Embedded - 74: All of Us Came in Sixth

Episode Date: October 29, 2014

John Schuch (@JohnS_AZ) talked with us about being a semifinalist in the Hackaday Prize, his project, and entering other contests. John's webpage John's Hackaday Page Winning Entry on Mouser 500 Challenge Honorable Mention on Circuit Cellar's ChipKit2012 Many contests are announced on Circuit Cellar and searching the EEVBlog forums. IRC channel mentioned is TYMKRS

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Elysia White, my co-host is Christopher White, and our guest is John Shook. Hi John, thanks for joining us today. Hi, and thanks for having me. So John, your Twitter description gives your ham radio license, says you were a Motorola manufacturing engineer, an ex-aerospace telemetry sales rep, and an EOS ESD geek. You speak Perl and C, and now you code or design whatever you want. Is that a good introduction, or do you want to fill in the gaps?

Well, I don't think that leaves a whole lot of gaps. You know, I've had a whole lot of very different experiences through my life and career. And at this point in my life, I have the luxury of pretty much just playing with whatever I move to work with at the moment. How do you decide? That's tough. That's at any given point, I probably have two dozen projects in various States from it's a scrawled note on a post-it to, well, I ordered parts and they're sitting on a box on the shelf and I got to get

back to that too. It's spread all over my bench. Sometimes the blank slates are the hard ones to really fill. Yeah. So I'm, I'm never lacking for anything to do. You know, it's the balance of work-family time that, you know, if I could be left alone for a month, I'd get a whole lot done. None of which involves vacuuming and laundry and stuff. But, no, I always have a lot of projects going on on and it's just whatever is tickling me at the moment. Well, one of the projects I came across was during the Hackaday Prize, the Space Prize, and you entered that. First,

before we talk about what you entered, why did you enter it? Well, that was kind of funny. The project that I entered, that was kind of funny. The project that I entered that I'm still working on has been in my head for a number of years that I wanted to build this remote indicator for water consumption. And actually, in the past, I got a couple of sensors and tried sensing on the water meter, and it didn't work. And then there's this brand-new sensor, so I bought one, and it has been sitting on my back bench for probably a year. Then this contest comes up, and I hang out in an IRC channel with a whole bunch of really awesome engineering-type people who were pushing me very, very hard to enter that contest.

I had no intention of entering the contest. With that high a prize, I figured the competition was going to be just absolutely insane. But they twisted my arm and twisted my arm, and I had that project and that sensor. So I said, you know what? Maybe I'll make the first cut. It's only going to take me 20 minutes to write up the first paragraph, the proposal, or the outline, or whatever it was. So I'll just write it up and stick it in there and get these guys off my back and move on to other things. And then, sure enough, I made it through.

So then it's like, holy crap, I guess I had to build this thing then. Yes. Which is another point, because at the point I made it through and I had to build the thing, I'd never tested the sensor. So at that point, I had absolutely no idea if the thing was going to work at all. You're saying that nerds exert as much peer pressure as any other group. Oh, more so. Oh, way more so. Because not only do they exert pressure on you, there's performance anxiety among engineers because, you know, how good is the circuit?

How, you know, is there a better way? And did I do this right? And is it working? Because, you know, engineers will almost always be more than happy to jump in and help you right after telling you how stupid you were to do it that way in the first place. Look, this is why you're wrong. And here's how I can do it better than you. Never mind that I've only looked at your project for five minutes. You know, and then in the contest, there's anxiety, too, because my background is more electromechanical and mechanical systems

and robots and manufacturing stuff. I am not a professional coder by any stretch of the imagination. I've had no real training in how to do software. And so you do this contest, and at some point, it dawns on you, holy crap, Alicia White is going to read my code. Oh, my God. So, you know, there's some angst and anxiety there from all different directions. But, you know, you get past that.

And hopefully your enthusiasm in your project minimizes all that other noise. But it's worth doing. It's a lot of fun. Well, and you talked about the anxiety. It's all, especially for this contest, it was all very in public. I mean, it was supposed to be open and there was the logs as you go along and the code and the hardware and people commented. Yeah, not only are the judges looking, but everyone else who's interested in the contest is looking. Exactly.

And with over 800 or around 800 entries in it, I mean, just that group of people watching every step. I don't know. Maybe I'm a little lucky because I've done real simple projects that I put up on my website before and stuff. And that's typically how I write anyway. It's very conversational. Start from nothing and work your way all the way through it, where most people doing stuff online don't approach it that way. They only want to go out and say, here's what I accomplished, not why did you decide this or that or the other thing. So actually, the fit with the Hackaday thing was fairly natural for me. I'm not going to complain about their web interface or stuff. I mean, there's a look a look feel thing that isn't my favorite but black backgrounds i do feel like when i when i when i stop surfing that page for a while and i look around i have a lot of things floating in my eyes still yeah well you know

and if you understand that you can go back there's the one back. One of the pages in my entry, you had to do a block diagram. So I drew up a block diagram, and I put it up there. And it's like a black page with this big white rectangle with a black drawing on it. And it's like, well, that kind of looks like crap. happen to go back and look you'll see that my graphic has a black background and all these neon traces and parts and stuff that that like holy cow i would never do that but it fits on their page well so um know your audience yeah exactly so but you know that's you know things about this hackaday contest were were very different than most engineering contests. Maybe I just take it, look deeper at it than most people.

But I mean, trying to put up information and graphics that fit their graphics format and look halfway decent. And the writing, which from the rules and all the stuff they published, what they wanted to see, to do well, there is a lot of writing in that contest. And then the fact that there's absolutely no boundaries to it. I mean, it all adds up. That was probably one of the toughest contests I've entered so far. It was very much a communications contest. You needed to have a neat project, but you needed to be able to explain it very well. and the drawings, the illustrations, probably took twice as much actual time as sitting at the bench writing code and putting circuits together. Documentation takes twice as much time

as whatever you're documenting, which sadly very, very few people do anymore. But that's a big aspect to it. Really, I think that is a very big part of why my project made it to the, what, the final 50, the semi-finalists. Yeah. So, you know, as I look through a whole lot of those entries, there were a lot of really, really awesome projects with really, really horrible documentation. Or no documentation at all. No schematics, no descriptions of what's, just nothing.

