Embedded - 7: Lights, Camera, Electrons

Episode Date: June 26, 2013

Josh Chan and Tarun Pondicherry, founders of Light Up, join Elecia White to talk about how to teach electronics to elementary and middle school students. The Light Up Kickstarter ends on June 30, 2013, click on that link to buy your kit or to see the video (including the augmented reality smartphone application). We also talked about going on Kickstarter, being a startup and about HAXLR8R, an accelerator to help hardware startups. El's version of the traffic model of analog electronic components came from There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings.

I'm Elysia White, and you're listening to Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. Today, we will be talking about lighting the fire of electronic discovery in your favorite nine-year-old. We'll also hear a bit about a tiny startup making these gadgets and how they're using Kickstarter to get going. I'd like to welcome Josh Chan, the CEO of LightUp, the amazing new electronics kit for middle school, even elementary school kids.

Hi, Josh. Hi. Thanks for having me. And we also have Theron Pondicherry joining us, and you're the electrical engineering brains of this organization. Is that right? Yep. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us.

And Josh, tell me a little bit about yourself. Well, I studied human biology at Stanford, and then I went on to study, get a master's in education at Stanford, where I was also teaching at a local high school. I'm actually a freshman biology class, and it was actually at Stanford, which is where I met Tarun.

And Tarun, what about you? I've always loved engineering. I did my undergrad in electrical engineering at Princeton and then electrical engineering master's at Stanford. And one thing I really like about engineering is you can make a lot of cool things and I always wanted to help other people make cool stuff with electronics.

Well, I think LightUp probably qualifies under the making cool stuff. But before I gush about your system and get all excited about it, can you tell me a little bit more what you would say? What's the rational explanation of LightUp? Well, I guess the rational explanation would be that LightUp is a powerful combination of hardware and software. And we're combining electronic building blocks. So things that, you know, kids for many decades have loved playing with Legos and other building systems. So we kind of have that element of play. And we're adding a new technology.

We're using an augmented reality app so that kids can learn interactively using something on their smartphone or their tablet. So I'm combining the tangible with the virtual. Okay. I am so excited to talk about the app, but I'm also excited to talk about what it is. And let's see, we have some in front of us and I know all of you listening, don't get to see this, but it's really cool. So one of the things we have are magnetic connectors attached to wires. So two magnets and a wire in between. And you just put them together. And the magnets hold on.

Okay, now what else do you have in front of you? In front of me, I have, I guess, more of our pieces. We have a couple other blocks. We have a battery, a button, and an LED all connected in a loop. So if I press the button, you can see the LED light up, and you can turn it off by letting go of the button. Okay, so he's got a couple of those little wire things, which are, they look like fuses, really.

I mean, little metal ends and little plastic in between. And in addition to the wires, he's got a battery. It's a coin cell battery so looks like a standard size and it's oh about the size of a medium-sized post-it note and that magnetically connects to a couple more wires all the way to an led and the led is on a i don't know maybe a little bigger than a quarter although it's the size of a square i mean it's a shape of a square size of a quarter uh and it's got an led on it and then one that's exactly the same form factor except it's got a button on it and another wire connects it back to the battery

so we have things going all the way around um where things are electrons for those of you who want to be all technical and stuff and right now now, right now, the LED is not lit, but the battery's on. And that's why. Why isn't my LED lit? I think I'll let the electronics person explain that one. Sure. So basically, in order to have the LED light,

current has to flow through the entire circuit. And the button, it has two states. When you push it down down two pieces of metal touch each other which allows electrons to flow through the metal part and complete the circuit but when it's not pressed those two metal pieces aren't touching each other and air isn't insulated which means electricity cannot flow through it and so the led can't light because current can't flow in a full loop around the circuit. Okay, so that's pretty technical, but basically the electrons can't pass through because the button is up and therefore

doesn't make a connection. You can kind of think of a switch as a drawbridge. So when the bridge is up, cars can't pass through it, whereas when the bridge is down, cars can pass through it. Okay, so push the button. And now the LED is lit. Now, you could take this apart and put in this other one that's the same size as the LED, and it's a little tiny motor with a fan on it. It's got a bright teal fan. And then the button would make the motor work, right? Yeah.

Okay, so let's do that. Okay. So I just connected the motor where the LED was a second ago which like me to press the button oh yeah press the button and the motor goes so we have a little tiny fan um but the cool thing for those of you who aren't witnessing the little fan go is that that's how long it took we didn't have a solderless breadboard to pull wires in and out.

We didn't have jumpers. It's all just magnetically connected. You just pull it away, a little gentle magnet pull, and you pop in the other thing. And from an LED to a motor, you know, a second. And that's the cool part.

I mean, that's the cool part to me. I'm kind of known for sucking at soldering. I'm pretty good with the solderless breadboards, but more than about 15 wires and it looks like you've created Frankenstein. But you haven't. You've created something to avoid solder and solderless breadboards. You got magnetic breadboards what are you going to call this i guess we called it light up i'm sorry but uh yeah we definitely noticed that doing workshops with kids that even though they understand concepts when they can't see like on a breadboard exactly what's connected to what it makes it hard for them to visualize

where current's flowing it makes it hard for them to visualize where current's flowing. It makes it hard for them to debug. So we designed LightUp so that basically when you build a circuit, it kind of forces you to lay it out in a neat way so that you can visualize all the paths and you can see what's actually connected to what without having to think too much about these underlying construction issues. They pulled out a solderless breadboard,

normal, you know, with the white on and 10 pins and they all connect together. And it's got five wires on it and I could not write out what this did because the wires are all kind of tangled and clearly laid out by someone who needed something to get done, but didn't need it to be beautiful afterwards.

And the magnetic version, it's kind of beautiful afterwards. Thank you. So if I was a nine-year-old, how would you explain what a circuit is to me at all? That's a great question. I think the way that I look at it, and I don't come from a technical background, so in some ways I'm like this nine-year-old maybe. I see it as circuits. Electronic circuits are a great way to get something to do something.

And you just need a couple basic elements in a circuit to do something. You need, I think of it as three things at least. You need a power source. So in our case, we have a battery, do something you need. I think of it as three things, at least you need a power source. So in our case, we have a battery, a coin cell battery. If you want to be able to see something happening, you want what I call an output. So maybe a light or a motor, something that moves or lights up, and you need something that can complete the loop. So wires, the wires are what kind of connect everything together. So if you have a power source, if you have wires, you have an output, you can make a circuit. And from there, you can add, if you want to control it or you want it to be something that's affected by the things around you,

you can add an input like a button or a sensor. But really, I just see it as a means to an end. Circuits are a way to kind of build the ideas you have in your mind and kind of make them real. I like that. Circuits are a way to build the ideas in your head. Yeah. That's very cool. I'm not an engineer, but true can give you the technical definition. I don't know if it's technical. I always explain circuits as like, I like to think of it as say you're living in your house, something motivates you to get out of your house. So you're hungry, you want to get something to eat. Then you might hop in your car, drive down the road, pick up something, and then come back. So the idea kind of being, the battery is kind of like your house, it's where the electrons are, it's where you kind of start out.

