Embedded - 63: Dingo-Rabbit Deathmatch

Episode Date: August 13, 2014

Steve Dalton (@spidie) told us about starting a hackerspace, visiting Silicon Valley with a homebrew incubator group, and tech and fencing Australia.  Gold Coast Tech Space started off building the Rep Rap 3D printer Steve's consulting group is Refactor Silicon Lakes incubator just opened a call for applications to the SURF accelerator.  The Arduino-like GCDuino, available on Little Bird Rabbits are not indigenous and not appreciated in Australia. They have the rabbit proof fenceand the Easter Billby. 

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Elysia White. My co-host is Christopher White. Hello. And our guest is Steve Dalton, co-founder of Gold Coast Tech Space. Hi, guys. Thank you for coming on the show. Hi, Steve. It's a pleasure.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Well, I'm sort of tempted just to say ditto on a lot of your guests you've had recently. Basically, I guess I grew up in that home computer era that a lot of us grew up in, tinkering around with little computers not connected to the internet and typing in programs from computer magazines and things like that. And yeah, I grew up in that era, so I taught myself BASIC and hacked around with computers, took a lot of things apart, got in trouble with my parents for breaking things that weren't broken, things like that.

And I guess sort of fell into electronic engineering because I really didn't know what to do. I was good at maths, physics, computers, things like that and electronics is kind of that thing that you think, oh, I can make a good career at that and use all the things that I'm good at. So went off to uni, sort of probably partied a lot more than I should have and kind of struggled through uni a little bit for a variety of reasons.

But I went off and did a year. It was just fortuitous to go and do a year at IBM in an IBM research lab. And that really, I guess, put me back on a different course. Had a really good year with those guys. And then came back to uni, did really well. And from then on, I guess, got more into software because after I left uni, I went to 3Com and did embedded software, embedded systems.

So I had a great graduate training scheme at 3Com. I think you guys have talked about this before, but I was really, really lucky to be part of a good scheme that sort of taught me a lot of good practices and from then on a little later I moved to eventually moved to Australia and did had sort of 12 dark years I guess of doing business software and earning money as a contractor and kind of forgot about all my electronics and embedded stuff until I moved up to the Gold Coast, where there was really little tech community and I really had to start it myself. So I ended up doing a lot

of things and started the Gold Coast Tech Space, which is a hackerspace. And that's where I really got heavily back into electronics again, back to what I originally loved and kind of did a big full circle, really. So that sort of sums it up in three minutes. Before, you said you went to Australia, so you're not native there, but you're also based on the words like uni. You're not US-based. Where were you before? I'm from the UK originally, from a place called the Midlands.

It's actually, the area is called the Black Country. And it's basically called that because it was a lot of coal mining. It was basically the industrial heartland of the UK. It's pretty much where a lot of the industrial revolution started. So it's a very working class area. It's actually now a very up and coming area back in the UK. It's a big focus on R&D and startups, so it's quite interesting. Moved to London for a while. Also spent a little

bit of time in the US on the East Coast, and then moved to Australia with my wife, then my girlfriend, but she's from the Gold Coast. I didn't even think places could be called silly names like that. When she told me she was from the Gold Coast, I said, that sounds pretty good. It's got about 70 k's of beach. So it's a pretty nice place to live. So that's kind of where I ended up here. So I'm a dual nationality. I guess I have the two passports.

So I can go to a lot of places. My accent's all over the place. You've gotten to see some tech in different parts of the world. And I know you were in Silicon Valley for a little while, at least for a visit not too long ago. How would you compare the flavor of technology across the different places you've been? Yeah, well, I guess growing up in my early days in the UK,

we didn't really have the internet as we know it. So things like meetups and all these things didn't really exist in the same form as they do today. So it's only really been since I came to Australia that a lot of these things have happened. But I have lived in Sydney, which is much bigger. Australia is pretty much kind of the tech center of Australia is Sydney. It's still very small compared to Silicon Valley, but that's where I guess most of the density is in Australia.

But yeah, moving to a smaller place is both really hard, but also great because you're in a desert. There's nothing really happening around you. So if you want to build something cool, then you can do that. And there's really no precedent. You can be the king. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I've been able to do a lot here. It's been a struggle as well.

But if you're listening to this and you live in a small place, don't be scared. I guess it's my advice to try things. And you can fail a lot of times. But there's a lot you can do in a small place. We're half a million people, which is quite a lot for Australia, but very small compared to, you know, I've been to China and been to their cities, you know. And like half a million people is a village over there. So it's interesting how different places compare. You know, Australia, very, very big country, very low population.

Well, you mentioned Gold Coast Tech Space as a hackerspace. And 500,000 people to support a hackerspace seems small. Yeah, it is. But tell me more about what it is. Yeah, so I guess we, I'd been, I'd visited a hackerspace that was just starting in Brisbane and I had been listening a little bit online to a few podcasts and things like that about this maker movement. And I was currently running the Linux group on on the Gold Coast which was again very very small but there was some good people there and so we decided we wanted to have our own place where we could do bigger things so we just kind of went out on a limb really and

rented a building and just did it and drew a bit of attention, got some sponsorship from the university and the local government, and just did it. And we didn't have a lot of equipment. We got donated a few things. We didn't have the luxury of big laser cutters and things like that. We basically set ourselves the goal of building a 3D printer. That was the first thing we wanted to do, which I think a lot of hack spaces do. And we built a RepRap, and it took us a long time, but we managed to

build a rep wrap printer and get it working and that really drew a lot of people in because people wanted to see a 3d printer it was like magic that would be a good place to start i mean 3d printers can't then print all of your other gold devices i mean you're not going to get a 3D printer to print a laser cutter. Oh, no. But it's an enabler. We printed a second 3D printer. Yeah. So, yeah, the 3D printer has been really good.

And I guess even to this day, we get people coming in, all they want to see is the 3D printer. Can you turn it on, please? Can you turn it on, please? And it is like magic to a lot of people even though you know this technology like the first 3d printer i think i saw was 2007 uh when my friend vick oliver came over from new zealand we won and he showed it at linux conf melbourne and that's when we bought the parts to an old darwin i don't know if you ever saw the Darwin RepRap.