Here's some videos. Here it works. See? Blink, blink, blink. Well, that's not the point. Unless you had a time machine or something, that's not going to fly. Yeah, it's not going to work well. So your project, it was a remote water consumption display.

Yeah. And you actually put something out by your water meter, a sensor, and then RF'd back to a display module in your house and then wi-fi'd to the internet where you could then get bigger tracking and whatnot we're correct so which is kind of funny um the whole wi-fi thing with the uh what's that little thing the The electric imp, which is very, very cool. But as I envisioned the project, you know, and this is another thing about contests, I never would have put that in that project. I'm, you know what?

When I'm out to dinner with Lisa or family, I don't want to know about the water. I really don't care. And that's this whole Internet of Things thing that's like so silly that, you know, if I'm not here, odds are I can't do anything about it anyway. But it was a requirement of the contest that you have to be connected in a meaningful way. So I got the imp and it records water and it sends it out on the Internet and I can see it on my phone. So there you go. But the crux of the project is giving you immediate feedback of how much water you're consuming right now while you're standing there at the kitchen sink. And having a very easy, there's the number on the display

of how much water you've consumed in the last 24 hours or in the last month or whatever you wanted to see. Which I accomplished. Yay. Like I said before, when I started, I had no idea if it was actually going to work. It actually worked. So I was very pleased with that. Well, and one of the reasons that it might not have worked is because reading your municipal water sensor is not trivial.

No, it's kind of tricky. Do you want me to talk about water meters for a second? Yeah. Okay. The water pipe comes from the city, goes through a water meter, goes into your house. The actual meter that's owned by the city is two pieces. There's this large brass block that has the little impellers and propellers and gear trains and all that stuff. And all of that goes to a shaft that has a very, very strong magnet.

And that's all that comes out of that brass block. The part when you look in in the meter and you see the dials is a plastic puck that has all the gear reduction for the number displays and stuff. And it's magnetically coupled to the magnet in the brass part. And the reason they do that is water can absolutely never get into that gear train. If the gear train fails, they can come out and just snap off the plastic part and put on another one, and they don't have to dig up anything to replace the water meter if the number part fails. So it's really a good design. And what

I always figured was, well, those two very, very strong magnets, there has to be a way to detect that magnetic field as that thing spins around in there. So previously, years ago, I tried Hall effect sensors and some wire wound coils and stuff and just never found anything sensitive enough and then came across a data sheet for the three axis magnetometer chip which is used in tablets and cell phones and things to to detect orientation and bearing and stuff for that i've never seen anybody use that chip for anything other than that but i thought you know if that little chip can detect north which is a minuscule magnetic field i had to be able to just stick that thing up against the water meter and be able to detect the uh the magnets turning around in there and i think that was the the very or the second

video i published for the contest was just a crude little LCD display connected to that sensor. And I'm sitting out there in the gravel, holding it up to the meter, watching numbers flip around on the display. And sure enough, it was sensitive enough to do that. So actually, once I got the sensor going and a microcontroller that's out there with the sensor and the little wireless link, that was was 90 of the project is actually detecting that magnetic field doing a little math on it and wirelessly sending it into the house once you get that pulse that tick count from the water meter landing on a microcontroller inside

then it's you know i'm sure you know it's, it's pretty basic at that point. You just have to accumulate ticks over periods of time and display them appropriately. So that is the genesis of the water meter project. And what did you use for your RF transmitter? I don't remember the name of it. It's the really, really inexpensive one I grabbed from SparkFun. Are we allowed to say brand names oh yeah distributors it's we don't have sponsors so you know we can say whatever so we can bad bad mouth some of them too well you don't have to worry about it wouldn't be the first time i said

mean things about something i think iar got a big rant at one point. That's me. Yeah. Well, anyway, it's the really inexpensive one from SparkFun. The part numbers are on my project entry there. Yeah, that'll be in the show notes. And at this point, I don't know that I would use that one again because I really had to hack the thing inappropriately to get the data to come across, which is another point of the contest. When you're working to these deadlines, sometimes you're forced to make really, really bad decisions engineering-wise. I'm sure everyone listening knows that I didn't make it to the final five.

I made it to the 50, not to the final five. So I'm going to finish the project. But as I said on that last post I put up, it's going to be better now because now I can go back and I can get a better radio transmitter that's going to work better for that. I can fix some code things that, well, yeah, it works enough that I can make a video that the display works and be honest about it. But I can go back and improve things. And I'm kind of on the hunt for a new radio link between the sensor and the house. And actually what I'd like to find is a bi-directional one, but basically the transmitter, I should stop saying basically.

It's okay. I say so a lot. I know that. It's okay. I don't have any verbal tics. That's not true. The transmitter receiver is a serial link you're supposed to send serial data in one end and it comes out the other end it's just an rf equivalent of an old 212 modem setup yeah and what i found out is that the processor out at the water meter couldn't transmit fast enough. It couldn't convert the numbers to, it has to convert it to ASCII strings. You're sending it out of serial port.

And then send it out the serial port and get it in here. It was missing ticks of the water meter while it's processing all that other stuff. In software, maybe I could figure that out. missing ticks of the water meter while it's processing all that other stuff. And that's not in software. Maybe I could have could figure that out, but I was under deadline and I had to have a video show and the thing where blah, blah, blah. So what I actually did is the, the data in pin on the transmitter.

I just sent the ticks, just a positive pulse. I mean, it's expecting RS-232 data. I'm just giving it a pulse. And on the receiver side, they have a pin that's kind of a demodulated analog out. There's a digital out that's all cleaned up. You'll get a serial string out of that. I took the analog one. And since I'm just pinging the heck out of the data line on the other side, the signal strength was bouncing enough, and my processor in here could very easily take that as an interrupt and use that. Totally not how that radio set is supposed to work. So hopefully I can find a better solution than that. Yeah, you basically did Morse code. You telegraphed it over radio.

Exactly. You have a spark gap emitter over here. You telegraphed it over radio. Exactly. You have a spark gap emitter over here. That would have been cool. Yeah, actual spark gap. You have a big one. You could have looked out the window and seen it at night. Hey, the contest is run by hack a day. Exactly.