And then if something motivates you, like a voltage, and you have a way to move, like on a road, you can kind of go somewhere, do something. In that case, I guess you're eating something. An electronic circuit might be powering a light bulb, but then you always come back. So there's always this full loop where you start somewhere, you do something, and you come back. And that's kind of what an electronic circuit is because the electrons, they start near the power source,

they go through, they expend some energy, they do something, and they always kind of return to that power source. I like it. I like it. And how did, what did you start with? I mean, you didn't start with magnetically connected components. What gave you the idea? What did you start with? Well, it's, I guess, a little bit of a two-part story that a couple years ago, I had started working on a project with some classmates, and it looked quite different. But this project did involve, you know, components. And the idea was like, can we make it easier for kids to learn about analog circuitry? So just building simple circuits.

We did that for a while. And then kind of we got all busy with other things, you know, jobs and classes. And a couple of years later, my professor introduced me to Tarun. Tarun was working on a similar project, but it involved kind of teaching digital logic, which is another area involving, you know, microcontrollers and logical operations. And he thought we could really work well together. So from that part, you know you know I guess introduction we decided about a year ago that we wanted to really continue working on light up so we kind of combined our forces and have been working on what you see in front of you so this started out as a class project yeah yeah it was definitely inspired by I guess two separate class

projects at Stanford yeah and you had a separate one. How is it different or the same or whatever? I guess Josh's project focused a lot around kind of teaching electronics on the analog side, so they had a lot of analog components, also using a slightly different magnetic connection framework. And then I did computer architecture research at Stanford for a while while so i've always been interested with digital logic like and gates or gates and microprocessors and things so i took

actually the same class the year later two years later i think and our project was okay let's teach you how to build like a basic calculator so you have these gates you have this block that adds two binary numbers but also going back to this magnetic connection framework because before that i used to teach i used to i ta'd a couple classes for undergrads and then i also taught little workshops for middle and high school kids and it's never really the construction that causes sorry it's never really concepts that causes too much difficulty because people can explain to me the theory of how it works but then they're actually building it they get. And so this seemed like a good way to

make it engaging if we can make a construction platform that preserves what the circuit looks like. And it still looks like a real circuit, has all the real components, but gets rid of the frustration of the breadboard and just alligator clips and whatever they were using. Yeah, soldering was always a barrier to me. And then even the jumpers are nice. They're so much better than soldering. But it's not really the way I want to go, let alone the way I want to teach an elementary school student. I mean, in our view, there is still a place,

there will be even after LightUp is released for things like solderless breadboards, alligator clips, soldering. But for certain situations, for certain learners, you know, these aren't the most important concepts that you need to master on day one, or even the first couple weeks of learning, you know, there are more important concepts that kids we think shouldn't learn first before they have to worry about, you know, wielding a soldering iron, or understanding how internally a breadboard is kind of tied together. Those can come after.

Oh, I think the most important thing that a kid could learn is this is cool. Yeah. Yeah. Get them hooked. Get them inspired. Get them inspired and passionate enough to get past the annoyingness of learning to solder or dealing with the jumpers. And then everything else is, they'll do it if they can be convinced that it's worth learning all those things in the future.

Excellent. And did you look at other kits? Did you get ideas from other electronics kits? Or did you have some as children yourselves? I guess I did. Josh speaking, I had some of the old Radio Shack, like build a radio, and you kind of put the cardboard together, and you have a working radio set. Yeah, definitely played with a lot of... I guess I was kind of weird. I like all the kits that are out there. I also just grabbed the breadboard and stuffed things in and blew up some things,

which probably weren't great when I was 10. But I mean, I learned from that, I guess. Blowing things up is a great way to get hooked on electronics. That is true, yeah. Yeah, depending how good your parents are about it. But yeah, I mean, my parents were a little bit more cautious and that's kind of why I didn't ever get a soldering iron,

for instance, you know, so. That's just abuse. Yeah, it depends on the parent, you know, it depends. My parents actually, my mom had an engineering background, so she would explain things to me and show me how a lot of the stuff works. And actually, one of the reasons that we added the augmented reality to LightUp

is not everyone has someone around that has that experience and can guide them. So we wanted to use the technology of phones, which are so ubiquitous today, to enable kids to have that kind of guidance even if there's not someone around. They can take a picture of the circuit that they build or if they're having difficulty

and it can give them some guidance as to why the circuit might not be working and show them how the electrons are flowing in the circuit. We have a lot of other cool things that we want to add to it to highlight different concepts in electrical engineering. Okay, so that's the augmented reality part. And I think I understood it was on your Kickstarter, but essentially if I had this circuit here that has the fan in it

and I connected something incorrectly, backwards or whatnot, I could take a picture and your app would read that picture in from my smartphone your app would run on my smartphone yeah we can show you real quick and he pulls out an android something or another and when you take the picture

it's going to highlight what went wrong hang on a second we have to build something this is so cool and you know it's a full circuit so here I just built a circuit what went wrong. Hang on a second. We have to build something. This is so cool. And you know, it's a full circuit. That was it.

So here I just built a circuit. Sorry, you listeners, I guess maybe at least you'll have to explain it to you, but it's a circuit with a battery and an LED, but it's connected, and the battery, I can tell you, works,

but the LED isn't lighting up. So that would be a very common mistake that we've seen many first-time learners do, and Tarun's going to take a picture of it with his phone right now.

And give us a second. And, you know, it's just a matter of highlighting, looking over it, getting the whole circuit inside the frame and hitting take a picture. Yeah. I mean, as a kid, you don't have to really understand how it works. But more technical discussion is basically looking at these codes we have on the block so we can see, so our app can recognize what the circuit what's in the circuit okay so looking at the photo darren has handed me his phone there's a red circle going around and around on the led

does that mean the led is backwards yeah so uh we wanted to yeah so the led is backwards in the circuit and we have some animation to kind of draw attention to that so we don't want to just explicitly necessarily tell the kids like you need to change the led we want them to recover from the mistake on their own because that's a good learning experience but we want to give them enough guidance that they kind of know where to look and it's still like it's still something they're discovering on their own but they're not totally lost so that they'd end up giving up a small amount of frustration that's how people learn the right kind of frustration learn until they remember it turns out like there's some studies

that kind of show you're more likely to retain something if you get a little frustrated make a mistake because you really have to then grapple with that you know like why isn't it working and then but in the long run it can be a good thing yeah yeah i remember the things that were difficult because they were difficult for me. The things that were easy, half the time I have to look them up again because, I don't know, is it this way or that way? But letting kids flounder a bit is a great way for them even to come up with things they didn't mean to. Learning through discovery. So now if you fix it, what does the picture look like?