It was the first generation RepRap printer. It was awful. But for the time, it was amazing. It was a cube. It was really unstable. It had a lot of problems. But it's what birthed the later generations. And it inspired a lot of people.

How much of your goal with the hackerspace is to kind of build the community and expand it and do outreach versus just provide a space for existing people to do projects? Do you have programs that are specifically designed to say, okay, because you say people are coming in and saying, oh, I want to see the 3D printer. Are those people who are already into the tech kind of world there or are there people who have never

heard about it? We've kind of got sort of two sides to it. I guess we've got the hackers and geeks but we also the city that I live in is it's a very family focused city. There's a lot of families on the coast that move from over the border in

New South Wales that migrate up to a nicer place to live. From Sydney and New South Wales where the property prices were a lot higher, they come to the Gold Coast basically to have families. So we have a lot of kids that come to our space, a lot of parents. We run holiday programs and teach kids about electronics and programming and things like that. And some of those people become members, but some of them don't. They just come along in the holidays and drop in. So that's fine. We've just managed to kind of keep those two sides to the space.

And it's also allowed, I guess, some of our members to get an opportunity to teach and actually use some of their skills and pass that on to other people. So it's been a nice little fit, I guess, having those two things. And the education aspect can just make everybody more enthusiastic. It's a very good way to build goodwill in your community. Absolutely, yeah. So we've had all sorts of people come by. We've had people from the university who were prosthetic surgeons

and things like that wanting to see the 3D printer and print off prototype limbs and things like that who have access to lots of equipment at the university but weren't able to do some of the things they wanted to do. So they came along and they brought their kids, told other people about it, and it kind of really just spread around like that. We don't really do any publicity or anything like that.

It's just really a word of mouth thing. So as a member, what do you get to do? I mean, what does it mean being a member? Yeah, I guess we don't have a massive amount of equipment. Some of the other tech spaces have a lot. They have too much, actually. It's more the camaraderie. People really like to have a place they can go to.

We have a Wednesday night's Arduino night, which is usually full. And people just come along with their projects but a lot of the time people just want to come and have a chat and we have a thing on a Sunday afternoon where people just drop in. We do have quite a few people who are unemployed who just come along and it's kind of their their hobby to keep them busy or they some of them aspire to maybe getting a job doing this but there isn't a lot of work in our area or Australia at all, actually, embedded systems. So that's another kind of part of the problem.

So we just try and, I guess it's that camaraderie. People come along and want to come together. It's funny how we went from not having the internet and not being able to connect with people with common interests because they were far or we just couldn't find them or we just weren't that social with each other in order to find the other people who were like us. And then the internet comes and you realize, oh, geeks, yes, all right, I'm not alone. And then you go back to wanting the actual human Face to face Face to face, and now you can find it

Yeah, well, I'm a huge fan of Meetup I've run a lot of Meetups over the years And when I was in Brisbane, when I work in Brisbane Which is our nearest capital city. That's like an hour and a half away. Yeah, we do a lot of lunchtime meetups for people in their lunch hours because they're working pretty boring jobs half the time. They just want to connect with people doing cool things.

So there's a lot of software dev groups. And people want to meet face-to-face, and they still actually want to sit there and see a presenter in the flesh talking about something i think i'm not a huge fan of webinars and things like that i don't know about you guys um i do like to see the person that's why i like going to conferences and still having that face to face ambivalent sometimes I want the video because I'm doing something and I want to be able to stop it for when I hit an error. But videos are slow. So for pure information dump, I want to read it.

Or meet someone. Because then I know I can ask them questions later. I seldom do, but now I know who to ask a question to. And you hear other people ask questions in conferences that you might be interested in the answer to. It's a different experience than webinars. And people talking to real audiences tend to be more interesting than

people talking to a video camera. You don't have that person next to you muttering under their breath about something they disagree with or whatever. And it's that whole community thing that you get at conferences. I went to a little side story, but I went to an Amazon, what's it called? Not a forum.

It's like their Amazon Day that they do the other day. And I turned up there and it was in between talks. And so I just stood around, got a coffee. And I hadn't been to Brisbane for a few months. And within the space of 10 minutes, about 10 people I knew had said hello to me. And I thought, I'm just going to, maybe I won't go to any talks. And I spent the whole day not going to talks. And basically spent the whole day bumping into people.

So sometimes that's the best thing about conferences. Oh, yes, definitely. Well, and does Brisbane have a Maker Faire? They're trying to do it, and we've tried to do one down here as well. But it's been, I don't know, they just haven't really got their act together. I'm not sure. It's a lot of work. There is a Sydney Maker Faire, which I think is happening in a week.

This weekend, next weekend? Yeah, Dave Jones is going to that. I used to live in Sydney, so I'm quite drawn to Sydney. I like to go down there. It just didn't work out this time. But yeah, we would like to do one. But again, Brisbane is a small brisbane is a relatively small city as well even though it's a capital city uh so yeah our population is very small here

and you know you've got to really hunt to find these people most people aren't doing tech in like the valley and you visited uh that was one of the ways we met, was you visited Silicon Valley earlier this summer. What were you doing? Well, my summer, your winter, I suppose. Yeah, well, I'm sort of slightly connected to a group called Silicon Lakes on the Gold Coast. I remember my friend Aaron, and he runs a yearly trip to the valley. It only started last year. And this year we ended up getting sort of 15 or 16 people involved in startups to go over for three weeks.