That's right. It doesn't have to be elegant all the time. But that works but but now that i'm out of the time crunch i can i'm going to revisit that and find a better solution for that radio link i wouldn't think that you would have to send the serial as truly ascii numbers you could send serial binary data well you would still have to convert it to a string and send it out a serial pin on the microcontroller into the transmitter. And that all takes up time.

I mean, the way it's set up now, it, it just, wow, I guess you haven't looked at my code. Have you? Well,

that's a relief. Do you know how much code there was to look at? I'll bet. Not to mention the videos, which you just had a number of videos you had to watch. That was about six hours. I did add that. That's why that last thing I posted, I thanked all you judges very, very much because that must have been an insane amount of work. And the lesson I learned is if I'm ever asked to judge a contest, I just don't have time.

I'm sorry. It was worth it. It was really interesting and I learned a lot. But it was a't have time. I'm sorry. It was worth it. It was really interesting, and I learned a lot. But it was a lot of time. And, you know, we're going to talk in a few minutes about you've entered other contests, but one way to really understand how to win contests is to judge them. Because you get the idea of what people have time to look for after. I mean, on entry 45,

I really wanted to be as good as entry number one. And so I had these things I was looking for and looking at, and which code I read really depended on what I wanted from you. Right. And yeah, no, it did give me, it's like a couple of times I've been track chairs at various conferences, and so I read all of the applications.

And that has made me much better at writing to go to other conferences. Well, they always say the best way to improve your writing is to read. Yeah. Consciously read and pay attention to how things are written and think about why. But as far as those entries, I mean, you know, it's kind of funny because, you know, being in the contest, I went back, I read a whole lot of other entries because, you know, you want to see what everybody else is doing. And as an entrant, what you really had,

they gave you very clear rules and guidelines about what they wanted to see. In addition to that, they said, these are the eight people who are going to judge when you get past the semifinals. And here are each of those eight people's bios. And here's their blogs. And here's their blogs and here's their twitter handles and you know what if you had any intention of like winning this thing and didn't go read those bios and didn't follow some people on twitter and didn't try to understand okay what is this judge what is their hot button um openness is it was a huge one Several of the judges came right out and said, I'm going to

be looking for openness, which is why I chose the mode of openness I did, because it doesn't get more open than that. But I read a lot of other entries that they either didn't read the rules or had no idea what the judges were were or it just didn't make sense. And there were some really, really awesome projects that just so missed the boat on the technicalities that they really would have stood a chance. So maybe they'll hear this and they'll know better next time. Well, one of the hard things for me were the ones that said we will have open source code and that killed me because i couldn't decide if that meant it was open or not i couldn't read the code so therefore it was not open and that's what i finally stuck

with and and i felt kind of bad because you know know, these people really, really are saying, we're going to open source everything. And I'm like, yeah, but you didn't. So it doesn't count. Yeah. But actually, I realized that openness was a huge aspect of this. And honestly, I never really paid that much attention to open source and open hardware and open this and open that. So, I mean, back when there was a couple years ago, it was the big thing, and I followed along, and I thought I got it.

And I said, well, I better go read up and figure out what do I need to do to show that I'm really open. And what I found out is that there are 18 ways to look at every single one of them. Yes. And 18 different opinions. And everybody disagrees that this is open and that's not open, but you can't use that, and you can't use this program because that's not open this is free as in beer

this is free as in puppies this is whatever holy cow how are you supposed to figure that out so that's why i finally decided you know what public domain everything i'm doing is public domain there it is there is no license it is what it is take it want. I don't care. And that's why I think everything was public domain right down the line. I think a lot of the folks who said, we will open source this, they got, I'm just projecting, I don't know what their motivation to say that and not follow through was, but I just wonder if they didn't feel ready. Like, oh, I don't want to put this source out. It's not in good shape. It's kind of ugly. I don't want anybody to read it. When that actually would have been better for them to put something that wasn't quite ready up. Because then at least you're showing your work.

And yeah, okay, you have something. If I look at something and says, we're going to open source this and there's nothing there, I wonder, is it even done? Well, and most of these weren't. So, there i wonder is it even done well and most of these weren't so yeah or is it even working at a yes right kind of rudimentary level has hello world been completed right well there you may be absolutely right because i'll tell you you know all the the code that i did which is pretty simple code actually um i put it all up as i wrote it and

it works okay publish it well okay i clean it up a little bit but it and it works, okay, publish it well, okay, I clean it up a little bit but it's kind of terrifying the IRC group I mentioned there are some serious professional software guys in there who will absolutely take me apart for you know, in a friendly jibing kind of way

but you know, before you push that publish button it's like oh man maybe i should go through just one more time and you just gotta get over that and say what the heck boom there it is there's a lot of exposure that you're just leaving yourself open to so and i and i gotta say i was relieved because most of those guys read that code nobody took me to task for any huge things no i mean i liked that you had a solar panel and you had a really good explanation about why you couldn't modify the city's water system and yet you wanted to sniff off it and how i liked i liked your solution i just it was an easy read so. And I particularly like a project that slightly thumbs its nose at big utilities that aren't open.

It's kind of annoying that you have to go through these lengths in order to... You have to believe that their meter is being read correctly. And I like it from the aspect of you can kind of keep an eye on your water bill and well you know i have my personal meter said i went through 10 000 gallons and yours says 20 000 so well there's kind of a funny very real brief way back story when i was first playing with the water meters and i tried a hall effect sensor and i went out there and opened the meter box and it had become totally full of leaves and dirt and stuff. And all you could see was the little dials sticking out the top of it. So I dug all that out, and I had my little Hall effect sensor and a little amplifier board and a little circuit board and stuck it down there and put it to the side.

