Embedded - 69: Look at This Entire Aisle of Standoffs

Episode Date: September 25, 2014

Mike Szczys (@Szczys) discusses @Hackaday, the SPACE! prize, being a professional musician, and visiting Silicon Valley. Hackaday.com blog including Mike's post about Why Open Design is the way forward  Hackaday.io project site Hackaday Prize All entries 50 semifinalists Science fiction contest winners (previous contest) Mike was on the judging panel to winnow down from 800 entries to 50. Some projects that he thought were particularly awesome that didn't make the semifinalist cut. Intelligent Ski Course Taylor Multifuel Null-rotor Turbine V-Sink -- video in anything out (not discussed) Daisy Kite Airborne Wind Turbine (not discussed) Supply Frame FindChips and (upcoming) Parts.io In response to a listener question, Elecia wrote a blog post about things to do in Silicon Valley. When Mike visited for the first time, he caught many highlights: he went toHSC/Halted, enjoying how organized it is, woke up early for the De Anza electronics flea market, and had a ball at the Computer History Museum.  Mike's Science Friday segment

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Alicia White. My co-host is Christopher White, and our guest is Mike Stish, managing editor of Hackaday.com. Hi, Mike. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks, Chris. It's nice to meet you, and nice to be speaking with you again, Alicia. Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Sure. I think the thing that people are usually surprised to hear about is I actually have a completely different career from Hackaday. I'm a classically trained musician. I play in two orchestras here in Madison, Wisconsin, where I live. And maybe going to classical music isn't the best way to make a living. I've always had kind of a love of computers and programming. And when I got out of school, I started spending more and more and more of my free time kind of exploring robot building and then getting into programming embedded systems.

And I answered a call for writers for Hackaday in about 2009 and started writing part-time, and it's gradually consumed my life ever since. So what is Hackaday? What is Hackaday? That is a really good question. I like to think of Hackaday as a global virtual hackerspace. Well, we have hackerspaces here like HackerDojo where you go and you sit at a table and you put stuff together and people walk by and say, what are you building? Which is great if you want to talk, but bad if you want to get

things done. I think we serve kind of the same purpose. So one of the major parts of Hackaday all along has been that we have a pretty active blog. And by active, I mean we have a lot of people that are actually reading and commenting on the things that we cover. We generally cover projects that are interesting to engineers and engineering enthusiasts. Some of them are real engineering projects, and some of them are definitely not real engineering projects, and that's where the name comes from. It is Hack. Originally, we just had one post a day, but that quickly kind of went aside as people... Hence the name. Yes, exactly. As people decided they wanted to read more than one post a day, but that quickly kind of went aside as people... Hence the name. Yes, exactly. As people decided they wanted to read more than one post a day, we went to a couple

and then three, and now we're up to about eight posts a day. And the community has really grown into that. And you can see at any given time, we have posts that are 20, 50, a couple hundred responses long. And in general, 50, a couple hundred responses long. And in general, there's a lot of productive and good things there, in general. And so there's a community. I mean, the forums are places you can go and say, I have this. But the blog is mostly about projects. And even that ends up being sort of a forum because of the comments.

Yeah, that's right. So by forums, we actually just started in January a community called Hackaday.io. It's actually on a different domain. And it's just like your little corner of the internet that you can stake out. I had specifically been doing a lot of project development where I was getting interrupted by the multiple jobs that I have. And so I'd drop a project for a few weeks or even a few months and have problems coming

back to it. I wanted a place that I could very quickly hammer out some notes on what I was doing, maybe post some pictures or videos or really anything. And I'd struggled with actually getting myself to do that. And two weeks later, you're just not going to remember what you're doing. So it kind of started do that. And two weeks later, you're just not going to remember what you're doing. So it kind of started like that. And then, like anything on the internet, once you launch it, it's really the way that the users decide that they want to use it. And so it's developed into a way that people can work collaboratively on projects together. They can go around for ideas

and even ask questions on what other people are doing and we have things like hackerspace pages so you can see if there are physical hackerspaces in your area and we've just started working with event pages as well so that there's a way for people to congregate and actually meet in real life especially if they've been interacting for years either through comments or through these projects with with the same people in the hackaday community actually meet in real life, especially if they've been interacting for years, either through comments or through these projects with the same people in the Hackaday community. Well, with the projects, it is very much like an engineering notebook. It's kind of a blog per project is sort of how I see it, but you also get the comments.

And it was kind of neat to read how people didn't start out with a finished product so often you hear about these home home passion projects whatever they're called and everybody's like look i made a 3d printer and it fits in the palm of your hand oh and you can run it off batteries and i used an arduino too and i'm like yeah that's awesome i can't even begin to wow i bow in where did you start with that yes and the finished projects are always so intimidating yeah and you forget that you know okay this person spent six hours a day for 18 months or whatever and it started out you know the arduino did this and oh right i'm using arduino and a laptop. So you see the progression and I like that.

It shows that things don't spring up fully formed from people's heads. Yeah, I really do think it's a virtue because wizards don't just sprout into being. There's a long path of learning and there's a lot of people that have to lend a hand along that way. And so really, I look at what i would like for everyone in the hackaday community to be is um to to kind of celebrate inclusive elitism so you can say it's great to be the best at something those two words don't usually go together oh it's there it's one of my favorite pairings um because it is it is in on one hand good to be elite at something it means that you've worked to be the best and then that you have this great accumulated skill but i think

as you get there you have a ever-growing burden of sharing that knowledge and helping out others that are coming up behind you i yes i agree with that um is so do people submit their projects for that reason or does it tend to be something else? Why do they submit projects? It's kind of a pain to do documentation and you have to spell everything close to right. Obviously, you haven't read Hackaday. You know, the thing is it's the learning. It's the want of trying something new and doing something hard that we really celebrate. So if you spell something wrong, I think it's okay.

