Embedded - 52: Maximize the Sonic Boom

Episode Date: May 21, 2014

Elecia spoke with Micheal Worry, CEO of Nuvation, about engaging with and working at a design firm.  Disco Fish, the autonomous Burning Man party vehicle Udacity course in autonomous vehicles ROS is Willow Garage's robot operating system Contact Nuvation at their website or on twitter (@Nuvation). Contact Disco Fish and its build buddies on Facebook. 

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. This is Alicia White. Michael Wurre, CEO of Nuvation, is our guest today. We're going to talk about getting from napkin sketch to a shipping product without doing a lick of work yourself. Hey, Mike, thank you for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me here. And we have Chris on the mic, too.

Hi, everybody. So, Mike, Thank you for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me here. And we have Chris on the mic, too. Hi, everybody. So, Mike, what do you do? So, I run Nuvation Engineering. We're an electronic product design company. And as you've described, we work with customers in order to take marketing requirements and take it through to shipping product. That's kind of a big job. What kind of team do you have? So, we have a team of about 100 people. So we have an office in Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, and we have an office up in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

And we have teams of engineers that do hardware design, programmable chip design, embedded software, and ultimately all the way into manufacturing. And do you have mechanical engineers as well? We do some mechanical work. So, for example, we do mechanical enclosures and so forth. And then we have a network of partners we bring in to do complex mechanical design and industrial design. That really is kind of the whole team. What stage do people really come to you in? Is it really just, I have an idea? So most customers come to us at a point that they have identified marketing requirements or really a business problem. And where we pride ourselves on is a

customer comes to us and says, I have this business challenge. My existing product needs to be smaller. My existing product needs to be twice the speed. It needs to be a third of the cost. It needs to be connected to the internet of things. There you go. I have an existing running shoes, t-shirt, skateboard that I want to put on the internet. And I have no idea how to do that because electronics

is not our company's core competency. And so what do I do? And we sit down with them and we whiteboard out and figure out the electronics that would make sense. Then we go off and build that and deliver it to the customer. That sounds kind of easy, but there are some steps in there. I mean, how do, let's say I have a product. Let's say I have this idea that I want to monitor my elderly neighbors. And I want a device that can tweet or email or text to me

when my neighbor fails to get out of bed or when they don't check in. Sure. So for example, for one of our clients, we just built a health monitor that addresses that specific problem. And so I won't touch on that you want to monitor your elderly neighbors. No, they want me to. Oh, they want you to. Okay. So it's a mutual thing. It's not creepy.

You guys have agreed that that's cool and Desire will live in. Okay, good. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Or parents or even college students, but yes. Not creepy. I swear it's not creepy. Not very creepy.

So, yeah, for example, we worked with one of our clients to develop a health monitor unit, and it hooks back to a pendant that's worn by the user. It has an accelerometer in it and can detect the movement patterns of the user. up with systems like that, where you're building hybrid wireless systems and embedded systems, where, you know, one wireless standard really makes sense, you know, in the home, the low power to go a short distance, whereas you then have a different wireless standard through a gateway to the larger internet. And we're very accustomed to solving those sort of problems. But it's a really rapidly moving technology space. And that's why it really makes sense to work with a company like Nuvation, because we're continuous at that leading edge of technology. But I bring you this idea, and we sit down and we determined that my volumes would make

sense and that I really can write a check that's good enough to engage. That's a key part. If you have money, that's a good, Marketing requirements and money is a good combination for us to get started. And so we sit down and you write a proposal. Yep. And I get the proposal. And how do you deal with the sticker shock? So the engagement process,

so we want to walk through with a customer. And very early on, we do what we call a gut check, where we say, you know what, basically what you're describing, you know, it looks to us like sort of this size of budget and sort of this size of schedule. And we, you know, target to do that, you know, very early on, sometimes even in the first conversation, to make sure that, you know, we're both spending our time wisely in order to build a product that for your market and for your volumes, you know, makes sense to make that level of engagement. Because there are some products that, you know, really have phenomenal business cases

and should be built as quickly as possible. And there are other products which are really cool and really gadgety and really awesome, but don't have the ROI and sufficient volume in order to be built yet. And do you have any handy rules of thumb with the gut check? I heard an interesting one recently from Andre from the Great White North, who listens to the show, who suggested that for his company, they often have this six plus six idea, which is if you bring us a medical device, we're going to start you off at the point that it's going to take $6 million in six years to get it through FDA certification.

And sure, a less invasive, less complex device may take less time, but let's just start there and work one way or the other, depending on the complexity. Do you have rules of thumbs? And Andre, that was awesome. Do you have rules of thumb like that? So, you know, customers that are out there that are listening in that have $6 million available to apply towards electronic product, please call me immediately. Those are the kinds of customers that would work really well with us. So, you know, I'm not sure if I can get it down to a soundbite like that because we have customers that approach us everything from, you know, I need an investor demo to put together in four weeks. And we would then build like a Franken system that would, you know, be like a five-figure type budget all the way through, you know, customers who are, you know, rolling out an application that they're

building hundreds of thousands of something. And it really makes sense to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to even take a dollar out of the product. And so, you know, we'll do projects that, you know, most of our projects are system level projects, meaning there are multiple engineers for multiple months. But it can range from a $50K engagement through a multimillion-dollar engagement, and we have all of those as active projects right now. How do you decide what mix you want? Sometimes it's feast or famine in this industry. Sometimes, maybe not right now.