And it totally didn't work, but I was trying various things, and I just left it there for a few days and where I sit at my home office I can see the street from my window and I saw the water meter reader guy come up cue the jazz music he he pops the top off and he looks in there and then he gets down on his knees and looks at my little circuit I left it in there it was stuck on the side of the meter and he was like real curious about that but then he finally punched the numbers in the thing put the lid back on and left not my job two days later and after that i went i should go get that thing i went and pulled the thing out and brought it back in the house two days later i'm sitting at my desk working on something else and here comes a car with the city of mesa i live in the city of mesa this little sedan pulls up and stops right in front

of my house and the guy just sits there. And about a minute later, this big utility truck pulls up behind him, and they proceeded to take this gigantic hole in the front yard and remove and replace my water meter, because obviously I had tampered with that water

meter. So as we sit here right now, my sensor isn't there. But I'm waiting waiting once this is done and i install it i'm gonna have to watch those guys because they might just rip the whole damn thing out of the ground and take it away now i'm thinking of a giant electric do the opposite of your water meter a giant electromagnet which causes you're gonna they're spinning parts to not spin i don't think sealing water is really what we should be using our engineering powers for. I'm not suggesting it.

I'm just wondering if it's possible. As an engineering exercise. Exactly. I can't imagine it's that hard. But what I've decided was since the two magnets in the water meter are very strong and very, very closely coupled. And you're going to try and break that externally outside of the brass body of the water meter. So you're saying you've thought about it. From an engineering standpoint. What I decided was, okay, what you're going to need is a really, really big electromagnet.

And the cost of the electricity to run the electromagnet would cost more than the value of the water you'd be stealing from the city. Well, it really assumes you run the electromagnet all the time. You should only run the electromagnet when the water consumption is over. John, you're also assuming you haven't performed the same thing to your power meter. You see, you need to adjust your power meter so you can get the power necessary to adjust your water meter. Yeah, we got smart meters now. I'd be afraid to monkey around with the electric one. Yeah, it'd be nice if we had smart water meters.

The human has to go read it method is just bizarre. At least, for the most part, that's out in front of your house instead of on the side. So yeah, just to get it out there, I have no idea if you could disable your water heater with a great big magnet. And I have never tried and have no intention of trying. Us neither. Well, we can use this as evidence in any future court cases. Okay. Anyway, now we're off track and I don't remember where we were.

Well, you mentioned that you would probably do things a little differently. Yes. Even as you go forward. But if you had a time machine, what would you do differently from then? And what would you do differently if you restarted now? If I, you mean if the Hackaday contest started tomorrow and I was just starting over again? Yeah. Oh, I'd front end the work a lot more than I did.

Because you wrote your paragraph and then became a semi-finalist and then realized, oh, now I have to get some work done. Oh, crap. Yeah. And a lot of the best engineering innovations come out of oh crap moments um this is no exception but it you know in the if you look at this contest it's like okay you state a goal and you're accepted or not and then you've got to meet this benchmark and that benchmark and that benchmark it's no different than an engineering project, a professional on the job.

Okay, we want you to design this thing. Yeah, we're going to do it. So we want to see this by then and this by then by this by then. And an engineer that's been on the job knows that in that first period, which may be, say, 25% of the project, you try to accomplish 90% of the project. But at the end of that first quarter, you don't show them 90 25 of the project you try to accomplish 90 of the project but at the end of that first quarter you don't show them 90 of the project you just have that all done so you have you have work behind you that if you hit some crisis it's like well i've done all this other stuff so i've got a big block of time to deal with this um in this contest, a lot of times I was right up against a deadline where

I had to do a video showing that the thing worked and it didn't. So it's kind of that 11th hour crisis mode thing. If I was doing it again, I would preload a whole lot of the work and have it, I'd have had the whole contest done before the second deadline. And if I made it, well, then just schedule releasing more posts and more videos, and it would be a lot less stress to it. But as far as technically what I did, had I preloaded the work, I would have become disenchanted with my radio link much earlier. I might have found a different thing for that. So I would have worked much harder much earlier than I did.

I think that's about the only thing I can say that I would do differently. I feel that way about engineering sometimes, is that every once in a while I'm kind of grateful I procrastinated. But for the most part, I really wish I hadn't. Well, it's tough working ahead, because a whole lot of times requirements change. Most of the time requirements change before a given project is done. Well, even on Hackaday, the rules kind of changed with regarding connectedness. I would have said your system was connected because of the RF module between the sensor and display.

You didn't need the Wi-Fi module. I agree with you. It's interesting, but it's just kind of yeah i felt the same way but decided you know what it's in it's ambiguous i said you know what if i stick a wi-fi module onto the bloody thing nobody can say this isn't connected so it's just just takes the debate right on off the table. There it is. I'm just going to hot glue this RJ45 to the system. We'll plug an Ethernet cable in. It won't do anything, but it will be connected by God. And it'll be in the picture.

I'll take five volts to power my thing across the Ethernet cable. So it's connected. It's power over Ethernet, and we're just using the power. That's a bit more obvious to the meter readers. Yeah. Well, you know, there are things I could criticize about how that contest was set up. But given what they were trying to do, you know, it's tough. They wanted it wide open.

They wanted to make no limitations. So you end up with requiring things like connectedness without defining just what the heck that is. And it was a really big contest. And they did end up with a really broad range of entries. Anywhere from, you know, kind of the silly and whimsical to extremely serious medical kinds of projects. So it was a broad range. Absolutely. And the five that made it to the finals, I have no problem with those five.

They all deserve it. They're pretty awesome. And actually, two of them, I'm going to steal some of their work for stuff I have planned. Yeah, that's what's cool about it. Well, and that is their whole point about openness is that, you know, my water, I have no, I can't imagine that a hundred, I can't imagine 12 people are going to go out and reproduce my water thing. But what I've presented is look at cool stuff you can do with this sensor that nobody else is playing with. And here's a different way you can use this wireless link and all these different things that hopefully find their way into other projects

and solve problems for other engineers and hackers and hobbyists trying to build stuff. Yeah, I think you've made it so that more people will say, a magnetometer, maybe. And maybe that will solve this problem, even though I'm not trying to find north. I'm trying to find moving things. Yeah, and it leads to other things. And I haven't put the, this will be in a future post on the project.