That's the nice thing about the internet. You can go back and edit it. It's not like a print newspaper where it's out the door. But I think there's a lot of different reasons that people document. But one that I keep coming back to is just this, like, it's in the human nature that when you do something that you're proud of, you'd like to tell someone else about it and maybe get validation for it. But maybe that's not even part of it. Just sharing is enough. And one of the things that I occasionally grind my teeth about with hackerspaces is you build something and you show it to one of your

friends at the hackerspace and it quenches that need. And so really great ideas and builds and that sort of thing, I think are not being seen outside of the small communities of these hackerspaces. And that's one of the places where we really do shine is if you don't have, if you're not a member of your local hackerspace or you don't have a local hackerspace, this is a place where you can put your project out there and maybe have a little conversation right away about it. But a few years down the road, someone can look at that and that could get them past what they've been having trouble with

on their own project. So it really becomes an innovation machine for people building on their own time. It's almost serving a similar purpose as Stack Exchange, not in the same way necessarily where people are asking direct questions and getting answers, but putting stuff out there and getting help indirectly even with projects that they might not be able to get help with in any other way. And a hackerspace,

like you say, is local, it's small, it's whoever happens to be there at the time. And yeah, I think expanding that to more global and expanding your reach is a lot of value there. I heard of Hackaday actually fairly recently, which is kind of amazing because now that I've seen a little bit about it, why did I not hear about this sooner? But I heard about it from the Hackaday Prize, the whole, we'll send you to space if your project's good, which is different than I thought initially, which was we'll send you to space if your project's really bad. But I think the good is better. Get off the planet. I think some of the commenters, when we originally announced it,

were saying they didn't say they're going to bring you back. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so the Hackaday Prize is a great opportunity that we have to promote open design, which is open source software and open hardware. And these are things that I really strongly believe about. And it's one of the reasons why I'm doing a couple different careers at the same time, both of them basically full hilt. How many times in your life do you get a chance to really evangelize for an ideal that you believe in? Open source isn't necessarily for everything all the time, but I really do think that it helps move humanity forward.

So we put up this huge prize, which is a trip into space. And there's a slate of five really great prizes. That's the grand prize. There's team skydiving, a trip to Akihabara Electronics District in Japan, and a pair of industrial-grade machines, a milling machine and a 3D printer. And then a whole bunch of t-shirts and that sort of thing. Wait a minute. There's skydiving and space. These really sound more like, well, I want to go to space. But for Christopher, that would be punishment. Skydiving, I think, would be punishment for either one of us.

And not something we would strive towards, but run from. Trade it in for something else. I've been skydiving. It's an immense thrill. I would highly recommend it. If you have the, you know, if you're able physically to do it, it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. So if you're not able to do these physically or if you don't want to go into space, I guess that's fine. We do have cash alternatives, so there's a pretty big purse, as it were. But the 3D printer, the million machine, Japan, I'm on board for those. Well, when we were thinking about this, like I like life experiences. I think the best gifts are things that people wouldn't buy for themselves.

And I would never buy a trip into space. I can't. You know, it's like it's in the range of $200,000 to $250,000 for private carriers, depending on who you choose. And I just couldn't justify that. But if I won it, oh, that would be a tough decision. I might have to actually do it. So we have the five big prizes, but we also have 50 smaller prizes. Yeah. So there's 50 grab bags of electronics and those have not been put together yet, but we have already narrowed down the field from the original about 800 entries to just 15.

I don't think we've actually talked about what the actual goal is. I thought it was to go to space. That was the goal, right? I think the goal is to design the future of connected devices and to make it open so that, um, you know, as we do see more and more things coming into, uh,

you know, a network situation, um, people that have the skills can look and see what's being done with the data. Um, and also, uh,

if these are documented, it's easier for people to, um, take a new device and get it into an existing ecosystem. And it helps prevent the unintended consequence of if someone owns the protocol, they could shut someone out of the market. And so I think open for a broad range of these things is a good idea for the way that they get connected and the way that they transfer data. But it was a little tough because the connected was not defined. I mean, is it connected if

it's a serial port to my computer? Is it connected if it's wireless? Do I have to call it part of the Internet of Things, even if I hate that term? So we had a little bit of trouble with that. Yeah, I think that did turn out to be a little bit confusing. We specifically avoided the word Internet of Things because I think it kind of— Because everybody's going to make fun of it. Yeah, well, I think it kind of shuts down your thinking. I think Internet of Things is, whether it's positive or negative, tends to have a picture in people's minds already. So for me, I think of tweeting receipt printers or the ever-promised Internet-connected refrigerator.

And that was very interesting a decade ago when we were promised an Internet-connected refrigerator. But now that I've had time to think about the idea, it's not nearly as exciting. So certainly Internet of Things is out there in the hobby market. We see a lot of projects with it. But I don't know that we've seen the proliferation of devices that we were promised. And what I'm really hoping is out of this contest we get that leap in how this could really be an important part of our lives and how it could be something that people don't look at with fear of privacy issues. So how do you feel about the entries you've seen so far?

Oh, I'm blown away by the entries. He did some of the judging for going from 800 to 50. Yeah, so yeah, going back to Christopher's question, how did you feel about it? He did some of the judging for going from 800 to 50. Yeah. So, yeah. Going back to Christopher's question, how did you feel about it? Well, I was absolutely blown away by the entries. And actually, very early on, just the first handful that we saw coming in, it was obvious that there were going to be a huge range of really unique concepts coming into it. And I can't refer to it any other way than a horrible experience to go through 800 and have to narrow it down to just 50.

And it ended up being, after I got through the first 100 or so, I looked at the notes I'd been taking for myself and I said, I need more lists than this. I can't just do a list of who I think needs to go on. It needs to be a little bit broader judgment. And all of us, there were 12 of us doing this first round of judging. And all the editors and several of the writers ended up keeping lists of ones that they didn't move on to the finals, but they felt we really needed to explore with features on the blog.

And we've been doing that basically every day since then. So, and it's going to continue on. It's a very long list. What was your personal favorite that didn't get to go on? My personal favorite? Well, I don't necessarily have a favorite that didn't get to go on? My personal favorite? Well, I don't necessarily have a favorite that didn't go on. I have some that I think are interesting concepts. So, you know, it's not for me, but I think it could be a really cool product. There was this one called Intelligent Ski Course. And it's like

the closest thing to like Star Wars-y droid type of things that I've ever seen, I think. It's these little flags or I don't know what you call them, buoys maybe that float in a lake. And you just throw them out the back of the boat and they have propellers on them and they form up their own slalom ski course for you and they hold position that's amazing yeah yeah so you know they they they are networked together they have an idea of where each one is in the sequence and they can position themselves in a straight line a certain you know amount of yards apart i'm trying to think of nefarious ways to misuse that, but that's pretty cool. I think of them as a dot matrix printer and have them dance around.

Yeah, and make little pictures and stuff. Like the marching bands have started making animated Tyrannosaurus rexes and stuff. Well, you know, I live in Madison, Wisconsin. It's near Chicago, and every St. Patrick's Day, they dye the river in Chicago. Yeah, right. So, I mean, if you put some dye in these things and put them out in a lake, you could have them paint a pattern. Spirograph. So, I mean, right off the bat, you can look at it.

You could say, okay, I don't slalom ski. I don't really need this, but it's kind of a really interesting idea. And, you know, I wouldn't say it's easy, but there's a low bar of entry for building a robot on wheels. But building a robot that's going to go out in a lake and navigate around and be in contact with other robots, that to me seems pretty hardcore. There's a lot of problems with that, just from water interfering with radio and keeping stuff sealed. And yeah, it's a tough little problem to solve. Yeah, water and electronics together, they don't match as well as you might think.