The light will light, I assume. Yes, we'll show you. So we'll turn the LED around because LEDs only work in one direction. And so now it's lit up, as you can see. And Trun's going to take another picture. So give me a second. Closer to you, actually.

Let me see. So I'll take a picture. And it's the same deal, filling up the camera screen with the schematic. I want to say schematic, but it's not. It's the actual circuit. That's a good point, actually. We put some conscious design effort

so that the circuit bill looks exactly like a real schematic. So I just took a picture of the circuit, and here's the phone. Oh, this is very cute. On the phone, it's i broke it sorry no problem that's right my superpower is working very well today i just have to touch the phone for things to go wrong but before i broke it it uh showed where the electrons were going like a little loop and it had the light kind of fake lighting up um and that tells you where the electrons are going and how it works

right yeah we're showing the flow and uh you know this is a great example but you know this is all software things and we have all sort of you know a lot of exciting ideas of how can we augment it even more like you maybe show show electron flow we can show charge flow um we can show you how changing the resistance affects the the speed of the flow there's you know all sorts of things you can do once you've connected, building these building blocks with the software, with our app. And I seem to think I read on your website that you might actually be able to take a picture and it would go to a schematic capture program.

Yep. So we're working with trying to find, or I guess we've talked to a couple of people who do web-based circuit simulation. And we think it'd be really cool if once you start building a lot of circuits, if you can share them in the same way that an engineer might share them, but without having to go through necessarily all of the intricate steps of figuring out, oh, this is like a resistor symbol. But just learn that because that's just how you're sharing it directly. So you'd take a picture and it would create a schematic that's like a normal engineering schematic. And then you'd be able to share that with your friend and he would know what it meant because that's what his would look like.

Right. And I think that would be really fun. Of course, I don't know, maybe I could do all of my schematics that way instead of laboriously drawing them and then sending them to an electrical engineer who has the appropriate program. We would be honored. So how does it work? I mean, does each component have something the camera identifies? So each block we have has one of these circular codes,

which the software recognizes after you take the picture, and that gives us the orientation and placement of each block. So then we know where the... From that, we can extrapolate where the terminals are, what's connected to what, and then from there, it can either overlay the simulation or figure out how to help debug the circuit or eventually go to the schematic.

So it's a bit like a QR code, but we think it looks more elegant it's smaller and simpler and it fits better in our in our blocks and i didn't even notice them the led one looks so much like an ear that i just figured it was some sort of cute little thing uh but now that i look more closely it's got the little it's got led on it because you know that is helpful to be able to talk about it. For us humans, yeah. And then it's got the little ear, and then it's got a standard LED diode schematic symbol. And then the motor, it has one whole circle and then about three quarters of a circle, but cut up.

I know, that didn't make much sense. And its schematic symbol, is it really just a circle? Yeah. Yeah, it should have an M in it. I think some of the silk screens in our initial run were a little bit misprinted. Good catch. The button.

The button looks kind of, actually looks a lot like the motor one, but with just another dash on one of the lines. And I do know that button symbol from my schematics. This is neat. You really could actually, not just testing how electronics works and learning what a circuit is, you can learn the real language of electronics.

Right, yeah, and that's kind of why we really want to reinforce it so we have not just the human readable name, like LED or button, we also have the schematic because that's something that that as you go further along and, you know, learning, you would start to encounter these schematic symbols. And then, you know, that's just not the piece.

You know, once we're in software, we love for users to be able to, you know, toggle between different views. Like maybe you click once, you see your circuit as a schematic. You press it again, you might be able to see it in, you know, the name or maybe a symbol. So there's all sorts of things like that. Yeah, one thing we can do with the software that we'll be releasing eventually is you can layer information as people are learning. So in the beginning, you probably don't want some ridiculous, weird equations and crazy stuff on there. But once people understand the basics, maybe there's some particular concept or whatever circuit they're trying to build would be really helpful if they knew this one concept. We can pick up on that and then add that kind of

one step at a time at the right time. So it scaffolds their learning as they go along based on what they've already done so far. I think I want to talk more about the pedagogy, the teaching methodology. But before that, what comes in a basic kit? And right now you're only available through Kickstarter, right? Correct. So if I go to Kickstarter, what's the smallest amount I could be out of pocket and still get something really nifty? Well, this is a little subjective, but we currently have four different kits that we have as Kickstarter rewards, and we've named them kind of cute names.

The first one's the Maker Mini Kit, and that one is $40, I believe, on Kickstarter. And that includes, for the most part, analog components, things that a lot of what you see in front of you are actually things that would be in the Maker Mini Kit in the sense we have. There would be LEDs that light up, buttons, motors, a light sensor, I believe, a battery, of course, wires. So kind of enough to get you started. And then as you go up, I think the next kit level at 69 would include, actually, we haven't

talked about it today, but the ability to learn programming with the microcontroller block we have. And I think maybe that's where the really cool nifty stuff comes in, where you can really not just build simple analog circuits, but start to introduce kind of functional and interactive behaviors through Arduino programming. See, that's funny coming from Josh, because he's the one that built the analog kit initially. It's true, yeah. But I love Arduino. And like I said, I'm not an engineer, but Arduino is a great platform for even people like me

who did not study many years this like Dryn did, but still feel really empowered to make cool projects because of, you know, platforms like Arduino. Well, the $40 kit is pretty cool by itself. I agree. Before we get to Arduino. Sure. Because you can make things like a dimmer switch and just making things light up. Last week or a week before, we talked to Akana and she was talking about how the first time she connected a light to a battery and realized this is how the world works.

It's a moment of discovery and imagination. And you get that. Yeah, it's amazingly powerful. And I think sometimes we have to not lose sight of that because we've been working with this for a couple of years now. But even my housemates who are, you know, like very accomplished web developers or Stanford graduates, I just show them this. They make a motor spin or a light light up and they're amazed. Just a simple thing like that. Yeah, you're right.