And some of the guys actually went to Vegas as well for the first week and got to see what's happening. I don't know if you've seen what's happening in Vegas. They went to the Up Summit, which is all part of the Startup Weekend thing. And they went to that and saw a lot of this Day on Town project stuff in Vegas as well. So yeah, anyway, back to the Valley. So we got to go all over the Valley, the 15 or 16 of us. And it was a really interesting group because we had a local politician we had some

students we had some people raising money from venture capitalists we had some people like me who were looking a lot of different things and basically threw us all together for three weeks and just had a saw what we could do really um it was fun um i'm going into more detail on anything in particular. Well, the Silicon Lakes is like an incubator of sorts. Sort of, yeah. It's sort of trying to find its feet at the moment. It has an accelerator program that's starting in a couple of weeks called the Surf Accelerator. It started up really fast. And that will really be a bit of a test to see how we go with silicon lakes

um because the problem in australia there's there's really no funding so anything you do doesn't have any funding at the end of it which makes things quite tricky when you're running an accelerator program because all you can give really is desk space and some mentoring and things like that there's there's really no one there to actually put any equity in so that's one of the things a lot of us want to see over in the valley is the way that funding works we did get to talk to some vcs one very very senior vc who was quite interesting and really to see how that works and see how the valley works. A lot of us want to move to the valley, but practically it doesn't always work out

when you have families and commitments back here. And also Australia is an awesome place to live, so it's pretty hard to leave. So who organized the trip? Yeah, so that was organized by Aaron, who's at Silicon Lakes. So Aaron's got quite a strong connection back to the US as well because he spent some time last year there, and I guess he wanted more people to see it.

So we did a bit of a panel when we got home just a couple of weeks ago, and we had about 120 people turn up to see us talk about our experiences. So there was obviously interest, And we had about 120 people turn up to see us talk about our experiences. So there was obviously interest. And I think it's a good option for Australians to have one foot in the valley and one foot in Australia. It seems to be a model that's working quite well for a lot of people in Sydney. People fly back and forth quite regularly. So maybe it's a model for us too.

Did you have much of a planned itinerary no that was when we touched that was like yeah it was weird you had you were doing all these amazing things but everybody was kind of going their own way flop from one to the next one thing to the next it was very interesting uh one of the things that aaron told us is basically don't make too many plans because the more people you talk to they'll open doors for you so we had a couple of things going in the first couple of days and then part of my mission was to go and look at other hacker spaces and accelerators particularly around hardware and so i just asked around everyone i spoke to i asked where should i go i had a few dead ends, like a VC told me to go and check out the Samsung accelerator in Palo Alto, which was pretty funny that we rocked up to the front door and got past security and then basically were escorted out.

They were very secretive. They wouldn't even let one of my colleagues visit the bathroom. So that was a bit of a dead end. It looked very fancy. I don't know if you've been up there. It's in the old Borders bookstore in Palo Alto on the main street. But yeah, they were very, very suspicious of these crazy Aussies trying to come in and talk to someone.

So yeah, we went there. I went to a few different accelerators. I got to visit some contract manufacturers. I went out to AQS and got a tour of the production line. That was pretty cool. What's AQS? AQS is a contract manufacturer out at Fremont over by Flextronics. I think there's about seven different contract manufacturers out there,

and a lot of them are starting to have their own accelerators. Some of them even have their own VC funds. So it's quite interesting what's happening in the hardware space around that area. So yeah, we got shown around the production line by their COO. He was really cool and got to see how a prototype production line works. So I don't know if you guys have seen much of production lines. I've seen full manufacturing lines when I was at 3Com,

but this one was a bit interesting in that they can quickly swap machines around. So they had a lot of Kickstarter projects, and they could basically pull um reels in and out the machines and quickly quickly reconfigure the line oh interesting yeah that is a new problem having lots of small runs yeah so you could see like where their chip shooters and where their pick and place machines were you could see like spare kind of racks of reels that were sitting there that they can basically roll in and out of the pick and place machine and then i think the idea is when you're when your kickstarter goes crazy and you get lots and lots of orders they can basically call their friends up in china and just

say okay configuration a for this line can you set this up and then basically they can replicate the entire line in china as a fixed line um but i think they don't do that until they get to about 10,000 or something like that. It's quite a big number, actually, before they move out of the U.S. Right, that makes sense. That was quite interesting. When we went off the end of the line, they had to, there was a guy, did you guys read about the Alzheimer's, not Alzheimer's, Parkinson's spoon? Yes, I did.

Yeah, we mentioned that at a show a while back. Yes, as I walked along the end of the line, they were showing us their test facility and there was a guy actually testing the Parkinson's spoon. So they were manufacturing it there and he was doing this whole wobble of his hand, actually pretending to simulate that. And then he also had a little machine next to him

which had about 10 of the spoons all wobbling at different speeds. So that was quite cool because I just read about it the day before. And then I walked down the line and saw it being manufactured. So it's really cool to see things coming off the line. But yeah, it was just quite amusing seeing this guy wobbling the spoon. That was his job. They were making all sorts of different things. I think they're making Bitcoin miners.

They had some high-end audio equipment. There was, they were making little bits. I think you guys know of little bits as well. Yeah, the circuits. There was all sorts of things coming off the end of their line. So that was cool. So you did that. You met a VC.

You met lots of other people. Yeah. And you just did this by committing to go to San Francisco, San Jose and asking? Yeah, basically. I think that's really cool. People think, oh, I have to become part of an accelerator in order to talk to anybody. And it's not always true. Sometimes you just have to pick up the phone and say, I'll be in your area and I'm curious about what you're doing.

Well, I guess that's what I did with you guys. That's true. We had a few people in our group, like one of the guys in our group, Kusani, who's a student. And when we were meeting the VC, he was a bit shy because it was a bit intimidating and I just gave him a nudge at the end I said ask your question and he plucked up his courage and

gave his little pitch and asked his question and straight away the guy gave him a whole load of names to look up and then he went and looked those names up and then of course because he'd met this guy you can kind of name drop him a little bit that usually gets you a meeting so you can kind of just follow on from one thing to the next name dropping the person who recommended you is a great way to sort of get in get a meeting with people but we were we were just amazed how giving of their time people were people were very busy we're happy to make time for you so you know if anyone wants to do that i'd encourage them just to get out there and basically follow your nose. We've packed a whole three weeks just going from one thing to the next.

And we would just hang out in cafes. If we didn't have any meetings, we'd just go and hang out in a cafe and talk to the person next to us. And that would often send you on a new path. If you've never been to Silicon Valley, that is a weirdly good way to meet people. Or you can just eavesdrop in cafes in Silicon Valley. Yeah, I kept bumping into the same guy at the Red Rock Cafe in Mountain View where we met. And he was from Adelaide in Australia and he worked for F5, the local redirectors. And yeah, I kept bumping into him and he

every day I'd bump into him, I would introduce him to a different person who was in my group because we were all in different teams and different groups. So it's funny who you bump into. But we also had some very interesting interactions with people at hotels. We met a guy who was basically a mobster in Manview. I shouldn't talk about it on the radio, but yeah. Probably not.

