe life into creative work that also has its own story behind it. And I think people like that, you know? And I think that's something I learned from like Richard Hoover and from SCGC

is like they're so good at telling a story about their instruments. Like they get- The stories. Yeah, like they get wood from like, these very specific relationships that they've cultivated over generations, right? Here's this wood that we found at the bottom of a bog.

It's been there since the Pleistocene and we're going to build a guitar out of it. Come to Santa Cruz for the trees and the ocean and the boardwalk and the people watching and the beautiful vistas and the bike paths, but don't forget to go to the Santa Cruz guitar. You can just walk in? No, no, you need an appointment to go on this tour. But he shows you everything. And then he like picks up different pieces of wood just out of this giant pile he has. And he plays them with just a tap.

And suddenly you can hear the wood sounding different. And then he tells you this story about how this one came from the largest, what sounded like very cancerous, but that's not how he puts it, a tree that is the one of its only kind, it's huge and it's weird. And this one comes from the bottom of the bog and this one came from the Pleistocene and has been buried since... Yeah. And you get to see all these machines and he doesn't mind if you start the whole thing asking five million questions and just continue the whole time. Ask me how I know that one. asking five million questions and just continue the whole time. Ask me how I know that one. It was very nice about the, oh yeah, I do have another question. And yeah, anyway.

Yes. It was, so, but going on that tour really made me realize how important the wood is. How do you source the wood? Yeah, we, you know, people have all different ways of doing this. Some of our wood we order from suppliers that a lot of lesiers order from. Although I do always like to pick some places like don't let you see the wood. They'll just be like, we're going to send you some mahogany. And that's like, that's a no for me. I want to see the exact piece of wood that we're considering purchasing.

So yeah, we order from certain suppliers. We also work with local people. We have a local friend who does a lot of woodworking, custom cabinetry and furniture and things like that. But he also will go and get the local redwood that fell in the storm and take it to his kiln and dry it and re-aw it for sets of, you know, wood.

So, so for instance, like I have a, I have like a, we call it the tiny telly because I have small hands and only play short scale guitars and building a scaled down telecaster with my mentor from the women in Lutherie program, um, that's out of a local piece of Redwood. So I think that that is really cool when you're able to make those connections and use wood like that. Do you... How does redwood sound versus mahogany? Is there a...

Well, it's an electric guitar, so it makes less difference. Oh, it's electric. Okay, I missed that. Sorry. Yeah, electric's the difference. it's more in the pickups. Yeah, I think wood still matters, just like last, like Chris was saying, in electric guitars. But yeah, I think mahogany tends to have like a really mellow sound, and I think redwood like sometimes sometimes can but there's definitely redwood acoustic guitars I've seen yeah yeah yeah sgc they build beautiful beautiful stuff some of it with redwood we haven't built a redwood guitar yet acoustic we want to um but you can yeah

different wood definitely has different characteristics and how the the tone comes out combined with all the other things, right? But yeah. You mentioned when we brought this up that the confluence of your technology career and this side career, they're kind of different approaches. One is very technical, one is very creative. Was that a deliberate decision or do you feel like you need to have your feet in both places?

Zeng is someone who's kind of wobbling between the two realms. I'm curious your thoughts on how you approach it. When I stop working for the day, I don't usually want to play with computers. And... Wait a minute, wait a minute. When you start working for the day... When I start working for the day, I don't want to work with computers. That's a relatively new development. I guess where I'm headed is, like, is one the kind of the refuge from the other or is, or do they feed off each other in some way?

Is this the kind of the refuge from the other or is, or do they feed off each other in some way? Hmm, I'm curious to hear how you experience this also. I think for me, like I was definitely much more immersed in creative things when I was like in high school, like playing music and visual art, studio art, like that's where all my energy went. And then I think, like, I don't know, I turned 18, I graduated high school,

I had this idea that like I had to figure out how to like pay my own bills and all that and, ugh. And you know, went to college, was confronted, I like paid for a lot of my college education. So I was, I think like in a sense it felt like I, once I figured out that computer science could be fun, cause it's like a bunch of puzzles, like I was like, okay, maybe this is like a way that I could like make money

that I don't hate. And then I think like, it kind of took me a while to find my way back to the creative step to be honest. Like, there was a long period where, like, when I was at MIT, I got to work on all the craft stuff because of the work I was doing with Leah, which was really, really cool and fortunate. But I also, like, didn't really play music during that period of my life because there

was just, like, a lot going on and I was developing a lot of that technical skillset and experience. So I kind of feel like it took me some time to get back to the creative part and see that I really thrive when I feed that part of myself and that also there are ways to make money as a creative, it just, it looks different. And I think we don't, those paths are not always visible to young people, or at least they didn't feel visible to me.