It can really be like a light bulb moment and, like you said, a moment of discovery. And a giggle moment. The moment that makes you just – it's kind of – I'm tickled. The motor's moving. Oh, my God. And I did that. Yeah, so you start that and then it's kind of infectious and you go from there you know once you once you've got that what is the best uh reaction

you've had when you put this in front of kids because you have done some kid testing oh yeah quite a bit um i guess two things stand out to me there's this one kid i think the quote was this is going to revolutionize the world he was just so happy about being able to build stuff that was like pretty touchy. Maybe like a five-year-old, which made it all the more endearing. Oh, I wish you recorded that. I know. I totally wish we had that recorded. And another great moment that I remember is that there was a little girl who was, who built this fan and a button and she was so excited when she pressed it. And then she kind of ran away and I was like, oh, why when she pressed it. And then she kind of ran away and I was like, oh, why'd she run away?

And a few seconds later, she pulled her grandma over and was like, look what I made. So that was really explaining how it works to her grandmother, I recall. I think I remember that too because I was thinking, oh, it's like, oh, I guess she was bored and that's too bad. But no, she came back with someone in tow.

It was so much better than bored. Yeah, she left so she could show off her creation. And so you said five-year-olds. I think on your Kickstarter, you kind of recommend nine to 13, but I think some of these might be choke hazards for little, little kids, but there's nothing here that a five-year-old couldn't get.

This isn't harder. This is easier than Legos for sure. Yeah. I think that what you said is absolutely true, that in terms of the age things, we have to think about the safety regulations and so on. But we've had very young children using it. Surprisingly, young children use this.

And for a lot of the, especially the analog stuff in our smaller kits, you're definitely right. A five-year-old is more than capable of making a lot of cool things with light up. And you said LEDs can't be plugged in backwards. Sometimes you can plug an LED in backwards and sometimes they light on fire. Are you preventing that for the little kids? Yeah, so the parts in the kit are basically designed to work with each other so that while it might not always work as expected, it's never going to pose a safety risk.

That's a good idea. Yes. Yeah. It's a learning opportunity, but we don't want to injure our users. Then they'd really learn. Some people have said that, but we respectfully disagree. Oh, no. I worked at LeapFrog, and at lunch sometimes we would talk about...

LeapFrog makes educational transcripts. And at lunch we would discuss some of the safety issues there was one toy that had a book on top that was made of plastic and if you closed your hand in the book it was kind of painful and we thought that that was you know kind of a learning experience don't close your hand in the book and then of course we wanted to make all of the other things you know the the really hot skillet area. Don't touch the skillet, then they would learn that. But I think LeapFrog and you have made a good decision in not injuring your future audience.

Okay, so you were talking about Arduino, and I sidetracked us. So let's go back to Arduino. You've got this Arduinoduino uh piece here yeah and let me let me describe it visually it's got it's got a chip on it which is probably the atmel chip that is on all arduinos um and it says at tiny 84 which is what it is and it goes to, I want to say eight, ten. Ten little magnetic connectors, as though it were ten pins, but they're big because it's magnetic. And inside, I suspect there's more electronics. It's about almost a centimeter thick, maybe not quite that.

Yeah, actually, what you see is all that's on the board. So we took a lot of effort to basically make sure that what you see is what it actually is. We didn't want to hide like weird circuitry anywhere. And so we picked a chip that's relatively easy to set up. It doesn't really need anything but the chip itself in order to work. And so that's it. That's the chip. And you can actually see how each pin connects through a trace on the PCB to the connector.

Okay, I didn't realize that those silver wires were all that was going to be on here. I figured, you know, there would be a backside to the board with a bunch more electronics. No, no, that's it. That's very cool. So what does this one do? Well, at the moment, we've programmed them with different sketches. I believe one of them has the fade example from Arduino, so you can kind of fade in and out an LED using the PWM output.

And we did program another one that is kind of a light theremin, so you can control an instrument by kind of moving your hand up and down on a light sensor, so you can see, you can play it that way. And for you regular listeners that maybe sound familiar. Maybe we'll dig up the theremin that Akana and I built. Uh, but when we did it, it was on a solderless breadboard and it was ugly, but I bet when you do it, it's much prettier and much easier. But you said program. Uh, so this is just a board with a chip on it.

Arduino, when you buy the $25, $30 Arduino board, it has a programmer that comes with it, and it plugs into USB. This does not have a USB connector. It doesn't have any of the electronics necessary for programming it. Tell me how you're going to get something on here. So, yeah, that's a good observation. Right next to you on the table table you see we have what we're calling the programming shield and um i guess to describe it verbally it's uh it's it's another pcb

and it it uh has it's the same shape pretty much as our microcontroller block and it connects magnetically so you just snap it on top of the uh of the block so you snap it and uh connected to the board is a USB plug. So you can just plug it in, plug in the programming shield to your computer. You can open up the Arduino program or one of the very popular kind of visual drag and drop programming environments that work with Arduino. And they're off and running. You can program it.

And so this little USB connector plus board that is connected to your nifty magnetic board, that's all of the stuff that would be on like an Arduino Uno. All of the programming circuits and power regulation circuits. Yep, it's all there. And how your battery doesn't look like it's big enough to run an Arduino. It's three volts, so it can power the AMOLED chip. The chips are actually pretty low power in general, so it can very easily power the microcontroller that's on that board.

And the only difference really between a small battery like this and sort of a large 9-volt or AA battery is how long it generally lasts. But for the types of projects we make with this, and generally you don't leave it running 24-7, it works really well in that context. Okay, that makes sense. We do program a lot of Arduinos or use Arduinos with 9-volts, and it's nice to remember that it does run, I think, all the way down to 2.5. Yeah. So that battery that has the coin cell on it will plug into the Arduino,

and then we can make a circuit, and it will fade or light or control that motor or control a theremin, a buzzer, a speaker, based on a photo cell. Yep. And then the photoresistor, we can read that in through ADC controllers on the Arduino and then output a mount. Very, very cool. Why Arduino? I mean, I think it's a great choice, but why did you choose it? So we really like the community around the Arduino platform and the software has already been designed to be used by non-engineers and students

and they've done a great job of that they have a huge community with examples and tutorials going along with that so we wanted to leverage that with our kit so what we offer this great construction platform that helps people debug and also enforces concepts and we thought that because arduino has done a great job with the programming side of kind of with similar goals in mind that it would work very well for us. And it's not just Arduino I guess I would say another big reason I briefly alluded to this earlier but because it's such a thriving community a lot of people have developed things on top of Arduino so on top of the Arduino IDE that you can download that lets you program there you know different companies non-profits have been making these kind

of different ways to program in Arduino. A great example is one that lets you drag and drop blocks in. So instead of having to type in everything in text, you can just drag and drop these color-coded blocks, and you can add in ifs and ands and all these programming structures, but all without touching code. It's just all visually. So the nice thing about working with Arduino is that right off the bat, we already have compatibility with kind of a broad range of programming, I guess,

methods that may be more appealing to someone who is just a beginner and doesn't really want to tackle coding right away. Yeah, not all five-year-olds can type. Most of them can play with that mouse even better than I can. Or an iPad or something. An iPad, wow.