His grandfather was some mob family. So, you know, that was an interesting chat. We met all sorts of people in San Francisco. You visited Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. Yes. It's one of those just prototypical hacker spaces, one of the first that was super popular. Did it feel like home?

Did it feel like Gold Coast tech space? Yeah, it was good fun. We went along on one of the evenings. There wasn't many people there, and I just sat down in the electronics area and just kind of listened in to some conversations. And we met this guy who worked for the original, sorry, my mind's gone blank, the Silicon Valley, the birth company, the first company.

Fairchild. Sorry? Fairchild. Fairchild, yes. So he worked for Fairchild in the original Fairchild. So he had all sorts of great stories. And he was just one of the, he was retired. He was one of the Hackspace members just hacking around,

managed to fix one of their robots, which was funny because none of the robot team were there that night. And I saw the robot on the table and they said, oh, there's some problem with something. And they basically just rewired it wrong. So I just rewired it for them while they weren't there. And apparently it was all good. And then we used their laser cutter, did a few other things while we were there.

The Hackadosh is an interesting one. I don't know if you guys have visited, but they've also got this group off the side, which is called Hackers and Founders. So they've got a room off to the side where they're running kind of an incubator, just more around startups. And I could sense there was a little bit of tension maybe. I don't know if it's tension, but there's kind of two factions there in the space where, you know,

some people want it just to be a hacker space for hacking around and other people want to take it commercial. As you were talking about your own, you mentioned that there were people who were unemployed who were trying to get the skills. So I think that tension is part of it. I mean, I think that's going to happen anywhere. Yeah.

So I've been doing quite a lot boards that I kind of give away and sell at a very discounted price to a lot of the Hackerspace members. So I guess that's a bit of a sweetener for people when they really like what we've been doing and I can talk quite confidently about it to people and inspire them. So I've really tried carefully to not make people think that um i'm sort of using the hack space for my own nefarious means um but so yeah we've got a pretty good space where we're at it's quite small but uh it seems to be fairly harmonious but i know a lot of other hack spaces have had troubles in recent years where they've been storming a lot i know the noise bridge in san francisco i think it is i'm not sure where it is that's one of the original hacker spaces and i'm on their mailing list and i think they have a lot

of issues and they've had all sorts of problems and i think it's down to only a few members at the moment so hopefully they can do a bit of a reboot because that's the original, I think it's the first US hackerspace. You'd mentioned funding being difficult in Australia. And just to go back to the VC question for a minute, one of the reasons that Silicon Valley has such a thriving funding community is the industry built up over the years and people who

did well left active tech development to become VCs or to start funds or to participate in funds. And so that all built and became kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy or self-reinforcing cycle. It seems like there's a little bit of a chicken and the egg problem where you have to have successful companies before you can have enough capital to create funds, and yet you need funds to have successful startups. Do you see a way to break that lock? Is it to get funding from the United States or elsewhere

to bootstrap your region? It's pretty hard. We've got what we do have in Australia, which is quite good, is there's quite a lot of Australian startups that have done quite well. Most of them have gone to the US, and some of them do come back. And some of them, like Atlassian, are kind of the most well-known groups that are doing that. They're coming back to Australia and actually seeding

funds over here. So Mike Cannon Brooks, who started one of the founders of Atlassian, he's running a VC for NADA Sydney at the moment. So they're trying to give back to their home country. So there's a few people that do come back now and then. A lot of people have to say they do go to the US and stay there because it's just too tempting to stay. I hadn't considered that. They say they're going to come back. Some are occasional visitors but some of them do send

their money home and do things but most of that's around Sydney. We have some investors locally here but they call themselves angel investors but they're not really tech focused at all. They're more in know real estate bricks and mortar is their thing they know best and i think technology just scares the bejesus out of them so um yeah they're very risk averse here so i think it's only by some of these risk takers such as the alacins of the world

coming home to Australia and talking about it to people that things are going to change. Now there's some things happening around the world like London's doing quite well and there's a few other pockets around the world. But I think the valley is still going to be the centre of the world. It's the place to be. So I think really to be, yeah, if you're reliant on funding,

then I think you're going to have to have some sort of link to the valley. You can do things other ways as well. I guess Australia's got some strong companies that have built themselves via other ways, you know, the traditional way of getting customers and all those things that we should be doing. But if you need to rely on investment, then I think you have to go somewhere else. I don't know if that answered your question.

Yeah, no, I think it did. And like you said, there's other means. I think, I don't know if Kickstarter is a solution exactly, but those kinds of things that allow you to reach a broader audience and maybe pull in money from elsewhere. But yeah, the idea that if you're successful, you pull up stakes and move to the United States is kind of, it's not a way to build a native industry.

It's kind of appalling. Yeah. But yeah, you go to the US and I don't know if you've been to Runway, which is right next to Twitter on Market Street. There's an incubator there. And yeah, half, well, maybe even two-thirds of the people there were from overseas. We had like a German, some sort of German government thing

set up in the incubator for German companies. And we met all sorts of nationalities. So it really is kind of the place people go. So I don't really see that changing. But you are working on technical projects beyond the tech space. You mentioned the Arduino boards. Is that the secluded.io project? No, we've got an Arduino board,

which was kind of the first thing we did called GCduino. That's basically one of the guys I work with. He wanted to roll his own Arduino board. He had a few extra things he wanted to add, and I said, well, let's do it, and I kind of funded it. And it's not a cheap board compared to what you can buy on online some of the really really cheap arduino boards but it's it's a nice board we like it you know we made it pretty color put our logo on it we've added some extra pins it's a breadboard um plug-in board and it's been quite