Like I really felt like the messaging I got from my parents, even though they're very supportive people, was like, you need to get a real job, right? I think there's been some sort of fun full-circle-ness of being like, well guess what, mom and dad, people are paying a lot of money for our guitars now. Like, you know, but I don't know. But I think like in the course of that journey, I also fell in love with aspects of the technical work. So I don't think I could give that up either now.

What aspects of the technical work do you most appreciate? I think there are pieces of it that feel deeply creative still, like trying to solve a really hard problem and thinking outside of the box like how to do that, and how to remix different tools. But probably the human aspect is the part that's kept me. I really almost left computer science and academia at a certain point, because I just didn't feel like I belonged or welcome.

And it was really when I found open source that's so community centric, then like just a really different culture that I decided like to stick around and then really saw the beauty in that and wanted to like share that with other people. You talked about computational aspects to creative crafts. Do you have... I think a lot about that because when I do origami, there's computational aspects and the open source project that I'm most excited about working on, which I have not, is the origami simulator from Amanda Garcia. And I'm a little hesitant because there's some pretty deep math in there.

How do you encourage students or how would you encourage me to participate beyond the fixed typos level? I'm actually okay at that now for open source, but I never really get into it. Maybe that's because it's my job and I don't want to work on my job after I get paid to work on my job. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I think, like, one way that I have, like, kind of shepherded students into that space is, like, using open source projects or software as a way to, like, grow their own understanding of some of these concepts. So this maybe doesn't apply exactly to your circumstance, but when I was teaching at Berea College,

I did teach a computational craft class that was, it actually fulfilled like a, what did they call it? Like something reasoning credit or requirement, whatever that students had to take, because I taught them how to program in the processing programming language, which is a lot of working in a coordinate system and thinking about, we, in that course,

would think about visual art as things that you could generate with math. So we would generate beautiful fractal patterns and things like that, and then figure out how to output those on a pen plotter or a 3D printer. And so I think that things like that can be an interesting way to encourage people to start like playing with the math or the technical stuff without it feeling like, like, oh, I don't, I'm not a math person or I can't do math or like, like whatever.

Like when I like I failed calculus at UCSEs and I'm mad, like, you know, like, I think it takes like finding the right context. Like the first time I took Calc at UCSE, I failed it. And the second time I took it was with a different instructor who was teaching like integrals and everything in the context of like calculating volume of like bunch cake pans. And like that blew my mind. Like all of a sudden I was like, okay, okay, taking notes, taking notes, like how do I

adjust my recipe? And so I think like- Applied calculus is so much easier. It's the same numbers, it's the same equations, but once you apply it, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like that resonates.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, he totally. Yeah, so I think like I tend to be a believer that like there's just there's nothing that like anybody, any individual person can't understand. It's just about finding like the right context for your own learning in that space. And I think that has like, open source has helped me a lot with that to like, also embody that myself and get over like, feeling like I need to be an AI person to work on AI or a security person to work on security. So like, yeah, not that there's not like concrete technical learning, but I think a lot of it is just meant mental game. One of the difficult things with working on open source projects is the, and we talked

to Joel at Art Times about this, that you don't know what's happening with it. People fork your repo and then they take your code to space and you only hear about it because they mention it in their footnotes on a paper. You actually got a little bit of feedback about or you did a little bit of research about measuring the impact of the Lily Tiny. And I was amused because you did it partially based on how it was sold. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. When I was working on my dissertation research, I mean, part of it came out of like,

we've learned that I really like doing applied work. I like working with students and teachers, and how am I going to get a dissertation out of this? Because they're all but dissertation for a little while. Yeah, I was doing all this other stuff, but people were like, okay, sit down and write some papers. It just ended up being the case that 10 years had passed since we released the Lily Tiny.