Now you're upping the ante. One of the components I don't see here is a resistor. It is listed in what you get in this kit. Oh, I guess. Here you go. Sorry, it was hidden in the box. I see, yes. How do you describe what a resistor does?

So going kind of back to the car analogy that I like so much, I kind of think of wires as roadways with lanes and such, and a resistor is almost like a lane merger. So the flow has to reduce when you pass through that. And so that kind of causes a backup. So it actually reduces the flow throughout the entire path. And so the resistor basically does the same thing for electrons. So less electrons can flow through the circuit. So it's like being on 101 at five o'clock. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Terrible. I like your car analogy. It's much clearer than the plumbing analogy that I learned in school where a resistor is a sponge. And you're like, yeah, that's great. Now I have a sponge, great. But this is one kilo ohms because that's what it says on the little block that's slightly bigger than a quarter.

And it's got the circular barcode-like thing, and it says resistor and has the symbol. Are you going to talk about different resistor values and how they are different number of lanes? Yeah, so actually the kit will have a couple of different resistor values, so you can definitely experiment with seeing how that affects the circuit. And so a larger resistor is kind of like having fewer lanes. It blocks current more.

And if it was connected to an led that means the led would be dimmer yeah so yeah i think like you're you're absolutely right an led kind of let kids visually see that and i i'm as a teacher i'm really excited about what we can do in the the app side too like how can we explain it you know maybe maybe include that freeway analogy somehow in text or even an animation animated form on the app could be a cool way to kind of provide learners because you know kids have there's so many different learning styles and learning abilities and some people might get it if it's a verbal explanation or it's a textual or a visual so i'm really excited about ways to kind of teach kids of all sorts of different learning styles yeah with the car analogy i want to take you know

little cars and a little tiny city with me to explain all of, you know, this is a resistor. Now we're going to block off these lanes because this is where the resistor is. I like that. We could do that on the app. Yeah, absolutely. So what about a capacitor? So for that, the water analogy does work a lot better.

We're agnostic when it comes to analogies. Pick the one that works best. But yeah, the capacitor basically is like a storage tank. So once water is pumped up there, or in a capacitor case, it stores its charge and then holds it for release later. Okay. I do have a car analogy that's similar.

I believe that a capacitor is like a parking lot right before the bridge you know you're going to go over a bridge and if the parking lot is empty or has any spaces available you have to go park and then ride with somebody else over the bridge but if the parking lot's empty you get to go straight over the bridge and then at the end of the day you know the parking lot has to empty which is like a capacitor has to discharge so i think i think you could do a capacitor in in the vehicle world of electronics that looks really well yeah uh so so but there's there are more kits we've only talked about two of them

uh we talked about the mini maker and we talked about the Mini Maker, and we talked about the Maker Junior, which is the one that comes with the Arduino and the Arduino shield and programming system. There's also the Maker Pro Kit, which is $100. Yeah. And that just comes with more buttons, more stuff? Yeah, generally more stuff, more sensors, more buttons, and more LEDs to enable more interactive projects. Okay.

And then there's one that's $200. So you have a big jump, you know, $40, $70, $100, and then $200. Sell me the $200 one. I haven't bought mine yet. I totally planned to but I wanted to find out from you first which one should I get you're going to say I should get the most expensive one

not necessarily but I can tell you what that one does so that one in addition to having even more stuff it actually gives you two microcontrollers and an infrared transmitter and receiver so what that basically means is that you can do a little bit of wireless communication, line-of-sight wireless communication between two projects,

or build something that, for at least some kinds of TVs, you might be able to control that from your own project. Well, the idea of two projects is neat. Instead of just one circuit, which, I mean, up to that level, I can build one whole circuit because I have one battery block. But this one comes with more battery blocks, so it

and another controller and all of, I mean, I get doubles of everything. Yeah, at least. And that means that I get to control two things at once. And the wireless communication over IR, is that what you're... All right, that's kind of cool.

Yeah, I guess kind of the way we see it, I mean, not to pressure you for any one kid or another, but it's the same way as a kid growing up, my favorite toy by far were Lego sets. And my parents didn't buy them for me all at once. But it's kind of like a thing where you kind of have some and you keep begging your parents for more and the nice thing about legos is they all you know work with each other so you know when your parents buy you one for your birthday one for christmas it you know you eventually just it gets all jumbled up into one big pile and um so

similarly with light up you know whatever kit you get you know the idea is that if you want to build a new project maybe you need more parts and you you know now that you have a set that you're working with you can then add on to it and it's not none it never was a waste of money you just are adding to your collection as you uh as you have the the funds or the the need for the for more yeah okay that makes sense so if i buy the little one and then want something more i can buy another one yeah in the future fair enough oh but you didn't tell me with the deluxe one the one that really probably is going to push me over the $200 one, has the do-it-yourself blocks. Oh, right. Sorry, I forgot about that. You know this really well.

Well, I have notes and you don't, so this is kind of unfair. Yeah, so that's something that we've been really strong proponents of. We both come out of this background of building in the lab, prototyping, and we kind of want to bring that ability to the kids that are using LightUp. So what the DIY blocks are, are going to be blocks that let kids, or anyone really, kind of build their own blocks. So we'll give you a block that's compatible with LightUp, has the magnetic ends,

but instead of having a component on there already, it's going to have a space for you to put in your own. So if you can go to RadioShack or Frize or online, maybe SparkFun, you buy maybe some sensor we don't have yet or maybe some accelerometer. Let's start with accelerometer because that's so what I want to put on my do-it-yourself blog. Yeah, and we don't have one yet. So eventually we hope to. But yeah, you could absolutely, you know, put that on the DIY block.