I don't think they match very well at all. So, I mean, there are a lot more whimsical ones out there. There's a person who's building a project that he calls the Taylor Multifuel Null Rotor Turbine. Okay. And I can't even – I mean, it looks like he certainly knows what he's doing. Apparently, it's based on Tesla's turbine, which I don't know much about that either. But I'm going through this. He's done all kinds of work on the prototype. And I, for the life of me, can't really figure out how it

works or what it is, but I'm incredibly impressed. And so, you know, the thing that I'm hoping is people that are doing projects like this keep following them through. I don't want them to say, oh, I didn't make it to the next round. I got to stop now. These are great ideas, whether or not you got recognized and moved on to the next round. And so people stop now. These are great ideas whether or not you got recognized and moved on to the next round. And so people really should see them through. And maybe there's a product in there, or maybe there's just a really good start for a whole new world of hobby electronics. Okay. I looked at the Taylor Multifuel Null Rotor Turbine, and the description is awesome. A multi-fuel laminar flow drag-powered turbine based on a variant of Tesla's disc turbine. It should be able to be made with only common shop tools and off-the-shelf parts, maybe one or two machined parts.

And then it goes into a lot more detail. It's really complicated. It's neat, but yeah, some of those words, I know what they mean, but all together, I'm not so sure. Well, that's more of a mechanical project than an electronics project, it sounds like. Well, how could it?

Is it like software and hardware and mechanical? It's got all of it. Did you get me? Oh, sorry. Go ahead. We do kind of explore all avenues of engineering. So when I hire writers, I'm always looking to hire another writer with interests that are just a little bit skewed from what we have on the staff already. And so we've got electronics engineers and mechanical engineers,

and I'm not sure if we have a chemical engineer right now. We have artists and philosophy, people that have philosophy degrees. And music majors. Yes, yes. I've got a couple music degrees. And, you know, the thing is there's all kinds of engineering projects out there that maybe don't stack up to what you would do at work or maybe the precise level

that you would do at work but are still good enough to get the idea machine going and I think that's how you take a career and make it interesting for your entire life is you have to find the things that you really love and keep doing them even though it's not maybe called for in your 9 to 5 Well that's how we keep the the enthusiasm alive is is by i mean i am very

much a professional engineer i feel very strongly that if you're going to send a demo to paris in order to demonstrate here it comes a product it should be good and it should be settled a couple of days before so that you can bake it and it will all be finished. But when I come home, that level of don't touch it, let it work out its bugs, I don't have that. You know, if it crashes and it's my fault at home, that's fine. Uh-huh. But not at work.

Okay, I'm not going to do the whole rant about how my week went. No, I'm just questioning your characterization of leaving things at work. Well, I think that ebbs and flows as well. I mean, sometimes I'm sure you have projects at home that are incredibly well-engineered, and other times you do complete hacks, because, I mean, no one's holding you accountable. So it's like exploration time.

And Chris, I think you have said before on the show that if it's measured, engineering is something that's very well measured and very well disciplined and that everything else is art. And I really liked that because I do think that electronics can be art. And especially when it's on your own time, go out and create a piece of art and be really liked that because i do think that you know electronics can be art and especially

when it's on your own time go out and create a piece of art and be proud of it yeah yeah i'm not sure i said that but it sounds good so i'll take credit for it um i think that's something burning man is which i've never been to i've always thought it was kind of a neat idea but that art can be transient and that that's okay. That's actually a good thing sometimes. Well, music is transient in some sense. I mean, it used to be a lot more transient. And I don't want most of my engineering to go that way. But my hacking, yeah, if it's transient, it's for me.

I'm learning. Yeah, making one-offs isn't necessarily a bad thing. Yeah. Yeah, most of the projects that I do, I don't know what to do with them once I'm done, because it really is the process of learning and trying to make something work that you've never done before that I'm interested in. Yes, and then once you've got that, it might lead to something else.

But, you know, you put it on a shelf and it gets dusty. Boy, does it ever. I think people lose sight of that attitude during normal professional engineering too where you have a goal in mind i'll have to make this product i have to ship it and you forget that that that learning and and growing and exploring is still part of whatever experience you have with engineering but somehow when you're doing it for a nine to five you kind of lose sight of that because you're always looking to finish the thing and meet the deadline.

And the pressure. And doing stuff on your own can kind of reignite that and maybe bring it back into your professional life. That is very true. There are, I mean, many large companies do have these labs where the goal is to kind of make a one-off so that you can test the theory. And I'm fascinated by that. Okay, back to Hackaday Prize, because I have some important questions around this.

Let's see. That one's not important. That one's... So, I'm a Hackaday Prize price judge which i'm very honored to be well thank you so much for agreeing to do this we're very lucky to have you am i supposed to do well you know when you were saying that uh that we didn't define connected and it's it's kind of hard to figure out what it is, that's your job. Thanks.

So, you know, and I'm hoping that this has been so successful already that we'll do the Hackaday Prize again, you know, with a different theme as a way to promote people going out and publicizing their work and promoting open design. And so the next time we'll probably have a few more parameters that will make it easier. But we specifically didn't put parameters this year and instead put judging preferences. So there is a judging preference for how meaningful the connectedness of a device is. There's a judging preference for how innovative it is.

So if you've had something that's been around and been on sale for 10 years, you're technically allowed to enter it into the contest. And then the judges have to decide, is that an innovative product? And there are five other judging criteria in there as well. One of them was openness, which I liked a lot. Because you were saying you wanted it to be very open, but not everything has to be freely available. It's okay to have secret sauce. Yeah, we've talked about this a lot internally as well. And really, I should write another post on these sorts of things.

I did write a little rant called Open Source, It, you know, because I evangelize about that. But it's very difficult to define openness or to kind of meter openness. I mean, if you need to use a chip that's made by a fab, how open is that? You know, I mean, that's the really extreme thing. You know, or if you say, you know, look, I have an encryption algorithm that I've worked a long time on, and I'm going to put a blob in there in order to use that because it's my work. If everything else is in there and is open, and it's just that encryption, decryption thing that you wrote, isn't it worth seeing the other things? And I also think 1% open is better than 0% open. So it's kind of like a try it, you'll like it sort of thing. If you can get people who have said, I'm never publishing a single

line of code or a single schematic ever, to try it a little bit, they might find that their customers respond, or they have more interest in their product, or they might not. But i think it's worth the experiment baby steps indeed uh so you this isn't your first hack this is the hackaday this isn't the first hackaday contest you did one about science fiction it was really cool yeah we do we do a lot of contests um you know basically anytime we get um things that we can give away as prizes. We try to run a contest for it. So the Sci-Fi Contest was actually the first one since we launched Hackaday.io, which is the community side of the site. And I give away the secrets here, but we knew we were going to do the Hackaday Prize. And we were already planning it. And I said, boy, maybe we should test out this new platform before we launch this huge contest.