But my little prototype sensor pack, okay, it's just a bare board on the end of a wire. And we had huge thunderstorms roll through here. And I said, well, that thing can't get wet or I'm done. And it's all hardwired and I don't want to pull that all out of the ground. So I got two Ziploc bags and took the sensor and put a Ziploc bag and rubber banded it up, then put that in another one and rubber banded it all up and kind of stuck it up the post where that behind that solar panel if you remember the pictures from the entry so i'm absolutely confident and it stayed dry through all the thunderstorms and no problem but while it was

going the receiving end is on my desk working and out of the corner of my, every once in a while, I'd see those LEDs tick once over. You made a lightning detector. No, what I mean, it's detecting cars driving down my street. Oh. There could be uses for that. There could be total uses for that. What I did with the sensor, because there are three axes in the sensor, and I've got a small PIC microcontroller, that when you reset either power on or reset that sensor, it reads all three axes for a while and decides which one is it getting the biggest swing from and says, okay, that's the one I'm going to watch to determine my outputting the ticks that it found something. So when I put it in the bag and put it up, I hit reset. So it reset itself that the span it's looking for is the magnetic field of the earth is

where it set its limits, you know, its window in that measurement. So this two-ton UPS truck driving down the road six feet away from it is easily enough to disturb that. So the thing's counting cars going up. I could detect pulling into my driveway and turn on the floodlights. I could trip my security camera to start recording when it sees a car go by. I mean, there's a whole lot of other things that this sensor might be able to be used for. So I'm going to put that into a future thing, and then I'm going to play with turning it into a car detector.

I have some ideas on how you could optimize that to improve its range and accuracy and stuff. This is a very cool chip. Now I wonder if different cars will get different levels and could you detect your car and have an automatic garage door opener if that you are making model of car pulls into your driveway i don't know it just seems well theoretically the sensor is going to be, and it'd be the metal composition of the vehicle, fiberglass versus steel versus... You could probably...

Given the limited range of vehicles that actually pull into your personal driveway, you could probably come up with profiles to have it figure out which car is what. But I sure wouldn't want my security system to depend on that. No, we would definitely have to lock a few things. And so you wrote a really nice post after the finalists were announced, and it's titled Space Suit Order Cancelled, which I found pretty funny. In which you decided that everybody who didn't come in in the top five must have come in sixth, and you were very pleased with your sixth place out of 800. Absolutely. And you really need to decide to look at things in as good a light as you can imagine. You know, and I guess the reason I wrote that is because I read what a lot of other people posted

right after the announcement, the people that didn't make it. And most of them were like, well, yeah, I didn't make it. Yeah, thanks, Hackaday. It just kind of downed. And diminishing the fact that, you know what? You were one of the 800 that actually got off your butt

and made a project and wrote the stuff and got it on there. So you're way ahead of the pack at that point. And you got a project that worked to some level at some point, and you made it into the final 50. You're a winner compared to everybody else out there. All the people who said, well, yeah, I'd like to enter the contest, but it's a lot of work. You are so far ahead of the pack, it's incredible. And people that were just glum and beating up on themselves and beating up on other people

because they didn't make it into the final five are totally missing the point. And that's why I said, everybody, the 45 people that didn't make it into the point that, and that's why I said, you know, everybody, everybody, the 45 people that didn't make it into the final five, I decided all of us came in sixth in the pack. And then you go back and look at those projects. That's not, I, I couldn't tell you which of those 50 was the 50th place. You know, you really can't rank them. There's just so much good work

and good stuff going on. And the contest got people to write it down and put it on a webpage where you can go look and see. And I can't tell you how many, looking through the other projects, how many ideas I said, well, wow, I don't want to build that,

but look at this little thing he did right here. I didn't use that. I did the same thing i did the same thing one of the top five i got really excited about and did a lot of thinking about well could i adapt that to this other project and it ended up the answer is probably no but but it sure got you thinking and we talked about it and looked at it and thought about it and who would use it and who would build it and who would want it and turns out no one but that's fine well but you might be surprised and you know my perspective you know i'm a much older guy than virtually everybody i know online

and an irc and everything so so i have a bit of a different perspective where I'm really motivated to put stuff out and to celebrate things online that are helping the 10-year-olds that are out there now or the 12-year-olds who are sitting there putting chips in a breadboard for the first time and trying to figure all this stuff out. And if you can give them little bits and pieces that make things clearer, when they are 25, 35, 45 and working in their career, we're just making all. Hopefully helping make the next batch of engineers even better than the current batch of engineers. And, you know, I don't even know where I'm going with this. That's why documenting stuff is so important. Writing about stuff is so important. Well, the way you did it is nice because you show people it isn't a linear path. Engineering is often presented as, look, I made this awesome thing. And that's not usually how it goes.

It's, look, I went through this path and then that one and we kind of wandered around in circles here and and finally we ended up with this awesome thing but it was never linear and i like that the entries show that yeah yeah and it's you know and a lot of people people i've talked to personally that say boy you know i'd love to write but i don't i'm not good at it. I don't know how to, you know, I don't know. Okay. Practice. Software takes care of spelling. Whoever proofreads it is going to take care of all your punctuation stuff. So forget about all of that stuff. And I mean, my style is totally conversational. And what I tell people, if you really want to learn how to write this kind of stuff,

go find some circuit seller magazines from the mid-80s and read those technical articles. And Circuit Seller still is a very conversational magazine. Old radio electronics magazines. And that's probably why I write the way I do, because I read all of those things from the time I was 15, well, until radio electronics and popular electronics went away which is really sad because I look at things online now and sometimes it's so frustrating somebody else send me a link to worst case okay here's the worst case scenario somebody sends me a link this guy built this

audio shortwave receiver thing with a lcd display and it's small and it receives stuff and it's really cool go look at the video and so i go look at the video and here he is and he's got his thing and he has a battery and tunes it around and sure enough it works and it's really awesome and it's really really neat and I would actually reproduce that project. But there is no website. The guy just made a YouTube video. There is just a video. There's no schematics.

There's no parts. There's no pictures. There's no discussion. There's no text. There's no copy. There's nothing. There's a YouTube video. Look at my cool box. And not to knock the technical quality of what the guy did, the video is just showing off.