And I assume you might have a project in mind for that. So now you have that block. So you can add it to your, maybe connect connect it to your the microcontroller block and some outputs and uh and yeah there you go are all of the diy blocks uh one-to-one i mean does it go i mean all of the blocks i see here except for the arduino it has two magnets on it one end and the other end and the circuit goes through right but like an accelerometer, if I want to communicate with it, I have to power it and I have to talk to the processor. Are the DIY blocks going to have two magnets or are they going to have more? We definitely need to have different footprint DIY blocks depending on what kind

of component you're using. We still have to decide exactly what the right mix is for the kit. I'm so glad I'm here. I'm going to totally convince them that they have to at least I squared C for all of my different I squared C needs. As you can see, we're very much the process of determining these details. So you can have a big influence on us just at this exact moment in time. And there are other kits. That was kind of where i stopped for my personal amusement uh for a kit but there are classroom kits that have lots of multiples of things to allow people to teach multiple kits uh and was there was that it or were there more

uh i think there was a super expensive one where i can demand that you make a diy block yes yeah so we do have like as many Kickstarter projects, kind of a custom level. And, you know, of course it's expensive, so not many backers, but yeah, the most, the most expensive kit before the custom ones are the, is the maker camp kit that we call it. And we've had quite a few, you know, teachers, people that run tech camps kind of purchase these and, and they're very interested in not just, you know, getting enough blocks to support, you know, maybe a class of five or ten or a workshop, but also some material to go along with it to kind of help get them going with lessons and curriculum.

And that's something that we want to start rolling out now, and we want to continue to support educators using LightUp. And your background is in education, so the way you teach the pedagogy is really important. Electronics are kind of hard. I mean, a capacitor, it's fine to have an analogy for it, but if you just put it in a circuit, it doesn't really do much. How are you going to help through this? What additional classroom materials? Well, you're absolutely right, first of all.

Some kids don't want to read anything. They just want to put everything together, and a resistor could be kind of boring because it could just make your LED dimmer. So for visually, I think... Or it can just make your resistor hot if you don't put an LED in there. Yeah, or that. That's happened.

So as far as how to support kids, I think that a lot of it, traditionally speaking, most kids come with big booklets or written material. And to some extent, we do plan to provide that, too, in just the sense like to get kids going. You know, they open up our box. They give them some guidance, like some simple circuits you can try, you know, some experimental things you can change. But I think what we're really excited about as far as getting kids engaged is more on the software side. Like because not only will we be able to provide a written guide, but also a more of an interactive guide that can

detect what the kid is doing and then kind of suggest something in addition, like maybe the very first circuit they build is just a button or sorry, it's just a LED and a battery and the app could suggest what if you add a button here or what if you add a potentiometer here, you know, things that could lead them to discover, you know, cool ways to control their circuit or change things around. So, but I think ultimately what will get kids hooked is, is when they realize that this isn't just a dry exercise in learning, but really a means to an end, a way for them to kind of build their own things, like an alarm for their room or something that does something or something that is really impressive and they can show their friends. I

think, I think that's the, that's where the magic happens. A gizmo that changes their world. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what electronics are, you know, whether people realize that or not. It's already changed their world. Electronics. Indeed. And the app, the augmented reality app, that takes pictures and you can see

the electrons, I think it's really a great idea to be able to say, okay, well, maybe you want to add I mean, you've got the picture of what they have now, and now you can even show them another picture kind of in there that says, well, a button could go here and build out from there. And even if you're building something

and you want to show it to me, I get the circuit and I can see it on my phone and then I can build it the same. And they kind of line up, which means giving kids a cookbook for making a light theremin or whatever project you want to give them. It's easy. They don't have to, you know, here's the paper and then you go to the table and you look at it and try to figure it out. Here's the paper you go to and then you go back and forth and try to try to make them the same even though they don't look the same.

With the app, they can look the same. I just like that. So what if they get beyond that? They're beyond the cookbook. They're beyond the I want to build it for myself. And now they're kind of ready for the math. The app will help with that maybe if you get that far. I think that'll be cool.

But are you going to suggest something else for kids to get into this? Kind of like after they've kind of exhausted or they've used LIDA for a long time? Yeah, yeah, the exit strategy. The off-ramp for the... So actually, I mean, that's one of the actually other reasons that we have the DIY blocks and we have, you know, kind of using the exact same chip that's on the Arduino as well as having each block be a component is that while you're using light up, you're actually using the same components in pretty much the same form except for an easier connection and some debugging help that you would buy from, you know, SparkFun or something. And so a good off

ramp, you would be either maybe getting a conventional Arduino board or maybe just even getting components and start throwing them around without kind of the crutch that LightUp's provided you in the beginning and make projects the way that engineers and other makers make. And they can even start learning to use the existing circuit books. I mean, with your system, with LightUp, they can use the Make Electronics book because the Make Electronics book just tells you how to build simple circuits. And he goes through, I think it's a, Platt is his name,

he goes through and he describes how to put circuits in and how to solder them and how to use a solderless breadboard. They can skip those chapters and go straight to the cool stuff with the lighting up stuff and making sounds. And there are some other resources. We've been talking about the traffic model. I don't know if you made that up, but I read about it in There Are No Electrons, Electronics for Earthlings,

which was one of the first books that made sense to me. I have the art of electronics. I've taken electronics classes. V equals IR, fine. What does that mean to me? It means a lot of really important things, but until you internalize it a bit, it's hard to go from wheezy

connections to mathematical engineering. And I hope you do help a little bit with, here's some other resources. Go there when you're done with us. We'd love, I mean, we haven't really formally organized it, but I think Tarun and I independently, you know, we found I've kind of made a mental list of websites I really

like, books I really like. I mean, I've read some of the Make series, you know, electronics, getting started with Arduino, Force Mims has, you know, some books through RadioShack I've read as well. But also some great websites I found, just people that, I don't know how I found them, but they're just very clear

and they provide very succinct descriptions of things that an average textbook just completely muddles or confuses me with. So I think that's something we do hope to provide, maybe some sort of resource for really motivated learners that really want to get deeper in as they've maybe grown out of a little bit of the simpler circuits that they made with LightUp. And if you go to, I think it was the Minneapolis Mall,

there's a gigantic Lego store with a two-foot-high guy who's built out of Legos and he's leaping out of a Lego helicopter. Are you looking forward to whatever the light-up equivalent of the two-story-high Lego is? You should ask Tarun about that. I have this vision in my head all the time that once we have enough kits,

I can build a fully working calculator on a wall somewhere made of light up pieces cool so it's you know just see the guts of it all on a giant giant wall maybe two stories i don't know it's like quite a few pieces but yeah so going behind the curtain a little bit. I like the kit, but, you know, as a grown-up now, I'd prefer to be four all the time, but as a grown-up... Me too.

Light Up is a very small startup. It's just the two of you, right? So, yeah, the core team is just the two of us, but of course, we still work very closely with Professor Blikstein, whose class projects, I guess, kind of inspired this, and we went still work very closely with um professor blickstein whose class projects

i guess kind of inspired this and we were went through hexcelerator which has given us a lot of great mentorship on the manufacturing side i tell me more about hexcelerator and and spell it because it's not obvious um so it's spelled h-a-x-l-r the number eight and r or i guess h-a-x-l-X-L-R, the number eight and R. Or I guess H-A-X-L-R-8-R. It's accelerated. And it's a hardware startup accelerator. The funding model is similar to others in the Bay Area. So they give you some seed funding in exchange for equity. What kind of sets it apart is the first one that's purely targeted hardware.