popular we've sold i think we've sold a few hundred and And then we've made another one, which is a network-ready one called the GC3 node, because it's like a node, like a network node. And we've put basically little sockets on there that allow you to easily add all sorts of different network modules. And that's been popular for people wanting to do IoT-type things. And we use that for our own IoT prototyping, because we can plug a Bluetooth module in there easily there's a wi-fi module we've got a radio mesh radio module um so that's been fun it's led us into getting our own pick and place machine and doing our own pcb design and

all sorts of um learnings from there i guess and it's it's been something that we can use as a bit of an inspiration to other members. But it's not a moneymaker in itself, really. It's just led to other things. It's been a lot of fun, though. So if anyone wants GC doing this, let me know. They're great boards. There will be a link. Okay, so what is secluded.io

and so secluded.io is just something i i actually basically started that when i was in the u.s because i thought i'm going to actually start some sort of venture when i get back from the u.s and i thought i might as well put a name to something now and we had a couple of clients over in australia that we were already working with, sort of Internet of Things type devices. But the two that we were working on were both kind of a bit unique in that they're a bit secluded. So that's why I called them the secluded IO. One of which is we're monitoring plant rooms at the hospital. We're monitoring gas and hot water values and gas pressures and

thermostats and sometimes it's quite hard to get on the network in these areas even though there's network everywhere you can't plug into it and also getting access to power can also be tricky and the second one which is probably a bit more interesting, is the rabbit-proof fence, which is a project monitoring the gates around a very, very large fence that goes around our state called the rabbit-proof fence. Some of you may have seen the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence, which takes its name from that. I can tell you a bit more about the fence, if that's interesting. I know a lot of people are interested in it. Well, I mean, rabbits are not native to Australia and they eat all sorts of stuff and they're just pests. I mean, they're worse than mice.

But they're cute pests. Yes. And you've built a fence around the state of Queensland. And it's not like this is a state the size of Rhode Island. No. How long is the fence? I think the fence is a few thousand kilometers. There are some areas that aren't maintained,

but the area that is maintained the most is around an area called the Darling Downs, which is really kind of the food bowl of our state and there's a lot of farming there so there's the most incentive there to keep rabbits out I think they cause I haven't got the figures it's something like two or three hundred million dollars a year of damage not only to crops that they also burrow into the ground and cattle put their feet through their warrens and break their legs and things like that. So it's got a big impact to farming.

So the Darling Downs area has this fence and people have to cross the fence every so often. So there are gates. I think in our stretch of the gates at the moment that are notoriously bad for getting left open by people who come through and for whatever reason they forget to close the gate. Even though there's, I think, a $3,500, $4,000 fine for leaving a gate open, people still leave them open. So, yeah, we're just trying to keep gates closed

and keep rangers doing their real job as opposed to having to keep running back to close gates and sometimes making long drives along the fence just to go and close a gate. Their job is really to maintain the fence, not to be running around and closing gates for people. So some big distances here, so if a ranger has to make a special trip to close the gate, it could be a few hours. But if he doesn't know that the gate's open,

it could be three days before he gets to see the gate again and close it. In the meantime, several thousand cute bunnies may have come through. Fibonacci says that then you have three and suddenly you have a lot more rabbits on the wrong side of the gate. And they breed really fast. It's very, very fast. I think they breed within, I think it's within 30 days or something like that, they can breed again.

So as you can see, the populations can grow very, very fast. They have them over in New South Wales. Across the border, there's rabbits, and they cause massive devastation. And I don't know if I told you this story, but on the rabbit board website, they actually have a rabbit resettlement farm over the border in New South Wales where people in Queensland who have rabbits and they want to hand their rabbits in. Yeah, as pets, yeah, because you're not even allowed to have them as pets. They can hand their rabbit in and it will be resettled in New South Wales.

But several people I've told this story to have commented on the whole farm thing, sending your rabbit away to a farm. They have some nice photos of kids cuddling rabbits and things like that, and I have a feeling maybe that's not what happens. I remember my mom telling me my cat had gotten to live on a farm. I mean, I think I was like five at the time, so I'm not saying it's bad. Yeah, we had a really vicious dog when I was a kid. He was great with the kids, but he would attack the postman

and whenever anyone came to the house, they would would attack the postman and the electrician. You know, whenever anyone came to the house, they would get attacked. And he was sent away to a farm, I was told. So I don't think that happened. So, yeah, the rabbit fence, going back to that, it's pretty remote. We don't have any power. We do actually have some mobile coverage, which is quite unique for Australia. We have good mobile coverage across some very vast distances,

and that's mainly for political reasons. The farmers, I guess, have quite a large political influence in Australia, and state-owned, at the time, state-owned telco basically had to put in a lot of mobile networks into places that probably aren't economically viable. So we do have some good mobile coverage and we also have satellite, so we can get to the internet. So you have sensors that tell when a rabbit fence gate is open, and then you use mobile or satellite to notify the ranger.

Yeah. Initially it was the ranger, and then we thought, well, we can actually notify a local farmer. He might be nearer. And they hadn't even thought of that, so we just can send a text to a farmer because the Internet's not always a given that people can even get on the Internet, And they hadn't even thought of that. So we just can send a text to a farmer because, you know, the internet's not always a given that people can even get on the internet,

but they can usually get a text message. So we can also send a text message to a farmer. They can reply to say, I'm going to shut the gate, or if they don't reply, it can get escalated to a ranger. So we're just trialing it at the moment on a couple of gates, but we're hoping it will be successful and we can roll it out to a lot more and save a lot of time for rangers

and stop a lot of rabbits coming through. And you do this through your consulting business, it's Refactor? Yeah, Refactor, yes. So it sort of came about via, the rabbit proof fence came about via a friend of mine, Glenn Tozer, who is on the rabbit board. He's called the rabbit board and he's like a board member. And he mentioned it to me the one day. He said, oh, you know, there's this problem with the rabbits. And is there any way we can fix this with technology? i'm like well sure but for a price really easy it's actually quite easy

inductive sensor will cost you about two bucks online i think to buy an inductive sensor to test if a gate's open or not and then put a bit of electronics in so it's and it's a panel yes solar panel on the battery, yes. That's actually the hardest bit, is actually making the thing rugged enough to withstand the weather. And the Australian bush is very harsh. We have a lot of animals out there that like to attack things. I hear that.