A lot of other life had happened. Like Leah and I had both left MIT and gone on to other projects. And so like the project really had just been like existing out in the world for that time. And to be honest, like I didn't know, like did anybody ever buy that thing? Or like it was really cool that it became a product when I was doing my masters, but I didn't know. And became a product at Sparkfun. Yes, at Sparkfun. And you weren't getting any kickbacks, so you really didn't know how it was doing. I really had no idea. Exactly. Yeah, I had no idea. And this, like, yeah. And so it ended up being this really fun thing

to work with my eventual UCSC PhD advisor and then to reconnect with Leah. And Leah was able to get data directly from Spark Fund sales data for that 10 year period. And then I got to do research on that and figure out, and it raised a lot of questions. It's not perfect research. Feel free to, listeners, critique how I went about that work.

But we really tried to figure out, if sales data is all that you have, how can you even speculate? Some of the ideas we came up with were like, okay, well, if someone's purchasing the board in bulk, they're probably not making just like a bracelet for themselves or like, you know, a project with their kid. They're, there's a good chance that they're teaching a workshop or working with a school district. So that was like one aspect of the work was finding that people did frequently buy the

board in quantity. And then I did also do some sort of like qualitative again like imperfect shot in the dark. I went and I like scraped Twitter at the time to see like what people did with it and found everything from like somebody whose daughter had made a tutu for their dog which is incredible to people who were yeah teaching workshops at like libraries and schools and things like that. So yeah, it's hard to say for sure, but we know that over 80,000 units of that hardware sold in that 10-year period with a couple different programs running on it,

and a lot of people were buying it, you know, like 10 at a time. Could you get any information from scraping the educational infrastructure or the resources you had put together? No. You weren't at MIT anymore. And I think, yeah, I wasn't at MIT anymore. And yeah, you know, like, I don't know. I don't think I knew, like, where I was going in life. I was like one step at a time.

Look, looking back, I'm like, why didn't you put, like, some kind of tracking, right? I'm like downloads or, and I just didn't have the forethought to, I had no idea that anything would happen with the project, let alone, like, that I would want to know, like, how many people downloaded the resources or anything like that. Yeah. I mean, it was something you did and it was cool and you gave it to the world and the

world took it and you never really knew. And then I wonder how many of those things are happening now? Things that I will look back and think, well, you know, I really should attract that. Or I should have promoted it better. Yeah. I don't know. Okay, what kind of guitar are you working on now? Right now, we just finished a L00 model out of Brazilian Rosewood,

which is our first Brazilian guitar, which is exciting. It's a very fancy wood that people like. And right now, later today, I'll be working going into the shop to work on an OM model acoustic that I'll be taking with me to Japan later this year to bring to a shop of someone we know there. Konnichiwa. Yeah. That's all I know. And Emily, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with?

I think I'm actually still thinking about this comment you made a moment ago about like, what are you working on now and where will it be? And yeah, I don't know. I think like, it's just cool to think about looking back on the things you've done. And I just hope that people take risks and try new stuff. Because I feel like I've done a lot of reckless things in my career that people told me not to do. And it's neat to have these conversations and get to think about where different projects

ended up and feel really lucky for that. So Well, are you going to close the recklessness and say, and it all turned out fine or are you just going to leave us with, I did some reckless things. I'm not in jail anymore. I think I'm still, it still feels a little reckless. But you know, maybe what I can say is that my gut has always led me in like really exciting, beautiful, fruitful directions. And I think it's only recently that enough has come full circle for me to trust that.

So like, I don't know, when I work with students now, I think I try to encourage them to trust, chase after those gut feelings, you know, see where they go. I think that's good advice. I think there have been too many times that I have been, no, I have to stand straight and narrow. And I wonder what those paths would have led me to. And I don't think it would have been bad. Yeah.

Might have been different, but not bad. Yeah. I think for me, I spent years being really stressed out about what an academic should be and like trying to keep my guitar life separate from my academic life. And it feels special now to feel like I don't care anymore, maybe, or that, yeah, there's all these different ways to be an academic. You can be both. Two things can be true. Totally. Our guest has been Dr. Emily Lovell, computer science researcher and educator at UCSC and luthier at Aberdeen Guitars. Thanks, Emily.

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