It's pointless. It's worthless. It doesn't help anybody. No one can learn from it or develop further stuff from it. It's absolutely pointless. And nothing frustrates me more than people who put in a ton of work and design some really cool thing. And they either throw up a youtube video or some little blog post that here's the circuit that does this in one paragraph in three pictures

and that's it and they don't want to go on and document the rest of the stuff well you know what cool i loved your video and tomorrow i'll have forgotten about it and i'll never think about it again because there's nothing there that's one of the things that i personally lament sometimes in a larger way with companies um you know if you do a personal project and you're not open with it and you know 10 or 15 years it goes away like you're saying there was the video but nobody's ever going to look at that again and right you can't reproduce it so effectively that that thing never. And I think that happens a lot with companies where you have a large company, a startup, maybe that gets to some level of success and then fails. And they had this idea and maybe they patented, maybe they didn't,

but you can't really necessarily work from patents. And all of that is lost sometimes when the company is shut down, you even if they document it internally they don't open it when they die i just wonder how many great maybe world-changing ideas got 80 85 percent of the way there and are now just lost to history well there's a real good example who and the name is casey who made the little um the video camera video video recorder, the flip. Yeah, bought by Cisco. Flip, an awesome camera. I have two of them. I absolutely love the camera. It's great.

It does good. Everything it's supposed to do, it does really great. Well, they got by Cisco. Why the hell Cisco bought them, I don't know. They got here, and Cisco just killed it. Yeah. Just flushed it, like shredded the docks you know when that could they could have opened that design they could have handed it out they're not going to build it they're never going to build another one they're never going to see any revenue from any of

that ip but they lock it up that's the mentality you can't have it anymore and that's hugely frustrating um which back to my own work that's why everything i do is public domain i don't even put a by attribution or whatever the heck those open licenses are no no learn something you learn something i'm happy you know move on i am because i'm going to go build the next thing that i'm going to put out public domain yeah yeah there seems to be there seems to be some people have this attitude like, well, the thing I'm working on is the most important thing in the world. And so I'm going to hide it, even though two years later, it's no longer the most important thing in the world. You move on to something else. Yeah.

Well, you know, and of all the people out there building stuff in their basements and garages and their little shops at home. And everybody's got the great idea. And everybody, I don't know, they watch Shark Tank too much or something. Because my idea is worth millions and millions and millions of dollars. And, well, no, it's not. Ideas are worth precisely nothing. You know, and my water meter project, at least half a dozen people said, oh, man, you should patent that. You should go patent that. And I said, well, I, you should patent that. You should go patent that. And I said, well, I'm taking kind of a different approach. I'm hopefully making this so absolutely nobody can ever patent this because

here's all the prior art out there with no restrictions. No. Maybe if you're the luckiest guy on earth and lightning strikes and you have a whole lot of money to go produce say manufacturing a remote water meter display maybe it'll work but these people that like lock up every little bit of code and i'm not going to show you everything and oh and here's an mda you got to sign this before I show you my screen. Yeah, no. They just don't get it. They just don't get it. But as far as the documentation stuff goes, maybe that's

changing. Maybe people are appreciating that void that's developed now because without saying any specifics, since I didn't make the five, since that point in the past week and a half, two weeks, I've had three different organizations approach me and say, could you write stuff for us? Could you document projects for us? So there are people out there who understand that that's missing and it's not there. So that makes me feel good too. Yes and it's not there so that makes me feel good too yes it's not i mean this being a semi-finalist is good on your resume and it leads to other things even if it's not the project you did it's kind of that's one of the reasons i like these contests is it it often leads

maybe directions you didn't intend but that's cool there are all sorts of stuff well and like this one that i'm gonna finish this and i'll have my water meter and then i gotta go figure out car sensors and then all the projects that i have in mind from stuff i read from other entries where i'm gonna take a piece of this and a piece of that and put other stuff together so i've got a whole lot of projects to work on and just wait for the next big contest to come on. Well, then this isn't your first contest.

This is the third that I've placed in. I would say. You won one just about a year ago, right? The Mouser. Yeah, but that was a funny contest. You really have to follow content.

I'm a bit of a contest fiend. I love the contests. But some of them are incredibly complicated. The Hackaday one that's still going on is the most intensive contest I've ever come across as far as what you got to do and document. And they said, the Mauser contest that I went, that a lot of people just said, yeah, that's nonsense because it was an engineering contest, but you didn't build anything. And basically what they said is, okay, we need, and I'm going from memory here.

I don't have anything in front of me, but it's like, they tied it into their race car sponsorship thing, and race cars have load cells in all four corners, and you have to recalibrate the load cells for the telemetry. So design a rig to recalibrate load cells and describe it in 200 words. And that was the contest. Nothing to build, nothing to draw, no schematics, no code, no nothing. Okay, you want to talk about a writing challenge.

200 words. That's not very many. No. Sponsored by Twitter. That's a few tweets is 200 words. But that one was funny because I read a whole bunch of what other people submitted to it, and everybody missed the point because they said, you need to measure the load cell to three decimal places.

And you have to use an Arduino. Well, the A to D function in an Arduino is not going to give you a three decimal point resolution of any kind of an analog measurement. So, I mean, I think that's why I won that one because I'm the one that said, well, we'll use an Arduino. But since that won't work, we'll buy this Burr Brown 880 converter and smack it on the top to give you the resolution. And, you know, I crafted my words and stuff. I got the 200 words, and sure enough, I won that one.

And I have around here somewhere is my little iPad mini that was the prize for that contest so but you know some contests are that simple it's like stop think sit down write probably took me less than an hour to write that whole thing submit done wait and see some contests are that easy other ones like how could they have you pulling your hair out for two and a half months. And you did one for Circuit Cellar, too. The Design Spark? Yeah, that one was much more similar to the Hackaday one, where you actually had to build and document stuff. The big requirement was that you had to use the board.

Oh, boy, they're going to kill me the big microchip based uh development platform chip kit yeah chip kit that's right it all had to be based on a chip kit which i did and when you're doing contests that's another thing is you've got to in some cases you have to take your engineering hat off because basically the system I designed on that is it had a little GPS receiver. The chip kit, same as the water thing, it was solar powered and recharged, received time from GPS and sent it out as a broadcast all message on the little, what's the RF module? The XB module. XBs. Boy, you did your homework.

I don't even remember all this stuff. I've been looking at the webpage. And so it broadcasts time out on, and the reason I wanted that, because back at that point, see, this is, everything loops back together. I built that because I needed very accurate time because I wanted to build an alt-as antenna mount to track the ISS space station. So to do that, you have to know very precisely, what time is it here right now so I know where to aim that antenna?