Yeah, I hear that you have crabs that are bigger than dogs Is that true? Land crabs I had to Google it myself, but yes, they do, we do I have a picture here of a girl holding one up And yeah, it's pretty big That's not photoshopped No, we have a lot of big and scary stuff

And I think that's what a lot of people visiting Australia think about. They almost think they're going to get attacked at the airport by wild dogs and spiders and snakes. It's the little poisonous stuff that worries me more. Yeah. No, I typed in Queensland giant into internet, into Google, and it listed a couple of the options of what other people search for, and there was grouper, which I'm not too worried about because those are fish.

It's fish. Spider and shark. So really, Queensland giant spiders and giant sharks. Yeah. We do have some spiders, not really big ones. The biggest spider I've ever seen is actually in the US. So you guys have got some big ones too. The bird-eating spider.

I don't know if you've seen that one. Yeah, see, but all our stuff isn't venomous. We've got two species of venomous spiders in all of America. I think Australia has like 99% of all the venomous species. There's a figure somewhere. I think of the 12 most deadliest snakes, I think we have like 9 of them. The thing about a lot of the poisonous stuff, for people thinking of visiting Australia and they're thinking not, it's a lot of our

poisonous stuff keeps itself to itself. You don't see it. Like we have house spiders, huntsman spiders that do come in our houses, but they're not venomous the venomous ones are all hidden away you you really very rarely see them we have a redback spider which is kind of like the black widow and they generally kind of hide in places that you wouldn't unless you're cleaning your house and going underneath and putting your hands in places putting your hands in places you shouldn't and you're probably okay. And as an adult, you're not going to die. And really, if the entire

country was overrun by murderous animals, you wouldn't have this rabbit problem. Why haven't we trained the spiders to eat rabbits? Well, we have the dingo fence as well, which I think I told you guys about. There's a fence that keeps wild dogs out. The approach to every problem is to build a fence. Where's the spider fence? The spider fence.

Yeah, the dingo fence runs from across the middle of the country, and that keeps dingoes from the north out of the south. They call it the wild dog fence now, though. Yeah, the wild dogs are... They're dingoes of bred with other dogs, so they're not pure dingoes. But, yeah, so the dingoes... Dingo fence actually meets the rabbit-proof fence at one point,

and it goes higher. So they have... Someone pays for the top part of the fence and someone pays for the bottom part of the fence. It's very complicated. But I think, Chris, you had a good solution, didn't you, the top part of the fence and someone pays for the bottom part of the fence. It's very complicated. But I think, Chris, you had a good solution, didn't you, to getting rid of the rabbits with the dingoes? Was it to advance the fence 100 feet a year?

Until the dingo fence and the rabbit fence had all the dingoes and the rabbits in one place. Now they take care of each other. Dingo rabbit death match. I might place my money on the rabbits, actually. Well, the funny thing we have with the rabbits now is the rabbits are breeding with pet rabbits that have been let go. And wild rabbits, they're kind of those brown, you know, quite well camouflaged rabbits. The pet rabbits are often the most craziest colours and big long ears

so they're all breeding now so we're getting these really weird looking rabbits apparently along the border with black spots and white ears and all sorts of different colours so they're going to be easier to find at least now. I hear you don't have an Easter bunny anymore. No, so the easter bunny is is um yeah he's been outlawed um so we have a a native uh animal called the bilby which is uh similar to a rabbit which is actually really endangered and so they there's a real really cute yeah they encourage um people to have the easter bil instead. So Cadbury's actually make an Easter bilby in Australia,

not an Easter bunny. Bilbies are cute, and they have a bilby fence too. So we love fences. And that's to keep the bilbies in and help the bilbies. Sure, sure it is. And then the pet bilbies that end up at the farm We can probably go on for hours on bilbies and bunnies So you do the rabbit-proof fence technology

Through your consulting firm Refactor What else does Refactor do? So Refactor is actually originally a software consultancy So we were doing a lot of web development, mobile, quite a lot of Agile. I know you guys love and hate Agile, but a lot of our clients are Agile shops. So traditionally that's what we've done over the last five, six years. Before that, it's only really in the last year or two that we've got more into the hardware. So two of us have kind of took an offshoot off to the side and doing

more of the embedded systems hardware stuff. But I've still got two or three other guys working at companies doing web stuff. So we've got a pretty broad range of skills, I guess. Which is helpful as well, because now I'm doing more of the IoT projects. You don't have to actually put that data somewhere afterwards once it gets off the device. So a lot of the things I know about big data and web services

and things like that is useful. Yeah, it's useful. So all this stuff's going into the cloud. And I was at the Amazon thing the other day, and Amazon are very aware of hardware and IoT, and they have a few cool little things which you may or may not know about, such as Kinesis,

which is a very, very low latency place to send data on massive scale. The data only lasts for 24 hours, and then you have to actually get it out of there into somewhere else, into your data warehouse or do some big data analytics on it or put it into a database. But it's super low latency and quite cheap as well.

So that's one of the things I was looking at using for some of my things that are very high scale. But when you talk to these client guys, they're very aware of this kind of revolution, I guess you could call it. Or maybe it's a bubble, who knows, around IoT. And they're providing for it. So it's well worth having a look what they're up to. And it's neat that you're talking about IoT as electronics

and software and cloud and data. You have all of these parts to making a good Internet of Things thing work. Internet of Things thing. Internet of Things thing. Terrible, terrible term.

Well, if you've seen, we have the Internet of wearable things, the internet of industrial things. Everyone's tacking on a lot of different levels now. Well, one of the listeners, Steve, well, no, not Steve. I forgot his actual name. I only know his Twitter handle. Stuart?

Yeah. He's doing the Internet of Things Pet Rock because of the show. Yes, for Hackaday. For Hackaday. That is pretty funny to watch. I saw that. That was good. Actually, yeah, I looked at that Hackaday project

because I put a Hackaday project up, which is kind of languishing a little bit. And I think I got tweeted at the same time as his project as well. They did a tweet of the week or something. Ah, yes. Suddenly I got like 10 skulls after I got tweeted and I hadn't added anything to my project. You need visibility.