But you might have a lot of clients coming in with those kinds of, we need something in four or five weeks, and it's a very quick turnaround versus, okay, I need you to build this entire system. Do you turn some of those away because, well, we want to concentrate on one type of customer? So we're pretty good at splicing in new projects as they come to us. And so we find that we'll find a way in order to get all these projects done.

Most commonly, customers self-select out on a basis of that we'll get into a conversation of that this is the kind of budget and schedule involved with building a particular project, that if they're not familiar with dealing with those levels of complex projects, then they self-select out. You know, like we've had people approach us with, they come in through our web channel, and they're like, you know, hey, I have this really great idea to build an autonomous humanoid robot. And if we made that, like everyone would want one. So how much? And so those sort of –

We'll give you a cut of the profits. We won't pay you up front. Let us know when you're done. Right. I don't have any money right now, but, I mean, everyone would want one. So if we made this together, it would be highly successful. So we get stuff like that that, you know, we – pretty quickly in the conversation we get to that, you know,

this is someone who may not be familiar with the level of budget that they're that they're talking about. Whereas with other kinds, we know you get, you know, serial entrepreneurs who have been through multiple projects. And some of some of our best customers are guys who are, you know, business professionals or sales or marketing people really don't understand the electronic supply chain. And we can get into a really fascinating concept discovery conversation with them, or said, you know, do you know it's possible that we could put in your running shoe, the ability to measure the speed you're running at, the elevation you're running at, and actually analyze your stride, and then have a running coach on your phone that would

give you feedback on, you know, how you're running and how can you actually modify your stride to run faster? And they're like, what, you can do that. How much would that be? Like that, that product we're like, well, at volume we could build that for like 10 bucks or something. It's like, what that's impossible. And so we get into some really cool conversations that based on, Oh yeah. Cause, cause you, you know, so people that are in technology kind of know what's possible and they know

how IoT is moving along and, and, uh, what's there, but you interact with someone that, you know, so people that are in technology kind of know what's possible and they know how IoT is moving along and what's there. But you interact with someone that, you know, isn't in that, I don't know, 5% of the population that is really in tune with the leading edge of technology, you can get into some really phenomenal conversations of what's possible because technology moves along so quickly. And so we, you know, broad strokes, we talk about trends like you know at what point is robotic intelligence going to exceed human intelligence you know and you get ranges anywhere from 10 to 20 years out well what's the world going to look like um you know once robotic intelligence exceeds ours because it is going to happen apocalyptic right so i mean are we going to be you know who's going to be in charge of those like really smart robots who's going to be at the switches um what are the rest of us going to do?

And well, heck, do we really need to do anything? You know, and it's personal theory. I think it's kind of unlikely that we'll end up in some sort of Terminator or Populatrix war because these robots will be so smart that we'll basically be like pets. So, you know, we don't go on an exodus to eradicate all ants from the world. It's just not needed, right? There's no advantage to it um no we put them in little ant cages and watch them not sure that's an optimistic

outlook or not um and then you know to pick kind of a closer trend right um like you look at technology trends i'll talk with people who aren't in the thick of technology that you know hey we're gonna have you know autonomous cars available in the next few years kind of scale. And people are like, you know, what do you mean? Well, they hear about the Google car, but it's always, you know, coming. And you hear about it costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to put together all of those sensors. But nobody really talks about how you don't need all of those sensors. You don't need all of those sensors. You don't. And actually the, the fascinating part is, you know, most of these advanced cars are basically using lasers and

mirrors and motors, LIDAR sensors, which I mean is analogous to when the first CD-ROM came out, it was thousands of dollars, but, but, you know, when they got to volume, they got extremely cheap. And, and then, you know, a lot of the really advanced autonomous cars are using just video systems. And people argue whether that's really a solvable problem, not paying attention to, you know, decades of experience that we successfully drive cars as humans using primarily video and audio systems. So it's clearly a solved problem. And if you look at the superset that robotic intelligence will soon exceed human intelligence, then of course robots will be better drivers than we will. So you end up in these really fascinating technology conversations with people of what's possible in electronic product design that wasn't available even five years ago.

So it's a really fun, fun industry to work in. I have a few more of the how to design firm questions work. Sure. But I want to go on to the autonomous vehicle because you guys have been working on one. Yeah, so we built one. Discofish. This is Discofish. And so we're big believers that if you're going to work in a certain space

that you need to build one. And so we made the decision several years ago that we wanted to get into the autonomous vehicle design space. And so we said, well, if we we wanted to, we'd made the decision several years ago that we wanted to get into the autonomous vehicle design space. And so we said, well, if we're going to speak credibly about that, we need to make our own autonomous car. And, uh, and so we built Discofish. Discofish is an art car we bring to Burning Man every year. It's a 65 foot long self-driving roving dance party covered with 1036 computer controlled LED scales. It's got a big disco bell at the front. Wait a minute, 1,036?

Where are the other 12? Yeah, that's just how the geography worked out. There's an extra 12. It's the physical coverage, so yeah. It actually is split into four different strings and such like this. It's more the physical layout of the fish that dictated the the number of scales rather than the addressing space

um but uh but yeah it's it's uh it's it's super fun and so we have like an 11 kilowatt search light that's visible from four miles away we have a 20 foot flamethrower fed by 200 gallons of propane that's the most important part that Well, it is Burning Man, so yeah. You have to have a level of that. And we actually have built our own MSP430-based flame controller that has several hundred lines of code in order to maximize the sonic boom coming off the flamethrower. So you can tune these sort of things. And then we're big believers in being able to have your beer and drive too.