So we ran the sci-fi contest. And not surprisingly, there was a huge outpouring. Like the coolest tech out there is tech that's in sci-fi. And when you start looking at the things that people were doing, like Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, you could get the sonic screwdriver, you could have an R2-D2 build, or you could have the tricorder from Star Trek.

All of these things were thrown out there. We generally have the technology now to build most of those things and to build them at a very high level. There are some things like warp drives and lightsabers that were not quite there yet. You're missing physics there, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know, someday we'll figure that out. And so we actually looked at that,

and we hadn't picked the theme of the Hackaday Prize yet. But we looked at it and we said, you know, almost every one of these sci-fi contest entries is a connected device it's transferring data to or from something else in a meaningful way um because i think that's that's generally where the magic is right now in electronics and uh you know we ended up giving away some custom t-shirts to to everyone that that entered the contest. We had several different tiers of prizes. Like the top tier was hardware, like reflow station, solder station,

oscilloscopes, this sort of thing. And it was really just for fun and to try things out. And I don't think I'm overstepping by saying everyone had a great time. So success. Was it a lot different with the Hackaday Prize? It was such a big monetary value prize. Was it awkward in some ways? Or was it all just good? Well, it was a lot different from the planning side. Because when you're trying to, you know, there's a lot on the line with the prizes. You want to make sure that it's fair.

And so you need to, you know, look up how do you run a contest in a lot of different locations. We try to include as many countries as we could. But unfortunately, there are some, like Italy and Quebec are excluded. And my understanding is everything has to be translated into the local language for those countries and that doesn't just mean what we put out but it would mean every entry into the prize would have to be translated and uh so that that was kind of surprising to me um i think as far as uh uh how different it was from from the entry side of it. There was, how long was it? We launched, I think, like the 28th of April,

and it was somewhere around the 20th of August that we closed the entry period and started the first judging round. And so that was new to us. And I was delighted, but I was also surprised by the number of entries that came in in the last week or 10 days. So that goal of getting people to document what they're working on did work to some extent, but I would have loved to see most, you know, a lot of those projects had been going for a while

and they just, the creators hadn't documented anything yet. So that might be something we tweak for the next time around. You have to show us it from scratch. You have to show your work. Yeah, it's such a tough thing because, you know, just trying to get the word out that, hey, we're running this contest. And yes, it's actually a trip to space. And no, we're not joking with you. You know, that's a tough thing.

And so if you announce it and then you close the entries after two weeks, you're going to miss out on a lot of people. And then the flip side of the coin is, you know, people that worked for, you know, several months and then someone that came in in the last week and documented something, you know, is there a reward for having documented it for a few months? So that was a little bit difficult. But all in all, I think the tool set is basically there. And I think for the majority, people are okay just having their project recognized as being something worth looking at and worth considering. And even if they don't make the cut of 50, because like I said, there were just so many great projects and we had to pare it down. I have occasionally looked on the prize page. As a judge, I've been a little hesitant because I don't want to see it when they submit the

package and not peek when they're still behind the scenes. But there are so many fantastic projects. I can't, even when I go in and look, you know, just peek, I don't manage to page through the very first page of the 50 projects because it's just, this is cool. Oh, that's neat. Look, polymerase. Look, chemistry, biology, 3D printing, motors, robots. It gets really crazy very quickly. I have no idea how we're going to do the judging. I'm kind of hoping that you guys send me

some more criteria. Otherwise, I'm going to be building my own Excel sheets. Okay, this one's open. That one's really got the wow factor. Oh, no. I can see how this is going to go. Well, we'll be on vacation, so I'll have plenty of time. Oh, great. We're taking up your vacation, Ralph. No, I think that, you know, I keep biting my tongue in this conversation because there are some really, really awesome projects that I want to mention in all of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, come on, come on. I know that they're finalists.

There's nobody listening. Yeah, yeah. I just, I don't want to sway opinion, but, you know. It's just between us. There's nothing. I'll hear. I'll opinion, but, you know. It's just between us. There's nothing. I'll hear. I'll stop recording just for a second. If we're not caught, that makes it so much better. I am really looking forward to reading through these, but, I mean, it's funny being a judge. People are like, oh, you're a Hackaday judge.

And I'm like, yeah, except the entries are just a little intimidating to me, too. So don't get too stuck on how intimidating they are. And we are judging on documentation. So if it is just somebody coming in at the very end and saying, this is what I did, and it was super awesome, and I'm only telling you a little bit, that's not going to get as many points as the person who really shows us how to build it. Yeah, well, I'm excited. Yeah, you know, and I did, I was aware of that when we were going through the judging before, is that there were some that I thought had a lot of potential, but if you, you know,

if they weren't able, you know, from my personal judging, if they weren't able to show to me that they had documented enough that it was feasible for them to have a completed build by the time the contest ends in November, that was kind of a drawback to their project. So I think the people that have spent longer and have more refined write-ups, it shows you that they have a plan and they've thought about a lot of things and that they can get to the end of it. Well, the semifinalist round of judging starts next weekend. And so they don't have to be finished. They do get a little bit, they do get another month of going to mid-January, but they should be pretty finished if they expect to get from 50 to 5. Yeah, so one of the things is that if it's an item that's supposed to go in some kind of case or enclosure, they don't actually have to have

the enclosure done, but they need some kind of artist's rendering of it so that the judges can look at it and be like, okay, that's feasible. That could happen. It could be usable. They basically need to have all their components fleshed out or very close to all of them. And there's a five-minute demonstration video that needs to be created by the deadline of the 28th of September. And in that, you should see a working prototype of some type. So, you know, in general, when I was going through before, I'd put the video on and watch the preamble, and I've got a dual monitor setup. So then I would also have the write-up going. And what I found is the most well-documented projects, the write-up and the presentation of the video kind of followed in

the same order. So you could almost have notes as you went through and saw what they were doing. And those I really appreciated because obviously there's a plan. Yeah. Somebody thought, how am I going to present this and not just, hey, look, cool stuff. I had a lot of that though, too. You know, the videos are the best. I mean, it really is to me delightful to see people putting themselves out there and saying, this is something that I really think is cool and I've been working on it and here's why. And whether they're really comfortable in front of a camera or spend most of their time in a dark room at a keyboard, it just kind of warmed my heart to see the Hackaday community rolling out and sharing what they love. Very much.

So part of this was sponsored, all of this was sponsored, some part of it was sponsored by SupplyFrame. Yes. Which bought Hackaday like about a year ago, right? Yeah, just over a year. It was in July of 2013 that they acquired Hackaday. And what does SupplyFrame do? Well, SupplyFrame, their flagship website is findchips.com, which I think a lot of your

listeners will probably know about, or at least a lot of the hardware engineers will. This is a vertical search for hardware components. It can tell you vendors throughout the world, how much stock they have, what lead times would be, price breaks. You can get data sheets through, that sort of thing. And they looked at Hackaday and said, a lot of the people that are using our products are huge fans of Hackaday.