So I did the time broadcast thing with the ChipKit and got that all worked, but I haven't built the antenna thing yet. Well, now you have sat-nogs to look at because that's what they did. That's what I was talking about is they solved a couple of problems I conceptually had with, well, how am I going to build this? And they did it. So I'm going to take that. But anyway, back to that contest.

So you have to put the engineering out of your mind. The project I came up with, that chip kit board, it would be difficult for me to conceive of a worse board to base that project. That's why you only got an honorable mention, man. It's huge. It's a power hall. Getting the power down so it was solar powered, I had to get in there and remove like surface mount leds off

this stupid board because they were power indicators on a development board i don't know but it's the contest you gotta do the rules are the rules you got to use the silly board and actually um someone wants me to write up a construction article of that on that project and i said absolutely not until i redesign it with using a reasonable processor up there um but yeah honorable mention i think i was i came in fourth the top three got money and actual honorable mention paid money in that contest too none of this it was a couple 300 bucks i, for honorable mention in that one. But it was fun.

They're all fun. I enjoy the heck out of it. How do you find out about them? If you, a lot of the websites, if you go to Circuit Cellar, Circuit Cellar Magazine's website, they have a contest tab on the top that they always talk on what they're doing. But usually it's like I follow a lot of people on Twitter, and there's usually some buzz about them. Dave Jones' eVlog website, they have forums, and there's a forum group in there that's all about electronic contests.

Typically, a design contest is going to involve this is typically i mean hackaday is different but typically it's going to involve a distributor and usually a semiconductor or a board company are going to go together and and do a thing and sometimes they'll bring in some media company um sometimes when there's a board company they'll hand out dev kits for the first 300 who enter or whatever well and i will tell you i've entered a whole lot of contests just to try and snag that free dev i'm a i'm a dev kit hoarder i have to confess i understand and i unfortunately really i'm sitting here right in front of a stack of things I cleaned off my desk for you

Some of which I think Is an original 6502 dev kit from I'm kidding 6502? You had to check That's a cool one I did have to check So yeah, I have gobs

I have tons of dev kits I have never put power to May at some point But for some reason I thought they were cool at the time I have gobs. I have tons of dev kits I have never put power to. May at some point. But for some reason, I thought they were cool at the time and bought them, and there they sit in the box on the shelf. I sometimes go to the Embedded Systems Conference and manage to talk myself into a couple dev kits, and then I get them home, and I'm like, oh, this one's Android?

Oh, no, never mind. Next. Please email Alicia. Wait a minute. I thought we were sending, remember, all negative email goes to Chris Gamble. Oh, there you go. Chris or Dave, Dave treats it all so well. I think Chris Gamble said he had a $5 handling fee.

Oh, is that what it was? Last show we got off topic. Okay, so yeah, contests. But you talked about all three things there that you've won, or honorable mention, semfinalists and and winning but you those are all pretty different one of the things I did see in judging the hackaday contest was some people have been entering these same projects into multiple contests that's a couple early entries in there that are actually commercial products.

So, but I quietly flag somebody and they disappeared, I think. That's nice. Yeah. But yeah, no, there are people out there who keep rolling up the same project over and

over and over again. I, no, never. Because like at the very top, I said, I've always got somewhere between one and two dozen projects on my bench and in my mind and in the parts cabinets and it's like they want me to

write an article on that the time server from that very first contest i did that it's done it works it's finished i don't want to go back to that that's boring i've got 32 new projects here that are exciting that's that's that's old i don't want to go back to that. That's boring. I've got 32 new projects here that are exciting. That's old. I don't want to go back to that. And a whole bunch of new dev kits to buy. That's right. The contests are important.

That's another thing. You've got to follow the Twitter contests. I've gotten more dev kits and demo boards for sensors and stuff off Twitter than anything else. Has Hackaday sent you your goodie box? No, but the day they announced the top five, they said that we would get more information about that when they announced the final winners,

which makes sense because that's the award phase is when the contest is over. So I really didn't expect that i would instantly get my my thousand dollar goodie bag and the other question is i have not only do i have absolutely no clue what that is i know a couple of insiders at hackaday who tell me that nobody has any idea what that is at this point so whoever's in charge of that bag either better get on the stick or they're keeping it very, very quiet what that's actually going to be. So, yeah, I think it's like the middle of next month or something, the final announcement.

And then we'll find out what we won. I got to notice that they wanted more judging for the top five, which I thought they had a different judging panel for that. So it wasn't quite right. Oh, really? Yeah. It was, did you did you no it's you ate plus um the other guy that they added on just for the yeah just when you thought you were out

yeah but you know it's only five this time and i have already looked at them so now i just need to look at them again for what's changed. And I think we may be looking at them for manufacturability, but I'm not sure if that was, there was like an extra criteria. Yeah, it was manufacturability or reproducibility or something like that, which as I did my project, I kept that in mind from the very beginning. I'm trying to keep my parts counts down on the off chance. Honestly, I never expected to get to the top five. But just in case, the stuff I designed is minimal parts count and stuff for that.

And that was one of the things I was talking about. A whole lot of people don't read the rules because they're doing these projects that are absolutely awesome and absolutely nobody could manufacture that thing. It just could never happen. Or if they could, it's going to cost $200,000 and there's no market. So I did a whole lot of head shaking reading a whole lot of other entries to the contest. Well, and there were a couple of entries in the contest where you, I mean,

the, the ramen pie, his, how do you build it made me feel like I could start today and be done by the end of next weekend. Yeah. And it just felt so, I felt very led through the process and it was wonderful. So, yeah, mine was a little different because it's a virtual engineering diary. And that's actually the way I approached it. That's what I decided at the beginning. I said, okay, this needs to be like my old engineering notebooks where you start a project

and you write down what you try and you write down what didn't work and what did and different paths and, well, I'm going to use this chip and here's why. And so I approached the entire thing as an engineering notebook and that's the result I liked those they made me they made me happy that I could see what other engineers go through and I liked that a lot well I think I scored some points because at the very beginning I said I have absolutely no idea if this is going to work actually that is kind of nice no I never saw that on any other entry that says well if I if I get picked, we'll figure it out.