And so we actually made the whole thing self-driving. Drink responsibly? Have somebody else drive? Right. Not the robot. He doesn't drink at all. Well, so the standard we've used, in case we ever get pulled over by a police officer who wants to know who's driving and everyone on board is sloshed, the standard is when you're writing code,

you have to be sober. And so we can always say to the police officer, you know, you're right. There's no one on board who's capable of driving right now, but Otto was driving. And when we coded Otto, we were stone cold sober. And so effectively, there's human intelligence here that had no drinking involved that is currently piloting the vehicle. Do you have breathalyzer tests on your computer before you can hit make? No, just before you can hit commit. Okay.

So that'd be a good direction to go, yeah. Have you actually driven on streets? We've done a little bit on streets. I mean, we don't have the budget levels that Google has. So the subset of the autonomy problem that we elected to solve was having an autonomous car at Burning Man. And so for that, you're driving on flat ground. You don't have to do lane keeping algorithms.

You don't have traffic signals or stop signs. But you do have to avoid some pedestrians who may not be any more sober than you are. Yes, yes. In fact, you have to assume some pretty erratic behavior for the pedestrians and cyclists. And so we have a LIDAR on the front, a sick LMS LIDAR that is scanning and keeping track of any obstacles in front of the vehicle. And what it does is it actually modulates the vehicle's maximum speed based on how much clear space it has in front of it. And so if it sees no obstacles, it goes to its max speed, which is a Burning Man, you're only allowed to go five miles an hour.

And so it's a real subset problem. We're driving really slow. We're driving slow, but we're driving a vehicle that's 65 feet long, 16 feet wide, and 3,000 miles. Yeah, it would hurt if it ran over you. Well, and it's well lit. So, I mean, I suppose the people who are too intoxicated to get out of the way, you can stop for, but everybody else should see you coming.

Yes, yes. Plus we have a, you know, a four kilowatt pro audio sound system with like three 18-inch subwoofers under the stage. So we're both very visible and very loud and very entertaining. But anyway, so yes, we have a lighter on the front that's scanning and looking for any potential obstacles, be that art exhibits or humans. And then it modulates its top speed based on any obstacles it sees, up to and including stopping so that we don't hit anybody.

So we tested it at our office in Sunnyvale. We just went out on the streets, and we had someone stand in the street and say, okay, we've done all the simulations. Now we're going to drive towards you. We're going to put it in autonomous mode, and the vehicle should stop. But if it gets within five feet, you should dive. It's like a job for an intern. it should stop, but if it gets within five feet, you should dive. And, um, so anyways, it actually worked for an intern. That's, that's, that's what we did. And, uh, so it worked beautifully. So we, we didn't have any, any failures. Um, the, you know, the vehicle successfully

saw the intern and, uh, started to slow down as we got closer and then successfully stopped. And, uh, and actually actually so then we had to tune the algorithm uh a little bit to uh figure out the uh the best way to make sure that um we stay within a suitable um range don't stop too early but don't get within inches of people um so so that all that all can be tuned so it was funny though because we did all this testing on city streets in in sunnyville and in large parking lots and then when we actually got to burning man you have the additional component that you have like 100 people dancing on the fish because we have a dance floor on the front and a lounge inside in a second level the momentum and the weight cause problems well

um uh you know when when you're as a driver sitting and the vehicle comes to an emergency stop because it detects someone in front, you know, you're kind of paying attention as a driver. If you're, you know, dancing on the top of a fish and the vehicle comes to an emergency stop. It's like dominoes. Five miles an hour to zero. It doesn't sound like much, but it's enough to fall over. It'll knock you down. And so we actually found we had to further soften the algorithm to round off some of these problems. So it was kind of funny that we originally thought

this wouldn't be that hard of a problem. But as most things in the world, once you get into it, there's actually a fair bit of detail and tough problems to solve. And so there's been a lot of IP we've developed inside of this that we then bring into client projects. And how did you get into this? I know there's a Udacity course on learning to deal with autonomous vehicles. Did you do that or did you just all get interested? How did it start? So it started with working with the University of Waterloo. And so we're in a four-year research agreement with the WAVE Laboratory, the autonomous group at the University of Waterloo. And, you know, we declared that we wanted to learn about autonomous vehicles and develop that domain knowledge and create our own. And out of that, reached out to the University of Waterloo and said, you know, who can be working with here?

And so we formed a private-public partnership with the University of the Canadian Government and Novation in order to research autonomous vehicles and develop next-generation products in that space. And then through doing that, we would work with them and say, okay, I mean, they have these one-fifth scale cars. They use as their test platforms to test platooning algorithms and video analytics algorithms and emergency braking algorithms. And we're like, okay, that's awesome.

Our test platform is 38,000 pounds and 65 feet long. Covered in lights. And covered in lights. And so, you know, it's a different test platform, which is cool, because we actually have slightly different problems to solve, but we can leverage a lot of the same IP. And so we worked with them and said, hey, we assume it's going to be Linux, but what operating systems should we use?

They introduced us to ROS, Robot Operating System, which is also used by Willow Garage in town here. And so a lot of those things. And there's a significant amount of IP out there that you can, you can leverage. And, um, and then we had to do the drive by wire conversion of the vehicle. So we put, um, you know, motors, um, on the, the gas brake and steering of the vehicle. Um, we've elected so far, um, to leave the ignition, um, human so that the car can't in and of itself, start up and drive away.

We thought, okay, we're going to consciously have it that we, we as a human have to turn the car on, um, but before it can drive up, but we'll get there eventually where, you know, you'll be able to, you know, your car will be parked somewhere. You'll come out of a meeting. You'll notify it from your smartphone. Hey, come pick me up. It'll come pick you up and bring you on your way. Um, it's, it's going to be a really radical change because, because, you know, like parking lots will go away. There'll be no need to park anymore because your car will just drive away somewhere and come back later.