There's actually one software engineer at SupplyFrame who was reading Hackaday every day and had been featured himself several times and saw the post that said that the blog was for sale. And I think that day they started putting together plans for what would it look like to work together. And I have to say it's really been wonderful ever since then. They've been more than happy to invest in the community, building up the Hackaday.io site. But also we've had an ever-increasing presence at live events. So like this weekend, my contributing editor, Brian Benchoff, and our community editor, Adam Fabio, are at Maker Faire New York. I went to DEF CON earlier in the year. I was in San Francisco for Maker Faire Bay Area. Brian went to the HopeX conference, which I'm really sad I missed that one. I didn't realize it was every other year. And I thought, oh, I'll go next year. So I spoke before about this virtual hackerspace.

And the thing is, that's all fine and good to have a virtual hackerspace, but you need to get out and have community in person once in a while. And SupplyFrame's investment in Hackaday has really made that possible. And you wrote a blog post saying we're for sale? I'm sorry, that was way back there, but I'm still a little stuck on that. Yeah. I'm sorry, that was way back there, but I'm still a little stuck on that because I'm typing it up now. Two billion dollars. It worked for Notch. I'm sure it'll work for me. Well, we had a previous parent company before this. So it wasn't, I didn't own the site and I didn't start the site. I just worked for the site as a writer, as an editor at the time.

But yeah, the editor performing Caleb Craft decided to take a different job. And at that point, it didn't look like there was going to be anybody to step into this position. And the previous owners decided to see if there was someone else who would take over stewardship of what I really think is a community more than just a website. And, boy, you just don't know what you're getting into when you go through a merger like that or an acquisition like that. Yeah, so, you know, a few days before the sale went through, I talked to the CEO of SupplyFrame, Steve Flagg, and had a really good conversation. And I hadn't had any real intent of moving up and running Hackaday. But some of his plans and some of his values really matched where I thought we should be going. And so I said I'd come on part-time to run the site and see how things

went. And very quickly I decided that, you know, this great stuff is happening and I just, I can't, I can't sit out half the week. I need to throw in all my time. And it's been a great decision ever since. I kind of, I kind of balked at the idea of such a large contest. It seemed like an incredible undertaking to put it on. But we've really got a great team of people working together. And anytime we get into trouble or don't know what to do, we generally ask on the blog what people think should happen or what they'd like to see happen next. And we really get generally good answers and we get a lot of goodwill from the readers, which I appreciate. Yeah, that's something a lot of sites and companies could learn from. Yeah.

What should we do? We don't know the right answer. Well, let's just make a decision and hope everybody likes it. That doesn't end up working sometimes especially in community oriented oriented things so you were telling me before the show about something chris gammill has been kind of tweeting but kind of quietly about parts io parts.io yeah this is another um this is another realm that supply frame is exploring right now. Chris left his full-time job in the spring, I believe. To do contextual electronics, his

education class. He's big into let's educate this growing generation of hardware engineers. It was an online course that really focused on building a piece of electronics and going through every step of the process um in order to learn what it takes to you know to do that because having a double e degree does not tell you how to do electronics

in the real world no no in fact most degrees that you have doesn't tell you don't tell you how to do the job yeah yeah so um to see those educational outreach things like contextual electronics. But to fill out the other half of his time, Supply Frame approached Chris about working on a project for them that has kind of developed into Parts.io, which isn't actually launched yet. It's in alpha, and I think they're doing – you can go and sign up for information, but they're doing like private invites for now. But I've seen it a few times. And anybody who listens to the amp hour knows that for real estate, it doesn't just tell you about the house and how many rooms it has and what it costs. It also tells you things like historical pricing data, what the neighborhood might be like. It'll tell you about the schools. It might tell you what businesses are in the area. And even sometimes gives you forecast data for what it kind of can guess

might happen. So parts.io is a very similar set of benefits to engineers who are looking for the best possible choices that they can make in their designs on parts. And so in addition to being able to look at who has this op amp in stock worldwide right now and what are the price points, it also lets you go through and get some aggregated data on who else might be using this. It goes a little bit more in depth with can it recommend drop and replacements for a part. And generally gives you more information from a wider scope that lets you make a better choice that doesn't lead you down that dead-end alley of choosing a part that becomes obsolete

before you even get to production. Yeah, I've experienced that a few times where we choose a part and then design it into a product and then two months into development or right when we ship it's you get a notice saying oh this is end of life and it needs to be replaced by this which is no longer compatible and then you have to do a lifetime buy of all their stock just to make sure you can meet production is that the kind of thing it might help you with is okay this chip's this chip is not long for this earth or well i also want to know the parts that are going to go into things that are consumers,

because those parts are going to get cheap fast. Yeah. Both of those. Is that what it's going to do? Yeah, I think the goal is to cover all of that, and since I'm not a complete expert in it, I'm not going to make any definitive statements, but I have seen demonstrations that have features very similar to that.

That's pretty cool. Will be cool. All right. Good luck with parts.io for Chris. And thank you for telling me about it. So I want to go back to Hackaday and what you do there. Because what does a managing editor do? Oh, managing editor. Well, I kind of do a little bit

of everything so whenever something is not getting done it's my job to figure out how to make sure it does get done whether it's me or someone else so it it starts with you know making sure that we have writers so finding writers and training them so that they kind of have the same voice as Hackaday, helping those writers find things to write about, editing the posts that they write, scheduling the posts that they write. And that's kind of the blog side of things, and it goes over to figuring out how the community site, Hackaday.io, could be better, could work better, could have better features,

could be more user-friendly, could have better social interactions. And we also look at, should we go to live events? Should we host live events ourselves? What benefit is that to the readers and to the greater community? And so,

boy, I don't know, is that enough? Sounds like a lot. Yeah, it does. Sounds like everything. Yeah, even merchandising. I mean, we just opened a store,

store.hackaday.com. But we've had merchandise. It didn't have a whole lot. Yeah, it doesn't have a whole lot. We just launched it.hackaday.com. But we've had merchandise. It didn't have a whole lot. Yeah, it doesn't have a whole lot. We just launched it. A couple of kits. We've had merchandise for a long time, and we've actually had a store kind of come in

and out of existence for a long time. So I've spent way too much time ordering shirts and stickers and designing shirts and stickers just so we have things to give away for contests or to give out when we have live events. And now hopefully if we have a store, there'll be a bigger incentive to make sure we're stocked up on those things. Well, you sent me a couple of shirts with my Hackaday judge box prize thing and your shirts are very nice. So anybody who's been thinking about a Hackaday shirt, go ahead. They're very soft.