But sitting here right now, I have no clue if the sensor is going to work. And that made it kind of exciting for me, too, because it's like, well, jump off the cliff. What the heck? So what's next for you? I've got all these projects to work on here. Do you have anything chosen? So what's next for you? I've got all these projects to work on here. Do you have anything chosen? Well, short-term or long-term, I've got a few small projects, pick-based things. I want to play with detecting cars with my water meter when the water meter is done.

And I have a mission. I'm going to finish that water meter because I want it sitting on my counter out there. What I'm really going to work toward, the smaller projects I'm looking at doing right now, I want to do a series of tutorials on my website for newcomers. They're going to be pretty PIC microcontroller-centric. My sense is that there is a huge audience of people who are now in electronics as a hobby

or an avocation that are using Arduinos. And I'm not one of those people that's going to knock on Arduino. Arduino is awesome. I have half a dozen here. If I want to do a really quick and dirty, how the heck does this sensor work? That's probably what I'm going to grab. But they're wanting to do projects that that really isn't the right choice for what you want to do. So what I want to do is write a number of tutorials

of having in mind that you're new to the hobby, you've got your Arduino doing all sorts of cool stuff, but I want to build this teeny little embedded thing. Really simple projects to introduce those people to working with just a chip, not a big packaged board that somebody sold you for $25 or $35. Off the top of my head example of one of the ones i have jotted down in the notebook we just put in a small section of grass lawn in our backyard and we have three dogs and lisa insisted she wanted this patch of grass i said well the dogs

are only going to do their business on this grass once there's grass back there. But there's a sprinkler system on it. And it's like, well, how do we deter the dogs first thing in the morning from jumping right off the deck, right into the grass, doing their thing, killing the grass? Well, I have a sprinkler system and it's on a timer and it's all electronic. I said, what I need and what I'm going to build, I haven't done it yet, but it's easy enough, but it's going to be one of the tutorials. I'm going to build a little radio control thing, a little pick that sits next to the sprinkler control that says, turn on zone three for 90 seconds, which is enough for the dogs to say, I don't want to go over there. I'm going back over where we used to go all the time. But it's a very, very simple project that beginners can grasp what's going on, what's going on in the code. Here's how you program a pick. Here's, you know, very simple little projects like that.

I'm kind of excited to get some of those documented. So that, I've got big long-term projects I'm working on and just wait for the next big contest to come along that's going to make me push everything off my bench and focus insanely on another big contest project. I do wonder what Hackaday has coming next. I've heard hints. There is a Hackaday Prize 2 in the works. I don't think anybody knows what it is yet, even them. They asked for suggestions on Twitter, which didn't really go well.

They asked for prize suggestions. Prize suggestions. There were some good ones. You suggested they offer the moon, which seems unlikely. It's not my problem. It's their problem. I wanted a submarine

ride, deep sea. they have that disneyland i should have suggested they offer a disneyland tour underground disneyland tour back scenes disneyland tour but when they put out the posts on how do you think the the contest could have been done better i'll probably have more to talk about than what the prize is. I really don't care what the prize is. You know, prizes are great. And people say winning is not the thing. Well, yeah, nonsense.

Well, I think a lot of people got excited about this because space as a prize is inspiring. Well, you know, and honestly, you know, I'm in my 50s. You know, I ain't never going to space. I will never, so from day one, it was never go to space. It was 180 to 9,000, whatever the heck that Fibonacci number was. So, you know, I mean,

I always viewed the prize as cash. But the thing is, that prize was so huge, that's, initially, that's why I didn't want to get into this i said okay a prize that huge okay that is big enough that engineering clubs at mit yeah are going to put together 25 people to do a project for this thing and that there would be all these like seriously big gun competition in the contest and actually as it turns out you scroll through the you can't actually read the 800 entries but you scroll through them very i saw very little of that kind of activity so i was wrong at the beginning i don't know if that was an advertising problem that hackaday didn't tell them before school let out, or if somehow they managed to keep it, you know, hacky.

Yeah. The thing I saw, and there may very well be some out there, but I never came across any hackerspace team entries. I mean, I thought that would be absolute natural for those kind of groups and organizations out there, but I expected that and I didn't see it won. Too much anarchy.

I wonder if people got turned off because the prize was too big. I honestly think that. 200 grand is scary. Not scary for you, but scary for the competition. What kind of

competition is going to come out for that? You know, it's intimidating. If I was going to make a suggestion, I think that's too much. I really do. They did have a lot of prizes. I mean, they had 50 prizes they say will be $1,000.

Whatever that is. Whatever they scrape off the floor. I am very curious about what the prizes are going to be. Their t-shirts are nice. Yeah, I got one of those. That showed up. But I got to say, this is the first contest I ever heard of that said, well, you'll win something.

Congratulations. We're not going to tell you what it is. Everyone's a winner. Something. Yeah. It's like a third grade track meet. Everybody gets a trophy. You are a winner. Something. Yeah. It's like a third grade track meet. Everybody gets a trophy. You are a participant.

That's right. You got to hope it isn't $1,000 worth of stickers. You never know. A lot of stickers. You never know. If I were writing a thing, it'd be a $1,000 Visa gift card. Yeah. Yeah, it would be nice.

Which I could totally spend in my shop. They're going to do what they're going to do. Whatever it is, I'll thank them for it and it'll be cool. Yeah. Like you, I'm just kind of curious as hell. I guess we'll find out in three weeks or so. Well, I think

I'm about out of questions. Okay. John, do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I can't even tell you what we talked about. We just kind of rambled all over the place. It was more organized than you think. Welcome to Embedded, the show for where we ramble all over the place. If you listen to other podcasts, because that's kind of how they work. Yeah, I'm actually a podcast maniac.

I'm surprised most people don't listen to them I push yours all the time thank you so no I have nothing more to add people can find me online on Twitter I'm easy to locate yes and we'll have notes

we'll have links in the show notes cool so thank you very much for chatting with us thanks John it was fun thank you for having me I've enjoyed the heck out of this my guest has been John Shook Hackaday Prize semi-finalist and serial design contestant

thank you also to Christopher for producing and co-hosting and thank you all for listening if you'd like to say hello email us show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm or tweet at embedded.fm. No, don't tweet. There's no dot in the tweet. Oh, right.

It's just embedded.fm. All right. We should go grab that one too. I think this week's final thought will come from Walt Disney. I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it.