It's really fascinating the level of change this is going to have. I think it's the first major consumer application where humans have a perception or belief that they're good at something, and it's going to kind of be in their face that robots are better at it. Traffic fatalities are going to go so far down. Oh, yeah. That's always been one of my concerns. Not that cars aren't going to be better drivers than humans, but that we won't be able to accept it.

And so you'll end up with the whole legal wrangling where, oh, you know, there was an accident. Yeah, we have one out of a thousand accidents that we used to have, but the Google car had that accident, so let's sue the crap out of Google. You know, I mean, that's going to be some of the things that we have to wrestle with is, yes, they're much better, but who do we blame? We've got to blame somebody when something goes wrong.

I'm Canadian, but there is certainly kind of a style within certain cultures that you need someone to blame. Yeah. And so we are, as a society, going to have to figure out how to wrestle with that. Because, you know, it's interesting. The example I use is 9-11. 9-11 was a horrible tragedy. You know, 2,997 people died that day.

And that was a really horrible thing. And as a nation and as a culture, we've made a phenomenal amount of investment in societal change as a result of that. So here's the thing that's interesting. That same day, more than 3,000 people died in human-caused traffic accidents. Exactly. Because every single day, some 3,600 people are murdered by humans driving cars. That's what happens, okay? Now it's not front-page news. It's not big color pictures.

It's not a single large event. It's very distributed. But they still have families, and it still makes a difference, and we should be fixing that problem. Right. So if we look at the billions of dollars that we've invested inside of responding to 9-11, we should be willing as a nation to invest 100 times that

in order to have autonomous vehicles and bring that into a technology reality. All right, I'm going to skip the politics and go on. So how did you have time to do this? Is this what you do? Are these the sorts of projects that you do when you're not loaded with customers? Or how do you get done? Oh, these are all after-hours programs.

So we call it Nuvation Garage. And during the day, we work on client projects, and we're paid as engineers to do that. And then after hours, we work on passion projects for the love of the game. These are engineering projects that we get excited about and we use it as kind of our technology sandbox. And so we build an autonomous disco fish, we build an electric race car, we build combat robots, we built a robot that plays air hockey against a human. And these are all things that we've done just for the fun of it because we're engineers and it's innate to us to have a

joy to create and a love for building. Yeah. I like to build things and it does have to be something I want, something I care about because after a day of coding, getting me to do some more coding is not as much fun as it might be unless it is for a giant disco fish. Right. And for us, for me personally, it's really the social experience of it. I've had bits of times in these projects where, you know, to hit some deadline, you know, I'm working alone on something and it's really not the same level of enjoyment. What I find is, I mean, there's groups of people that get together and watch sports games. There's groups of people that get together and drink. There's people that get together and play cards. Okay, well, I got a group of friends I call my build buddies that we

get together and build. And that's kind of our self-expression in the world. And we enjoy the social experience of building with other humans. Pretty neat. I guess there are some hackerspaces that that can be true for, although I haven't found my build buddies yet. Maybe that's why I do the podcast. Maybe I'm just, I'm not interviewing people for the listeners. I'm just interviewing Build Buddies. It's not Dishne. Who wants to come over and build something? But it's really fun because, I mean, we get, there's dozens of people that have contributed in ways to build Disco Fish.

Because you'll get someone that'll show up and say, you know what, I love beer. So I want to put beer on the fish. We're like, awesome. We should do that. Um, now in our style, we have a computer controlled freezer in the trailer with a trunk line with, uh, you know, a little Arduino controller that, um, keeps the beer cool as it runs through the trunk lines and so forth. Um, cause that's how we play. Right. Um, and, uh, you know, when we build a flame controller, you know, it's not, it's not some simple thing. It's this multi-stage, you know, custom MSP430, uh, flame controller that monitors the propane to oxygen ratio and stuff like this. Um, cause that's, that's how we roll. So, you know, we're, we're talking now, but we want to build a bunch of autonomous drones, um, that would, you know, circle as fish around disco fish. So while we're driving, we'd have this school of fish, you know,

flying around the fish. And we're like, that'd be awesome. Who wants to work on that? It would be awesome. You know, so, you know, I'm sure there's listeners out there. They're like, wow, you know, you have. So we get these people who are highly talented, brilliant people with extensive expertise who want to volunteer their time

and their skills to be part of kind of a large social build project like that. And it's kind of fun that Discofish gets to be the platform in order to enable that. So is it only people who work at Nuvation or is this kind of an open call? So we have people that work at Nuvation that are kind of a lot of the core team. And then there's a group of build buddies, many of which who I've worked together for years and part of Disco Fish Camp. And so we have people who are fabricators, people who are welders,

people who are mechanical engineers, people who are artists, people who volunteer to handle the logistics. And so there's a wide spectrum of people that end up getting involved. And it actually works really well because if if everyone was an electronics engineer you wouldn't have you know the rest of the capabilities involved with it um so like we have one uh team member who's a phenomenal seamstress right and she shows up and sews all our teeth and sews all our custom tarps

and sews all our fun fur right and i look at what she does and i'm like wow that is so impressive like i i don't know how to do that you know can you show me a little bit of how you did that um you know whereas we go in and uh a bunch of us will be talking about that we're going to uh convert the entire fish to drive by wire and people are like you just like get motors and motorize your gas and brake and steering we're like yeah totally um because because that's what we do right and so you get all these little niche skills that you bring together um and you and you really get this phenomenal creation the other side that that none of us could have envisioned or dreamed in and of itself so how do you fund these projects i mean does

everybody contribute is there a part of it that Nuvation contributes? Sure. So Nuvation chips in on some of these programs. And then like with Discofish, we have a few people involved that have been successful in life and contribute towards it. And then this is part of kind of a larger Burning Man venture. And so then we have camp fees for the people who camp with us. And all these things contribute together to a budget that works for the projects that we want to take on. Cool. This makes it sound like it's fantastic to work for innovation. Like it's all fun and games.