Is that so? You just need visibility. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's a lot of what Silicon Valley is about is the fact that we do have all of these interconnections and meetups and the connections. Yeah, the IoT meetup, which meets at Hacker Dojo,

I think had easily over 100 people there. And it was a French company talking about wearables, some sort of wearable fabric that they had. And yeah, there was a lot of people there. That's how I made a few of my initial contacts and met a few other people. So that's a good one. But I think there's about four or five different IoT meetup groups in the Valley. So you can go crazy. Actually, going back to the Valley, that's really one of

the things I really noticed. It's awesome being there, but I think very distracting. I don't know how you guys go. I think you guys must have to lock yourself away for a bit to do some work. It helps to be cheated. Really, really old and cheated. And cynical. I can see yourself going there and just not doing any work

because you would just be going from coffee meeting to coffee meeting, meetup to meetup. That's the good thing about Australia is you can kind of get your head down without distraction. So it's actually a great place to get work done. The Valley is a good place to network, I guess, and raise money. But this is a good place to get work done.

And we do have plenty of engineers as well. And our wages are quite low. So anyone got lots of money out there listening, they want to come to Australia and hire some chief engineers, happy to hook you up. So what was the best part of your trip? Oh, the trip? Actually, yeah, it's interesting.

It was a bit of a surprise, but the last day, I managed to get myself an invite to Highway 1, which is a hardware accelerator run by PCH. They're a manufacturer, another contract manufacturer. So we got invited to their demo day. I don't know if you guys have been to demo days before, but I think they had about 17 hardware startups all pitching one after the other. And the pitches were okay,

but it was really just the people we met there. It was pretty interesting. And they did all the startups, but they had a desk afterwards sort of talking about their thing that they created. There's a couple of Aussie guys who've done a really cool robot arm, modular robot arm out of there. So they've basically moved to the US as well.

I don't think they're going back to Australia. That was a good part of our day. And then I guess the second thing that was the highlight was going to Singularity University. So Highway 1 first. I want to point out that Craig Zellender, who was on the show maybe a month ago about Vision, just emailed and told me he's going to be at Highway 1 working on a project for a few months.

So clearly I need to talk to them. Yeah, cool. I need to email them. They give 50 grand, which is one of the best paying accelerators if you want to think of it that way. You get 50 grand for I think six months

and they send you over to China I think for one month of that to Shenzhen where you do all your manufacturing. And then so they've had, I think they've had one or two tranches

so far and they just started their third one, I think. But they were great. They were very well set up. It was very professional. We met some great people there. That was just a very chance meeting, really. We just rocked up and managed to get in, and it was cool. I feel like we don't take advantage of all of the things around us.

I mean, we don't go to hardly any of these meetups. Been here a long time. And we came from a different background. Neither of us got into the small startup world, or at least not for a long time. Coming from big companies, it feels like a different valley when you're working for bigger companies, I think. Well, I guess San Francisco is kind of the place to be. Yeah, and San Francisco has changed a heck of a lot in the last few years

in terms of the tech there and that stuff. Yeah, we were blown away by the growth there and what was happening there. And I guess someone said to me the other day that maybe the new Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley. Maybe I heard that on your show, I don't know. Silicon Valley is going to be the hardware and San Francisco is going to be software. So that's one of the things that people were talking about.

We'll see. I still have my hopes that the San Francisco thing is a bit of a boom that will die down a little bit. Because it's good for networking. It's good to have high density and companies in close proximity to communicate. But it's extremely expensive up there. It just doesn't make economic sense to me. It's not a very big place. No, it's a small city, really. And it's not like they can increase the size at all.

Yeah, there's nowhere to go but up. it's not a very big place and it's not like they can increase the size at all. Yeah. There's nowhere to go. We met some people who would be basically living, living on people's couches permanently. Yeah. And another guy who basically sounded like he almost lived in a box. He had like no kitchen. I think he had a bathroom and he basically had a very,

very small, very small apartment without a kitchen. I'm not sure how you can do that, but anyway. Good trucks. Yeah. We were amazed by some of the Airbnb. I don't know if you've looked at Airbnb in San Francisco, some of the deals you can get on Airbnb

where basically you're sleeping on the floor of someone's one-bedroom apartment while they're sleeping there too. Basically, your bed is a bit of floor next to their bed. And they were charging ridiculous amounts of money. Cheaper than a hotel, and a lot of times you can't even get a hotel room because the two conferences blow out all the hotels in the city. Yeah, we really struggled to get a hotel in our last week.

So we ended up down in Siam in a not so nice area, but quite a nice hotel, actually. Once you get over the crack addicts on the corner of the street, it was actually a great place to stay. Ah, San Francisco. That is so not going to be the title of the show. Okay. So you said Singularity University was your second highlight. I'm surprised by that. Singularity University is very cool.

Certainly NASA Ames is a great place to visit, but you know that they believe in the singularity, right? I'm not sure if I'm still a believer yet, but yeah, we met some great people there. We got to meet Peter Diamantis and a few of the other people there. It was part of a, I can't remember what the day was, but they basically invited a lot of people to come spend a day at Singularity. A lot of them were people working at big companies. So we got to sort of schmooze with a few of those people,

drink coffee. And then at the end of the day, we got to join the new intake for their program. There was basically a kickoff ceremony. And there was a big party at the History Museum, afterwards Computer History Museum, which is where we saw the band that I think Chris knows. Is that right, Chris?

Yeah, the... It was a band playing 3D printed instruments. The swing band with the horns? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it was just... The Singularity stuff is interesting. I'm still not sure about it, but the whole day, as far as the people we met,

I think was probably the highlight we met some um really really um interesting um very very well connected after sometimes quite wealthy as well people um so i made some very good contacts there and um yeah it was it was a good day there was a good vibe there um it is the first The people are fantastic and it is a nice place to visit and talking about what do you do, what are you interested in, it is a really great place to just meet neat people. So I make fun of the singularity part because I read sci-fi and then I try to use my computer and wonder how this computer is ever going to take over the world if I can make it crash in 10 seconds. Then I try to use my computer and wonder how this computer is ever going to take over the world.