It would be good for me to mention that I'm not a one-man show either. So I kind of make sure that these things are running. But generally, we have people to run them. So we have a staff of writers who are all writing part-time for a meager sum of money and doing a great job of it. We have a couple of editors who I mentioned before who are doing a lot of the editing and scheduling and comment moderating and that sort of thing. Oh, so you do moderate comments? Well, this would be a good thing to get into. This is interesting. Because that's really hard. I always think it is the job of whoever's blog it is, it is their job to moderate comments. Yes. You know, we have the spam filter set pretty high. So if you are not logged in with a WordPress.com account and you leave a message or leave a comment,

it might show up immediately. But if it has has one link in it, or if you do something when you write it up that looks a little spammy, it goes to moderation. And it's hundreds a day of comments that go to moderation. Brian Benchoff has a special skill for making it through those. The majority of them are spam. But the problem is you don't want to spam good comments. Because if you say this is spam to someone's comment, it bans their IP address and automatically spams after that.

So we do have to kind of take a fine-tooth comb and go through that. And yet if you okay things that say, I like your project, then that person may be on the wait list for actually doing spam the next time. My sister earned $500 a day doing those are the usual ones. Yeah, yeah. earned $500 a day doing those are the usual ones yeah yeah so I always you know I always look at it and I think there must be a better way to do this but I haven't really found it yet so if you find it tell my email

it's the next Hackaday prize the perfect spam filter and moderator you've done it that's it that's all software you could have it go to their house and assault them or something. Mike already made a troll-sniffing rat, so he can find the rat. Troll-sniffing rat.

Oh, that was a fun project. So that was more a software project than a hardware project. I think the hardware was a couple of LEDs and an Arduino. Sorry, but that made it very easy. I just got a stuffed animal rat from Ikea, I think in the as-is department for a dollar or something, and I was like, I can do something with this. I ended up putting red LEDs in the eyes

and just connecting it up to an Arduino and adding a Piezo buzzer, and it would watch the RSS feed for comments, and whenever a known troll would leave a comment, it would play a horrible tune and light up the eyes red. And this is a list of trolls that we kind of keep an eye on. It's interesting on the internet. We really try not to censor our comments,

but if you don't do anything, it can get out of control. And what I find is we have access, if people leave their email address when they enter a comment, we have access to see those email addresses on the staff side of things. And if you email people that are misbehaving, they generally come back and apologize and say, I don't know what I was thinking. I'm not going to do that again. And so that works most of the time. But once in a while, we have people who are just out there trying to cause trouble and really have to keep an eye on them. It's so strange.

Well, and you still get flame wars and arguments in your comments, but they're polite. I mean, polite to the engineering form of polite that can say, I think your idea is stupid without saying you're horrible. And I hope you, I don't know. Well, there's a difference between trolling and being a jerk sometimes too. Yeah. It can be a jerk, but not a troll.

Yeah. And that's another one of those hard, hard lines to figure out. You know, in general, we don't want hateful or discriminatory comments on there. And, you know,

people call us out when we don't take care of that. And I appreciate comments on there. And, you know, people call us out when we don't take care of that. And I appreciate them doing that. And we do try to do as much as possible to prevent that and to take care of it when it happens. So there are also report links for comments. And so people can report them. But you're right. I think a civil flame war is not necessarily the worst thing because if you're adamantly debating a topic, that does add value. And I think people can take something away from that. It's just when it kind of goes off the rails and becomes hurtful that it's not reasonable. Well, I am very glad that Hackaday does the comment moderation and looks for these things. So many sites, I don't look at the comments at all

because you can't scrub that stuff out of your brain after you see it. And I'm not afraid of Hackaday comments. So thank you for doing that. I'm glad to hear that. Thank you. We stay on top of it. And the goal is someday it's going to be the Utopian Society of Engineering Knowledge. That could be the next contest.

So how did they build that planet that Wesley Crusher nearly got killed on? You know, the one where it's a utopian society and then he goes out of bed? Never mind. Musician, you've mentioned a couple of times, your other life, your other job, your secret hero identity is being a French horn player. That's right. So I play third horn in the Madison Symphony Orchestra and second horn in the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra. Coming out of high school, I had a very difficult time deciding whether I should pursue music or pursue computer science because I thought programming and my master's degree and ended up winning the job with the Madison Symphony the year after I graduated.

And then a year after that, I won the job with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra. And so I've been located in Madison for, oh, I don't know, maybe 10, a little more than 10 years now and playing those two jobs. And really, you know, that kind of delivered me into hardware hacking because I started, you know, getting into this hobby. And I had a day job at the time to make ends meet working in what I lovingly called a butter factory. It was a shipping receiving cold storage warehouse where we'd stored mainly butter. And I would read every single word of every Hackaday post every day. And I'd do really silly things like, you know, I'd be drawing out schematics on pieces of paper to take home and lay out. And once I got done with the schematic, I'd even hand write out code for the microcontroller. So I think I've got about the best two jobs you could have

because they're both things I'm passionate in life. And so you left the butter factory. I just have this image of, you know, there's carving butter. But yeah, so you left the butter factory to work at Hackaday? Not quite that linear? No, I was kind of marginally underemployed for a period of time. And I actually saw the job posting for Hackaday go by once and thought, I didn't do very well in English in high school. I'm not cut out for that.

And that's when they hired Caleb Kraft, who was the editor before me. Great guy. If you ever meet him, good friend of mine. And I did things like I was hacking the original Xbox, if you remember Bunny's discoveries on there. I was really going crazy with the hardware inside of the Xbox and what I can do. And even one day I was going into rehearsal, and I looked down and realized I was wearing the exact same clothes I'd been wearing to the rehearsal the night before.

Because I had stayed up almost all night soldering on this tiny, tiny production circuit board. And then the entire, I got a few hours sleep and did it the rest of the afternoon and did some pricing or whatever. But I hadn't changed clothes and I said, you know, this is really starting to consume my life. So when the Hackaday posting came up again, I was like, you know, I just love this stuff too much, and I think I know what I'm talking about, and I'm going to give it a try. So that's how I got there. If you were faced with a student who had this choice now that you faced then,

music as a career or computer science as a career, would you encourage them towards music or would you encourage them towards a higher paying job and doing part-time passion for music? This is a great question. And I actually encounter this a lot because I do teach private students. I should say I encounter it from time to time. I would never encourage someone to go into classical music. I usually put it this way. If you could possibly do something else, you should do that.