Is that what it's like? Do you have like unicorns and cotton candy every day? And rainbows and waterfalls and time travel machines. And all the oscilloscopes in the world that I might possibly want to use. It is really fun. I mean, we're a company that believes in, you know, the work hard, play hard culture. And so we have a lot of these really fun

after hours activities. And not surprisingly in interviews, that tends to be the piece we talk about the much because it's kind of the most engaging. But I mean, during the day, there's projects to be built and client requirements to be met. But we do it inside of a team of people who really enjoy spending time together. And I think that's one of the key defining parts of innovation is that we're a group of people that actively choose to spend their evenings and weekends together working on projects like this. And that strength and depth of relationship gets

brought into our client projects and has us, you know, really pulled together as a team in order to hit aggressive deadlines on projects that, you know, otherwise couldn't be built. And this family-ness of it decreases the amount of burnout, or do you end up working so much that people get tired? I mean, there's times where you have surges of work. You need to make sure that you manage and help people with well-being around that so there's a balance to it. So you can't work hard all the time. You have to, if there's a trade show and you have a surge for that, people will step up and do what they need to do. But you can't have a trade show every week. And so there needs to be, you know, kind of a balance to it. And there's times where, you know, we ask for a little extra flexibility from our team and there's times where the team asks us for a little extra flexibility. And so there's really a mutual level of trust and respect there. Are you hiring?

We are, yeah. At any given time, we're always looking for great engineering talent. We're looking at the moment for some additional FPGA engineers. PGA. We've mostly been talking about hardware and software. And that's certainly FPGA is an area that's growing. What, I mean, are you finding a lot of customers want that because they want to do their own chips, or is that just where power and processing meet? Yeah, so what's fascinating about FPGA work is it's really become recognized as a distinct discipline.

And so, you know, we kind of divide the world into, you know, knowledge, skills, and talent. And you can have a talent as an engineer that you can have a scientific approach to the world. But being an FPGA engineer or hardware engineer, board engineer, or a firmware embedded engineer, these are actually distinct skills from each other. And so, for example, to be a really capable FPGA programmer, you know, you're working in languages like Verilog, but more fundamentally, your brain has to be able to think in concurrent patterns. And so you have to be able to think, you know, how am I going to architect this into multiple parallel processing blocks? Whereas if you're an embedded engineer, you tend to think in functions and processes and so forth. And it's much more sequential operation. So for example, when I'm an FPGA engineer from earlier in my career, and guys tell me my C code looks like VHDL,

because it all compiles fine. But the way I think about things uh it makes my c code um look like vhdl so it's not surprising but yeah fbj is one of the the key services that innovations offers so it's it's um basically four major sections um that we do board design fbj design embedded software and manufacturing engineering do you do the high-level software for like iPhone and Android apps too? Or do you? We do, yeah. So we do app development most commonly as a related part of a larger electronic project.

You know, if there's something that's really just a custom app development, you know, there's companies that are focused on that. But as an adjunct to a larger electronic project, we have the capability absolutely to do that in-house. And using manufacturing. So it really is turnkey. I give you my napkin sketch and then you deliver on a pallet all of my devices.

Correct, yeah. Napkin sketch and money. And then we come back with shipped pallets of product. Why should people go with a design firm over building their own team? I mean, it is more expensive usually, or at least it seems to be. There's trade-offs.

I mean, people tend to look at like an hourly rate or something like that in terms of comparing cost. Our experience has been that it's actually a much faster schedule and a much more cost efficient in order to hire a professional engineering services firm because we have a lot of accelerated starting points and reusable design elements. And so when we're working on a project, we already have a place, all the tools, infrastructure, computers, equipment,

and processes in order to build projects successfully. And team members knowing each other is important. Huge. I mean, hiring is hard, a lot harder than most people think it is. You don't just go off and wave some money around and great people come and say, oh, yes, please, I'd like to do that for you. Agreed. And it's, you know, I've had some interesting conversation

with rich venture capitalists who, you know, have this view that you just dump a bunch of cash into a company and hire people and, and, and magically that works. I have met them, I think. It's, it's possible to, you know, wave money around and recruit someone onto your team is an entirely different level to have a team of people that, that pull together and communicate effectively well together and have a common set of methodologies and templates of how a product gets built in order to rapidly and first-time right deliver that to market. That's one of the primary ways that we've found an engineering

services firm like Nuvation is more cost-effective. We interact with companies that routinely plan to do three board spins before a board goes to market. Innovations methodologies are heavily driven towards first-time right designs. And so we spend actually more time on the front end of a design. We call it the initial design engagement, where we're capturing not only the requirements, but all the implications of those requirements. And then we have staged gates at points in the process where we have peer review processes. And the goal is to catch all those errors as soon as possible. Because if you catch an architecture error, you know,

in the first month of a project, you can change that in a Word document or a Visio diagram pretty easily. If you catch an architecture error in the lab, you're screwed. You're going to have to spin the board. And so, you know, we interact with a lot of customers that are used to doing multiple board spins where we have the majority of our projects, first-time articles have the opportunity to go into volume production. But do you prototype them or is this all paper and hand weaving? So in the first phase, so we call it the initial design engagement. And inside of that phase, you're capturing requirements and doing the detailed design descriptions, developing project work plans and acceptance test plans.