If I can make it crash in 10 seconds. They talk about doctors and teachers being replaced by mobile phones. Yeah, I'm not sure. We'll see. It goes back to, we got the internet and we were lonely. We got the internet. We became less lonely. And then we want to go back to meet people face-to-face. So when they talk about replacing teachers with computers,

I'm like, some things, sure. Some things computers would be better at. Certainly very fair testing is often computer-based, but sometimes you need people. Yeah, I think their argument is they're not going to get rid of people. Teachers are going to be more facilitators. And a lot of the knowledge transfer, I guess, is going to be via computers. And I guess mobile phones or tablets are a good form factor for that

when there's people in the world that don't even have computers and they're kind of jumping straight over to having phones so um yeah there's a they got a few um projects that they touted that uh that sort of examples of how that's working i don't know if you've seen the hole in the wall project and a few of those things that have happened over in india yes where they've just thrown computers into random villages without any support and kids have gone off and learnt things. So there's a few, they've done a similar thing with the one laptop child as well where they've just thrown a whole lot of laptops into, I think that was in Africa, I'm not sure

and people just use them and they've got a lot of time on their hands the kids have, to learn things. So they just experiment and eventually they work it out. Sometimes you don't need to come up with the perfect pedagogy if you just give tools and time. Absolutely. Time is something I'm very aware of now. I have my own kids and I see the kids,

how much time they have to spend on things and how little time I seem to have. I long for those childhood days when we had hours and hours and hours to tinker and play on things. I think that's a common feeling around from a lot of people I talk to. Well, changing subjects, let's see. Oh, let's talk about me now. What? You've been a listener of the show. That was how we met.

When you were in town, you emailed and said, do you want to get coffee? Why do you listen to the show? I always wonder that. What is wrong with you? The easy answer would be that Chris Gamble told me to. But no. I started off listening to the... Amp Hour. Amp Hour, yeah. And I guess the Amp Hour for me was really an intensive,

because I was getting back into electronics. It was a way for me to get a very, very quick flow of information without having to do a whole lot of reading to actually get some research. So Ampara has probably saved me months and months of research. Those guys don't realize how useful they are, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. And I guess I stumbled upon you guys via Chris mentioning.

I think you were on the Ampara. That was why. I was. I've gone back and listened to a lot of the older Embedded podcasts now. Yeah, so I think you guys, Embedded and the Amp Hour for me, have saved me so much time, and I've learned so much from you guys. So I'm really appreciative of podcasts in particular because you can listen to a podcast

anywhere, almost I really thought he was going to make fun of us or tease us or something expect something actually sincere it's what happens when you fish for compliments so yeah I tell everyone about podcasts I actually had a podcast of my own for a while which

kind of fizzled away but it was a lot of fun we got to meet a heck of a lot of awesome people through the podcast. That's the really great thing. Yeah, it opened doors for us. And I guess we just were so busy we weren't able to sustain it. So I think having something you can sustain is really important. So the fact that you guys put these things out regularly, same with the Amp Hour, I think is awesome.

So keep doing it. Don't stop. Ever. Which shows do you, what other podcasts do you listen to? A few others. I quite like the Steam Power Podcast, which I don't know if you listen to that one. That's the guy, I can't remember the guy's name.

And the Engineering Commons is quite good as well. And I've just started listening to the Amazon one and a few of the cloud ones to get myself back into that. But I find just an hour, because most of them are less than an hour, it's a good, you know, an hour commute. You can listen to a podcast and um have something to think about and then you can obviously go off and do your own research but uh it's that it's it's finding all of those things that you don't you know having that sort of spider to go out and get those things that you haven't heard about that

is where the podcasts are good i think um so there's about five I think I listen to at the moment. I don't go crazy. I had a time where I was listening to a lot of psychology and cognitive science podcasts and going off on random tangents, but I've kind of weaned myself off all of that because you can get carried away and be all over the place. So I'm pretty focused on electronics and embedded systems now. Cool. Now I have a couple more to look up.

Well, I think I'm out of questions. Do you have any others, Christopher? No. Steve, do you have any last words you'd like to leave? My final words were going to be about the podcast and for you guys to carry on and keep doing it. So you've already beat me to it on that one, I have to say. But if anyone's visiting the Gold Coast in Australia,

it's a beautiful place to visit. We have beautiful beaches and hinterland and all sorts of awesome things. And the poisonous animals don't bother you. They just hide. So don't worry about it. But you'd be very welcome if you want to come visit. It's a great place and I'm hoping to be back in the valley in November so I'll be there for the whole of the month of November in Wearable World Labs in San Francisco

your favourite place Chris Well thank you very much for speaking with us Thanks guys, it's been a pleasure. Thank you, Steve. My guest has been Steve Dalton, co-founder of Gold Coast Tech Space and so much more. If you'd like to contact him, there is a contact email on refactor.com.au, which will be in the show notes. Thanks also to Christopher White for co-hosting and producing and if you've got comments, questions or suggestions email us

show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm we do like to hear from you in fact we like to hear from you so much I'm giving away a Ballistic Cat CD which should be actually officially released by well a couple days after the show releases

now it is I think it's the 15th. But we got early copies. Anyway, we're giving away a copy. And this is the same album we had on the show a few weeks ago. So don't enter the contest if you didn't like the bonus show. But if you did like the bonus show, get a CD. Their website is BallisticCats.comcom and they have a Facebook page

so if you liked the show and you don't end up with the CD you can get to them still and now to get the CD guess the number that Steve will be giving me after the show is over and the album is yours whoever gets closest by 820 wins

Steve do you want to give any hints for your number? hints? no? sure Whoever gets closest by 820 wins. Steve, do you want to give any hints for your number? Hints? No. Sure. Green. Should I do that? Does anyone know the game Bingo?

It'll be something around bingo. It won't be one with a funny, funny bingo name. What? All right. That was a hint for somebody, but it wasn't for me. Maybe that's for the British people. Oh, you know. Thank you all for listening.

The final thought for this week, Charles Schultz, because, you know, Snoopy's the best. And that is, don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.