And because so much hardware manufacturing and the ecosystem is in Shenzhen, China, they take all of the participants to Shenzhen for three months. And you just work basically right in the heart of the electronics markets there. So a lot of the times we needed this weird component and you just walk down the street, buy it and come back. And it's pretty awesome because the turnaround time is so much faster. And same thing with PCBs and a lot of other manufacturing. You can find the samples right next to you. And if you want it produced at quantity, the factory is maybe two miles away. You can go visit. And basically by the end of the week, you can finalize the deal and move on to the next thing. So it was really cool. One of the reasons software startups are so much easier is because there's less outlay

and because you don't have to go anywhere to do a web startup. And you can build your team and build your company here all in a kitchen. But hardware is different. Hardware you have to touch, which means that it costs money. It costs more than your time to build it. And this Hackcelerator helps you both with the finances and with finding the people who can build it cheaply.

And also they have a tremendous amount of mentorship that goes along with it. So I guess it's run by one of the program directors is actually one of the MakerBot co-founders. And so he has so much experience just doing building things and taking it to market. And then other mentors have done some other pretty spectacular things and ship products. And they have experience from investment to distribution and basically everything you kind of need along the way. So I think a long story short, like as you said, a hardware startups are still are and still will be probably for a long time hard, you know, in many ways than a software web only startup. But you know, we've even though as you said, we're just a two person startup, still, we've benefited so much from these, you know, friends, these mentors, advisors, and these relationships we've built. So it's made it a lot easier for us to get going than if it were truly just two of us, you know, sitting in a room trying to do it all by ourself.

And are you still part of their incubators ecosystem? Well, I guess we, it's, it's officially over. Like we're back here in the Bay area after spending time in China. But, you know, we're, we're now an alum company and we'll always kind of be part of that network. You know, in terms of the mentors, we still reach out to you for advice and we can always go back to, you know, the, the people that run Accelerator for help. So we'll always kind of have some connection with Accelerator, even though we're no longer kind of officially in their program now.

And do you still talk with the other companies? I mean, it wasn't just you going to China by yourselves. It's a whole cohort of other companies. Ten of us. Ten companies total. Yeah, we're still talking to them a lot. A lot of them are doing Kickstarter campaigns. I just sent it recently. And we still have a lot to learn from each other.

A lot of us hope to see each other again pretty soon. So yeah, we really support each other. That'd be fun to go out drinking with y'all. Oh, yeah, we did. More than once, I suspect. How'd you get hooked up with them? Yes, Tarun asked me the same question. I don't remember the exact first time.

I think I might have been online reading a forum or something. And, you know, there's not that many hardware startup accelerators. There's plenty of software ones. So it kind of got in my head that, oh, there's a couple of these. And I think at some point, Tarun and I decided to apply. You know, why not? No risk. And a couple months went by.

We didn't hear anything. So we kind of forgot. And then we kind of got an email out of the blue saying that, you know, you've been accepted. Would you like to go to China? We're leaving in a month, right? It wasn't very much time. So we were, we looked at each other and thought, well, we might as well, you know, it seems like a good opportunity. So we kind of jumped in headfirst and decided to go to China. And then I think like a couple of weeks into China, we looked at each other and we're like, why are we in China? What are we doing here? But it was, but yeah, it was a great experience and we, I don't regret it at all. You know,

the whole, the whole thing. And did they hook you up with Kickstarter or was that, is that totally separate? I think it's a common path for a lot of companies nowadays for like us to go through Kickstarter. But it was entirely, entirely you know our decision in terms of uh um deciding to apply for to do a kickstarter campaign and um kind of raise funds that way i guess there probably are a few of you out there who don't know what kickstarter is but you should totally go to kickstarter.com and check it out it's a way for small, tiny companies, even some not so tiny companies, to fund a project. And what it is, is I will give you, like I will sign up for Light Up

and I will choose the kit I want. And it's not me buying a kit. It's me supporting a startup that if they succeed, if they succeed to get enough money, they will provide a kit to me. And succeed is not only getting enough money. It's not only reaching their goal.

It's also succeeding in building it. There have been many Kickstarters, you give your money and you don't get anything back because they didn't succeed. They didn't plan well enough. And Kickstarter tries to weed out people who aren't very good at it. They do have a bit of a...

A vetting process. A vetting process, exactly. And if you can't make it through their vetting process, you probably aren't going to ship a product. But if you do make it through their vetting process, then you sign up for a certain amount of money. How much did you guys sign up for? Our goal was $50,000.

So you needed $50,000 in order to build a minimum number of kits. Yeah, there's some kind of fixed cost we had to think about. And we did our calculations, made sure we had some buffer, and then that's how we came to that number. And you have surpassed that. Yeah, we've been really fortunate. We're more than 200% now, so we're at about $100,000. And Kickstarter lets you have stretch goals that are beyond your initial. So in addition

to everybody getting the kits that you promised them initially, you have now made some additional commitments. Correct. Yeah. And that's kind of a common technique that we've seen used very successfully. And in fact, we'll probably hopefully be announcing another one. And this is we're coming approaching our last week of our campaign. And we have a couple more that we're considering. But yeah, as you said, we've already announced a couple. And basically, the more money we have, they kind of give us, you know, more options and maybe hiring an intern to help us or, you know, maybe being able to reach some volume discount that allows us to produce the kits even cheaper. So there's a lot of things that kind of

doors that open if you can raise more money on Kickstarter. And you, so your Kickstarter has funded, which means you will get that money. Yes. If your Kickstarter hadn't funded, you wouldn't get that money and I wouldn't have to pay it. Yeah. Um, so, but yours is funded. So if I sign up now, I will be giving that money to you and I'm sure I'll be getting a kick cause you've seemed to have your stuff together.

Uh, but if anybody who goes to Kickstarter, be careful. You have to think about it. There's always a risk, I think. Kickstarter does what they can. But yeah, as you said, there have been some high-profile mishaps on Kickstarter. And your project closes on June 30th.

So if today is not July 1st or later, you can go and buy whatever you want. Any of these kits from $40 to a couple hundred to a thousand if you've got your own DIY block in mind. So go out, check it out. You should at least go see the video. You have only been hearing Josh and Theroon. Now is the time to go actually see what they look like.