We then move into an implementation phase in which we're doing the schematic capture, the coding, the RTL coding, everything's involved with that. Then you move into a prototyping phase where you're building half a dozen, 20, whatever makes sense in order to prove out the engineering design. And then following that, you move into a manufacturing process where you're then doing a ramp, you're doing pilot runs and ramping into volume production. So if people aren't going to come to Nuvation, maybe because they're not local or maybe just because they've, I don't know. Do you have advice for people going to design firms other than come to Nuvation is where I was headed with that? Sure. So, I mean, you want to pick a design firm that is a match for what you're looking to do. So you want to have a firm that matches the kinds of skill sets and domain expertise that you need. You want to pick a firm that has a track record

and has a pedigree of working on the kinds of projects that you want to do. And you want to pick a firm that matches the kind of product and complexity that you're looking for. So, for example, Novation is really, really good at solving complex, innovative problems that no one's solved before. And that's kind of what our brand is, you know, all our engineers are in North America. And we're targeted on building that next generation innovative product. You know, if someone comes to us and says, you know, hey, I need this 8-bit micro on a two-layer board to go in a toaster, we can do it, you know, well within

our technical expertise. But there's firms out there that frankly can do that more cost effectively. And so it's not the right project for us. Whereas if you went to that firm and said, you know, hey, I want to figure out how to get a skateboard on the internet, they wouldn't know how to approach something that had never been built before. Do you find yourself having to manage immature or, that's probably the wrong word, but more disorganized clients than you would like where they come in and they have an idea or they're part of the way down a project and it's kind of a disaster and you're parachuting in to save them, but they have different expectations than you do being an organized, you know, you have a good process and they don't.

And we work with a wide variety of clients at different levels in their product development and different levels of funding. And so we're accustomed to doing that. For us, the challenge is always just ensuring the customer is informed as to the implications of where they're at and the potential budget and schedule implications of the level of maturity where they're at. So we work with, we've done projects with Fortune 50 companies where they show up and say, you know what, we want a product that kind of looks like this, but we really don't know yet. And we know that we have to do a bunch of engineering to figure out exactly what it is we want to build. So don't bother to quote us. We like you. We're going to start working with you.

We're just going to pay you hourly. And this is the direction we're headed in. Go. They're like, okay, cool. Right? So we can do that. And we're totally comfortable working in that space, iterating documents, you know, building little, you know know hey innovation you know really what's it going to cost to to build this product and you know am i going to have products safely under the christmas tree

because we really got to hit a holiday shipping schedule um then we'll say cool uh we can do that here's the answers we need locked down here's the requirements that really ought to be finalized here are the points you can't change your mind on. Right. Yeah, because the single largest thing that results in schedule delays is change product requirements. And, and, you know, so we, we want to make sure that, you know, we just align expectations on budget and schedule accountability with with where people are in terms of the requirements maturity. Do you have warning signs for clients, things that you can tell things aren't going to go well and it's time to have a sit down and say, hmm, you brought us this problem and now you're changing your mind. I mean, are there just warning signs for clients when they walk in the door that you're like, ah? Yeah. So, you know, invoices start falling out of terms.

Yeah. That's a warning sign here, too. So, you know, it's the warning sign that we notice early on in sales calls. We work with customers with a wide spectrum of technical expertise. And so we're comfortable working with, you know, fellow electronics engineers on a project that can understand our language and work with us. We also work with people that are completely non-technical and say, hey, buildings already have wires in it with power flowing. Why can't my phone sip power off of the EMI noise from the wall? It's like, why can't we do that? Right. And it's fine. We've, you know, no problem interacting with that and explaining, you know, some of the trade-offs and capabilities and power levels that are available in these

things. But in that situation, we really need someone like that to trust our technical expertise. And so warning signs for us is when someone is not technical and isn't willing to provide a level of trust to the expertise we have. So basically says we're wrong, but they don't know what they're talking about. Those two things don't go well together. Well, I think for a lot of clients, sometimes it's nice to hire an outside firm because for some reason, some people trust the answers coming from an outside expert more than their own internal people. Yeah. And we're often, I mean, we've been cast in that role where there's different business groups in a company and they're trying to figure out different ways and trade-offs and requirements of a product they want to build.

And we get pulled in as an external engineering firm. And we actually end up arbitrating through our process what the requirements are of the product. Because we'll have, you know, two or three different groups who all have slightly different business goals. And so it's interesting. We're engineers. But the largest skill set that we bring forward to make a difference for customers like that is our project management. And so we're in there mediating what the requirements actually will be of this product that we're going to build together. Do you think that's part of your role as a design firm, or is it just part of your role

as being grown-up engineers? It's part of the role of being grown-up engineers. It's part of the role of running a profitable company is figuring out how to resolve barriers and get product built. We have a very execution-driven culture. And so everything that we're about is how do we get past these different viewpoints, find the common ground, and build a product that'll be successful on market. I mean, that's, that's really what we do as a business. Um, I mean, the, the alternative would be to throw your hands up in the air and go, well, you guys decide, and when you're done,

you know, call me and I'll build it for you. Um, but I've worked with that engineer too. Yeah. Yeah. You met him. Yeah. So, um, but there's no, there's no progress there. There's no success there. There's no achievement. There's no product that gets made. Um, you know, really for us, you know, a lot of the capability that innovation brings forward, um, is the ability to, to play in those gray spaces, um, pull together the, the different, sometimes conflicting requirements and figure out how to build a product that can be successful in market. So those are the warning signs for clients. Uh, what about going back to my earlier question for people going to design firms there are a lot of them out there and some of them are good i mean

nuvation and and i'll say generate is the other one that i tend to recommend for depending on what people want and uh you're gonna edit that clip out right no problem all right but they're different i mean actually they do more civil industrial smaller number not as pretty you'll go off and manufacture it sometimes they do they do different things. You guys do more consumer, more medical, more fully finished products. And you said about making sure you're going to the company that matches what you need and not just to the first company and I totally agree with that.