But if you have to play, you should play. I've heard that about writing fiction, that you should only write fiction if you have to because it's such a tough profession to make any money at that has to be your sustenance. Are you still in the same boat? Are you still in love with music? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I could do things under the contracts of the orchestra. I could take a year's leave from each orchestra and just work on Hackaday right now. And I thought about it for a while, and I said, you know, I just don't want to do that. I really like to play, and I thought about it for a while and I said, you know, I just, I don't want to do that. I really like to play and, uh, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to explore, um, you know, working full-time plus for Hackaday and I'll just, you know, take, take a few concerts off here and there as I need to and see how it goes. And, and so far, you know,

doing that for the last year, I've been, I've been very happy with it. I've cut some other things back. Um, I'm, I'm not taking new students. And I have a much smaller studio than I had before. But I also have been teaching for nearly 15 years. And so I think it's fine to take a little break from that. And I think that'll come back later in life as well. How did you really, I mean, how did you go from music to tech? Were you always kind of a hacker in school or did it start from having a job where you could take schematics during the day and play with them at night?

Well, it was never really hardware. But I was into computers from a very early age. So my first computer was an 8088 Packard Bell and floppy drive. Yeah, big five and a quarter floppy drive. I can't remember. I don't think that one even had a hard drive, but it might have. And I played with it a ton. My parents ended up getting me like a weekend course on BASIC

and at that time the computer was in their bedroom and it didn't take long for the computer to end up in my bedroom because they wanted me out of there. That sounds familiar. In middle school, I found out about modems and BBSs and so I spent a ton of time tying up the phone line. And eventually, a second line appeared in our house. And from some of the people that I've been interacting with on the BBSs, I ended up getting my first job in town with an internet service provider startup.

This is in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where I grew where I grew up. And so I worked, um, there for, I don't know, three or four years in high school. And, uh, you know, that's where we did some of the computer building and that sort of thing. Um, but I, you know, I liked those guys and I kind of liked the culture that was around that. Um, it wasn't until I was in graduate school and didn't really have the money to buy real electronic tools, but I found out about beam robotics. And you could just take basically junk. And if you're clever enough, you could put it together and get it to do something that looks like behavior. And that was really exciting for me. At the time, I lived in Minneapolis. And they have a great surplus store there called Axman surplus that you can go and get motors and switches and wire and resistors and all kinds of stuff.

And I enjoyed that. And it was right in my budget. I think at the time, the $35 digital multimeter that I bought from RadioShack was like really splurging for me. But I think moving on from there, my first microcontroller was a basic stamp too and i was really unhappy with it because of um i quickly wanted to do things that were that it it wasn't fast enough to do um you know like i was learning about charlie plexing and i was like charlie plexing you use the diode in the led in order to, you know, I'm like, that's so cool. And you couldn't get it fast enough to not see it with the basic stamp. This was a time before Arduino. And I looked at microchip and I didn't want to buy the programmer because you need a high voltage programmer.

But I came across the website avrfreaks.net. Ah, yes. It's a huge forum. And talk about the wizards. I mean, there are some guys there that they know everything about those chips. And the great thing about forums is they're so persistent. So you can go and look at all these old conversations. They also have a tutorial section.

This guy named Dean Camera, who is actually, I think, working for Atmel now. He was writing, I think it was when he was in high school. It might have been when he was in college. He was writing tutorials. He was like, Electronics 101 is like bitwise math. And then it goes down all kinds of tutorials on how to use the peripherals on these chips. And you could build a DAPA programmer. So you could use your parallel port to program these chips with just a 25-pin DB connector and, I don't know,

three or four resistors and some ribbon cable. Now, the hitch is if you want those chips to run faster, which was my original problem, if you start with an ATTD13, I think it ships with an internal clock of 1 MHz. And you have to burn the divide by 8 fuse in order to get it to run at 8 MHz. And once you do

that, you can't write to it using a DAPA cable anymore because it's too fast. So once I had my first half dozen microcontrollers that I bricked through different fuse settings, then I finally broke down and brought the $50. At a certain point, your time is worth more. Yeah.

So it really has been an organic growth. The greatest thing about my hardware odyssey is I've never had a single deadline because I didn't go to school for it and I don't get paid to do it really. So that's glorious. And amazing. I mean, there's a certain amount of self motivation that some people don't have. Yeah. It is, it is hard to maintain the, the personal projects when that's what you do at work too.

Yeah. At least it's hard for me sometimes. Um, so you mentioned the, uh, the Minneapolis, uh, surplus. Yes. Axman surplus. When you were in town, I suggested you go to Halted. Did you make it there? I did go to Halted, yes. What a fantastic place.

How do they compare? Well, okay, those are very different, but I think you could compare Apex Electronics in the Los Angeles area with Halted in Silicon Valley. I'm not sure exactly what town it's in. Sunnyvale. One of those fake towns that merge into each other around here. Yeah, they're all the same. Actually, that was my first trip to your area.

So I was on the GPS, and it was like being at Disneyland. That was a fun trip. But, you know, the thing is, Apex Electronic has more, like, bins of stuff that you pick something up and you go, I don't know what this is, but it's awesome, and I think I need one. I love that about Halted when we go. Well, see, with Halted, it's much more organized, or I feel like it's much more organized. Oh, my God. Have you not been to Apex Electronics? No. No, no.

Oh, boy. So I had seen Dave Jones of the EUV blog. He's actually also another judge for the Hackaday Prize. I had seen his video, a tour, when he visited Apex Electronics. And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. But then in January, SupplyFrame had a company Christmas party. And they have so many people on the road that they actually fly people in for the Christmas party. So Brian and Benchoff and I both got to go there for the

Christmas party, which is, I guess, holiday party, New Year party. And Brian's like, we got to go to Apex Electronic. And I'm like, oh, I kind of remember that. And I went back and watched Dave's video. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that place looks pretty cool. And then you get there and you're like, oh my God, look at this entire aisle of standoffs. So, and then you think you've explored the whole thing. And we only gave ourselves like 90 minutes, which you'd think would be a lot, but we had like 90 minutes and I'm looking around for like 40 minutes and then someone's someone's like hey mike have you seen out back yet and i'm like no i haven't seen out back and you go out back and there's this whole not covered area with just piles of everything and i mean

there's like rows of seating from hella or from airplanes there's like an airplane drop tank from like a world war ii era plane wow you know this is a little different red shirt there's like 1960s color television studio cameras that are like taller than you are and have you know three lenses each the size of your head i mean it's just like coil mountains of coils of cable that are you know you it would take 10 people to lift one of the coils um so halted is is very well organized and i even heard um i i was with uh uh i was with a friend who had been there before and he even kind of like knew where to go and i'm like okay well this is obviously you know well organized and everything but both equally good i mean i, I'm a person who really can't throw things away

and even looks at broken things and thinks, hmm, I could get an LED off of there someday. I could use that tactile switch. And so looking at these surplus stores and saying, you know, this is potentially going to a good use someday is great. And I don't have anything like that here in Madison. So even just, you know, I can go to RadioShack and get a resistor for as long as RadioShack is around,

but I can't go and get a motor or a whole conglomeration of motors or, you know, even etching solution is difficult to find where I am. So if you're someone that has a surplus store year, you cherish that and take your business there because it really is a nice thing. Did you go to the electronics flea market too? I did go to the electronics flea market. Talk about things you can never throw away. It's a flea market and you have to get there really early.