Thanks, Alicia. I should just say, yeah, the Kickstarter is until the 30th. And if it's after that, we haven't set it up yet, but we hope or we plan to set up kind of a pre-order, I guess, button on our website, on our homepage. So even after that, you can probably get one, but it might be for a later delivery or some other differences. And your website is lightup.io? Correct. Great. So check there. If it's after July 1st, look there. And when will you be shipping my kit?

We'll be shipping them in December of this year. So December 2013 is when we'll be shipping the Light Up kits. And we'll be getting it before Christmas, right? We're not guaranteeing it because it's a big sticking point. But it is definitely a goal that we've set and things you know based on everything we know now we are on target to do that but it's the first run of a new product so there's always the potential that it might get delayed there's a lot of new here there's there's the new software there's the new

hardware there's the new company um starting shipping something for the first time is really hard have you two been through another company where you've shipped product uh personally we so i i've shipped software i guess i should say so yeah well so um but accelerator has a great uh set of mentors that have shipped products and been helping us a great deal and making sure that everything's on track. I think it's great that you have them because it is very different. Having shipped products is really amazing. Of course, once you get the product shipped, how are you going to distribute it other than your website?

Are you going to go Amazon or Target or how is that going to work? Yeah. So, I mean, we're still in the process of learning the ropes of how, you know, distribution works and retail and buyers and all these things. But we've been really fortunate through Kickstarter, Maker Faire and a lot of events. We've gotten in touch with a lot of, you know, representatives from, you know, some big box chains, some smaller retailers. And we've gotten some really good advice from a mentor we trust. And his kind of general idea is, you know, you want to start with things like crowdfund like kickstarter and your website that's kind of your first sales platform and you learn the ropes you get better at it and then you kind of take baby

steps like the next thing might be going to some internet retailers maybe amazon uh maybe more a niche and then you kind of go from there to maybe uh uh not like a giant store maybe a small retail chain like sharper image or brookstone yeah something like that something small but cool not like a giant store, maybe a small retail chain. Like Sharper Image or Brookstone. Yeah, something like that. Something small but cool. Exactly, yeah. And then, you know, you don't really want to even attempt to try to talk to the big guys until you're really prepared.

You know, you've gotten your cost down. You've gotten your sales pitch ready. You know, you can really present to something like Best Buy and say, this is why we should have you, or sorry, this is why you should have us in all your stores. And for us, we realize that's going to come much later. So we're still in the baby step phase of direct sales and pre-orders. This is smart. This is really smart.

Because if you went straight to the big box stores, they can ask for your price to be so low that you're losing money and you don't realize until after you've lost money so far out of business. Yeah, we've heard those horror stories, so we do our best to avoid them, yeah. So, Josh, if you could go back a year in time, learning all that you have learned through Accelerator and through Kickstarter

and through just pursuing this idea beyond a class project, what would you tell yourself? I think one thing is, you know, going through Hexcelerator, being in China for three and a half months, one thing I've learned, especially for hardware, is that, you know, sitting at Stanford before I graduated, I was thinking, you know, this is a great project. We've made great prototypes, but this world of retail, this world of hardware manufacturing is just untouchable. Like I don't even know where to begin. And I guess one thing I learned is that, that I was a little bit too timid then. I'm not to say that it's, I've discovered it's super easy or it's, you know, a no brainer, but being in China,

getting the chance to talk to people who have shipped products, you know, thousands or millions of them. I've learned that, you know, it's, it's a long process and you need to learn the ropes, but it's manageable and it makes sense. Like it's people, the people that are there, there are people that are out there that can help you every step of the way, whether it's, you know, a contract manufacturer that can help you design it for manufacturing and produce it, or a distributor who can help you navigate the ropes for custom. So like, you know, even though hardware is hard and it always will be hard, it's not impossible. And I think there are a lot of people maybe listening to this that have these

ideas, but think it can never possibly become a reality. And I think that if there's some time and effort that they can, you know, expend to make that possible, I think it, I, you know, it's, it really is possible to kind of bring your ideas to life, um, in a large sense. So. Bring your ideas to life. I like it. Uh, Tyrone, what about you? Same question. Um, I guess along the similar lines of

Josh, not to shut down ideas before you thoroughly go through them. And basically, if you have a cool idea, just go out and tell everyone, hey, I want to make this. This is an awesome idea. This is what I have in mind. And just see what people throw at you in terms of I can help you do this. And you might be surprised at things you thought that would never be possible that can come together if you're willing to talk to people and just put your idea out there and not sit there by yourself and struggle with it all the time did you have any concerns about sharing your idea with everyone you know patent concerns i hear so much about secrecy and i i agree with you putting it out there asking for help and describing what you've got is so much more fun and seems so much

more likely to succeed but what about secrecy do you i mean our goal was we had both started you know kind of in a research academic background and our goal really is we want people to become engineers and be empowered to do that so primarily we want to make something that is accessible and people know about so we we did definitely think about it because we don't want to see someone take the product and then take it in a direction that kind of doesn't embody those values. But we felt putting it out there, people at least understand where we're coming from and what we're trying to do. So that itself is, we feel great protection right now. And I think also, you know, I guess I was, I think, positively influenced being in the Bay Area.

You know, it's a frantic, fast and frantic world of startups and living with, you know, founders of companies. You know, they don't patent things. They don't really protect them. For them, it's like we want to be competitive by moving fast and innovating and impressing people with what we make. And I think that at first I was surprised, like, but I thought you're supposed to patent your ideas.

But then I realized that there's another viable path forward, which is to really, you know, build a goodwill around your brand and your presence, but also kind of just presenting, providing a great product that really stands on its own and then, you know, continuing to, you know, provide something that people want to buy. And I think that's where we're at right now. And we definitely benefit away more from being open and sharing

than any perceived, you know, I guess, problems that have occurred from that. I think that's the way to go and really cool. And nice that you're so open with this. Thank you. I shouldn't keep you any longer if I want you to finish building my kit. By December, by Christmas. I really want it for Christmas. And then I'll find some kids to play with.

And I've been thinking about a game, maybe a combo of using LightUp to build circuits and JAX to throw a ball down and you have to put up the circuit in the right amount of time. It's very retro. So thank you for sharing your product and your startup wisdom with me.

I really appreciate it. Do you have anything else you want to add? I think you've done a great job asking us questions. And no, I mean, just thanks for having us on your show. We appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. And listeners, for a few more days, you can sign up to get one of the very first kits.

I'm pretty sure that if you sign up later, it won't be for Christmas. Search Light Up on kickstarter.com or look at the show notes on embedded.fm. As usual, if you have comments, questions, suggestions for the show, please drop me a line at show at makingembeddedsystems.com. A big, big thank you to our producer, Christopher White, for all the amazing things he does to make the podcast sound as good as it does. And thank you for listening.