So you're asking for someone considering hiring an engineering services firm, what sort of warning signs would they look for? What are the warning signs that you've chosen the wrong design firm, that these are not people you really should go with? So you want to be careful encountering a firm that overpromises. The challenge is, and we encounter this in a competitive landscape, if you have a budget and a specific product in mind, if you shop it out to enough firms,

you'll always find a firm who's hungry enough to say, you know what, yeah, I'll do that project for a fraction of the price. And so us as a professional firm, we get left with going, okay, we know that's an unreasonable quote. We know that's not going to be successful, but if you guys are going to pick the lowest budget that's overly aggressive or that schedule that's overaggressive or to combine together a bunch of features. You just have to be careful of a firm that doesn't have a structured process and is willing to manage expectations and willing to say, you know what, that's not something that technology is ready to build yet.

Please stop sticking your tongue in the light socket. Right. Yeah, sometimes you want your consulting firms and design firms to say no. Right. No, that's not a good idea. And stick to it sometimes. Yep, yep. And I mean, we're a firm that has a lot of fun building really innovative designs.

I mean, like that air hockey bot that we built, that actually started with Freescale. We're a firm that has a lot of fun building really innovative designs. I mean, like that air hockey bot that we built, that actually started with Freescale. And Freescale marketing manager called me up and said, you know, hey, we have this crazy idea for the Freescale technology forum that we want to build a robot that plays air hockey against a human. And I'm like, oh, okay, cool. Were you thinking of doing that with like video analytics Or were you going to put lasers on the table? Or were you going to like, oh, you could put a magnet in the puck and have little magnetic sensors underneath? I think they just wanted you to use a free-skill processor, right? I mean, that was what they really wanted.

But it was funny because I started on the phone kind of architecting, how would you do this? And the guy says, whoa, whoa, whoa. I have no clue how to build this. All I know is you're the first person who hasn't told me I'm crazy and it can't be done. And we're like, oh, no, this is definitely be built. That's not a problem. This will be fun.

This will be cool. You know, the guys have a lot of fun with this. And so, you know, we're commonly the engineering firm that says yes, that where, you know, where other engineering firms might stumble on a technical problem, we can figure out a way in order to solve that in a highly innovative way. But we do need to make sure that we draw lines in the sand. Because we'll have customers that will show up that are non-technical and they're like, hey, I want to build a wireless camera that can run on a coin cell for a decade, can broadcast, stream a high-def video signal for 10 miles. Through Bluetooth low energy. Right, and be the size of a poacher stamp. And I'm like, okay, I mean, that would be a cool product, right?

But here's the state of technology of where we can get to. And so that's kind of a required part of the onboarding customer education process. How well does design from work correlate with money in the Valley? Do you find that people are more likely to hire you when times are lean or more likely to hire you when things are flush? For me, it seems like people tend to hire embedded software engineers when they have lots of cash, but when things are

a little leaner, I get a lot more calls. Is that true for a professional design firm as well? You know, there is certainly a conversation that, you know, a rising tide raises all boats and so forth. But what we see is that the largest element as to when companies want to work with us is when they have visibility into what their product development is and what their design needs are. So for example, if you're able to accurately predict, you know, what your engineering needs are going to be years in advance, and you can say, you know what, here's my product roadmap, here's exactly the engineers I need, and map that out, then, you know, there's an argument to be made that it'd make more sense to hire those

engineers onto a core team and have those guys build your product. The other side of it is we get companies that they're a startup and they're like, okay, I need like 10 engineers for six months and then I don't need any engineers until I sell that thing. You know, that wouldn't make sense to hire a bunch of engineers and then lay them off six months from now. That's where it really makes sense to hire a firm. We have situations where customers pick what their kind of core skill sets are. So they say, you know what, this core research, these core bits of our product, we're going to have our in-house team do that. And then we're going to outsource the other elements of it to a firm like Novation in order to do the engineering design. Or we have situations where people want specific technical expertise. And so they hire us

because they say, you know what, in-house, we're going to keep a application software team, but we are not going to build up an FPGA team because FPGA is a unique skill set. And these are people who need unique tools. And we don't know how to recruit, hire, inspire, keep these people. It's just not something we're going to do. So those are all kind of different situations of how people tend to work with us. And I think I can map that back a little bit to your question of whether it's leaner or flush times. It really maps to a company's ability to forecast what their engine needs are.