I never make it because it's, I mean, if you're not there by 7 a.m you might as well not have gone but it is as though all of the electronics hoarders opened up their garage and said everything's a quarter it is so cool so what did you see uh i saw everything so i I just posted on Hackaday on Friday about this. And I have a huge, it's multiple sets of images just because there was so much. But in general, it is a lot older electronics. There was a pile of mini tower computers that was probably the newer of the things that are there. But in general, there's a lot of rack mount equipment and test equipment. So you can find analog multimeters in any state of working condition.

There was like I thought I was looking at audio equipment, but a commenter on the blog told me it's actually ham equipment. Great ham equipment. Like a lot of it, I could just put in my living room if my wife would allow it you know there's like a maybe two foot long but only three inch across um cathode ray tube and you could see through the back of the tube into all the bits and pieces that are in there which is extra fun at least i think it was a cathode ray tube it might be something else i don't know that's half the fun. And then there's even like this.

It might be a gamma ray generator. Yeah. Why won't this thing work? I'm looking right at it. You know, there was an Atari 800 computer with the floppy drives right next to it. And there were things that were art. There were bins and bins of old cell phones and old cameras and old calculators.

It's amazing to me that we've come to a time in history where we can have people who are, and I'm including myself in this, nostalgic for technology. It's like, oh, remember those old things that didn't work very well that we spent hours and hours on? You know, Atari 800s and 8088 PCs and Apple IIs.

And I wish we had those things back. It's like, wait a minute. Well, I think that's a great point. I also went to the Computer History Museum while I was there. And so I had gone to the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit when I was there this summer for the Red Bull Creation Contest. And that was really cool. They had really cool exhibits there. And I looked at them and walked around and had a good time.

Huge electricity generating rigs from the earliest of years. And Buckminster Fuller's circular Home of the Future design. Just really neat stuff there. But I didn't really feel a personal connection or like an emotional connection to it. But boy, if you walk into the Computer History Museum. I had that. I had that. I didn't get it for Christmas and I cried.

Yeah. Well, I think even just knowing about it, like this equipment that you really respect because you've read about it and you know like what a leap it was in the state of the art at the time is just amazing entertainment and uh you know i i had i'd gone there and i was going to try and go through there quickly and just get an article out of it because i didn't want to deal with traffic getting back into san francisco i ended up spending like like three or three and a half hours there um and I even at one point, they've got it. It's so well done. It's amazingly well presented and well curated. But at one point, I like wandered out of the maze that they guide you through to the front desk again because I was like, you know, Bill Hurd does videos for us.

And so I was looking for the Commodore section. I had to have him point me to the Commodore section. But even they have a – So I was looking for the Commodore section. I had to have him point me to the Commodore section. Yes, this is a museum that has a Commodore section. Yeah, yeah. Really everything. They have a, is it the Babbage engine? Yeah, the different engine. The analytic engine.

Yeah, which is just, it's an amazing mechanical computer that is literally hand-cranked on one end. Now, it's not itself a relic. It was built, I think, in 2008. And it's one of only two that were ever built. But it was built from a design from the late 1800s. And it works. It never worked then, as far as I remember.

No, they didn't really have the machining necessary to make it work. They made a design. It is a sweet piece of machining. It's really unbelievable. Oh, yeah. They had a gentleman there. It is so pretty when it runs. It's like math in motion.

It's beautiful. There are lots of videos. They put all the good stuff on the back side of it. Like the front side where the operator goes and the tape runs out. It's not interesting. But you go to the back and there's all these rods. I think we're about

out of time. I do have one more question. You were on NPR Science Friday, right? Yes, I was. How does that compare with being on this show? What? I had to know. They're both great honors, Alicia.

A diplomat. Well, I'm sitting in my own home using just a microphone and headphones. So that's different about this show. With Science Friday, I actually went to the local affiliate. How neat. Which is, well, I don't know.

The one I always listen to is the Classic and News Network, which is WERN. But Science Friday is on, there's a sister network, and I'm not sure what the call numbers are for those. But they call it an ISDN line, and I'm assuming that's the same thing you'd use for a computer. And the show is, am I wrong? No, no, you're right. She's just laughing at ISDN.

It's just not really fast. So they tell you you're going to be on the ISDN connection. I'm like, all right. And they put you in an empty room that's very darkly lit and very quiet, and you actually listen to the show because you know it's happening live. So I've got to say I don't really get nervous for anything. That would make me pretty nervous. Because I'm a performer. But, yeah, sitting there and listening to the show and then thinking about it going out live to so many radios.

It has millions of listeners. So I got some butterflies in the stomach. But I got to say, Phil Terone, who started Hackaday, was the first editor. He's a great guy. I haven't met him in person yet, but we do converse. And he wished me luck and sent him a picture of him sitting in the booth when he was on NPR Science Friday. And so I looked at that and I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. I never think to take pictures. So there's a picture of me sitting alone in a booth getting ready to

go on Science Friday. All right. Well, thank you. Do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Well, don't be so quick to dismiss hacking, Alicia and Chris. I think hacking is the playful spirit of the engineer. And I love great engineering, but I love a clever hack. The simpler, the better. And the greater leap that it can make, the better it is. So keep on hacking. And I usually don't like that word, but after reading Hackaday and your efforts to reclaim hacking as the fun part and not the criminally minded part, I am more okay with that.

So yeah, advice I will take as long as it doesn't refer to people at work trying to ship things at the last minute alright Mike, thank you so much for being here thank you both my guest has been Mike Stisch, managing editor of Hackaday and third horn in the Madison Symphony Orchestra.

The Hackaday Prize semifinalists need to finish their projects by September 29th. And then I will drop from view so I can read through them, along with Lee Morfreed, Joe Grand, Jack Gansel, among other fantastic judges. Then we'll get down to five amazing projects, and I'm not sure what's going to happen after that, because, wow, that's going to be tough. They are amazing. In the meantime, thank you to Christopher White for producing and co-hosting, and thank you all for listening. We got some new listeners in September. We're not sure why, although we welcome you. We welcome you very much. Where did you come from and how did you hear about us? To answer that or make suggestions,

email us show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm, tweet at embedded.fm. Lastly, Christopher and I provide the show without commercials. It is sponsored by our consulting company, Logical Elegance. Please don't ask us to work right now. We have plenty. If you are getting the show with commercials, well, that is super annoying. Let us know where you're getting it from so we can tell them to stop being jerks or at least share the money. Now, enough monologuing. How about a final thought? I think this is from MacGyver because it seems really suitable for the show and for Mike. And that is when MacGyver looked at the broken, at anything, yes, really, and said, if I had some duct tape, I could fix that.