And if they have good visibility on that, it goes out multiple years, hey, you should have a team of people in order to do that. But if there's some variability to that, which is a more common case, then it makes sense in order to work with a company like Novation. Do you have your own products? We do. And so we recently built a battery management system. I heard about this at EE Live, so I kind of knew. There you go. And so we have our Gen 3 system out in the market now, and we're working on our Gen 4 system,

which will bring in a whole new level of capabilities. So battery management systems are needed for, you know, large battery packs, uh, lithium cells and so forth give us additional energy density and power density. Um, but they require electronics to make sure that, um, they stay safe. Um, they don't explode, don't get damaged and don't explode. Right. So it's, uh, it's kind of a good trend for us because lead acid batteries, you can kind of be really rough with. Um, so you get the advantage, uh, of, uh, lithium energy density, but you need electronics in order to manage it. Hey, we like that because we build complex electronics. So, so this is a good trend. And, uh, and so we built a battery management system and it dovetails well with well with some of our other products that are in the autonomous vehicle space. So a lot of our work is in power, autonomous, and video are some of our core work areas. And so we build up products inside of that. Do you think I can borrow one

of your engineers to talk about embedded vision? We've been wanting to do a show about that, but I haven't found anyone yet. Oh, yeah, we do a lot of video work. So we've done hundreds of video projects. All this time I knew people and I didn't know that I knew people. All right, we'll have to talk about that after the show. Maybe we'll have another innovation person come on. Sure.

And do you have any other products? So we have the other sort of products that work a little bit behind the scenes is we have a number of accelerated starting points, which are platforms we've built up that we can then bring to client projects. And we have these reusable design elements that don't incorporate client intellectual property, but really are a common way to do embedded design across multiple platforms and can get our clients to market much faster. So it's not something you would, you know, list as a shrink wrap product you'd buy at Fry's, but it's kind of internal products that we use in order to accelerate client projects. When your battery management system might have started that way, where you already had to do lithium polymer handling, and then you did it again for another client and you realized, hey, we should take this part and make it our own. Is that kind of how it came about?

Yeah, it can evolve in that direction. The starting of the battery management system was actually an interesting story. So we tend to try and direct Nuvation Garage programs towards areas where we want to develop technical expertise. And so we go back like five years. You know, I'm a strong believer in electric vehicles. And so we said, you know what, we want to develop domain knowledge in electric vehicles so we can work on electric vehicle projects. Well, in order to do that, in our style, we need to build an electric car. And so we built E-Rex, an electric race car. And one of the goals in doing that was, you know what, as we're building this, let's pay attention to areas of the vehicle where it's hard to buy the required system components. And therefore, there's a hole in the marketplace in order to build that product.

And so as we built this thing, there are three areas that they were missing. We couldn't find a really good battery management system. We couldn't find a really good DC-DC converter for the 12-volt system that could run at like 350 volts, like 600 watts. Those kind of specs, there wasn't one out there. And the third was a system controller. It was basically the driver interface in the GUI. There wasn't an off-the-shelf product that we could buy in order to do that. So as an electronics company, we made all three. And we made them as, you know, one-offs to put into EREX and have that project be complete. And then on the other side of it, we looked at it and said, okay, of those three, what do we want to commercialize? And we evaluated them and said, you know what, the thing that has the greatest

legs is the battery management system. So we then took that, you know, sort of prototype one-off system that we built in EREX, and we learned a heck of a lot building that thing and putting it on the racetrack and blowing up chips and learning that induced power noises of 1,500 amps at 350 volts is a lot of power that kills all your digital electronics. So we had to go through multiple iterations of figuring out how to appropriately shield cables and software de-glitching and, you know, just how your wires got routed really mattered. And then, so we took that into innovation, commercialized that technology, and then made it available to customers as a product that they can either order and have shipped to them or can be customized to their specific application. And so what's going to be productized from Discofish? So Discofish is our test platform for autonomous vehicles.

And so we're productizing the innovation autopilot out of Discofish. So we built this computer and a bunch of algorithms on it and developed substantial knowledge and IP as to what's involved to build an autonomous vehicle. And that's now the foothold and foundation of the innovation autopilot. And the E-Rex, so it's an electronic race car, electric race car. How fast does it go? And what are the stats?

It's fun. So it's like zero to 60 in five seconds, top speed of 160 miles per hour. It's a three-wheeled, so it's a trike. So it's really low to the ground. It's like 4 inches off the ground. And so when you're driving it, it's super fun. So we've taken it to trade shows, and we take editors for rides in it and so forth, and they get a huge kick out of this because you can take it on the highways and really punch it.

And you're so low that 60 feels even faster. Yep. And there's no doors on it. So you're just right there by the road. So it's quite a fun experience. Well, I think we're about out of time. Do you have any more questions, Christopher? No, I don't think so.

Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? You know, I really appreciate the opportunity to come and talk a bit about innovation and some of the fun projects we work on and philosophize a little bit of how technology would continue to impact humankind. I think we are really at an exciting point where technology is going to become even more involved in our day-to-day lives. And I think we're going to see a substantial consumer shift

as technology continues to get cheaper and more intelligent. I think it's going to have a huge impact on our lifestyle. And it's exciting to have a huge impact on our lifestyle. And it's exciting to be with Nuvation and be a part of that trend as we see it change how society operates. Cool. Very cool. My guest has been Mike Horry, CEO of Nuvation. If you'd like to contact them, check out their website, nuvation.com, which will be in the show notes. You can email them, solutions at Nuvation.com. You can find their Disco Fish Facebook page.

They do have a Nuvation Twitter account. And let's see, is there any other way that we should list? I think those are a lot of the ways to reach us. I mean, on Nu innovation.com's website, we have a web inquiry form. So if you have a project opportunity, there's a contact link there. That's a great way to reach us.

Well, thank you for being on. Great. Thank you. And thank you to Christopher for holding down the other mic and for producing the show. Finally, thank you for listening. Hit that contact link on embedded.fm if you'd like to talk to us or email contact link on embedded.fm if you'd like to talk to us

or email us show at embedded.fm and if you want to know my final thought for the week I have to say I changed it midway it's kind of strange for me but this one comes from Ken Jennings I for one welcome

our robot overlords